What are the best simfile packs released after 2010

[Gundam-Dude]

choof basically reiterated my sentiments but better than I did.

I kinda had the idea in my head a few months ago where I'd force myself to actually do another 4key pack, except I'd basically throw back into the chancellor elitist bullshit era and judge as reasonably critical and harsh as possible. tentative rules I came up with during the same string of thought that I can remember atm:

- if I don't like the song because I think it's too rhythmically boring or repetitive, auto-rejected.
- experimental and/or "steppable" music encouraged.
- superficial dumps are auto-rejected. find an actual song that warrants difficult layering.
- weeb music is auto-rejected.
- if your file is monotonous jumpstream/handstream for like 4 minutes, auto rejected. send that shit to nuclear blast, yolomania, or whatever the fuck, not to this pack.
- basically, if YOU think it's a really good file, send it to the pack. don't send it unless you're at least 75% confident that it will get in.

so almost like untitled stepmania pack but arguably stricter.

prior to untitled sm pack, the last pack I can think of off the top of my head that's similar to this idea was xoon 5, which received over 200 file submissions and only 47 files made it to final release. a little over 50 files were accepted, but the pack had a phase 2 weeding process, which basically dropped the weakest files (many of which ended up in light chancellors pack 1).

good luck in trying to convince me to actually make this happen though because my current interest in 4key and stepmania in general has been the lowest its ever been. I have bunch of files you probably don't have volumes 4 AND 5 sitting on my hard drive but I've done nothing with it. I might just randomly release both without any organization, gfx, or w/e.

and good luck in getting anyone that's currently active to actually submit files, because they'd just ignore the pack in favour of more superficial/generic dumps.

Originally Posted by Dynam0

That being said the FFR Seasonal Packs had a ton of unappealing music, I've always shied away from the J-Pop stuff and there really is a lot of it in FFR Seasonal.

it's all good, bobby, I even admit myself that the ffr season packs' song choice is pretty bad and I take full responsibility and blame for it. fun fact: ffr autumn was close to 80% japan because I was FLOODED with submissions from the korean smoc simfile authors. after that, I enforced a no japan songs rule for the following ffr winter, and I got next to no submissions, so I kinda had to become lax with song choice rules again towards the end of the pack.

Originally Posted by dAnceguy117

I really liked them. so when you say "no one" it's kind of alienating, fam...

it was an overstatement, sorry fam

[dAnceguy117]

good to hear from ya, bboy!

the post-2010 pack I'm the most attached to is FFR Community Pack Summer 2012. I was suddenly super active in the community for a pretty short burst of time, and a lil' while after its release I stayed up all night one night and played/reviewed all of the files. maaaan I was loopy.

[choof]

Originally Posted by Gundam-Dude

- if I don't like the song because I think it's too rhythmically boring or repetitive, auto-rejected.
- experimental and/or "steppable" music encouraged.
- superficial dumps are auto-rejected. find an actual song that warrants difficult layering.
- weeb music is auto-rejected.
- if your file is monotonous jumpstream/handstream for like 4 minutes, auto rejected. send that shit to nuclear blast, yolomania, or whatever the fuck, not to this pack.
- basically, if YOU think it's a really good file, send it to the pack. don't send it unless you're at least 75% confident that it will get in.

do this pls
even if it ends up being a minipack of like 10 charts or something

[bboyflames]

Originally Posted by Contrapasso

http://stepmaniaonline.net/downloads...ll%20Pill).zip

Thank you!

Originally Posted by dAnceguy117

good to hear from ya, bboy!

the post-2010 pack I'm the most attached to is FFR Community Pack Summer 2012. I was suddenly super active in the community for a pretty short burst of time, and a lil' while after its release I stayed up all night one night and played/reviewed all of the files. maaaan I was loopy.

Hey man! I hope all is well =0D

I actually have that pack downloaded so Ill be playing files from it soon.

[leonid]

I'll try to send to that pack if I find a song steppabl enough

[Reincarnate]

If someone can teach me how to sync shit properly, I'll step some files.

[leonid]

just set up the same bpm and step, then have someone else sync it for you

[blindreper1179]

Originally Posted by Reincarnate

If someone can teach me how to sync shit properly, I'll step some files.

You can always have someone sync a file for you, Then step it

[bmah]

Originally Posted by MooMoo_Cowfreak

Choof and bmah people seem to be saying that it's if people post scores of your stuff, but what if your file was relatively easy and getting a great score on it doesn't really show off much? I don't think that means people didn't play it, or didn't enjoy it, just that they didn't feel the need to show off to the world that they did well on the chart.

Actually, the reasoning that certain scores don't appear to be posted is most often because people don't score well on them. To me, that should be an incentive to work on the file and post your progress. People post scores they're proud of, so they don't post "sucky" scores. This is what I've been told time and time again. Yet such files are the ones that have more room for improvement. People's perception of a fun file suddenly changes to one they can score well on, and for whatever reason they never seem to get bored of it. In my opinion, playing a file you're decent on with only minute progress in regards to shaving off perfects/goods is like beating a dead horse. Play something else.

[ilikexd]

I mostly agree with GD's thoughts.

Given that the amount of SM players has been slowly declining due to the fact that over time people quit and now less people are starting, the few who are remaining have an average skill level that is astonishingly high.

In addition to that, the way many play the game is to reach for the best possible speed & stamina scores, usually going for AAs. There's nothing wrong with this; you can play however you want, and this is just what many want. Casual play and accuracy score-seeking are much less popular, so much so that they're thought of as an "other" category of playing different to the main one of going fast.

