Leaderboard D9 new name and color

[xXOpkillerXx]

For colors, here's what I would suggest:

Dark mode left: #6c8d97


Light mode left: #7b96a0


The screenshots show both the mix of D9 color with D8 color (which we'll see inverted in high D8) and mix of D9 color with the unexistant "D10" which is just black or white depending on the theme.

[RenegadeLucien]

Wow, another division? I get the feeling that the division system as a whole just breaks down at the top end because there's always going to be a gap between the top few players (potentially even just the top 1 player) and everyone else in the top division that isn't going to be possible to close in the span of an OT. This isn't a new thing either, I remember back in the 6th official where Dossar was so far ahead of everyone else that people were basically viewing D6 as a contest for second place.

[xXOpkillerXx]

Originally Posted by RenegadeLucien

Wow, another division? I get the feeling that the division system as a whole just breaks down at the top end because there's always going to be a gap between the top few players (potentially even just the top 1 player) and everyone else in the top division that isn't going to be possible to close in the span of an OT. This isn't a new thing either, I remember back in the 6th official where Dossar was so far ahead of everyone else that people were basically viewing D6 as a contest for second place.

I'm aware of the confusion that leaderboard vs OT divisions bring (see the rest of this thread). Now with that being said, and at the risk of being blunt, why is anything tournament related brought up? I tried to keep the OP short and the second line explicitly says that it's not related to tourneys (or at least yet). I'm quoting your post but this is meant for a few others who have posted too.

We're not making a D9 because people are too good in tournaments vs the rest of D8, we're making it because it follows a logical progression of how we (FFR) defined arbitrary skill level brackets to represent milestones. Skill gets harder to gain the better you get, therefore the top divisions shouldn't have a huge level range just because we don't have many players filling it. The fact that the top player is that far ahead is a mere coincidence; they could all be close in skill at some point in time, and that's not a predictable thing.

[RenegadeLucien]

Originally Posted by xXOpkillerXx

why is anything tournament related brought up? I tried to keep the OP short and the second line explicitly says that it's not related to tourneys (or at least yet).

...oops. Well I'm a moron, sorry about that, haha.

But honestly, my mind jumped to OTs without even going to the OP to confirm because as far as I'm concerned, OTs (and tournaments in general) are the only reason divisions even need to exist anymore. What purpose do divisions serve other than for OTs? We don't need them to designate player skill in general like we did in 2006 when they were used for the 1st OT; we have a skill rating system that does that job better than any divisional system could ever hope to.

Maybe I'm in the minority on this next point, but I don't think there's much of a point in having divisions as arbitrary skill thresholds either. As someone else said:

Originally Posted by sff_writer_dan

There's really not much difference between a 58 and 59 player

Why should level 58 to 59 be given more weight or emphasis than 59 to 60? Or 60 to 61? Outside of an OT/tournament context, I don't consider myself a D5 player, I consider myself a Level 74 player. The level does the job already.

Yeah, I realize I'm being "that guy" that's rehashing the "divisions are outdated" argument that's been done to death, but every time we tack on a new division I feel more and more in agreement towards it.

[xXOpkillerXx]

Originally Posted by RenegadeLucien

I don't think there's much of a point in having divisions as arbitrary skill thresholds

They are great milestones. Skill level is the main skill metric of FFR, and leaderboard divisions provide checkpoints to achieve with meaningful/concrete rewards (even if just aesthetics). By dividing the entire skill level range in multiple divisions, you make it so that people dont just see a number going up or stalling. It's the same reason why so many other games have emblems and icons for specific level ranges; they could make it just a floating point number, but that's very boring and monotone. I hope that gives you at the very least food for thoughts.

[RenegadeLucien]

Yeah, that's where I might just be an oddball here because to me leveling up and division-ing up don't feel any different. If anything, I prefer the less discrete progression of the skill rating system. But I can totally understand if others don't share my opinion here.

