Old 03-30-2014, 08:59 PM   #1
Zapmeister
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Default Driveway [Heavy] [38 or 24]

So here's the thing. I've noticed difficulty threads for songs lower than like 66+ are for the most part largely ignored in here, and yet, as someone who only started playing this game after they switched the difficulties to a 1-99 scale, I've noticed tons of inconsistencies in difficulty levels that I'm not sure are genuine inaccuracies or just variations in how individuals perceive difficulties of ffr songs. However EzExZeRo7497 (I'm not typing that name out in full ever again ugh) stated here that songs lower down may be mis-rated since everyone in charge of quantifying these things is d7 level, so if we're going to seek out songs to change difficulties we should really be looking at this end of the scale, which is currently largely ignored. (Also I have no clue why that thread got locked despite a consensus that Survive could get bumped down, but anyway.)

I guess at this point, the burden is on me to convince any lonely soul who dares to venture into the unknown hideous depths of the ffr difficulty forum that changes in low-rated ffr songs are really worth bothering about. I'll stop rambling right now and cut right to the point. My point is that ffr difficulty rating mishaps are worth far more than they appear at face value. Take a look at these famous financial mistakes that have happened in the past. In each case, it is absolutely clear what caused the mistake, and it wasn't ffr songs being misrated.

Titanic sinking (1912): economic cost $7.5M (adjusted to $170M at today's values)
Cause: the central propeller wouldn't reverse

Chelsea FC buying Fernando Torres: economic cost £33.5M ($56M) (bought from Liverpool at £50M, current worth £16.5M)
Cause: Fernando Torres sucks

Mars Climate Orbiter crash: economic cost $330M
Cause: 2 groups worked on it and one group measured everything in metric and the other measured everything in silly imperial units and the measurements weren't exact enough

Zapmeister buys bitcoins: economic cost $4 billion
Cause: I bought bitcoins when bitstamp was at $775 and then sod's law says that whenever I buy something hoping the price goes up, the price will fall. Naturally if I hadn't bought anything the price would still be at least that much right now. Cost is the difference in market cap.

Tons of other financial errors: see here (seriously it's a pretty interesting read through)

Now, let's measure the impact of misrating the difficulties of ffr songs. I'm going to focus specifically on the misrating of Driveway [Heavy]; even though there may have been others as well, this serves as a good example.

Driveway [Heavy] was released in July 2007. It was rated an 8 on the old scale, which is 34+ (I think) on the new scale. Now 34 compared to where I think it should be which is 24 or 25 is a pretty huge difference, huge enough to send shock waves through financial markets, as we will shortly see. What else happened in July 2007? Well, just have a read through this: 2007-08 financial crisis. Is it certain that the rating of this ffr song caused it? Read the first sentence of the article:

Quote:
The financial crisis of 2007–2008, also known as the Global Financial Crisis and 2008 financial crisis, is considered by many economists the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Worst year since the 1930s? That means that out of over 70 possible years since then that the "worst one" could have taken place in, it happened in the same year as the mis-rating of Driveway [Heavy]. That's significant at the 2% level! Conclude that there is strong evidence to support that the mis-rating of the ffr song caused this financial crisis.

It's hard to estimate the financial impact of this crisis, but from skimming through the wikipedia article, it talks about one of the effects being the US bear market 2007-09, and in that article it mentions
Quote:
the downfall of the economy with a gross domestic product of about $14 trillion
$14 TRILLION! That's several orders of magnitude bigger than all the mistakes I talked about in the first part of this post. Now it's probably unfair to assume that all of it was due to FFR songs being mis-rated, but let's just say arbitrarily that it was responsible for one percent of that, because I'm feeling generous. Still, $140 billion is something you can't just blink at and move on.

What else? Oh yeah there was that 2007 bank run on Northern Rock and those other financial institutions that I can't be bothered to figure out but wikipedia says
Quote:
The International Monetary Fund estimated that large U.S. and European banks lost more than $1 trillion on toxic assets and from bad loans from January 2007 to September 2009. These losses are expected to top $2.8 trillion from 2007 to 2010. U.S. bank losses were forecast to hit $1 trillion and European bank losses will reach $1.6 trillion.
$2.8 trillion losses. Again assuming a responsibility factor of one percent that's $28 billion, dwarfing all the other numbers up there.

I could go on but I think I've made my point. The point is that the global financial crisis of recent times could well have been either prevented or significantly lessened if this song had been rated a borderline 6/7.

