[Dynam0]

Originally Posted by Zapmeister

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

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??