Since all of my actual beefs with the divisional system are directly related to its use for tournaments which (as established) isn't the point of this thread, I won't derail this thread any longer than I already have, haha. I will echo sff_writer_dan's suggestion of adjusting the lower divisional thresholds though.

[ToonE156]

Originally Posted by XelNya

It actually doesn't. Just listing the divisions, and songs with numbers, is more than good enough. I frankly dislike D7 folks getting their own user group.

It would make the Divisions boring tho

[rushyrulz]

shift D7 and D8 titles up and rename D7 to Grand-Master.
Novice D1
Intermediate D2
Advanced D3
Expert D4
Master D5
Guru D6
Grand-Master D7
Legendary D8
Godly D9

"Revolutionary" comes off as cheesy / gimmicky and doesn't fit the skill bracket IMO.

[s1rnight]

the mysterious part is that i already thought d8 was like for three people only, but it seemed to expand to fit a whole lot of people that were like "high to mid d7" in the end... and eventually d7 seemed like it has a lot of people that were originally d6... yes, i know, maybe the players got even better!!! but i wonder if there is a danger of inflating the ratings for things like this...

(its interesting to me that dossar's score for death piano, still about a decade old, is still the fourth place entry on the song. its higher than "d9" players on the song! and he was "d7" at the time he scored it!)

(im not sure of the reason for there being a division inflation (if there is...), if there is, it might be down to there being substantially more charts for higher difficulties now... since if there is more hard charts, there is more "hard charts a person can consistently equiv well" and thus their rating will probably be high compared to the range of difficulties of the charts (because there is now more charts at that difficulty range they can use to fill out their equivs with). i wonder if something like this can be solved by having a "ddr LIFE4"-like requirement for divisions instead. (this would also be similar to how chess does their titles too...) which is to say that a person may need a certain equiv rating, BUT also he may need to show that he can AAA X songs above Y difficulty (to show that he is not stacking near-scores on easy-to-equiv hard songs... i know that sounds silly, but there are easy-to-equiv easy songs so maybe its the same!)

[sff_writer_dan]

That's largely done by just weighting the top scores such that one or two spiked scores, while they would be the largest contributors aren't the sole contributors.

And while it is definitely possible for somebody who can AAA a 114 to continue to gain ranking as more songs at 112+ are added resulting in the kind of inflation you're discussing, the MAIN reason there's division inflation is just that one player's score going up does not result in another player's score going down, so naturally over time, the top end gets larger and larger.

Whether that justifies making more divisions is a different question, but it's inevitable that more and more people will be in the current top division both over time, and as more high difficulty songs are added.

[Lights]

Originally Posted by rushyrulz

shift D7 and D8 titles up and rename D7 to Grand-Master.
Novice D1
Intermediate D2
Advanced D3
Expert D4
Master D5
Guru D6
Grand-Master D7
Legendary D8
Godly D9

"Revolutionary" comes off as cheesy / gimmicky and doesn't fit the skill bracket IMO.

+1

[Gradiant]

Originally Posted by XelNya

Stick to the D[Number]

This

Originally Posted by rushyrulz

shift D7 and D8 titles up and rename D7 to Grand-Master.
Novice D1
Intermediate D2
Advanced D3
Expert D4
Master D5
Guru D6
Grand-Master D7
Legendary D8
Godly D9

"Revolutionary" comes off as cheesy / gimmicky and doesn't fit the skill bracket IMO.

This sounds alright I suppose if it does happen to go this way. Never really liked anything after master as it comes across really cringe imo, and 'revolutionary' is even more so to me.

[s1rnight]

Originally Posted by sff_writer_dan

That's largely done by just weighting the top scores such that one or two spiked scores, while they would be the largest contributors aren't the sole contributors.

And while it is definitely possible for somebody who can AAA a 114 to continue to gain ranking as more songs at 112+ are added resulting in the kind of inflation you're discussing, the MAIN reason there's division inflation is just that one player's score going up does not result in another player's score going down, so naturally over time, the top end gets larger and larger.

