Suggestion: Replace 'FC' Bar
 

Passing a song in FFR is super easy for anyone with the bare basics of this game, and the profile progress bars emphasize AAA's, FC's, and Tier Points. People like using these bars as progress meters for getting better at the game.

Now that we're using raw scoring for everything, I often read complaints from the few newer players that happen to get on the forum that their FC was overwritten - giving them a sense they've lost progression even though it turns out they did even better than before.

Here's my proposal - set a raw score benchmark for every song, and if someone hits the target, call it a 'Clear' or a 'Pass.' Once achieved, they never have to worry about losing that bit of progress on their profile. Our days of combo based scoring are far behind us, and the FC bar seems outdated now.

My proposed benchmark raw score would be about 90% of the max raw score possible. I prefer this to a set number of raw goods because it balances better with song length. The benchmark itself is arbitrary and could be discussed, but I think it would work far better in our current raw scoring system than a FC bar.

Thoughts?

Re: Suggestion: Replace 'FC' Bar
 

I disagree with this suggestion completely. Going for FC's is a great goal for casual players and newcomers, because it is not too hard to achieve, thus giving them a way to feel good about their score and feel like they are improving. The raw benchmark score "pass" you want to replace it with doesn't sound ideal to me as a substitute either (if it were to be replaced).

FC'ing every song was the first goal I ever had in this game, (my first few years playing), which I had a lot of fun going for (I also wasn't aware of the combo based score system). It felt easy enough to eventually do and FC'ing a song was a nice personal achievement, having the green FC next to a song name felt good.

Just because combo scoring isn't a thing anymore, doesn't mean FC's are outdated, they still show your improvement in the game. FC's might not be big achievements in terms of getting better compared to everyone else, but this is a game about personal achievements, having fun, and improvement, so even if you aren't a good player going for top % scores as achievements, you can still go for FC's as your personal achievements and use it as a way to see improvement in yourself. If you do, however, want to get achievements that would be more impressive to other players, you have the ability to go for SDG's or AAA's as well.

Re: Suggestion: Replace 'FC' Bar
 

I personally don't care to see pass as opposed to nothing because anyone who is D2 or higher should be able to mash through any song.

However, I would really like my FC flags back when I SDG something with a miss and lose it. Since I came back to semi regular play, I've actually killed a couple of my FC flags. That would be an awesome goal for me to do it grab some FC's but since I can grab one and lose it shortly after, I don't really care for it at all.

Re: Suggestion: Replace 'FC' Bar
 

I disagree. Thought I'd like to see more in-between tags regarding the AAA & FC. For instance PA where average and misses (and maybe boos) need to be 0. SDG can be too hard on some songs.

Re: Suggestion: Replace 'FC' Bar
 

Actually yea, more inbetween flags would be kinda cool. I like your suggestion for PA since I have a few songs in the 10s and 20s with greats and nothing else. SDG is more than a fine flag, people actively try and Single Digit Perfect in DDR and Single Digit Excellent in ITG so its kinda conforming to other games.

Re: Suggestion: Replace 'FC' Bar
 

Why not both

Re: Suggestion: Replace 'FC' Bar
 

FC/A/SDG/AAA maybe? Only trouble I see is differentiating when you've hit the score threshold but not a FC.

idk really, there does seem to be a lot of love for the FC bar, so I guess it would be better to add than replace.

Then again, I wouldn't be the one who would have to program that lol.

Re: Suggestion: Replace 'FC' Bar
 

The problem with FCs is the degree to which they don't actually require a lot of skill if you can mash hard enough, especially when an FC gets taken away when you get a cleaner Non-FC score (which seems to be the thing that prompted the thread in the first place)

I'd either set the FC bar to just increment when you got a score of 0 misses for the first time on a song, and never decrement even if your best score was not an FC, or come up with some applicable formula that could define around what a "Clean" FC is for a given song. Not my forte to figure out but something like "The raw score that comes from less than 1% boos and 5% averages" or whatever, to be like "You cleared the song well and cleanly" and use that instead.

Re: Suggestion: Replace 'FC' Bar
 

The problem with raw scoring is that you could FC a Difficulty 100+ song with a score like 500-0-0-0 and it might not meet the 90% raw scoring requirement even if it's a clean FC.

Keep in mind that the reason why everyone loses their FCs is because the game only keeps in memory your best score on a song.

If there was a condition outside of the best score that would scan for plays to give you a FC permanently, that could work too.

Something along the lines of:

A) The song was fully played.
B) The song was played on 1.0 rate.
C) The miss count is 0.

You could even have a condition where the boo count is under X to make it qualify as a FC assuming we wanted standards over mashing.

It's also debatable if we want this to give you FCs instantly or in chunks by updating leaderboards/levelranks to not run queries as often, but that's getting technical.

Re: Suggestion: Replace 'FC' Bar
 

Yea, at this point, I think I'd advocate for a new rating somewhere between a FC and a SDG, not adding a raw score requirement for the current FC flag. Maybe AA like stepmania? Idk

Hell, why not give every score a letter grade.... Now I'm going too far :p

It would be nice though if it permanently remembered a FC (like my old super-mashed WWE score lol)

Re: Suggestion: Replace 'FC' Bar
 

please god for the (pretty sure it's actually literal at this point) millionth time, remove whatever spaghetti is causing the "FC flag" to be overwritten. I'll give benefit of the doubt to the dev team and say it's a bug not a feature.

