Hunting for Bolds [3]

[Ihavenoname248]

Another week, another TON of bolds scored. Quick summary:

Mishmesh: for a 3 star difficulty this one was on the harder side for me. Eventually I made a map with all walls and floor displayed as such, with recessed walls to show which way to go second, traps showing dead ends and even a red key/lock for the one area on the top where the recessed wall method wouldn't work. Took about 45 minutes to score.



Knot: Piece of cake, got this 2nd or 3rd try due to some boosting mishaps.

Scavenger Hunt: I watched the AVI to see which directions to go at forks, this bold followed up immediately.

On the Rocks: Some untimed levels I've scored. This one I simply played through to get it out of the way.

Cypher: First try, no reference.

Lemmings: The first of a few levels I had to reference the public TWS for-there's no AVI of a 577! Definitely a fun route to perform due to all of the organized chaos going on-I also messed with alternate block timings to see what the results would be, and the 577 seems to work by cutting off the lead monster in the monster order. I wonder what bold would be if the entire monster order was reversed?

Ladder: I identified that I could move the chip collecting ladder to the end of the route without wasting any moves, so I did just to get the (marginally) trickier part out of the way as soon as possible. All in all, smooth sailing through here...

Seeing Stars: ...until Seeing Stars. This is way too hard to remember to be only 3 star difficulty (for on this later). I spent an hour on this and only had the first 40-50 seconds (out of 200!) completely memorized. From there, I decided to switch gears from rote memorization to trying to get a better understanding of why the move savers saved moves. As a result, the corners all became much easier to remember-though if you asked me now, I wouldn't remember the specifics of how to move the blocks to the spots, I could tell you the spots that blocks need to be parked. It still took another hour to remember everything past that point, but I did eventually score 597 with 0 dropped moves. Not the kind of level I like working on.

Sampler: The bold difficulties seem to be more based on how hard an optimal tenth is than an optimal second, to me. Just comparing Sampler, Seeing Stars, Lemmings and Mishmesh, they're all ranked evenly, and yet Sampler and Lemmings I found easier than Trinity, which is ranked as 2 stars! It took a couple tries to remember the teleport sequence, but executing was pretty easy.

Glut: Too easy, even though as a kid I could never figure out the teeth exits-I thought they were traps

Floorgasborg: Oh come on, seriously? This is 3 stars? It took a few attempts to get the timing down on the initial force floors, but this is nowhere near the difficulty of Seeing Stars. I got the 195 on my second attempt reaching the random force floor-the first time they sent Chip left and down, straight into the fake wall on the back wall.

I. C. You: Interesting happening while attempting this-on an attempt with 0 lost moves, I actually got prevented from pushing the block by the blob! I couldn't be mad about that, since the probability must be something like 1/1000. It's pretty funny (the blob moved immediately after, so with odd step the odds of this happening are 0, for anyone curious). Beyond that, remembering which way to spring slide caused the bulk of my issues, but it was a relatively easy bold. Still, I'd rank Sampler equal to it, not 3 stars vs. the 2 stars here.

Beware of Bug: First try, not much else to say.

Lock Block: This was also a first try bold.

Refraction: This is another level, like Blink, where I used text notes to remember which direction to move in.

SE(L->R), NE(R->L), tanks, NE(R->L), SE(1L->R->1L), toggle

NW(R->L), SW(1R->L->1R), tanks, SW(L->R), NW(R->L)

As a result, remembering which quadrant to go to, and then which side in that quadrant became trivially easy. I lost 1 move stupidly, but it evened out due to having to wait. I nearly died due to it though! Funny story about this level-I actually ran out of time on it as a kid-300 seconds did not feel like enough.

Monster Lab: I tried for the 292 for 5 minutes, scored 225, and kept going back while paying attention to something else. Still no 292, and I can't be bothered to get a 226 if I plan to obsolete it anyway. It's a real shame about the walkers in the southwest-this was always one of my favorite levels to play, and knowing that you can skip pretty much the entire thing makes me sad.

Three Doors: First try that got the opening ice slides.

