Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties
 

Yeah, that's not a minefield worth threading on considering the whole harder songs thing is supposed to cater to that population.

In any case the distribution of AAAs in the 92/93+ range should increase a bit with the increased number of songs due to the hard batch.

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties
 

Anecdote:
Back when I was a wee lad, the requirements for unlocking Oni kept changing and becoming harder. Back in 2011 or whatever, None Would Escape and Novo Mundo were valid unlocks for Oni and I had flagged them both, but could not AAA, despite my best efforts. Through gradual change of requirements, it kept "running away" from me, and I was trying my hardest to chase it. By the time I AAA'd Novo Mundo and None Would Escape, they no longer unlocked the token. Eventually I caught up with it on a lucky Largiloquent Dithyramb run two years later, and many other qualifying AAAs followed in the next few months. (There is a similar story for Scarhand [Heavy] btw.)

Point being: shit changes, just gotta roll with the punches. I'm not necessarily in favor of revoking someone's token that they legitimately earned during a time in the past, and I would not lobby for removal of Oni from some D4 yokel that unlocked it on NWE in 2011. To be quite frank, token requirements shouldn't be screwed with that much anyway. Leave derby where it's at relative to the new system, and if you want to come out with some 100+ shit, make a new token for that. (And I'm going to regret saying that because it will be yet another one that I will never earn...) After all, there is a significant skill gap in AAA-ability between the two difficulties in question (25:7). I'm ok with making some tokens slightly easier and screwing with the division system a bit, since it's obviously not a perfect system anyway, but anything that would cause dramatic changes should be handled differently.

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties
 

Here's my question: do the tokens really matter THAT much, that you have to sort them out before anything else?

If you want to expand the difficulties (which I still don't think is necessary, but everyone ignored my first post, w/e), why not just make your changes, figure out the new divisional cutoffs, and set the tokens based on those cutoffs? Especially since everyone uses token X = division X for all divisions 3+.

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties
 

I agree with Rushy that Token Requirements shouldn't be touched, however, with the difficulty expansion I must ask; Will Division 8 become a thing in the future, after the expansion?

Even if 10 players are qualified for it, I think it would be appropriate to have it because I do not think that D7 should be split from 87-120 (depending on where the 13th title would be placed, 92/93-120). In lieu, that should warrant a new divisionary/skill token that passes Derby (requiring 98+ AAA, for example).

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties
 

No token with a AAA range higher than Derby is going to be added, at least not for quite some time. For Derby to have an unlock range comparable to the other range AAA tokens, the new unlock min for the hypothetical token would start at Death Piano (even Derby itself is too low imo). That's asking people to AAA a song difficulty that no one's even gotten close to AAA'ing since difficulties of that caliber have been live on this site.

If one day there are players at that hilarious of a skill level, then that could be open for discussion. For now, it looks like the most fair thing to do would be keeping the difficulty unlock min as it was prior to any difficulty conversion because it would be such a substantial jump in AAA difficulty (although I'm tinkering with the idea of throwing Drunk Optimus up as lowest FSO, so that could've been the 'harder Derby' freebie lol)

It's crappy because I really like attributing one of each of those tokens to an entire title range, but again I don't think it's right to remove the token from anyone that's earned it previously nor should the unlock requirements be so drastically changed.

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties
 

Honestly I don't think more divisions should be added. The more divisions you make, the higher chance there is of "misplacing" someone and the more issues you will run into with sandbagging and such.

Back in the day it was beginner, intermediate, advanced...plain and simple. The qualifications for making it into these groups I feel should change over time, rather than the number of groups.

On the topic of difficulties however, in other disciplines the "rating" aspect varies across the board. Some sports like competitive diving maintain a strict difficulty rating system that, as far as numbers go does not change; however what constitutes a difficulty of 4.1 from year to year may change. I'm noticing that you will rarely see the scale itself get larger, rather the difficulty of a certain element may change its rating within the established scale.

One thing is for sure though, pretty well every sport will go through an overhaul of difficulties if the need is there and old standards just don't cut it. I would think this to be the case with FFR since as Rob mentioned, there will be a ton of files that are harder than Death Piano and simply assigning a 99 to them won't cut it.

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties
 

So...what exactly is wrong with say, moving DP to 90 and RATO to 95 (or whatever will be appropriate with the new files coming out), making the new hardest file the 99, and just scaling everything currently back by 10%? Speedvibe Heavy unlock would go to 45, Oni would go to 60, etc.

The compression thing might come up, but if the site lived on 1-12 for so long [whose textual rankings persist even to this day], I don't see the problem. Moving from 1-99 to 1-120 seems to me like adding 21 more unnecessary labels, especially since this would require a complete overhaul of most of the game's songs just to accommodate about 25 incoming super-difficult files.

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties
 

what you just described also involves a complete overhaul of most of the game's files for it to be done accurately

it just, in addition, makes poor use of the upper half in the scale

edit: I should note at this point, this thread wasn't created to decide whether or not the scale will be expanded to 1-120 from 1-99. That is definitively happening as I've stated numerous times in the past in multiple threads. Nor was this thread created to discuss new divisional boundaries (although I'm sure those are most definitely going to be shifted a bit when the tourney begins, and of course range AAA token discussion will lead to division discussion as those have been commonly used in correlation with one another for a while). It was simply to discuss where the the 13th title should start, and if players are okay with Otaku [Heavy] and Scarhand [Standard] unlocks being lessened by their current difficulty minimums slightly. I can understand other questions having arisen during difficulty discussion, but barely anyone has answered the questions articulated in the OP, which just leads me to believe no one read it.

