AAAs have no meaning

[GuidoHunter]

I maintain that an AAA is not indicative of any more skill than, say, an SDG. Rather, all it indicates is a greater time devotion to grinding it out.

If you can consciously hit one arrow as a perfect, why can't you hit every single arrow that comes to you as a perfect, too? Obviously, nobody can do that. But why? Various things can come into play: environmental issues, such as getting distracted and forcing your mind to react to something else could (and do) play a part, as do physiological issues, such as the message getting somehow delayed in transport from the brain to the hand to the key or the inefficient muscle control systems, which might cause your finger to strike the key at a slightly different angle, causing greater resistance and delaying the input.

These are not all controllable factors. As such, there exists a statistical chance that one of these (or any other) factors will affect your keystroke and cause a good instead of a perfect. Given this percentage and the number of steps in the song, each song has an expected value of these goods. I maintain that any score with a number of goods below that expected value is equally indicative of skill, and that the closer to an AAA a score is, the more statistically lucky the player. That is, an AAA simply says, "I played this song until chance smiled on me and I encountered no aberrations."

I consider myself a decent player; I can FC some eight-foot songs and SDG'd One Last Battle. Yet when I try to AAA Stay With Me, I just can't. Forty-six tries today. I got a good on most every arrow between #8 and #233 (autofail on one good). Does this mean I'm any less good now than I will be when I finally get the AAA? Surely not.

So, my conclusion is that an AAA is meaningless in terms of skill.

This doesn't reflect the general attitude ef the FFR community, though. Why is that? Where am I wrong? If you agree, why is there so much emphasis placed on, "go for the AAA"? It just seems like a waste of time aftor proving yourself by getting a comparable score (unless you're concerned with your levelrank, of course).

What say you, FFR?

--Guido

http://andy.mikee385.com