A Few Points Concerning Difficulties

[One Winged Angel]

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties

I wish it would've been like that from the start as it's quite a considerable bump in difficulty to shift from 89 to 92/93 now.

For reference, there's around 25 players that have an 89+ AAA but only 7ish with a 92/93+ AAA. I don't think it'd be fair to make the requirements significantly harder without removing the token from players that don't qualify for the new reqs, nor do I want to strip the token from anyone.

[Frank Munoz]

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties

I don't really see a downside to expanding other than the amount of work needed to do so. Also the possibility of "expansion" becoming a norm.. kinda like what zap mentioned. In time we will thirst for harder files, and eventually expand again, and again. But tbh that seems fine.

About the token thing... it's kinda like pianocore. and that other token.. I don't remember them quite well, but they require % amounts of fc/aaas and as we add more files to the game, the amount of charts needed to be aaa'd/fc'd increases, and if you aint played ina while you will fall under the required amount.
I'm not sure how that's being handled currently, or if it's even still an issue BUT

1. I wouldn't mind losing a few tokens if I no longer deserve them. Times are changing, ffr is becoming more and more challenging and the average player's skill cap has increased with it. It'd be an incentive to keep playing and eventually become a better player to achieve those lost tokens once again. It also wouldn't be fair to newer players who have to work harder for the tokens that I got before the new requirements.

2. I worked hard for those feats.. You think I wanna AAA club again?
There have been no indications of the tokens we unlock having the potential to be locked once again. it wouldn't be fair to those who have already proved themselves worthy.


I'm gonna stand by point 1. here. i know most of our community consist of vets, but we do need to cater to future players, and not give older players any "special" treatment.

;;;

[icontrolyourworld]

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties

I'm not too concerned with how many levels are in ffr tbh. Like I think you can make a reasonable scale starting from 1-10, 1-40, or 1-120, or 1 for every single song rated in order of how hard each song is. You do you, I know that you'll take good care of the difficulty system <3

[igotrhythm]

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties

Regarding range AAA tokens being benchmarks for division placement:

Yeah, they feel awesome when you get them, and the fact we still refer to C and VC, artifacts from before the 1-99 system was a thing (hell, Oni get still explicitly uses the FMO title in the pop-up) tells me that we'll continue to be using them as rough groupings for a while.

However, with advancements in ranking algorithms being what they are, I'm in favor of the current plan to expand up to 120. The possibility of songs that are objectively harder than DP and RATO blow my mid-D5 mind (namely, HOW), but I'm against bumping the D4 skill window lower because it's already infamous for being AAA or die in the early going.

Regarding Frankie's post:

I see no reason to lock tokens because the requirements have changed. Imagine my surprise when I AAAed Makiba before it was added to the list. Then about 2 hours of whoring later, Oni was finally mine. Just because a song isn't on the unlock list anymore doesn't mean we didn't get it fair and square. Besides, only a scumbag would pull a douche move like "I got the AAA on this song, but now it gives a different token instead, so can I have that manually unlocked?"

[Frank Munoz]

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties

I see no reason to lock tokens because the requirements have changed. Imagine my surprise when I AAAed Makiba before it was added to the list. Then about 2 hours of whoring later, Oni was finally mine. Just because a song isn't on the unlock list anymore doesn't mean we didn't get it fair and square. Besides, only a scumbag would pull a douche move like "I got the AAA on this song, but now it gives a different token instead, so can I have that manually unlocked?"

Is the situation with the Makiba example that:
-you aaa'd makiba.
-2 hours later makiba was added to the oni-get list
-you in turn unlocked oni from the makiba aaa beforehand?

that seems fine and understandable but isn't what i discussed.

