What makes a file difficult?

[iironiic]

As seen recently, there seems to be a continual debate about some of the difficulties given to certain files. What in your opinion makes a VC a VC, or an FMO an FMO? etc.

Before I let you guys begin, please do not use your scores obtained, or your strengths and weaknesses as a legitimate argument. Don't say, "Excite Bike should be a 2 because it's really easy to AAA it!" This only tells me that you can AAA Excite Bike rather than "What difficulty should Excite Bike be?"

I'd like to hear the community's response to this question so that I can think about resolving this rating issue. Please let me know what you think! Thanks!

[TheSaxRunner05]

Re: What makes a file difficult?

I'd use DDR's old 5 pointed difficulty minus the freeze arrows to describe the difficulty of the file, Stream (Average file density) - Voltage (Instances of high NPS) - Air (jumps/hands) - Chaos (pattern difficulty).

While pattern difficulty is subjective, certain patterns are definitely more difficult than others. Using these four values, you can somewhat objectively scale the difficulty of a chart.

[V-Ormix]

Re: What makes a file difficult?

fmo is like 200 bpm js with a few mini jacks or 24th stream at 170ish or 32nd rolls, fgo on the other hand is like long jacks (4 arrows plus) and generally has stream as fast as 150 bpm 32nds or 220 bpm 16ths with colored notes like white and green and cluster ****ed burst patterns topped with any technical/fast patterns they can throw in the file. very challenging is like challenging but with occasional mini jacks/jacks or some really stupid hard pattern that occurs once through a rather easy challenging file.... that is just my rough idea of difficulties

[bmah]

Re: What makes a file difficult?

Files with certain patterns in them. But before you say that one can be good/bad at a particular pattern, let me explain a generality that can probably serve as the best evidence I can provide.

Most people tend to have common strengths and weaknesses to the dexterity and flexibility of their fingers and wrists. It's no different than playing on the piano: your index finger is much stronger than your other fingers. Your middle finger follows, and then it only gets weaker as you play with your ring, pinky, and thumb (but you're unlikely to use the latter two for FFR). This is due to the muscle and finger placement, which fingers you tend to use most often, etc. In other words, it's normal to have a strength in your index fingers and a weakness in your other fingers.

Applying this to FFR, certain patterns emphasize the weaker fingers moreso than the index. For instance, a one-handed trill (e.g. 34343434) forces you to not only keep track of a repetitive rhythm/motion, but to also use your middle finger, assuming you play with a normal spread setup. Compare this to a two-handed trill (e.g. 23232323) where you use BOTH your index fingers. You have much more power and control.

Similarly, -most- people are right-handed (or if you're not, just read this vice-versa). Thus, right-handed patterns are easier than left-handed patterns. A good example are jacks. It's more awkward and difficult to exert force onto left-handed jacks, whereas you can comfortably apply that same pressure with ease for right-handed jacks. Again, the preferential usage of one hand over another physically constrains people from playing certain patterns in a comfortable manner.

So what makes a file difficult? A file with patterns that are awkward according to a player's usage of their hands and fingers. The point is that there's physical evidence to this as opposed to simply stating a subjective opinion on patterns. People have strengths and weaknesses that are naturally dictated by the human body and our habits (i.e. preferential usage of our hands).

[iironiic]

Re: What makes a file difficult?

Great posts so far! I have a few tentative ideas now! Keep posting

[Mike Weedmark]

Re: What makes a file difficult?

The hardest technical patterns imo are ones that force quick alternating motions of the same finger, like jacks, but not always jacks. Think of playing a piano: If you slide your hand across it, you can play a million different notes in less than a second without even trying, even if it is very messy. Compare that to trying to hit the same note the same number of times with just one finger. There's an obvious technical challenge that comes from taking away your margin of error for recovering from the last strike and preparing for the next.

