Should the FFR Official Tournament Only Use New Files?

[ilikexd]

Originally Posted by Trumpet63

Oh god, internalizing sounds awful! Screw the official, we need to stop internalizing!
(This isn't sarcasm, I'm serious!)

Let's say there are 4 batches used for the official, 50 files each for 200 in total. 70 are accepted, and the official needs something like 56 to run. Out of those 70, the majority will be concentrated in the 40-78 difficulty range. There will be holes in the upper and lower extremes. So you can run another batch, a special easy or hard songs batch. This fills a lot of those holes. But even after one of those there are still a couple of empty slots: maybe d6 needs a final round, d7 needs a semifinal, and d1 needs a first round. Do you run another batch? A "90-95 difficulty batch" and "1-10 dificulty batch". It sounds absurd, but even if you did one it would mostly be charts submitted that go way out of their way to be difficult when it doesn't well suit the music -- this is already a notorious problem in regular hard batches themselves. Now remember that each one of those batches, the normal and special ones, require a lot of effort from the steppers, judges, and batch organizers that might not be possible. And in the end there are still a few empty slots that need to be filled, it's just a statistical near-certainty that even given an arbitrarily high number of batches ran, there is very likely going to be a missing file at like difficulty 90-91 for a certain round of d6 or d7, or even that there just happened to be no file suitable at difficulty 43-45 for d4, or such and such. Keep in mind a chart can be generally acceptable for FFR, but certain types are more preferable for official tournament play. Internally slotting files is a low-effort and fast fix to a near-unavoidable problem. It's hard to say it fairly from a biased position, but whatever. I think it would be cool to see a greater diversity of steppers having content in all stages of the tournament, and it's regrettable that it doesn't happen.