Over in the Bug Report forum, a complaint about difficulty ratings was replied to with a link to this thread so I decided to check it out. I didn't realize people considered the ratings to be that far off. Now granted, as a new player I'm not a great judge of difficulty. Even some of the easier songs seem difficult to me; the few higher level songs I tried for fun look damn near impossible to me, but people can do them. I did assume that the difficulty levels in the game were basically right though and was kind of working my way up the list. From what I see here, it looks like people like chardish's rating system better so I think I'm going to have to check it out a bit more, try songs according to these ratings and see what I think.
The basis of the system looks pretty good because you've got some fairly concrete things to measure difficulty against -- note duration (quarter, eighth, sixteenth, etc), step pattern (regular even beats or not, maybe matching the melody instead), song tempo (faster is typically harder), that sort of thing. Hopefully that would make it easier to get accurate difficulty levels and you're right, fewer levels should make it a bit easier to decide what goes in which one. When you make the scale too fine, it does become difficult to tell one level from another. Too few though and you risk grouping together songs that are different enough to really require separate levels. You could let people say "this is low beginner" or "this is high beginner" for example, but that's almost like doubling the number of categories. It wouldn't have to be done on all levels though; like everything at Master might be essentially equally difficult. But if there's enough of a range in difficulty which is likely to happen on the easy end, then giving it a low/high split within the level could be useful. *shrug*
Anyway, this sounds like a good idea for revising the ratings. I haven't compared yours to the game's yet to see how they match up, but when I get a chance I'll take a closer look.
P.S. -- Maybe there are no 1 foot level games because that would kind of imply that you could do it on a dance pad while hopping on one foot, but since you use both feet the minimum difficulty level is 2 feet?
The basis of the system looks pretty good because you've got some fairly concrete things to measure difficulty against -- note duration (quarter, eighth, sixteenth, etc), step pattern (regular even beats or not, maybe matching the melody instead), song tempo (faster is typically harder), that sort of thing. Hopefully that would make it easier to get accurate difficulty levels and you're right, fewer levels should make it a bit easier to decide what goes in which one. When you make the scale too fine, it does become difficult to tell one level from another. Too few though and you risk grouping together songs that are different enough to really require separate levels. You could let people say "this is low beginner" or "this is high beginner" for example, but that's almost like doubling the number of categories. It wouldn't have to be done on all levels though; like everything at Master might be essentially equally difficult. But if there's enough of a range in difficulty which is likely to happen on the easy end, then giving it a low/high split within the level could be useful. *shrug*
Anyway, this sounds like a good idea for revising the ratings. I haven't compared yours to the game's yet to see how they match up, but when I get a chance I'll take a closer look.
P.S. -- Maybe there are no 1 foot level games because that would kind of imply that you could do it on a dance pad while hopping on one foot, but since you use both feet the minimum difficulty level is 2 feet?
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