That's why imo, from hardest to easiest, at the same taps per second, this is my list:

1. Quadjacks (not really seen in FFR much, but very hard not to split)
2. Anchors (RunnyMorning intro, Revo Etude ending, Club, Aim Anthem, OHJJ + Trill, NASTY pattern)
3. Handjacks (the reason GEP is one of my worst FMOs)
4. Two hand jumpjacks (I used to split these in So13 _SO_ hard, still do in Mephisto Waltz)
5. One hand jumpjacks (Largo intro, Op.10)
6. Regular jacks (bmv.578, ER Bridge, Grist)
7. One hand trills (Blooddrunk, M8BT, FotBB)
8. Two hand trills (M8BT, Almost There, FotBB)
9. Handstreams (Radical Rat)
10. Three Finger staircases (M.A.M.A, Strangeprogram)
11. Jumpstreams (Pick a file)
12. Rolls (Reality, Minute Waltz, Electrorush)

Remember, that list only works at the same taps per second. Walls of Doom would fall under rolls, which I put in last. Anything can be made hard with pure speed.

A lot of the difficulty of files like Electrorush comes more from reading them than actually doing them. What makes files hard to read imo is a combination of density and chaos. Combine lots of different patterns, squash them into a small period of time, and the song looks like a bag of skittles to me.

[TC_Halogen]

Re: What makes a file difficult?

When looking at a file, the quickest way for me to generalize a difficulty involves examining the speed of the song. Note that when I'm talking about speed, I'm not talking about physical BPM of a song on its own.

To take it a bit more objectively, I'll take the typical pace of a song and base the difficulty off of what's contained within it in terms of density, extremities, and patterns. While patterns are subjective in nature, the best way to figure out which is harder on an objective level is to take a interval of notes and a speed, and judge what's hardest. Let's take a basic, standard pace of 150 BPM, with an interval of 16th notes, for example.

Most difficult: Triple-streaming - at least two arrows at any given point will be repeating themselves within 1/16th of a note, forcing you to handle some sort of jump-jacking and streaming at the same exact time, which is nothing short of impossible at this speed. Even at a lower speed, the pattern complexity of a stream of triples is considerably harder than just smashing all four notes at once. The difficulty of this pattern gradients downward as the BPM drops, but it doesn't decay really quickly because there will always be an element of difficulty to avoid some sort of boo.

Quad-jacks: every arrow is occupying a space of said interval, and therefore is at maximum difficulty for that particular speed/interval because you can't increase the difficulty without adding a note of a new, faster interval. Obviously, a song with a ton of quad-jacking (obviously not applicable to FFR because you don't see it) would need some sort of difficulty ramp. This would become less and less of an issue as the BPM of the song would continue to drop, so unfortunately, subjectivity starts coming in.

Triple-jacks: coordination of three notes at once at a relatively decent speed

Jumpstreaming (not to be confused with streams that have jumps in them): straight jumps always leave two arrows open, so while density is considerably less of a problem, boos and averages enter the picture as they would with triple-streaming.

Then you'd have jump-jacks/regular jacks (> 4 notes) because they require a motion of repetition that typically isn't called for unless you find a song that uses some sort of pattern at twice the speed (compare: 150 BPM straight 16th jacks to 300 BPM 16th trilling, which is essentially two sets of single-note jacks, or jump-jacking). Like quad usage, the difficulty of this pattern starts to decay very quickly as the song's speed drops.

From there, you could break down concepts of jacks by shortening them to what is considered a mini-jack (2, maybe three notes) and apply the above to the current situation.

After that, you've got things that will always be subjective in nature, like jump-trilling, streaming, trilling, rolling, bursts, etc.

It's really hard to divide things objectively, but you could come up with a nice formula by adding weights to certain patterns. I dunno.

(blabber)

[hi19hi19]

Re: What makes a file difficult?

I'd use DDR's old 5 pointed difficulty minus the freeze arrows to describe the difficulty of the file, Stream (Average file density) - Voltage (Instances of high NPS) - Air (jumps/hands) - Chaos (pattern difficulty).

This was a decent system, except for Chaos. Chaos was broken in part because it assumed everyone was using xmods, and that simfile authors were using 8ths as their base "simple rhythm"
In a keyboard community where the base "simple rhythm" is a 16th not an 8th it would be kind of broken.
For example under this system Kidney Stone would have next to zero Chaos because it's basically all 8th notes, whereas a file with absolutely nothing but simple patterns such as Vertex Beta would have max Chaos, making it a pretty useless metric.

