What I've decided going forward is that I stop recording when I get to 1 hour, so the video (with edits) is always guaranteed to be under 1 hour. However many levels I can solve in that time is what goes into the LP. Ideally, it shouldn't take that long to get through the first rank of a pack anyway! If it
does, then I'd suggest that players are even less likely to take on the later ranks.
Maybe this is why there's a shift towards labelling them as "groups" rather than "ranks", since the difficulty seems to be extremely subjective, varying quite wildly from one pack to the next, and not always representing the traditional "beginner, novice, expert, master" pack structure.
This is why I've tried several times to suggest/introduce a
Forum-wide difficulty standard which level designers can match up their levels to in order to give a clear idea of what difficulty the player can expect. The issue is that one person's "easy, medium, hard" is another person's "hard, extra hard, forget it!" So, the problem remains of how to accurately advertise a pack's difficulty.
Anyways, the main goals of this series are to a) find out what makes a "good easy level", and b) showcase as much custom content as I can. So, if I end up only playing a few levels within the space of an hour, it's still more than possible to achieve both of those goals even though I might not have LP'd the full group of levels.
Thanks everyone for getting involved btw, it's good to know that people are interested in the series. I may well take Eric's suggestion and do
Open Air instead of
World Tour as Strato's pack for the series, but if namida's comment is anything to go by, it may end up only being a handful of levels in that episode!