These things combined mean that the simfiles that the player base demands are those that challenge speed & stamina at the highest level, which means cranking up the NPS to as high as possible. Of course, high NPS implicitly limits variation in what can be placed in just four columns, and what sort of music can be used, at least if one is to follow all conventional stepping ideas such as layering of elements, pitch relevance, and literal following of rhythm. An unintended consequence of this is that the large majority of the content to be enjoyed is unenjoyable or even disheartening for newcoming players. Packs intentionally targeted at beginner players were a good effort to address this, but the fact remains that there is no central SM body seeking to attract new players and thus no motivation for this to be a regular thing, or for people to include easy charts along with hard charts, since steppers will tend to target the larger audience (or more accurately, not even the larger audience, but the audience which is actively posting / sharing scores).

More strict judgment of stepcharts on conventional ideas and uniqueness/originality lead to the exclusion of most extremely hard submissions to a pack due to, again, how high NPS is implicitly limiting. There is still room to make extremely difficult stepcharts that follow these ideas, but due to just how fast and physically demanding they are, there is almost no difference in "kinesthetic connection" (i.e. feeling like you're playing the music) between these, since you will often just being pushing your physical limit at any part where it's challenging, and a dumpchart that foregoes strictly following the rhythm in favor of just following the intensity of the music (which can at times as well follow rhythms partially or fully). And in some sense, if there's less connection of feeling between the music and the steps, absolute uniqueness/originality in the steps themselves goes from being the highest virtue to just being a good trait in balance with the music being something many want to hear, the steps in some way following the intensity of the music, and the stepchart overall having a cohesive and meaningful difficulty structure. So in some sense you could say that these are not the "best" in the extent that they don't display the highest levels of creativity and originality, but I don't think it's fair to say that they're bad or even worse in any meaningful way when they exist to fulfill a different purpose.

[MooMoo_Cowfreak]

That was straight beautiful ilikexd. It seems like there's a disconnect of communication between people interested in speed, and those interested in rhythm/accuracy. I see no reason why the two can't coexist and both be catered to by simfile authors, even in our small community.

bmah, I guess what I was saying is that if people don't post scores of your charts that doesn't mean that they aren't being enjoyed, even by higher tier players.

[bmah]

That's not really much comfort, as you can imagine that to be the case for any file. A moot point IMO. :/
Confirmation that people play it is nice, you know?

[Leo137]

I guess people like standard challenges, the fact that you can easily separate a lot of files into js, speed, jacks and those are focused on a sole skill probes that point. The benefits of standard challenge files is that they are more easily noticed because there's more ground for comparison (i can totally feel how a handstream file feels given a bpm even if i didn't played), so they are more likely to be posted.

Also, i can totally expect what i should be encountering on these kind of files, killing the surprise factor and giving constraints of what you can and cannot do on a certain file (so i cannot be fully creative with the patterning), standarization also discourages difficulty spikes so you end with very plain files.

I think both styles or players do coexist but the trend on newer stepartist favor the fairness of the challenges (standarization) over giving an unique experience

Probably expressed in very blunt terms but i guess you can feel the idea

[choof]

i think you may have missed the point

[bmah]

Well stated, that sounds like logical reasoning. Yes, the flattening of difficulty spikes is something I've also noticed, sometimes taken to an obsessive degree. Balanced files suddenly become so balanced that nothing different happens. And comparison of skill through such cut and dry files I suppose is why people constantly compare their scores with those files compared to others.

[L.B.D.D]

i never play stepmania much anymore but when i do turn it on every few months i play the odi packs and xoon packs

they are great fun

not sure if they're mostly after 2010 though, but that's my 2 cents

[Xayphon]

Originally Posted by choof

xay's recent pack is a breath of fresh air, a ton of unique charts from one of those dudes I mentioned that had a distinct style

Fun fact is that originally I was planning to make a GDMP revival with a bunch of MetzgerSM-esque dumps to make people relive something from the old days. Later, after finishing exactly those few German dump songs that are in the pack (and there are not many), I wanted to step quality stuff again, because that's where I felt attracted to the most. I couldn't grasp making a huge pack with just files made for the highest divisions with a very blunt stepping style, because I'd actually feel ashamed for making a bunch of files that remotely play just like something from NB or YoloMania. But if I only stepped a bunch of quality songs, I was literally afraid of the fact that I WILL waste my time with the pack because nobody probably wouldn't be arsed to play it.

So I went with the decision that I wanted to make a pack that appeals to every single person currently playing the game. A mix of Speed dumps, JS and unique quality/artsy files with very unique music that would just reiterate the fact that files don't need to be hard to be fun. Literally a Mixtape of all kinds of songs and all kinds of difficulties.

So thank u guys fam it was one of my goals to break into the current meta and release something Stepmania was all about a few years ago especially to prove to 4k osu!mania people that making fun files is not all about making them dumps or 300 BPM JS so they don't get the wrong idea about charting because else this will become the single biggest thing that pisses me off about the osu!mania community (since there's also a osu!mania release version of xay pack) But man, if I hadn't done some JS/Dumps the pack would probably be totally shit, so there you go *****s

shit I think I got triggered

[SKG_Scintill]

hey, I step ungeneric stuff :[

[hi19hi19]

Chiming in after Scintill to say yeah, I try to occasionally step nongeneric stuff too.

Glad at least one person mentioned my packs. Pack 3 was intentionally a pretty straightforward speed pack but pack 4 had a big range from straight speed to very technical.
I know at least one person still steps what makes them happy and not exclusively what the masses demand
If people think my charts are too generic recently then I have some surprises coming over the summer.


Packs in sig.

[Reincarnate]

I literally just finished downloading your packs hi19hi19 -- any files in particular I should check out first?