I feel i'm misunderstanding all this because these two sentences express your preference,
"I see no reason to lock tokens because the requirements have changed."
"Just because a song isn't on the unlock list anymore doesn't mean we didn't get it fair and square."
essentially : I want to keep the tokens i unlocked even though i no longer meet the requirements.
-if you kept the token(s)/benefit(s) of something when you no longer have the required feats for them it would no longer be fair, or square.
-I believe you should not sustain any benefits until you meet the requirements again, just like everyone who must succeed you

compared to these two examples which don't really compliment your preference
"Imagine my surprise when I AAAed Makiba before it was added to the list. Then about 2 hours of whoring later, Oni was finally mine."
"Besides, only a scumbag would pull a douche move like "I got the AAA on this song, but now it gives a different token instead, so can I have that manually unlocked?"
they express a situation where : you achieved a feat on a file before the feat was accessible through the file, and in turn you want to be rewarded the benefits.
-that is fine, it's understandable with reason of you met the current requirements, so you get the prize.

[AutotelicBrown]

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties

I wish it would've been like that from the start as it's quite a considerable bump in difficulty to shift from 89 to 92/93 now.

For reference, there's around 25 players that have an 89+ AAA but only 7ish with a 92/93+ AAA. I don't think it'd be fair to make the requirements significantly harder without removing the token from players that don't qualify for the new reqs, nor do I want to strip the token from anyone.

Yeah, that's not a minefield worth threading on considering the whole harder songs thing is supposed to cater to that population.

In any case the distribution of AAAs in the 92/93+ range should increase a bit with the increased number of songs due to the hard batch.

[rushyrulz]

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties

1. I wouldn't mind losing a few tokens if I no longer deserve them. Times are changing, ffr is becoming more and more challenging and the average player's skill cap has increased with it. It'd be an incentive to keep playing and eventually become a better player to achieve those lost tokens once again. It also wouldn't be fair to newer players who have to work harder for the tokens that I got before the new requirements.

Anecdote:
Back when I was a wee lad, the requirements for unlocking Oni kept changing and becoming harder. Back in 2011 or whatever, None Would Escape and Novo Mundo were valid unlocks for Oni and I had flagged them both, but could not AAA, despite my best efforts. Through gradual change of requirements, it kept "running away" from me, and I was trying my hardest to chase it. By the time I AAA'd Novo Mundo and None Would Escape, they no longer unlocked the token. Eventually I caught up with it on a lucky Largiloquent Dithyramb run two years later, and many other qualifying AAAs followed in the next few months. (There is a similar story for Scarhand [Heavy] btw.)

Point being: shit changes, just gotta roll with the punches. I'm not necessarily in favor of revoking someone's token that they legitimately earned during a time in the past, and I would not lobby for removal of Oni from some D4 yokel that unlocked it on NWE in 2011. To be quite frank, token requirements shouldn't be screwed with that much anyway. Leave derby where it's at relative to the new system, and if you want to come out with some 100+ shit, make a new token for that. (And I'm going to regret saying that because it will be yet another one that I will never earn...) After all, there is a significant skill gap in AAA-ability between the two difficulties in question (25:7). I'm ok with making some tokens slightly easier and screwing with the division system a bit, since it's obviously not a perfect system anyway, but anything that would cause dramatic changes should be handled differently.

[RenegadeLucien]

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties

Here's my question: do the tokens really matter THAT much, that you have to sort them out before anything else?

If you want to expand the difficulties (which I still don't think is necessary, but everyone ignored my first post, w/e), why not just make your changes, figure out the new divisional cutoffs, and set the tokens based on those cutoffs? Especially since everyone uses token X = division X for all divisions 3+.

[_Zenith_]

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties

I agree with Rushy that Token Requirements shouldn't be touched, however, with the difficulty expansion I must ask; Will Division 8 become a thing in the future, after the expansion?

Even if 10 players are qualified for it, I think it would be appropriate to have it because I do not think that D7 should be split from 87-120 (depending on where the 13th title would be placed, 92/93-120). In lieu, that should warrant a new divisionary/skill token that passes Derby (requiring 98+ AAA, for example).

[One Winged Angel]

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties

No token with a AAA range higher than Derby is going to be added, at least not for quite some time. For Derby to have an unlock range comparable to the other range AAA tokens, the new unlock min for the hypothetical token would start at Death Piano (even Derby itself is too low imo). That's asking people to AAA a song difficulty that no one's even gotten close to AAA'ing since difficulties of that caliber have been live on this site.

