Discussions of "difficulty" over things like arbitrary or uncommunicated skill lockouts desperately make me wish the Zarf Cruelty Scale was more well-known.
(With reference to this post here.)
The thing you need to understand is that this absolutely would not help, because the "git gud" crowd regard literally everything as a legitimate axis of difficulty. Much of the difficulty-in-games discourse is founded in the idea that the act of playing a game is a form of intellectual combat between the designer and the player, where the designer's goal is to get you to stop playing by any means necessary, and the player wins by continuing to play. A game that's unpleasantly tedious to play is merely "challenging" your tolerance for tedium; doggedly continuing to play in spite of the fact that you're not having any fun thus represents victory. When that particular crowd responds to structural critique by telling you to git gud, they're not misunderstanding you or being disingenuous: in their world, all forms of difficulty in games are ultimately expressions of structural hostility to the act of being played.
As a game designer, this is such a weird thing to say or to believe, the entire point of the game is to be played and making it more fun to play is the designers job
Why do you think so many of them have big messy public tantrums whenever a game has difficulty settings or accessibility options, and won't take "nobody's forcing you to use them" for an answer? That's the designer breaking the contract. You're not supposed to help people play!













