request: EXTREMELY EASY songs batch (difficulty 1 songs and lower)
 

hello!!

the website is going really well recently. i have been so excited by the tournament that i wanted to get my friends into the game by playing multiplayer with them. however, a lot of them have never played the game before, and even difficulty 2 (!!) songs are very difficult for them, and they have to mash and miss notes to finish those songs... difficulty 1 songs are very fun for both of us, and i enjoy watching my friends play them and getting better... however, theres only like four of these in the ENTIRE GAME, and one of them has to be unlocked. despite the great gains made towards the extremely skilled players, there is not many "extreme easy" songs. this is a shame, as i think a large variety of extremely easy songs would be a great way to ease people into the game, without it becoming boring. the batch would (probably???) be much easier too, and you would be able to get a lot of these sorts of files very quickly

ok, that was my wall of text. never forget the little guy!!! s1rnight out!!!

- s1rnight

Re: request: EXTREMELY EASY songs batch (difficulty 1 songs and lower)
 

also, from a very pragmatic standpoint, here is the lobby of the flash flash revolution game, and (i assume these are not spam bots...) each user is a player who would like to have fun playing the game. the amount of players who do not even have an AAA on a difficulty 1 file is... half of them!



this should mean that at least half the files in the game should be around difficulty 1. ok, well, maybe the forum posters are a little better at the game. but these guys want to play the game too! i clicked on a bunch of their profiles, and a bunch of them are stuck mashing the very difficult songs, and presumably stop playing...


insert: a "level 0" user getting a new "personal best" on Sayonara Cosmonaut, an 89 difficulty song.

Re: request: EXTREMELY EASY songs batch (difficulty 1 songs and lower)
 

Wouldn't be a problem but also I don't think novice players mash difficult songs because there aren't enough easy songs to play lol

There are a ridiculous amount of songs in game, and more than enough to improve with. Song selection is absolutely absolutely not a problem right now - we get new files because simfilers want to share their work and people with cleaned levelranks need something to do

When I was just starting out I mashed hard songs just because it was fun and I like seeing different color notes on the screen .___.

Re: request: EXTREMELY EASY songs batch (difficulty 1 songs and lower)
 

another thought, (apologies for the triple posts, i just like to organise thoughts this way), is the "list of songs" for new people is very daunting. it scares even me! lol. now that we have a "skill rating" that is roughly numerically contiguous to the level difficulties, it would be very nice if there was:

!) a default pane that showed the user songs that were "within their reach", and maybe gave them a cool xenoblade-like colour scheme. sort of like... this!


insert 2: a difficulty system from a completely different game.

a lot of the "colours" in ffr's current employ are already dedicated to whether somebody got a "single digit greats", or "full combo", or "booflag", etc... but to a new player, none of this matters too much... really, to even experienced players, this doesnt matter too much... whether the song is "an intolerable strain on them", "just within reach", "good fun to play", "good fun to perfect", "too easy" is probably more important than what score they have. with this system a user would DEFINITELY have a strong idea of this. if a song was too hard, it would be clear to the user. in fact, there are probably lots of users for whom even free space is very difficult, and you'd have a good idea of how easy you should be making your songs too... perhaps even negative difficulties (laugh) but i'm thinking too much!!! i will log off now, take care everybody. i hope the last round of the tournament is a lot of fun!

Re: request: EXTREMELY EASY songs batch (difficulty 1 songs and lower)
 

I don't think I agree the site's going well lately, and to be honest I found the tourney a tad dull after the first two rounds of files. The highest round files are amusing though at the very least.

There's only five* of them in the game because either: 1. it will never make it through batch 2. no one makes them because very little people will play them because they're only focused on playing within their skillset instead of playing the game.

You can literally send arguably strong files and still get a 4 because some judges don't like the song. The batch system is fucking terrible the easier the file you make in my experience personally. (And I'm not the best file maker - I know that.)

I agree expanding the lower range of files is great, but difficulty in even the 1 - 5 range is inconstant, and requires playing them all to figure that out.

The only reason Excite Bike is a 3 instead of higher is the length, even though it's on a technical basis harder than every file till about difficulty 6 - 8 I'd say is fair.

Excite Bike is more on a compared level with Pita than any other file in that range in terms of actual difficulty if it was any longer than it is. It's essentially a noob-trap.

I wouldn't say we need just difficulty 1 songs, I'd argue the spectrum of 1 - 10 could be expanded on, is I guess where I'm going with this. Any new player should be able to play that range from the get-go and pass without trying super hard.

And I know this as someone who has taught them-self multiple play-styles. I can play upscroll, downscroll, index, and spread (mix these up even) in that range fairly competently. A new player after just running through that list about twice would be at level where mashing is less consistent than just taking the miss.

Got a little ramble filled. My bad.

tldr: yes we need more files, but widen the range and the other suggestion of difficulties is a bit silly. The current one is fine, it just needs to be explained better.

