Well, so that's where my step 4) come in. We can say, ok top 5% are *****s, or we can say top 30% are 5 stars. Steps 1-3 get us the relative difficulty of each game, after weighing for time and difficulty. Step 4) let's us arbitrarily say how many get to be ***, how many get to be *****, etc.

I remember reading a bit through the Plat Difficulty thread for LA Noire on PS3trophies.org, and a lot of people have said that they don't believe the game is as difficult as people are voting. A few trophies are tedious, but they believe that there are a lot of people just screwing around and voting the max for the game (there was something like 10-15 votes for a difficulty of 10 within the first 2-3 days). I think there should be three factors for the rating of a game on here: the difficulty of the game, the length of the game, and the amount of information readily available to help with the game. The last one involves the amount of trophy guides and info that comes out that can make a game, like LA Noire, become really easy. Obviously, this will affect the more obscure games, but over time they even get some very good and comprehensive guides.

Games that have a very long platinum time (WKC, Mortal Kombat and Star Ocean 4 are three games that may not be the most difficult, but take a long time) should definitely be a factor. All three of those games probably take upward of 400-500 hours, which seriously cuts into playing other games and the like.

EDIT - Some people say they don't use guides for the first playthrough or at all, but it should still be a factor in the ratings.

I'm sure we can do a more advanced way of picking the average difficulty rating than just taking the average straight up. There are ways to filter out outliers, like the 10's for LA noire (lawl, btw). If this starts getting serious I'll look into them.

edit - actually a really really simple way to do this is to just take the median rather than the mean, though with a small range of values (1 - 10) that has its own problems. The point being, extreme outliers aren't hard to filter out.

edit 2 - ok, so the kinda DUH way to do this is actually to just through out the lowest and highest 10% of values. If they're outliers, we have better data. If they're not outliers, well, the average won't change much.

all one star so far have been games you can p[retty much pick up and finish in 2 days.

I hardly think LA Noire fits the bill...

From the comments I read for the difficulty rating of LA Noire, I am worried if companies have started abusing PS3trophies.org..... So many votes for 10 and those people didn't even leave a comment???

42% voted for 3-5 difficulty

41% voted for 8-10 difficulty

Is that why you gave it a 3 star, Arucurus? (2 4)/2  XD

I keep forgetting to sync my trophies.

I should have a few more.

Still 13th though.

Thanks Arcturus for the update.

PS - I actually have a backlog

Playing 3D Dot Game Heroes.

Have Avatar and Sports Champions unopened.

A bunch of PSN games half finished.

It might seem small to you guys, but ot me its pretty new.

Not that Im complaining.

Kylie, it might be you just have a different scale of difficulty compared to most people? I've never played mortal kombat this gen, so I can't say how hard it is. But perhaps you just have a different scale from other people... For example, what games would you say warrrants a 9/10 or 10/10 difficulty?

Though of course it's entirely valid people are just voting out of their asses... Reading over the trophy list, some people are stressing over win 10 online ranked matches in a row, when PSN's been down (though I can't imagine that'll be easy regardless)

edit - as for the time thing, I'm sure roadmap writers on ps3trophies.org take that into account, so the time they post will be accurate. As for people factoring time into their difficulty votes, I'm not sure how to account for that. Hopefully someone has an idea.

edit 2 - I just checked myself, the guy who wrote the trophy guide specifically mentions the leave on overnight trick. He says:

This is the total objectives that you need to complete OVERALL MINIMUM:
- 2,800 wins
- 2,800 -alities (fatalities and/or babalities)
- 4,200 X-Rays moves
- 280,000 liters of blood
- 672 NET HOURS!! of play (like 28 days playing a full 24hrs a day)

There are two tips for making this trophy half way faster and doable in around 350 hours or less

So the leave-on-overnight method is projected to cut the time in half, and that's already been taken into account. On top of this, it's still estimated at 350 hours.

Kylie likes to argue about the rating of time consuming games but he never plat those...

Assuming that the MK wins are similar to "ranked wins" in Super SF IV with each character (i.e. can't just win against CPU and no private games) then that MK trophy list seems a lot harder than the Super SF IV plat which I think is a 5 star difficulty.

As for LA Noire, sure it takes less skill to "beat the game" than say AC 2 or AC:B and less skill (if you're following a guide) to get a 5 star ranking on each case but that still requires pretty much 2 play throughs for most people (who probably don't get 5 star rackings on each case the first way through without guides) as well as all of the misc. collecting, etc. etc.

I would think LA Noire (have to beat 2 times and some tedious searching) would be on par or a little below AC 2/AC:B/Infamous/Uncharteds (each of which you have to beat at most twice, sometimes just once and have some tedious finding).  Sure, one could argue that beating LA Noire is easier than beating Uncharted or AC 2 because you literally can't fail but it's not as if those other games are difficult either.

My vote would be *** or ** difficulty.