[TC_Halogen]

Originally Posted by hi19hi19

It used to be that the pool of steppers who could actually get things into FFR was so small I could just ask what people were stepping or post on the forums that I was stepping a certain song and that alone would make me reasonably sure there would be no conflicts. For example to this day I have the folder of music that bmah sent me that he was holding for stepping and I don't touch anything that's in there, at least not without telling him.

I'm going to echo trumaestro's sentiments in response to the first bolded point here:

Originally Posted by trumaestro

I would also point out that the pool of suitable music for FFR has grown a lot. We no longer have 4 files of the newest cornandbeans song in one batch or a 3-way "race" to get a Trisection v2 in queue. We have permission from -hundreds- of artists and Creative Commons licensing allows for countless more.

I don't speak from recent experience, but I think that nowadays you'd either have to step "VSRG meta" songs, or tread on someone's niche like :VS: to risk encountering this problem. But with so much music to choose from, shouldn't this conflict be getting more unlikely?

Additionally, I'd like to add that having some ability to see someone charting a file in question is not much of a solution given the history of how batches grow and how users respond to submission cutoffs. The Official Tournament batch is a fantastic example - the number of files in the batch nearly doubled in a one week period before the batch's closure, on a batch that was open at the start of January. This alone showcases the fact that "collisions" would not be prevented because users will commit to making a file last minute, put the effort into making the file, then submit -- users are not going to throw away their last minute efforts to put something in game.

We're also open to accepting multiple versions of a chart that are within reasonably close difficulty, so this is less of an issue than people realize.

Originally Posted by hi19hi19

As the judging in FFR has gotten less strict and the number of steppers submitting has grown, I've found the odds of collisions has grown a lot - I still don't feel great about what happened with Aggressor, for example - and with that in mind I find being able to see everything is nice. More than a few times with the old Batch Search Engine, I heard a song that I was considering stepping then searched it only to find there was already a submission for it, and each time that happened I appreciated that functionality stopped me from investing hours into something that was already envisioned by someone else.
Yes there are solutions like adding in multiple difficulty tags or [Another] but even then I personally prefer not to step on anyone else's toes, and I imagine I'm not the only one who feels that way.

The situation that happened with Aggressor was absolutely under no circumstance a collision in the way that everyone is concerned about: DarkZtar's chart for Aggressor very literally got lost within the batch system, likely as a result of changeovers in management/transitioning. There have also been numerous files that have gotten lost in this same way -- Koi no Subou Flag was one, The Day The Sun Exploded was another. This was as a result of poor management on my part back when I was handling the responsibilities of game management. Things like this literally can't happen now.

It bears repeating that any collisions that could have occurred only would have occurred in literally any other system. Public submission threads only occurred when enough files had been packaged up to create a batch, and the utilization of multiple emails both predated and coexisted with the public system -- meaning there were plenty of other opportunities for collisions that could have existed, but no one mentioned it. To put simply, users have always accepted the risk.

Originally Posted by klimtkiller

I don't think anyone's trying to be argumentative here...people are merely stating a concern. no one wants to spend the time to step a file only to find out it's rejected because the same song is already in queue. it's not like it's a really big issue. one solution could be for there to be a search function in the batch; when you search for a song, it tells you whether or not it's been sent by another user.

As stated earlier, files will not simply be rejected simply because the same song is queue. In situations where two charts are basically the same interpretation, it is absolutely sensible to simply pick the one that is higher quality in the similar interpretation. Anything beyond that is risk that had existed in the past that users accepted in the process of submitting files.

Adding a search function won't solve issues, particularly if users submit files where the metadata is incorrect (this wouldn't be done maliciously, it's a common accident). While not the most relevant given that one was a full version and the other was a cut, the Chaos Time songs were a good showcasing of this -- one of the files submitted had proper metadata, and the other did not, meaning neither of these users would have been able to spot one another's file being in a batch.

Originally Posted by HammyMcSquirrel

Would it be too drastic of a compromise to allow people to ask a judge if a song they want to step is already in a private queue on a case-by-case basis? [...]

This has the potential to absolutely inundate game management with more than they need to deal with as it is. It shouldn't be their responsibility to have to check private batches over and over again because users have (historically unnecessary) concerns about it.

I'm finding it rather peculiar that people are bringing up some of these things now and not really appreciating the fact that this entire system has basically organized everything into a centralized position. The hyper fixation over seeing information that simply doesn't need to be seen, and historically -wasn't seen, is somewhat disheartening to both the development of the system and the ideas put together to make the process more streamlined, all in the name to gain information for no seemingly good reason (or at least, any reason that was ever available in the first place).

The benefits of the change to the system to keep content well organized without potentially exposing more than necessary far outweigh everyone needing to have access to things that traditionally they weren't able to see. The only thing this affects is tournament content - which is something that game management has wanted hidden for quite some time. It previously wasn't possible without having to aggravate logistics by doing things like sending people private messages for reviews on their charts -- but by posting things publicly, it was always exposed for people to see, especially when tournament-specific batches occurred.