How to judge difficulty of course

[Oak]

Hello, 

I've been playing around with the designer for a couple of years at this point (since 2k21) and have made some courses so far (mostly in 2k21)
I have never published any of them however, since I haven't been happy with the results.

Now there are several reasons why, but chief among them I feel is that I have no idea how to judge difficulty and playability of a course.
I am not very good at the game (playing on Pro settings) and as such with the more generous swing difficulty and putting experience, I do not have a feeling of how hard a given course actually is.
I have been looking through quite a few of the threads on the forums discussing problems with courses, and accordingly I have attempted to bring down the difficulty of my current WIP.

I don't actually know what "tips and tricks" I am asking for, maybe just general advice on judging course difficulty 



I am new here on the TGC forums, so if this has been posted under the wrong section please let me know.

[albinobluesheep]

One great suggestions I saw for testing out playability of courses was to set your game difficulty setting that you are pretty comfortable making par or birdie every time on most courses (hitting fairways and greens the vast majority of the time), and then play your unpublished course with John Cena (hits the heck out of it) and Trent Ryan (hits it nowhere, hard to hit it straight/clean everytime)

Cena will give you an idea of what obstacles people with the longest club/character set ups might be hitting over/into, or just what a helping wind would do on most of the holes.
Trent Ryan will give you an idea of where all the short/off target misses are. (The real Trent Ryan actively lobbied 2k to make his character really really bad)

You can do play unpublished courses by just searching for any search term in the local match course search, and then by clicking the funnel  then scrolling to the bottom

[Oak]

Jan 30, 2024 13:48:24 GMT -5 albinobluesheep said:

One great suggestions I saw for testing out playability of courses was to set your game difficulty setting that you are pretty comfortable making par or birdie every time on most courses (hitting fairways and greens the vast majority of the time), and then play your unpublished course with John Cena (hits the heck out of it) and Trent Ryan (hits it nowhere, hard to hit it straight/clean everytime)

Cena will give you an idea of what obstacles people with the longest club/character set ups might be hitting over/into, or just what a helping wind would do on most of the holes.
Trent Ryan will give you an idea of where all the short/off target misses are. (The real Trent Ryan actively lobbied 2k to make his character really really bad)

You can do play unpublished courses by just searching for any search term in the local match course search, and then by clicking the funnel  then scrolling to the bottom

That is actually a very good idea. I will spend some hours with the two golfers (Cena and Trent) and see what comes of it.
I didn't actually know you could play as different golfers, nor that you could play your own unpublished courses outside of the designer.

I appreciate the advice.