[s1rnight]

Originally Posted by sff_writer_dan

That's largely done by just weighting the top scores such that one or two spiked scores, while they would be the largest contributors aren't the sole contributors.

And while it is definitely possible for somebody who can AAA a 114 to continue to gain ranking as more songs at 112+ are added resulting in the kind of inflation you're discussing, the MAIN reason there's division inflation is just that one player's score going up does not result in another player's score going down, so naturally over time, the top end gets larger and larger.

Whether that justifies making more divisions is a different question, but it's inevitable that more and more people will be in the current top division both over time, and as more high difficulty songs are added.

well it is the opposite that is happening... (wrt your second paragraph) - there are people who can AAA a few 96s and 97s getting fortuitous low-raw good scores on 101s and 102s...! if even four songs are scored on that way, it accounts for over 60% of the equiv weightings. "one or two spiked scores" is already over 40%! that caveat is no joke!

its a tension primarily because song difficulties are rated relative to their "ability to AAA", and not "ability to low raw good"... (maybe its partially related to "ability to blackflag or booflag", but i've seen so many people "stuck needing a skillboost to get past a blackflag" that it seems reasonable to assume "no" even there... though maybe it is "mindblocks"...?) so songs that are "+standard deviations in rarity/extremity" for "easier to low raw good than to AAA" can easily show up given the increase in songs, and since the weighting for equivs stay the same, it is also easy for those rare songs to influence the levelrankings...

(making people AAA songs for division cutoffs might be a little intense considering how much trouble people have with that... but i do think it is the only sensible way to structure it, since the difficulty system itself is based on it! another other option would be for each individual song to have an "equiv curve" relative to how difficult it is to attain each relative range of scores. but thats kind of a lot of work/things to keep track of...! but otherwise, the lack of individual touch is bound to cause issues like this...)