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Originally Posted by devonin
So if songs have a relative numerical difficulty, and based on your scores on those songs, you have a level which is used to compare your skill to others, your whole issue is in saying "Let's put this particular range of those people together into a group"?
I mean, in a perfect world where we had 1 million active players, wouldn't it make sense, for example, to have all players of one single skill level compete against each other? That's literally divisions, just 110 of them.
Every system of assigning difficulty/level/division/etc to anybody is arbitrarily defined. And the lines are only "ever-shifting" if we keep deciding to shift them around.
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skill ratings can be used as a metric of comparison against other people, but it's literally no different than any other game that has an arbitrary rating scale for assigning players based off of performance. we don't have thousands of divisions for people involved in ELO-like scaling.
moving on to your bolded point: no, it absolutely doesn't. i'm literally advocating *against* all players of similar skill levels simply competing against each other. that's not how competitive circuits work for any game whatsoever. there's concepts of qualification and seeding. there's even events that have splits between "open" or provisional and those who are "ranked" but there's no arbitrary subdivisions. if you face someone who is substantially higher up, that's just how it is and it's the end of that.
if you're interested in competing deeper in an event, you have to train so that you can.
the point about "ever-shifting" was also missed, likely due to me not conveying it the way I intended: the system of assigning difficulty is arbitrary, but that's going to be the nature of anything that is not algorithmic in calculation (and even that is erroneous). the ever-shifting point had to do with divisional cutoffs and song selection with regards to them.
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- forcefully constraining content to arbitrarily growing difficulty that users inevitably complain about being incorrect over and over again
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the point that i was making is that the existence of divisional lines adds additional strain by not only constraining difficulties to a certain floor/ceiling per round. the more divisions we have, the tighter those constraints get for being used appropriately in competition. this is ineffective utilization of content.
you could easily and more effectively judge overall player competition using the same number of songs and even grouping them in similar ways so long as the songs themselves had ascending structure per round. this would force higher level players to task themselves with easier songs, but honestly: they can suck it up if they want to play in a competitive environment.
imagine having the ability to use 64 songs in a divisionless tournament in ascending difficulty per round, with 8 songs per round -- starting around your traditional D1 level start and transitioning upward per round to where the final round essentially tosses the highest content out into the game. all of the players that are in the middle-ground divisions would perform well until -- you guessed it: the middle of the tournament, where ideally songs are at a level that would challenge them.
by having an ascending, scaling difficulty like this, you could also more effectively test players by getting a cumulative score per round on charts of multiple skill-sets that are also in a reasonably close difficulty range (a range that would likely encompass a traditional range within a player of that division that would also be interested in moving up into another division). no more getting eliminated because you drew an unlucky song that plays against your skillset (alloyus comes to mind as someone who was crushing D7 this tournament up until the round that they abruptly got eliminated). difficulty would ascend in such a way that players would have a tournament placement of out of the entire pool of entrants and that would be their finishing position for the tournament.
no sandbagging. no shit given about divisions - you harm yourself by trying to underperform. you get a ton of content to play, it ascends in difficulty in a way that is mostly logical and you have motivation to try and climb the ladder.