On June 8th, 2012, about a month before I started playing this game, you guys changed all the difficulty ratings to the 1-99 scale, making the scale of the misjudgement in rating much more precise, as you issued it a 38 rating, way higher than the minimum 8 threshold of 34. Since that's an increase of only four points, you'd expect it to be responsible for another catastrophic financial blunder, but a smaller one. Here [pdf] is a list of all the natural disasters occurring worldwide during the month alone of June 2012. Note again the opening paragraph:
Quote:
The United States endured a highly active month, with multiple natural disaster perils occurring from coast to coast. The most costly event came across portions of Texas and New Mexico when severe thunderstorms pelted areas (including the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan region) with golf ball and baseball-sized hail. The Insurance Council of Texas noted that more than 100,000 claims were filed and total insured losses in the state would exceed USD1 billion.
Yep, $1 billion, and all of this is the responsibility of the ffr difficulty system (will prove this later but for now take it on assumption). Also if you look further into the article you see that damage costs in the USA just for that month alone were about $4 billion, and another $4 billion for the rest of the world. See? That's what you get for misrating ffr songs.

What else? Have a read through the wikipedia about the 2012-2014 North American drought. Naturally it started only shortly after the change in the difficulty rating system. What was its economic impact?
Quote:
The drought has cost more than $35 billion in the Midwest, and is predicted to reduce the gross domestic product by 0.5-1% of the US as a whole, equating to a loss of $75 to $150 billion.
That's not a very informative statistic, because $75 is 9 orders of magnitude smaller than $150 billion! But at least you can make a sensible guess that the actual value would be likely to be at least 10% of the way up, so like, $15 billion? That sounds like a reasonable number for messing with the ffr difficulty system.

What about Hurricane Sandy? Well that happened much later, so we can assume - and I'm being generous here - a 1% responsibility factor. Nicking the numbers out of the article, that's another $0.62 billion caused by misrating this ffr song.

I'm too lazy to add these numbers up but the whole point is that misrating ffr songs, especially (but not limited to) this one, is responsible at least in a pretty large part for screwing over world economy and causing several billions of dollars worth of losses worldwide.

Oh, I almost forgot, proof of responsibility. Well this article says
Quote:
Blah blah blah blah made 2012 the United States' second costliest year for natural disasters since 1980, federal officials said today.
That's a p-value of about 6%. Make of that what you will - it's certainly less convincing than the 2% in the first one but it'll certainly flag up as significant on quite a few tests. So yeah, that's pretty convincing proof.

To sum up: Misrating ffr songs is destroying the world economy and needs to stop right now. Only you (the reader) can help by publishing further well-sourced posts to the ffr difficulty subforum.

Ok, if you've read this far, you're going to be pretty convinced that this song is misrated. How to rate it correctly? Let's do some comparisons.

Driveway [Heavy] is 213 bpm 8ths stream with a few jumps in it, no tempo changes or anything weird, maximum of 10 notes per second and consistently like 7, and it's rated a 38. The song I can find that most closely resembles it is Driveway [Standard] which is exactly the same song but with like 10% fewer notes. Still pretty much the same patterns, except the stream is a tiny bit less continuous, and not so many jumps. It's an 18. Why the huge discrepancy over just adding in a few notes here and there with keeping more-or-less the same patterns?

Goodbye, My Love is a 21 with basically 8th stream at an even faster 220 bpm. It's less continuous (but more so than Driveway [Standard]) and doesn't have as many jumps but again has broadly the same patterns.

On the harder side, Elements is a 25 with again the same sort of patterns at roughly the same speed (couldn't get the bpm here) but with a few more jumps in it raising the notes per second to a maximum of 11, though it's shorter. (Incidentally I think it's a little under-rated but maybe that's just my opinion after doing poorly on it in sax runner's rates tournament)

Chase You Down is a 26, same song artist, long boring rock song, a little slower at 170 bpm (halved), more jumps and slightly harder patterns, so about the same difficulty.

Solar Force is a 27 with much more jumps and harder patterns in it and is 150 to 185 bpm so I'm going to put this as a maximum difficulty bound.

Finally, in EzExZeRo7497's (copy-pasted the name) Ask Me Anything thread:
Quote:
4. Pretty sure the reason why Driveway [Heavy] is overrated 15 points higher is because the song is fucking terrible. I'll give it a look some time soon.
That doesn't explain the discrepancy between it and Driveway [Standard] at all.

