I watch about three hours a week of youtube/twitch watching the best 2D Mario players (Dode, the Beast, Grand Poo Bear and CarlSagan) beating very difficult levels. Some of these are on Mario Maker and some are full Rom Hacks created by the Super Mario World community which has been active for years and years. These levels are to the even seasoned players, incredibly hard. They will use techniques (or glitches) which only expert and dedicated players will know or be able to pull off. This is just what I like to watch because I know i'll never be that good but pushes the game and players to the limit. 

MM has been out for about 4 years now and level creators are trying harder and harder to create levels which are difficult to beat and will challenge the player. Some creators are brilliant at creating but can't play for toffee so create "dev exits" in their levels which are very hard to find doors which they can use to take themselves to the end of the level and complete it (a requirement on MM to upload). But as creators made harder and harder levels, so came trolling.. If you want to make it hard for a user to beat a level, kill them without warning. This reminds me of games like Rick Dangerous on the A500 where you basically had to learn life by life where all the traps were. Few were possible to know before they happened. Creators started implementing troll elements to their levels, an example might be a flying fish entering the screen giving you miliseconds to react and move. Or off screen thwomps craching down and killing you as you pause for what looks like a complicated section of the level. 

But players got wise to these and started playing to adapt to things like this. Some troll moves are deemed more ok than others. Like there's an ethics behind setting a player up to fail or not. 

Fast forward two years to the last 12 months and the players are now asking creators to make whole levels of troll set ups - called Troll levels (see what they did there?). Troll levels are levels designed to play with the players psychosis. Give the player learnt behaviour then fuck them. Some of it I fall for as a spectator and some of it is absolute genius. 

The latest technique is called CP1 Trolling. CP1 stands for Check Point 1. In long levels on MM players put check points in to make it easier for the player. It means if a player dies they return to the check point not the start so not to repeat long parts of the level. However, players have created a system of level design now where they will set traps to make you fall into CP1, so you may get to CP3 or CP4 and be near the very end of the level but enter a pipe and end up back at CP1 which means you have to redo all of the level again. So it's actually been turned into a negative to have CP1 as opposed to a good thing meaning you don't start from the beginning. The setup's for CP1 are so fucking clever, using previous trolls or normal mechanics to fuck you when you least expect it. 

An example, hopefully you can picture this. You're big Mario, there are spikes two tiles up so you know if you run into them you'll shrink to small mario. On the floor are 4 tiles wide of ice bricks so you know you could slide under the spikes. At the end of the ice bricks is a pipe. You run along, hold down to duck and slide under the spikes (to stay as big mario) you slide, slide, slide, still holding down, go over the pipe and then boom, go down the pipe because you were still holding down. Next thing you know the pipe drops you from the ceiling onto CP1. Back to the beginning again! This video has some clever setups to do this.  




So when left to our own devices in MM creators have ended up trolling the player for fun. Other clever designs involve creating escape the room type levels, using codes and such. 

If you could design a level in a game, which game would you love to design a level for? What would it be like and why?