Does FFR need a Funk category?

[gstarfire]

Personally, I don't like listening to funk songs very much and there are so few it seems kinda pointless to give them their own category. Maybe FFR could move those into the miscellaneous category and make some other category such as Dubstep for example? Or maybe newly added songs there like the official has been doing to the funk category. I'd like to hear your opinions.

[ilikexd]

The categories are really antiquated and haven't faithfully served their purpose for a long time given how limited/specific they are and the wide variety of music on FFR. "Arcade", for example, doesn't really make much sense, and as a result you'll see some inconsistency in what type of music gets placed there.

[PrawnSkunk]

I think FFR would be better off without genre sorting entirely. I would be interested in replacing genre categories with the option to switch between Numerical Difficulty Sorting ("Difficulty 70-75") and Difficulty Names ("Master"). Another interesting thought would be categorizing songs using "themes" similar to packs on StepMania.

[rayword45]

I think instead of removing anything, FFR should add new genres and sort things accordingly (Examples: Jazz, Japanese Bullshit, IDM to ease up on Misc and Dance2)

[bmah]

I personally would go for a system where the song styles are retained, but the sections divided by song genres removed.

...And then maybe we can then rename "styles" to "genres" because more people are familiar with that term.


Anyhow, this is a topic that has been discussed numerous times, and obviously nothing here will change until the entire menu interface is changed. I hope that'll come eventually.

[Rapta]

I hate funk music. Get a new menu~

[gold stinger]

Does this hint at a possible R^4?

[noname219]

Yeah, sorting songs by genre is pretty much a relic of the past. The "categories" were determined when there was 4-6 songs in each of them. Other categories (Dance 2, Purchased, etc.) were added when the Legacy was the only engine around. When the Velocity engine was added, categories stuck because in order to change them, we would have to change the Legacy engine. (and I think our sole coder at the time was reluctant to touch that engine) Basically, we're stuck with a decision that was made over 10 years ago.

Oh and there's 13 categories total, we could use the old ranking system instead.

Also @bmah : the FFR database calls them "Genres", the Legacy/Velocity engine calls them "Styles" or "Genres" depending on where you look...

[choof]

if we get rid of funk where are all of the tourney files gonna go

Originally Posted by bmah

"genres"

going to quote this out of context, thanks bmah-kun


On a serious note, the current "categorization" is really non-cohesive. In my opinion, we should do away with genres/styles altogether and have them sorted by difficulties, like 1-10, 11-20, all the way up to 100.

[ilikexd]

Originally Posted by choof

On a serious note, the current "categorization" is really non-cohesive. In my opinion, we should do away with genres/styles altogether and have them sorted by difficulties, like 1-10, 11-20, all the way up to 100.

Yeah, this whole topic was discussed in a Skype chat, and, while it's agreed upon that these categories are pretty ambiguous and unhelpful, the existence of some form of categorization is helpful to help new users. Music "style" aside, difficulty would be the logical thing to base it off.

[hi19hi19]

The current categories make very little sense. There's a lot of questions to ask to fix it though:

How many categories do we want to have? In other words, how specific should they be?
How many files per category is right to aid in navigation? What is the upper limit where it's totally unhelpful as a sorting tool, and the lower limit where it's just needlessly specific?
How do we deal with songs that fall into multiple categories?
How do we deal with adding new songs that eventually make existing categories too large and unwieldy?

There's a lot of things to think about.

Originally Posted by gold stinger

Does this hint at a possible R^4?

This reminds me of "Thirdstyle is coming soon™"

[andy-o24]

"Genre Name #" up to 16 or 17 pages (above this overflows the page number navigation over the arrows for flipping pages in Legacy engine)
Once 16 or 17 pages are filled.
"Genre Name #+1"
Repeat.

Now we just need more specific genre names to eliminate the Dance 2 having 8 navigation numbers overflowing the flip page arrow with some of those number overlapping each other issue.

-o24

[justin_ator]

While I definitely agree the "genres" need an overhaul, I personally don't like the idea of sorting solely on difficulty. The majority of the reason I played when I first started had nothing to do with skill, it was playing songs I enjoyed. I never would have found those songs to begin with had I not been guided somewhat by the genres, because I wouldn't have had the patience to go through a bunch of "Difficulty 11-20" songs to find ones I liked.

Just my opinion though. If the engine(s) can sort based on song "style" (or genre of music, whatever we choose to call it) then it's a moot point because some new person wanting to play techno and not j-pop would just search techno.

[gold stinger]

would there be any chance of a branching system to be discussed? (as in the top layer of genres is difficulty-wise, being 1-10, 11-20, etc. and then branch the original engine choices (dance, hip hop, arcade, classic...)) you would see a lot more holes in areas as you go up the difficulty tree if you sort by sub-genres, allowing resource & pushing-forces for people to fill those gaps (there is no 80+ hip hop), and it will still allow newcomers & players alike to pick what songs they want to play based off genre.

Another choice is to offer a search possibility for certain genres, but with how many genres & styles of music there is in FFR, it might be worthwhile to turn it into a drop-down list, and offer players the option to revert back to the old system.

This is one of those things where the situation is heavily opinionated, and not everyone likes it. So why not both? It's a great idea, but imo, I would prefer the current system that we have now, and an option to resort into difficulties.

[lurker]

having difficulty be the default categorization wouldn't be user friendly because let's face it, most people don't like ambient and classical
it would work if more songs under 20 were like rainbow road (standard) but iirc that is not the case

[lurker]

the funk category is outdated and should probably be replaced by something that splits up edm more, but picking the genre to replace it would be annoying as fuck
using the choof definition of dubstep (i.e as stated in dubstep minipack 2) could actually work