Nowadays in online Geometry Dash spaces, a highly prevalent topic of conversation continues to bring consideration to the difficulty of the game; "Is Geometry Dash getting too hard?" This is a fair point. seeing all of the recent achievements of players dedicated to their craft that involve unfathomable, inhuman skill. Is Geometry Dash getting harder or is our perception of the game's difficulty just being skewed?

Similarly to a sandbox game, creativity and freedom is Geometry Dash's lifeblood. With a community of daring, skilled, and willing players—pushing the limits of the game's difficulty is an unavoidable phenomenon. Ever since the release of the game in 2013, it's creators have pushed the difficulty ceiling higher than ever thought possible; which makes sense! In this case, infinite creative freedom means no end-goal. Therefore, players must find their own end goals; and for the Geometry Dash community, that end goal is pushing the difficulty ceiling from the roof — to the skies — to the moon and beyond.

It's only in 2017 that we started seriously ranking levels based on their difficulties with the Pointercrate Demon List. The Demon List is a tool that is still used today to determine the hardest levels rated and verified in Geometry Dash, providing an additional incentive to make and verify the hardest possible level. Around this time, the hardest level rated and verified was Artificial Ascent, now nearly out of the top 500 and has over 750 documented victors.

Nowadays, the environment of top-players and top play is entirely different. Our latest top levels require frame perfect precision, pixel perfect timing, inhuman skill, and unfathomable dedication over tens or even hundreds of thousands of attempts which only a handful of players are brave enough to even attempt.

Recently, the infamous "Crimson Planet", previously number one on the Demon List, fell out of the top one-hundred-fifty hardest levels with the placement of ORBIT, ironically verified by #1 player Zoink. This raises the question; is Geometry Dash actually getting too hard? Short answer; not necessarily. Just because a level falls off a list doesn't make the level any easier. It always stays the same difficulty regardless of it's difficulty according to the list, even though it might feel that way. Just because your hardest fell off the list doesn't make you any worse of a player. Despite this, our obsession with ranking levels on a one to one-hundred-fifty scale allows (and realistically forces us) to subconsciously devalue levels outside of the list.

Subsequently, the rapid, exponential growth in the difficulty of the list has left many players reeling to keep up. For example; Shardscapes, RUST, shimmer, ta1LSD0ll, and Bloodlust are all previously very common first list demons that have fallen off the list, leaving many without list demons, and it feels bad! It does feel bad to have your achievement that likely took weeks or months fall off the list used to separate super hard levels from the hardest levels and be devalued because of that.

For this exact reason, a scale like the NLW (Non List Worthy) levels list is much more helpful in deciding difficulty. The NLW ranks levels based on their difficulty individually, not comparatively to each other. The NLW ranks also do not move whenever another level of difficulty in Geometry Dash is reached which makes difficulty rankings consistent and predictable in future.

In a time of extreme volatility in Geometry Dash's difficulty progression, it's more important than ever that we reevaluate how we evaluate the hardest levels in the game. To rely on the Demon List for entirely accurate evaluations of levels is shooting yourself in the foot, and it's important that we take the Demon List's opinions with a grain of salt. "The AREDL placements are decided based on various difficulty opinions from many players. Your opinions WILL differ from this list, do NOT take it as an objective fact," says the All Rated Extreme Demons List's front page disclaimer.

We think that Geometry Dash is getting harder, but is it actually? In reality, the game is only as hard as our artificial scales of difficulty frame it. Having been said, it's getting harder for newer players to keep up with the Demon List, but the NLW might be a great substitute where a flawed scale of difficulty has failed us.