Pier Seven: THIS is why I think the bold difficulty needs a bit of a re-evalution. This level is ranked as 4 star difficulty. I got it in around 10 minutes, and 10 minutes later had the perfect tenth value. Compare to Seeing Stars, a 3 star level that took well over 2 hours. It seems like boosting=+1 star-except Trinity, though my opinion on Trinity may be biased due to scoring it so early. The thought still remains: the bold difficulties on the wiki seem pretty arbitrary, and Jimmy V.'s site of easiest bolds is fairly outdated. Looks like I'm on my own on determining these difficulties

Mugger Square: After the mini rant, the wiki pegs this one at 4 stars. Ironically, the hardest part for me was any ice to force floor slide-I died because I failed the override after picking up the flippers no less than 3 times on 377 pace runs. Fun level to play though, definitely a learning experience on how to deal with force floors going into teleports a bit better, and the fireball cycle was a good way of knowing if I was ahead of pace or behind pace.

Problems: It's just walking around, I'm not sure how that garners a 2 star rating.

Digdirt: Trying to remember waits by cell number wasn't too effective, so I remembered them by how many chips are left. Once I made this switch in how I learned it, instant bold.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE:

I said I could get an award on CCZone in less than 5 minutes, that isn't a 5g award. Well, it's the "Let's Play" award, for let's playing 20 official CC levels. Well, I've picked out quite the set...

Lesson 1 17 Glut 3


Lesson 2 10 Floorgasborg 5


Lesson 3 11 The Last Laugh 18


Lesson 5 15 Scoundrel 6


Lesson 6 6 Victim 8


Lesson 7 11 Metastable to Chaos 10


Lesson 8 4 Fortune Favours The 14


Southpole 16 Lobster Trap 14


Nice Day 17 Trust Me 6


Forced Entry 7 Thanks To... 12


The longest level in this group has a bold time of 18 seconds-even taking into account tenths and time spent switching levels, these 20 can go down in 4 minutes (210 seconds, to be precise)-5 is enough for an intro and mistakes to be made. As a result, I learned a few other bolds, so here's my thoughts on them!

The Last Laugh is nifty. Scoundrel I did as a kid. Victim I never would have thought of. Metastable to Chaos is mindblowingly simple. Fortune Favours The had me facepalm with how simple it was. Lobster Trap I saw the time and found the route for. Trust Me might as well have said Bust Me. Thanks To... I didn't score bold on, but it's quick even without the 1/64 shot. I'll probably record this later today and claim a couple other awards at the same time, for efficiency's sake.



Miika requested this, so even though it's still really bad: my current score my CC1 is 1,091,100, with 51 timed bolds and 57 solved levels, 4 of which are untimed on this TWS. 5,970,000 should be fairly easy to obtain, but the real test will come when I must return to RNG hell, level 23...and this turned into a wall of text I don't even know how I just typed what I thought ;_;

[M11k4]

Thanks for the graphic!

There's only one impossible bold on TW so maybe you could extend the yellow to mean something like "you can't score it because it is impossible in TW or the bold route is not public and you have not found it yet".

Feel free to update the bold difficulty ratings on the wiki, particularly after you have played even more levels. I think there are several reasons why they aren't yet quite consistent. They were added in all at once by a veteran who was very familiar with the levels and routes. They haven't been updated much since then so there is not as much peer review on them as with the actual difficulties of the levels. I'm not sure quite how much of the bold difficulty reflects the bold performing difficulty and how much the bold discovering difficulty, or how consistent this distinction is. Additionally, I don't know whether this scale is independent of the set, or if it scales to a bit like the other difficulty rating.

The reason Lemmings (and Amsterdam) do not have avis is because our avi expert Andrew Bennett was no longer around when those routes were discovered and published. Maybe someone with MSCC can record those for us at some point??

Good luck with your quest!

-Miika

[Ihavenoname248]

If I change yellow to include non-public routes CCLP3 will be half yellow: I went through and compared the AVIs and public TWS to the list of bold times, and of the 146 timed levels, the route is known for 78 of them.

[James]

This has been a fun blog to read so far. Glad to see the competitive community isn't totally dead! Are you planning on playing CCLP1 competitively when it comes out, or will you wait? [Also, your graph format there is awesome.]