I'm suggesting 24 or 25 and I also hate it when a forum post describing an FFR song difficulty change doesn't end the way I think it capybara.
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Last edited by Zapmeister; 03-31-2014 at 05:46 PM.. Reason: corrected the second p-value
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Old 03-31-2014, 01:50 AM   #2
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Default Re: Driveway [Heavy] [38 or 24]

What a weird thread. Thread approved.

I'll give thoughts later.

EDIT:
Since you already gave comparisons to files, I'll just respond to them accordingly:
Goodbye, My Love: More sparse streams compared to Driveway [Standard], slightly faster for sure, but it's probably overrated by around a point or so I feel. Regardless, it's definitely harder than Driveway [Standard]
Elements: Slightly harder than Driveway [Heavy] as it has harder patterning and it feels ever so slightly faster, but I'm not sure. Might be underrated, however. 26 might be better.
Chase You Down: Hardest part about this is the length, but the patterns are definitely harder than Driveway. Might be the same difficulty, but I think Driveway is easier by a point.
Solar Force: Clearly harder than Driveway [Heavy]. I feel that this is underrated personally, would be better as a 29 or so.

I think 25 is a better fit compared to 24, but I generally agree with the fact that it's definitely overrated.

Regarding Survive, I thought it was already bumped down to around 54 but turns out it wasn't, my bad.

Last edited by EzExZeRo7497; 03-31-2014 at 02:32 AM..
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Old 03-31-2014, 04:29 AM   #3
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Default Re: Driveway [Heavy] [38 or 24]

Great, you have to go and ruin one of my best scores by turning my first 8 AAA into a 7...

:P
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Old 03-31-2014, 07:28 PM   #4
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Default Re: Driveway [Heavy] [38 or 24]

Quote:
Originally Posted by Guest15937 View Post
7
24 (new) is actually an old 6 :P

25 would be a 7 I think
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Old 04-3-2014, 07:31 AM   #5
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Default Re: Driveway [Heavy] [38 or 24]

While I do agree that 38 is a bit too high, doesn't the length of the song factor into the difficulty? Because that song is effin long, man. I'd almost say that it's because it's such a boring long song that it deserves that 38.
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Old 04-3-2014, 11:06 AM   #6
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Default Re: Driveway [Heavy] [38 or 24]

Quote:
Originally Posted by minhtam2448 View Post
While I do agree that 38 is a bit too high, doesn't the length of the song factor into the difficulty? Because that song is effin long, man. I'd almost say that it's because it's such a boring long song that it deserves that 38.
it's people like you who are partially responsible for destroying the world economy.

almost every song in the rock genre between 15-30 is like this. long and boring with generally easy patterns. driveway [standard] is the same song with like 10% fewer notes in it and it's an 18. there's nothing about this song that justifies a 30+ rating.

i secretly hope that the world economy goes into total irreversible meltdown and hyperinflation so that my decision to buy bitcoins would be vindicated
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r5: 3
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Old 04-3-2014, 11:40 AM   #7
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Default Re: Driveway [Heavy] [38 or 24]

I used to play this song all the time, its really not that difficult but definitely a step up from the last. Id say 38 is a bit too high but 24 is WAY too low. Maybe 30 or 29.
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Old 04-3-2014, 11:42 AM   #8
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Default Re: Driveway [Heavy] [38 or 24]

siding with Zap/Eze on this one; definitely beyond overrated -- anywhere from 25-27 seems alright to me.
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Old 04-3-2014, 11:45 AM   #9
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Default Re: Driveway [Heavy] [38 or 24]

Quote:
Originally Posted by SK8R43 View Post
I used to play this song all the time, its really not that difficult but definitely a step up from the last. Id say 38 is a bit too high but 24 is WAY too low. Maybe 30 or 29.
WHoa you would say that, wouldn't you? You D6+ one-percenters are the reason why today's world is in this mess in the first place, yet here you are denying that there's a problem at all. It's good, hard-working, D2 folk like Zapmeister who end up losing their homes and going bankrupt while you line your pockets with overrated song difficulties.
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Old 04-3-2014, 11:47 AM   #10
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Default Re: Driveway [Heavy] [38 or 24]

lol well okay then
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Old 04-3-2014, 11:54 AM   #11
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Default Re: Driveway [Heavy] [38 or 24]

If I bump this down to 25, when can I expect my excellence award in global economic affairs?
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