During my conversation with a marathon team today, this connection was outlined, the conclusion of which might be interesting for others as well. That's how I thought I'd describe it.
The team played two rooms in a row, as a Marathon Challenge: the first was the Wizarding World - Burrow and the second was the Wizarding World - Prisoner of the Wizard. Burrow is a relatively difficult course, saccra 7/10 and the teams have 60 minutes to solve it. The Sorcerer's Dungeon is our easiest course of all, maybe around 5/10 and 75 minutes long.
They managed to get out of the Burrow in the last minutes, while in the Wizard's Dungeon they practically - with a slight exaggeration - ran the length of the course. They still didn't set a record, but they had 37 minutes left out of 75. And then came the philosophical - and completely legitimate - question: "But why do we give more time to the easier course?"
There are several aspects on the basis of which we determine the difficulty of a room and several tools with which we can make it easier/difficult, in proportion to our vision for a room. The main aspect we work with is statistics. From which room, in what proportion, with what dispersion and in how much time do our players get out.
And what we can play with to make the rooms easier/difficult is, in addition to many other things (difficulty of locks, type of tasks, whether the track is linear, etc.) the time given to the room.
Determining the difficulty of the room is based on the opinions of many test teams. It may happen that a task that we thought was trivial turns out to be not so clear during the game... and of course the other way around. Fine-tuning them is a process. There are times when we tackle the task one by one, or we increase the time given to the room.
And if during the tests the given room turns out to be too easy, then we can add more tasks, or make it harder on the existing ones, or again: reduce the time given to the room.
Returning to the example that started the idea: The Burrow is a relatively difficult course because you have to solve a lot of tasks in 60 minutes and they are not linear. The tasks themselves are neither easy nor difficult, it is the time available for them that makes them difficult. So, for example, if - since we are talking about a difficult room - we followed the thought process of our player and gave the room, say, 90 minutes, then most teams would definitely do it. Which is basically not a problem, but this is where the above-mentioned deviation in the performance of the teams comes into play:
The Burrow is a 60-minute course with a difficulty of 7/10... and yet the record time on it is 22 minutes. The Wizard's Dungeon is a 5/10 difficulty, relatively easy, 75-minute course, and here the record time is still 31 minutes. So maybe our best team needed more time to complete the easier course, but proportionately fewer teams get out of the Burrow and they need more help on average than on the other course.
And to complicate the picture, there is the Chamber of Secrets, which, although 75 minutes long, is – again only thinking on average – more difficult than our other two Magical Light rooms...
So, among many other aspects, the time given to the room is one of the factors that sometimes represents the challenge: a difficult 60-minute room can be easily completed in 90 minutes, while the easiest 75-minute room will give up the lesson to anyone in 30 minutes, simply because of the lack of time.