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties
 

This is the current distribution of files per difficulty range.
1-10 = 152
11-20 = 145
21-30 = 169
31-40 = 202
41-50 = 255
51-60 = 290
61-70 = 372
71-80 = 231
81-90 = 122
91-100 = 26

If you increment the difficulty range you might solve the cluster in the 51-70 range, but the FSO category would have ~20 files (+ the ones coming) in the 100-120 range. That range would be too empty tbh.

Since we are discussing tokens as well, I feel like the requirements for Here We Go should be changed a bit. With the increase of harder files and the introduction of the raw score system, this token went from difficult but fair to almost impossible.

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties
 

I'm on my way to work now and will look at this thread later, but with the expansion 1-10 will have significantly fewer files in that range. Currently files that breached Standard (the 5th title in 1-13) start at difficulty 10. That's going to be stretched out considerably.

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties
 

Alright. Well then.

I'm of the opinion that Otaku Heavy/Scarhand Standard actually NEED to be lowered, especially if they're so closely tied to the divisional system. Right now, D3 = 46, but Heavy is 50. Likewise, D4 is 55, but S[s] is 58. No other division have gaps of this size--D5 and D6 have gaps of 1, and D7 has a gap of 2 [but that is being changed by the new system.]

It seems quite weird to me that you can be well into D3/D4 without getting their respective token.

So either the divisional cutoffs need to go up or the tokens need to go down, and since we're talking about shifting the tokens, I'd go for the latter.

As for the 13th title, I can't say anything about this. I'm nowhere even close to good enough to be able to tell a 92 from a 93, or even an 89 from a 92.

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties
 

dude you made my day you have no idea

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties
 

Tokens in general could use a rework, but that's a discussion for another thread.

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties
 

YAY PURPLE IS COOL

your example can't be representative of all sports or rating systems. grade inflation happens, and individual sports or whatever make their own judgements as to how to deal with this. let's take the example of British rock climbing grades, which is an extreme case the other way, but is my favourite example to discuss when the topic of grade inflation gets mentioned.

back in the early 20th century, when the sport of outdoor rock climbing (with ropes, not just bouldering) was first introduced over here, British rock climbing grades went: Easy, Moderate, Difficult. fair enough, right? just like when you said ffr divisions were beginner, intermediate and difficult. but then people got better and better, along with climbing equipment getting better as well. and by the era of the end of world war 2, the grade system was: Easy, Moderate, Difficult, Very Difficult, Hard Very Difficult, Severe, Hard Severe, Very Severe, Hard Very Severe, eXtremely Severe, Exceptionally Severe.

in the '70s, people started thinking ok this adjectival system is getting ridiculous and we need a better way of adding levels to the top of the scale. so they renamed the last 2 levels to Extreme(ly severe) 1 and Extreme 2. i think you can tell where this is going. at the moment, the highest difficulty level is Extreme 11. this site gives more details about the british system

it's not just britain that does this, although i picked the best example because the adjectives are funny and they make it sound like they really didn't know what they were doing. take a look at other countries' grading systems and you can see how every scale is deliberately left open-ended to make more room at the top.

grade inflation is definitely a thing that exists everywhere where people don't suspect. as another example, the introduction of the A* grade at british gcse and a-level exams comes to mind, since it was much easier to introduce new grades than redefine old ones.

this post has no relevance at all to ffr difficulties but i felt like typing it anyway because i thought some context would be interesting

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties
 

Well, it somewhat does have some relevance and I think this sort of approach is much more easy to adapt when the sample size of elements you're dealing with is quite large. For instance in diving, gymnastics, acrobatics etc. the number of distinct maneuvers you can choose from is much more limited than the complex variation in say climbing routes or in our case note charts. It's easier to keep the rating on 1000's of carefully rated songs and up the ceiling than to overhaul everything which is why for us I think truncating at 120 is good. If the need calls for >120 then I'm sure we can add to it no??

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties
 

My personal thinking is that there is not much gap between 80-85 but for 86-90 it's quite one. However, currently (in-game) difficulties are not that consistent (There are lots of "easy" 85s comparing to a few "extremely-hard" 80s.) So we may need something like a "80 standard, 85 standard and 90 standard" to further discuss this.

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties
 

difficulties are already being reworked

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties
 

To add more only somewhat relevant junk:

Has anyone noticed that songs on the edge (e.g 50s, 60s, 70s) are harder than the level above? Like I find 71s easier than 70s...

Maybe I'm bad tho

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties
 

A 99-point, soon to be 120-point system is definitely gone have a few errors made.

Right now I still think the 76-80 range is worst, though 64-67 can be pretty dumb.

Re: A Few Points Concerning Difficulties
 

The struggle is real.

As for the OP, I just wanna touch on the lower-ended portion -
I'm for the difficulty shift downwards on unlocking Speedvibe [Heavy] & Scarhand [Standard]. As stated before, it makes sense to have the token unlock at the lower-end of the division cutoff and not in the middle. That'll at least give players something to aim for once they reach (or even prior to reaching) that plateau.

Mentally speaking from personal experience, even though I'm Lv. 58, I don't feel like I'm really a D4 player. That's mainly due to me not having St. Scarhand. Even if the changes are implemented, I still won't have the token... (that's another story for another day.) I think that knowing that you have the skills and capabilities of getting a AAA to unlock a 'division determining' file will help with your overall confidence.

/endrambling