Ice difficulty
How quickly your players will solve the ICE puzzles in your site is almost impossible to predict when you design your first sites.
Individual players will be better at some puzzles and worse at others. There will be players who are good at word search but worse at tangle, and vice versa.
Players will become better at solving ICE puzzles over time.
Some ICE puzzles really benefit from having multiple players working together to solve it. So the solve-time depends on how many hackers collaborate and how good their collaboration is.
Starting point​
The table below gives an idea of what the original design goal was for ICE difficulty. This is for a single player who has had some training with the puzzle.
| Strength | Average | Range |
|---|---|---|
| Very weak | 1 minute | 0 - 1 minute |
| Weak | 2 minutes | 1 - 3 minutes |
| Average | 5 minutes | 3 - 7 minutes |
| Strong | 10 minutes | 5 - 15 minutes |
| Very Strong | 15 minutes | 10 - 20 minutes |
| Onyx | 25 minutes | 20 - 30 minutes |
To give some idea of how inaccurate this table is for predicting actual ICE solve times: there have been three players who solved a Very Strong Netwalk ICE in 86 seconds.
So before committing to large sites with high impact on your plot, it's smart to try out a few low-stakes sites with your players to get a feel for how fast your players are. It will also give them some low stakes practice.
TODO point to ICE statistics section.
Player ICE preference​
Besides how fast players are at solving certain puzzles, some players don't like certain types of ICE. So from that perspective it's good to add a variety of ICE throughout your site to give everyone something they do like.