I absolutely agree that NPS and spike NPS should be listed somewhere as pretinent info. Possibly even display lots of them so that people can read into it what they want, like...
Average NPS: 6.7
Max spike NPS over 1 second: 11.1
Max spike NPS over 2 seconds: 10.9
Max spike NPS over 5 seconds: 9.2




Also. with regards to simply what makes a file hard, I always put a huge emphasis on patterns, ESPECIALLY for FFR where things are pretty easy to cheat.
Let's look at this really quick example of three patterns which have the same NPS but completely different difficulty:
(for the sake of demonstration let's assume this is a fairly zippy BPM, 160 or so maybe)

The first, on FFR, is jumptrillable. This is almost completely ignorable assuming the rest of the file is the same density.
The third, on FFR, is cheatable as a 1234 roll. This is easy to split and therefore would be considered more difficult to AAA, but fairly easy to combo.
The second is just a complete nightmare. Simply put this is hard to PA, hard to read, and hard to combo.

Thinking about what the player has to do to hit the arrows is always my first concern when evaluating difficulty.
Sometimes it's not a perfect system, but then again no system is.

[Choofers]

Re: What makes a file difficult?

nvlm_zk files

on a serious note, streams that incorporate one handed trills are, imo, very difficult. especially at speeds around 270-320 (lol #est)
trills alone are kinda tricky but 250 bpm streams oh god 121212121212 trill for 1/3 of the measure UGH.

I would say jacks but lol I'm kinda good at them.

[SKG_Scintill]

Re: What makes a file difficult?

There are a couple of patterns that can make a file difficult, but it's no specific pattern.
It happens when a pattern repeats for a bit, then changes 2 arrows to get you offguard, abusing finger memorization.
Another example is when one hand is put in a straining syncopation while the other hand is also going (Comfort Betrays from RFP)
Also, weirdly syncopated jacks à la He's a Radical Rat near the end. They require full reading focus, for if you screw up one, it'll be difficult to recover.
I could mention colourmesses, like Bud Ran Back Out, but that's just a technique you have to master.

[hi19hi19]

Re: What makes a file difficult?

Also, I might add my two main issues with recent difficulty ratings is that so little emphasis is put on burst difficulty and awkward patterns.
Awkward patterns I discussed above, and people too frequently forget that some things with similar NPS are vastly different to actually hit.

Burst difficulty, more often than not, sets the tone for the entire file- just look at Runnymorning and Crowdpleaser as the classic examples, but even less extreme examples such as the recent Fall Silently, Planet Karma, or the ending of For FFR. You almost have to totally ignore all the easy stuff (even if there's a TON of it, like Planet Karma) and rate solely on the hardest part of the file, because that's the difficulty that players will remember.
On FFR, a file always requires a player to operate at the level of its hardest section thanks to combo scoring.

[bmah]

Re: What makes a file difficult?

Yes, you bring a good point subin in that strengths and weaknesses of playing certain patterns is due to, more specifically, a combination of finger usage as opposed to just one. I'm mainly emphasizing an individual finger to simplify the concept. But we get the point. It's no surprise that piano teachers constantly tell the players to work on strengthening the ring and pinky fingers. (I suppose scales on the piano is comparable to isolation files on FFR...good practice can come from that)

Anyways iironiic, what are you trying to postulate after gathering all of these ideas?

[rushyrulz]

Re: What makes a file difficult?

I SDGd Frictional Nevada using 'rock on' setup (index and pinky spread), subin makes a valid point in combinations of fingers.

[TheSaxRunner05]

Re: What makes a file difficult?

I SDGd Frictional Nevada using 'rock on' setup (index and pinky spread)

Can you make a video of that? =)

[hi19hi19]

Re: What makes a file difficult?

This is a great example in showing the common-style bias present in the judging of most music-rhythm game charts, not just on FFR:

Yes you're right, I should have specified that too.
Like it or not, we have to admit that the majority of the competitive community plays spread and work with that in mind when making charts and judging.