Re: Suggestion: Replace 'FC' Bar
 

^Yes please. Add a linked table with columns [songId, username, FC boolean], its totally doable

Re: Suggestion: Replace 'FC' Bar
 

I'm sympathetic to the FC flag overwriting. After all, there is no FC flag.

Fix that. Please. It's not a particularly difficult thing to do.

Re: Suggestion: Replace 'FC' Bar
 

This. I imagine all one would need is to store a single bit (per file per player) to represent if that player fc'ed that file at some point. And then setting that bit to True when a player FC's a file.

I don't have access to FFR's codebase so maybe such a task is more difficult than I imagine it to be. One possible issue that I can maybe see is the amount of time it would take to set the correct value for the bit for all the current scores that people have...there's a lot of players and a lot of files.

I think in most SQLs, there's a bit type that supports three values: 0, 1, and null. It shouldn't be too difficult to create a new column with default value of null. Then, instead of updating the bit for everyone at once, perhaps it can be updated when one views there levelranks. If it ends up being a performance issue when one checks their levelranks, then perhaps there could be another bit (per player) that indicates whether the FC bit has been updated for their profile (so that the FC bit isn't unnecessarily updated every time someone visits their levelranks).

I can't imagine that an extra bit would take up too much space...if it does...then I guess I don't really have a solution lol.

Re: Suggestion: Replace 'FC' Bar
 

If the FC flag being "overwritten" thing gets "corrected", then a similar flag with 0 (or low) boos would be an interesting in-between, or else most songs will be mashed (as they can already be, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to encourage both mashing and not mashing at the same time :/).

Boys we need a new synonym for arbitrary ne1 feeling it or?
 

Use the old way. The change from the long used pure point based combo driven ranks to raw was fair to some but I think the combo way was and still is niche. I think all the effort to change the system, in myriad way, promotes toxicity and oneupsmanship. Kudos to the coders. Your nerddom is fully justified and leet, but I love a nice critical perspective. There's nowhere to go from the bottom but up I always say.
And that's the thing about videogames and the people that play them. They're there with benchmarks, goals, and challenges to face but then the goals change and a new challenge occurs, sometimes clearing the scoreboard of your old accomplishment. The real pride comes in knowing that you've done a good job, which further exemplifies why the points (in emotional meta) make some and break others. A toxic behavior to those who are scrupulous and not nonrepentant douchazi.

Re: Suggestion: Replace 'FC' Bar
 

Without reading anything but the OP i kind of agree. I feel as if getting an FC is pretty pointless at this point and when i have an fc of something like 10-0-0-0 and get 5-0-1-0 and lose my FC its pretty lame. I dont know if i fully support the idea, but i do agree that fc's need to go.
I mean going for fc's is alright i guess if you are completely non mashing but losing them to a better raw score is definitely heartbreaking.

Re: Suggestion: Replace 'FC' Bar
 

The new site will keep track of FC even if a better score isn't a FC. It will also keep track of how many FC and AAAs just like how plays are tracked. This can also be expanded to and other flags we would want to track in the future.

Adding a flag is more of a nightmare due to how the site was coded 10+ years ago where every single song on FFR is a completely separate table in the db. If any changes are made to 1, it has to be reflected across all 2200+ tables. On top of that, some sections of the site fetch all columns using a numerical fetch, thus adding or moving columns will break it.

No one wants to touch the score code because it's a fucking mess that took me 2 months just to figure out for the dev site.

Re: Suggestion: Replace 'FC' Bar
 

I think that having another flag to bridge the gap between FC and SDG is a good idea, because I have plenty of FCs that have abysmal accuracy, and plenty of FCs with better than 95% accuracy as well. To me, this makes the FC flag feel good the instant you get it, but it holds no special value to me outside of that.

So your post got me thinking...

What about replacing the SDG flag with LPG (low-percent goods) or AA? In my opinion, this would count as a 95% or 97.5% score. With this sort of flag, I could see some my best scores and they would actually have a more concise flag on them. Let me provide some examples with my top scores:

Maelstrom (98.3%)- no flag, I got an incredibly good AAA equiv, almost an SDG (11 raw I think?), but because it has no flag it's basically invisible to me.
Pimp Slap (96.1%) - FC flag, I got a really good AAA equiv but when I see it ingame it doesn't feel special.
Problematic (97.9%) - FC flag, again, it would like nicer with an AA tag because it shows that I actually got good accuracy instead of just plain old FC.

I hope I illustrated my point clearly enough so you can see it from my perspective! :)

I see from Velocity's comment that adding or replacing a flag would be incredibly difficult to do right now from a technical perspective, but it would definitely be very nice to have on the new site; getting SDGs is my current goal because they show me that I'm improving, better than an AAA or FC, in my opinion.

Re: Suggestion: Replace 'FC' Bar
 

When you say "the new site"; do you mean the current website, or an upcoming one ? Because the behaviour described still occurs (a better score canceling a FC can reduce the FC count by one).

Red