Public opinion poll on Etterna Chord cohesion removal

Re: Public opinion poll on Etterna Chord cohesion removal

Note that i do not represent anyone and just want to get the community's opinion on this

Re: Public opinion poll on Etterna Chord cohesion removal

Why not use the FFR poll function?

anyways I'm very much against the removal of chord cohesion

Re: Public opinion poll on Etterna Chord cohesion removal

Why does the sm community always have an all or nothing attitude to everything

Re: Public opinion poll on Etterna Chord cohesion removal

Re: Public opinion poll on Etterna Chord cohesion removal

There was already some votes in sry

Re: Public opinion poll on Etterna Chord cohesion removal

Maybe because not everyone who plays stepmania posts on this cesspool of a site

Re: Public opinion poll on Etterna Chord cohesion removal

stepmania has the exact opposite problem right now: individual players have extremely different playstyles and priorities and are quick to form bubbles of files that only they care about, making the community extremely fractured
the community doesn't seem to think this is a problem even though this means new players come into the game unsure of what to do, get 50 completely different answers from 50 different people who have been around for the same amount of time, then get confused and leave because of course they can't tell who actually speaks for the community as a whole
chord cohesion requires an actual discussion of whether or not we want to remove it because if we treat it the same way we've treated every other issue in the game (i.e just let individual players do whatever they want), you're going to have people playing the same exact file and getting different notecounts in their results, making them completely incomparable
this is far worse than j4 vs j5 because at least with that misses mean more or less the same thing in both systems and you can sort of figure out what different MA/PA ratios in one system are equivalent to in another

Re: Public opinion poll on Etterna Chord cohesion removal

the OP is really really bad and i doubt they even entirely know what they are talking about so i'm gonna go ahead and give some background:

Chord cohesion is a mechanic in StepMania whereby all notes that occur at the same time count as only one judgment. When you hit a chord (which is a jump, triple/hand, or quad), the latest time that you hit one of the notes in the chord serves as the time you hit the entire chord. This mechanic is copied directly from DDR, the game StepMania was made to simulate.

This mechanic makes StepMania fundamentally different from almost all other rhythm games, and specifically vertical-scrolling rhythm games such as Beatmania (along with all of its simulators), pop'n music, O2Jam, and osu!mania. Because of this mechanic, some notes don't count as much as others, and the ones which don't count in a chart are different with each play (I'm mainly saying this to distinguish it from mini-freezes, where some notes count more because the charter felt like being creative). In addition, this mechanic can mask both early mistakes with perfect hits and perfect hits with late mistakes, with no clear reason why early mistakes should be more forgivable. Lastly, while BSing is a common strategy to all rhythm games, I cannot think of a more blatant yet rewarding way of cheating in a VSRG than hitting a split trill as a jump trill with one extra note beforehand and getting all marvelous on it.

With the development of Etterna, a version of StepMania geared more towards keyboard play, some people took the opportunity to bug Mina about throwing a switch for chord cohesion into the game. He did so, and while the original release with it available was removed from GitHub, another user named Skelif made a spin-off of it (executable, source). To turn off chord cohesion, go into the .ini after running the game once and set OverrideChordCohesion=1. Skelif's build is a bit different from the original in that it shows two versions of scores without chord cohesion, called "scaled" and "unscaled". The scaled version, which Mina came up with, counts notes within a chord as a fraction of an actual note so that the total number of points available in a file remains the same as it did with chord cohesion (among other reasons which I would much rather he explain if he wants). The unscaled version counts every note in a chord as a full-fledged note.

The question, then, is whether or not we want chord cohesion removed from Etterna before it builds up more momentum. Personally, I think that while removing chord cohesion ups the ante for accuracy players like myself and brings the game more in line with other rhythm games (which I think it desperately needs), in general it doesn't actually impact scores significantly enough to warrant changing the game as significantly as it does. But that's just me.

Re: Public opinion poll on Etterna Chord cohesion removal

Alright, so first thing worth pointing out is that chord cohesion is likely not going to be done away with altogether to begin with. It is currently a preference.ini value that can be set either to 0 or 1, and honestly, given the fact that the removal of CC is clearly a highly-divisive topic, I very much doubt that it would be forcefully carried out in any and all future build releases to come.


The second thing to address lies in how this will affect the average newcomer to the game.

All it takes at this point is, "hey, should I play with CC on or off?" from such a person in order for hell to break loose, in light of the plethora of different conflicting answers that they would receive - lurker very much brings up a valid point in that regard.

My personal answer to that question is the following: I honestly do not see how less-experienced players within the game can benefit at all from disabling CC, as their playstyles lack the requisite physical control to even make anything out of the added visual feedback.

Because that's literally the point of disabling CC in the first place: increased reading and error detection resolution.
But, in order to make anything notably tangible out of it, you need to reach a certain level of reading and physical control first.


To illustrate my personal case, I have no reason whatsoever to be switching CC off until I reach the point where I can do the following without physically overstraining too much:

1- Fix my trilling control issues and begin to slice through JS consistently, and...
2- Reach a point where I can actually go for 97+ scores on 24+ msd level chordjacking stuff consistently.


If you are targeting cutting-edge AAs on dense chordjacking files regardless of how good you are, you are actually better off enabling CC.
If you are learning how to play jumpstream or handstream without splitting chords left and right all the time, you are definitely better off enabling CC.


My viewpoint is quite honestly not one that appears to be held, let alone publicized very often, as the SMOC community is pretty much doing their own thing, and Mina himself doesn't hold a very high opinion of chordjacking in the first place.

But, I feel that my perspective on the matter does hold capability in regards to assessing things in a manner that can be clear enough to both newcomers and seasoned players alike. That being said, if there are any fundamental flaws in my reasoning, then by all means go ahead and point them out for me.


I am generally reluctant to voice my opinion on such things due to the off-chance of it being unheard or making zero difference whatsoever, but in this case I'm willing to go for it as I have been meaning to do so eventually anyway.


To address the OP however, I do feel that scaled points are very much the preferable choice under the context of CC being disabled - that is primarily because of unscaled scores being far too different from CC-on scores, not to mention that being able to draw comparisons between CC-on and scaled CC-off scores far outweighs the benefits of resorting to unscaled CC-off... that is, if such benefits even exist at all to begin with.

Re: Public opinion poll on Etterna Chord cohesion removal

Thinking that scores absoloutely 100% need to be comparable between everyone is an assumption that I hate and would like to completely reject; that seems like one of the foundational reasons you all like to go in one complete way or the other.

Re: Public opinion poll on Etterna Chord cohesion removal

yeah i agree there shouldn't even be a community

Re: Public opinion poll on Etterna Chord cohesion removal



Yeah I agree that that's the sole thing that defines a community

Re: Public opinion poll on Etterna Chord cohesion removal

chord cohesion is bad like this thread

Re: Public opinion poll on Etterna Chord cohesion removal

i would continue to give a shit if you hadn't just skipped over everything i had posted to pull out the one thing you don't like