Re: request: EXTREMELY EASY songs batch (difficulty 1 songs and lower)
 

I agree completely with this idea

Re: request: EXTREMELY EASY songs batch (difficulty 1 songs and lower)
 

@MikeShinoda: the reason for playing hard songs makes sense. though, i do think there should be lots of easy ones... or a "mod" that "makes" songs easy (...?)... the rate feature is arguably this, but i don't think anybody wants to play demonically slowed down songs that take 8 minutes to finish haha

another idea i had was a "notes per second" or "notes per bar" cap that auto-stripped out superfluous notes... 64th/32nd notes + one arrow of 16th "jumps" + 8th "hands" + 4th "quads" on one tier, then 16th notes, 8th "jumps" and so on, until you got below a consistent rate... this might make awkward patterns, but if it is for making very easy songs for newbies, it might be okay

@XelNya: that makes sense. it is a shame if songs arent being accepted for selfish reasons... recently i enjoyed playing the game a lot more with friends on a "casual" basis, and a lot of that is picking songs that are fun to listen to and playing them, while enjoying that my friend was playing them too. if i play a few very easy songs with friends it is kind of like "drinking a beer on a warm moonlight night". if you are REALLY GOOD at the game, probably there is a lot of songs you can play in this way, but i can barely "single digit perfect" a 3 now... heehee...

@Rapta: hooray!!! i remember your "goat" posts very fondly from when i was first here, by the way. i'm glad that i got to keep it in my signature...

Re: request: EXTREMELY EASY songs batch (difficulty 1 songs and lower)
 

In all the years I've played this game I've never seen any new player struggle with difficulty 1-3. I'd argue that a lack of familiarity with game settings holds back most new players. Heck after 2 days of helping my gf find the right setup for her she was clean FCing 10s. I disagree with the claim that we need more extremely easy files.

Re: request: EXTREMELY EASY songs batch (difficulty 1 songs and lower)
 

A few thoughts on the subject of easy songs / low-skill players, since I probably have the worst ratio of "age of account" to "skill level" out of anybody :P

Most of the level 0s you see in chat have simply never gone and updated their level. I used to go into mp and see who was a zero and manually update their stats for them, and over half were actually somewhere in the 10-30 range but had never updated.

Of the ones who are actually 0s, most of THOSE have just not played enough songs to actually establish a skill level, but they have a top AAA equivalency of >1 even if it's only in the 2-5 range. The overall conclusion is "Barely anybody you're seeing displayed as a level 0 is actually a level 0 in terms of their stats or their actual skill.

'Mashing' is a term for hitting many buttons quickly in an attempt to hit a pattern that is too fast for you to read/follow. There is nothing in any of the songs at that level that could even conceivably require mashing. Are you just observing them not hitting the notes? Accidentally hitting the wrong button? Frequently the problem is that the very low difficulty songs are TOO easy, and the extremely large distance between the notes causes people who don't have a strong internal sense of rhythm to lose the beat, and then be surprised by the appearance of the next arrow. In many cases people who can't play 2s can actually play 5s because they start having enough note density that you can use seeing and hitting the notes to keep beat.

Missing an arrow or two when you are BRAND NEW is fine and common, you haven't internalized where your fingers are, and you spend time going back and forth between the screen and your hands and mess up. You get over that quickly with a bit more play.

I'm not in favour of any mode that modifies people's charts in this way.

You're in D2, your best score is better than my best score. I don't know what you're trying to claim here?

Yeah this is mostly my position too. I've found that 1-3 are TOO easy with TOO FEW notes and those cause more struggle than any idea that the songs are too hard.

Though this is also to say, if for whatever reason "a bunch more super easy songs" are actually wanted, and somebody did the work of sending me a bunch of mp3s we had permission to use, I could put a bunch of solid very low difficulty charts together, and would.

Re: request: EXTREMELY EASY songs batch (difficulty 1 songs and lower)
 

You hit level 1 when the weighted average of your top 15 AAA equivalencies hits 1.00.

I've found that people get their first AAA equivalency on files that are closer to Lvl 10. The reason for this is that even a few 'goods' on a lvl 1 gets you a zero equivalency. I usually suggest Pollyanna (lvl 11) as a first song to score on after you've played a little bit.

Novices need to develop a certain level of accuracy to begin scoring equivalencies. At that point, improvement comes quickly.

Perhaps there should be a handful more lvl 1 songs, but none of my friends have ever had difficulty swiftly being able to play harder files than that.

Re: request: EXTREMELY EASY songs batch (difficulty 1 songs and lower)
 

Pretty much this. If you struggle with songs that have 1 note every couple seconds for more than 15 minutes its because you arent familiar at all. But even that being the case its pretty easy to get used to it and play up to 10-15 range within a day. My nephew only plays like once every few months for a few minutes and he usually plays 30s and such even though he cant fc them he gets dingle digit misses most of the time. He has no rhythm game experience other than FFR and rarely plays yet doesnt find extremely easy songs hard.