If one day there are players at that hilarious of a skill level, then that could be open for discussion. For now, it looks like the most fair thing to do would be keeping the difficulty unlock min as it was prior to any difficulty conversion because it would be such a substantial jump in AAA difficulty (although I'm tinkering with the idea of throwing Drunk Optimus up as lowest FSO, so that could've been the 'harder Derby' freebie lol)

It's crappy because I really like attributing one of each of those tokens to an entire title range, but again I don't think it's right to remove the token from anyone that's earned it previously nor should the unlock requirements be so drastically changed.

[Dynam0]

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties

Honestly I don't think more divisions should be added. The more divisions you make, the higher chance there is of "misplacing" someone and the more issues you will run into with sandbagging and such.

Back in the day it was beginner, intermediate, advanced...plain and simple. The qualifications for making it into these groups I feel should change over time, rather than the number of groups.

On the topic of difficulties however, in other disciplines the "rating" aspect varies across the board. Some sports like competitive diving maintain a strict difficulty rating system that, as far as numbers go does not change; however what constitutes a difficulty of 4.1 from year to year may change. I'm noticing that you will rarely see the scale itself get larger, rather the difficulty of a certain element may change its rating within the established scale.

One thing is for sure though, pretty well every sport will go through an overhaul of difficulties if the need is there and old standards just don't cut it. I would think this to be the case with FFR since as Rob mentioned, there will be a ton of files that are harder than Death Piano and simply assigning a 99 to them won't cut it.

[RenegadeLucien]

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties

So...what exactly is wrong with say, moving DP to 90 and RATO to 95 (or whatever will be appropriate with the new files coming out), making the new hardest file the 99, and just scaling everything currently back by 10%? Speedvibe Heavy unlock would go to 45, Oni would go to 60, etc.

The compression thing might come up, but if the site lived on 1-12 for so long [whose textual rankings persist even to this day], I don't see the problem. Moving from 1-99 to 1-120 seems to me like adding 21 more unnecessary labels, especially since this would require a complete overhaul of most of the game's songs just to accommodate about 25 incoming super-difficult files.

[One Winged Angel]

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties

what you just described also involves a complete overhaul of most of the game's files for it to be done accurately

it just, in addition, makes poor use of the upper half in the scale

edit: I should note at this point, this thread wasn't created to decide whether or not the scale will be expanded to 1-120 from 1-99. That is definitively happening as I've stated numerous times in the past in multiple threads. Nor was this thread created to discuss new divisional boundaries (although I'm sure those are most definitely going to be shifted a bit when the tourney begins, and of course range AAA token discussion will lead to division discussion as those have been commonly used in correlation with one another for a while). It was simply to discuss where the the 13th title should start, and if players are okay with Otaku [Heavy] and Scarhand [Standard] unlocks being lessened by their current difficulty minimums slightly. I can understand other questions having arisen during difficulty discussion, but barely anyone has answered the questions articulated in the OP, which just leads me to believe no one read it.

[woker-X]

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties

This is the current distribution of files per difficulty range.
1-10 = 152
11-20 = 145
21-30 = 169
31-40 = 202
41-50 = 255
51-60 = 290
61-70 = 372
71-80 = 231
81-90 = 122
91-100 = 26

If you increment the difficulty range you might solve the cluster in the 51-70 range, but the FSO category would have ~20 files (+ the ones coming) in the 100-120 range. That range would be too empty tbh.

Since we are discussing tokens as well, I feel like the requirements for Here We Go should be changed a bit. With the increase of harder files and the introduction of the raw score system, this token went from difficult but fair to almost impossible.

[One Winged Angel]

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties

I'm on my way to work now and will look at this thread later, but with the expansion 1-10 will have significantly fewer files in that range. Currently files that breached Standard (the 5th title in 1-13) start at difficulty 10. That's going to be stretched out considerably.