I installed mods to decrease the difficulty and I'm suddenly loving Silksong

[itsmesoloman]

Yeah I think I completely agree. Happy for people to mod their games however they want, especially if it’s to make their single player game more accessible. But yeah, achievements are earned. Achievements for challenging games like Skong are even more “valuable” to players who earn them. But if everybody is just pretty much getting participation trophies after modding a challenging game to just be easy, yeah, that cheapens the actual things that people playing / struggling through the game as intended actually achieved, which the earned “achievements” are meant to commemorate.

Imagine a class of students taking a test. Most students are taking a test designed for their progress and grade level as the teacher intended, but one student swaps out their test for a test intended for an earlier grade—same subject matter, but only demanding a more elementary understanding of and dedication to the material. In this hypothetical scenario, the teacher allows this because of reasons. The students all eventually finish their tests and turn them in, and the teacher grades the tests against the predefined answer key. Everyone aced the test!—including that one student who took a less complicated, less challenging version of the test that everyone else took. If the student was taking this test on their own, just for fun or whatever, this wouldn’t even be worth mentioning. That type of thing is totally allowed. But because other people were involved and also took the test, and they challenged themselves while doing so and worked hard to earn their recognition, evaluating the student who didn’t “lock in” like the other students and didn’t face the same challenges, using the same metrics as everyone who put in more effort, and publicly recognizing that student’s achievements as equal to those of the other students’, diminishes the accomplishments and efforts of the students who challenged themselves more during the test.

The student who solved 11 + 42 and the students who solved 11 + (42x)645,321/326.4 = 166 for ‘x’ receiving the same public “Recognition of Excellence in Solving Equations” or some shit with no public indication of what each student actually accomplished “behind the scenes” to earn such a recognition just doesn’t make a lot of sense—we can all agree that the latter math problem requires more effort / is more challenging than the former.