Categories: by genre or difficulty ?

[noname219]

You know the beautiful song genres we currently have ? (dance, dance 2, arcade, rock, classical, etc.) I would like to hear your opinion of what is better for the future of the game, what has the most potential, what could be improved, etc. between sorting the songs by genre (current system) or by difficulty (1-100, proposed system).

I've already read some opinions/ideas concerning the categories (here, here and here), but I would like to hear more about them.

Imo, I think we should stick with the genre system, because it would be less confusion for everyone and will keep that traditional feeling (but that's more a personal preference...).
The difficulty (1-100) system is currently more solid and reviewed frequently, and it would be easier to add new songs.
However, I think we should try an update to the genre tags before doing any big changes. That would be the very first step.

[Mourningfall]

Difficulty, but with the genre easily identifiable.
Using Legacy, I tend to only play songs by using the search tool and arranging by difficulty, so I can play what I feel capable of at that point in time, but being able to see the genre of the randomly selected song would be a great tool to have.
Like a hover-over window or something, I know no changes will be made to legacy, but it could be useful to have on the newer engines.

[Coolboyrulez0]

Difficulty with searchable genre tab after genre reform happens.

[Gmanyo]

I wouldn't mind the genre thing if the genres made any sense. Songs from Dance, Misc, and Arcade are interchangeable half the time. Difficulty would be easier, although it would be really cool to have a better system altogether, much more like the "songs" button in the upper left corner.

[noname219]

If we decide to change and sort the songs by difficulty, why not use the old 1-13 system ?
There's 13 categories (Dance, Dance 2, Funk, Arcade, Rock, Classic, Misc, Secret, Purchased, Token, Hip-Hop, Skill and Legacy - not counting Favorites and Tournament) so the old difficulty system could fit pretty well.
I would propose to remove the Legacy, Secret, Purchased and Token categories at the same time. Those songs should be integrated, not have separate categories.

[bmah]

I'd like to have future game interfaces show song organization through difficulties, by far. As time passes, we'll obviously get influxes of certain genres more than others, which may change later on. It's never a consistent or static measure.

Originally Posted by Coolboyrulez0

searchable genre tab after genre reform happens.

+1 to this as well

[noname219]

I would love to, but I don't know if Velocity will ever touch the Legacy and Velocity engine again.

Something like this would be pretty nice :

Originally Posted by Coolboyrulez0

Difficulty with searchable genre tab after genre reform happens.

This also would be pretty nice, it would be easier to find songs within the same genre.

[FissionMailed1]

Genre and difficulty please. The 1-100 difficulty system is fine, IMO, and should stay. I want to be able to find all of the rock files in the 80-90 difficulty range, for example.

[igotrhythm]

I like how the Indeed Engine does it. Instead of by difficulty or by genre, files are sorted by the dominant pattern in the file. So you have a genre that's all stream files, another with jumpstream, one with jacks, and so on.

Granted, this system does demand of the player a certain familiarity with the glossary of specialized jargon we've developed. While everyone has specific files that they struggle with for no apparent reason, and most people know what sort of pattern is screwing them up in a given file, this would allow people to avoid the development of mind blocks by having all files with similar patterns grouped together. This would also allow for easier sorting of files by difficulty within a group because the comparison is more apples to apples.

[bmah]

Originally Posted by igotrhythm

I like how the Indeed Engine does it. Instead of by difficulty or by genre, files are sorted by the dominant pattern in the file.

But the degree of dominance is often very ambiguous. That seems to cater more towards players who are planning to season themselves to a higher degree. It's certainly not universally understandable and will appear confusing for anyone else who's not familiar with in-game lingo. i.e. that'd be a tool for self-improvement, but not appropriate for an overall presentation

[igotrhythm]

One could argue that this is already being done with the Legacy genre that has a difficulty all its own, but I see your point. :P

[Zaevod]

Why not give both options?