[qqwref]

Originally Posted by TC_Halogen

On FFR, you could use the top players as a sample for figuring out when a song is a 10 vs. 11, or 11 vs. 12 by seeing how regulars compare in the song versus songs in that difficulty range (obviously observing weaknesses and strengths in these players).

Partial bias, but it can lead to more accuracy in difficulty ratings.

That only works as long as you're comparing songs to each other. In fact, I'd say that all the VC-FMO and FMO-FGO borderline files should be decided by how the community performs on them.

The problem is, a lot of people will compare a song against their *idea* of what a difficulty should be, and that tends to slightly increase when you get better. So you start with people raised on low FMOs like K8, Southern Cross, LW4, NWE, etc., and then when they get better they decide that those songs don't "feel" like low FMOs anymore and should be pushed down. Nevermind that those songs basically defined where the VC-FMO boundary was for a long time. When you develop enough speed, you don't think speedy patterns are hard anymore - just look at all the people saying Lolo is easy enough to be FMO (because they have the speed to hit it), when someone who's starting to PA FMOs will consider it totally out of their league.