Maybe we do need a couple more, but i dont think many people just stick with 1s when first playing and usually venture off with curiosity and because of it get better a bit faster than you would expect

Re: request: EXTREMELY EASY songs batch (difficulty 1 songs and lower)
 

@devonin this makes sense! i didn't know about the level ranks thing. thank you for explaining it

i actually made the thread because i was playing with my friend gus today on multiplayer, and he was finding the difficulty "2" songs very difficult and hit the wrong notes with many boos and misses (usually when there were consistent eighth note streams, or jumps). i assume you mean "mash" in the sense of "hitting every note as fast as possible", but in this situation i meant, "he did not know what button to hit, and hit them all continuously, without trying to find the correct note". i find that you don't have to mash very quickly in any case... the difficulty "1" songs seemed easy enough to not get any averages or misses, so i assumed he both could see the notes and hit them exactly (and was unafraid enough to try to hit them in that way)... so in this case it seemed very much an issue of the songs being too difficult, rather than not being difficult enough, though i understand the issue you're describing, and i'm not sure what the exact reason for it is. it's possible that he would improve given a few days as well... i just wonder if there is an easier way to introduce people...

Re: request: EXTREMELY EASY songs batch (difficulty 1 songs and lower)
 

Four level 0s in the mp lobby

3 - Not enough songs played to generate a ranking
1 - Has a top equiv of almost 9

If they can't see an up arrow moving up the screen and press the button for 'up' and instead literally just hit every button, that's not the song being too hard, that's them needing to learn which button is the up button. This does not indicate, to me, the song being too hard at all.

Most of those songs across their whole length are 2-3 notes per second,

More songs that are so slow that you can lose the thread of the rhythm isn't the answer. Even the easiest songs on a Rock Band or a Guitar Hero are harder than our very low dificulty songs, and those had huge mass appeal among people who've never played a rhythm game before.

Re: request: EXTREMELY EASY songs batch (difficulty 1 songs and lower)
 

he wasn't mashing, he was Smashing XD

Re: request: EXTREMELY EASY songs batch (difficulty 1 songs and lower)
 

There's also the issue that there are not very many songs to choose from in the level one and two category. Of course as you get better, the amount of songs you are able to play increases dramatically, but I feel it would be a great idea to have more of these low level songs so newer players have more variety.

My eight year old nephew came to visit me and I showed him FFR, and he mentioned to me, "These songs are weird, are there any rap songs?" regarding the three level 1's he played. I told him they are much higher level and he was a bit disappointed.

Re: request: EXTREMELY EASY songs batch (difficulty 1 songs and lower)
 

The amount of effort it would take to add just a few more songs in this region is so small I can't think of any arguments against it.

Re: request: EXTREMELY EASY songs batch (difficulty 1 songs and lower)
 

It's not about the effort, especially if you just wanted the stepper to just hit every 8th beat of the song with a random quarter note, like many of the low level songs currently are.

It's partly about not wanting to "waste" an mp3 we have permission for on a song that almost nobody will play, and maybe a certain element of professional pride in work that makes people not want to make something incredibly simple and boring by the standards of 99% of the active playerbase.

The actual number of people who would self-describe as "Playing FFR" or being "an FFR player" for whom a level 1 song is at all interesting is probably in all seriousness, 5-10 people total.

Combine that with the time investment in putting songs through the batch/judge process before they finally get released, and the limit on the number of songs somebody is allowed to submit to an open batch, and you get multiple disincentives to make extremely easy charts.

I see you in here Kayla, if you want a bunch of super easy songs put in, just let me know and I can step like, 10-20 this week and we can just shove them into the game :P

Re: request: EXTREMELY EASY songs batch (difficulty 1 songs and lower)
 

i am glad that the idea is being received warmly, i was a little worried hehe... i get that it isn't something that means very much "once you've escaped the creche" so to speak, of which every poster in this thread has likely long since done (if they're playing regularly), but even players in humble d2 are better than "half the site"... even when people haven't played on the site for very long, "getting to know the website" when you just start out is very important. it would be nice if the website were as enjoyable for people just starting out, or who don't intend to play very often... (or who haven't played in years hehe)

Re: request: EXTREMELY EASY songs batch (difficulty 1 songs and lower)
 

I mean everyone wants to say "yeah why not" but I don't see any of you submitting these files to the batch. You wanna see them then pop some easy files into the batch that's open right now. I don't mean it to sound rude, it's just why make or post in this thread but not contribute to helping the cause?

Honestly a few more sure, but I don't really think there needs to be a ton more because generally with just a bit of practice you start to move up pretty quickly in the difficulties here. But that's my take on it.

Re: request: EXTREMELY EASY songs batch (difficulty 1 songs and lower)
 

I surely will for the next batch. I have already submitted two of my best files hoping to get one accepted and then have the ability to submit even more~