Whether that justifies making more divisions is a different question, but it's inevitable that more and more people will be in the current top division both over time, and as more high difficulty songs are added.

well it is the opposite that is happening... (wrt your second paragraph) - there are people who can AAA a few 96s and 97s getting fortuitous low-raw good scores on 101s and 102s...! if even four songs are scored on that way, it accounts for over 60% of the equiv weightings. "one or two spiked scores" is already over 40%! that caveat is no joke!

its a tension primarily because song difficulties are rated relative to their "ability to AAA", and not "ability to low raw good"... (maybe its partially related to "ability to blackflag or booflag", but i've seen so many people "stuck needing a skillboost to get past a blackflag" that it seems reasonable to assume "no" even there... though maybe it is "mindblocks"...?) so songs that are "+standard deviations in rarity/extremity" for "easier to low raw good than to AAA" can easily show up given the increase in songs, and since the weighting for equivs stay the same, it is also easy for those rare songs to influence the levelrankings...

(making people AAA songs for division cutoffs might be a little intense considering how much trouble people have with that... but i do think it is the only sensible way to structure it, since the difficulty system itself is based on it! another other option would be for each individual song to have an "equiv curve" relative to how difficult it is to attain each relative range of scores. but thats kind of a lot of work/things to keep track of...! but otherwise, the lack of individual touch is bound to cause issues like this...)

[sff_writer_dan]

Just use the existing skill rating system for everybody at say, 80 and under, and for everybody 80 and over, adapt something like the tier point system to score the top 15 songs on specifically chosen song-by-song score values to account for the difference between which songs are harder to SDG vs AAA :P

Easy peasy right?

making people AAA songs for division cutoffs might be a little intense considering how much trouble people have with that... but i do think it is the only sensible way to structure it

My best AAA is my 23rd score on my dashboard, and 25 skill ratings lower than my best score.

[s1rnight]

oh i like that idea...! and it surely seems like that was the original intention of "tier points" as well - "equiv-based" division placing wasnt around until about... well, at least 2015 since that is when the skill rating came into being. but there have been like ten tournaments without it!

and yeah LOL... i fei longered myself into a 38 equiv... but my best AAA is one time on a 27! and then one time on a 24, and one time on a 21... its not for lack of trying, those things are hard...!

[xXOpkillerXx]

Originally Posted by s1rnight

easier to low raw good than to AAA

I'll address this quickly, since I don't want to derail this thread: the goal here is to make this little step to normalise our existing concept of divisions, not rewrite the entire system in one go. While I agree that the current AAA equiv system is flawed, here is not the best place to discuss it. Please hop on #difficulty-system in the discord and drop your thoughts on that topic. ^^

[s1rnight]

well, its relevant to specifically how divisions are classified... simply it is a post stating "equiv is not a necessarily good way to mark divisions". certainly we could add another category on top, and so on, but largely it does seem to me that the same divisions have been shifted up one, and that this may just continue (especially since d1 has... mysteriously disappeared?!)

(i know that this is specifically a "LEADERBOARD D9" and not a tournament division, though...? i'm assuming that the equiv system goes a long way to picking people for tournament divisions, though!)

[xXOpkillerXx]

Originally Posted by s1rnight

the same divisions have been shifted up one, and that this may just continue

The skill ceiling got higher, and it's now even more difficult for the average player to reach the top. This assertion holds simply because we didn't shift down the difficulty of songs that were previously considered as the skill ceiling, yet new top players do better on them than anyone before.

This new division aims to mark this new achievable milestone that is a logical continuation of our arbitrary level ranges (divisions). If somehow some people in the future get even better and push the ceiling again, we can/should consider adding more because then it would be even more difficult for the average player to reach that, again. Why change the whole system instead of just letting new generations push the ceiling?

Take a random D3 player, say they've played for over 5 years and stalled at D3 for like another 5 years up until now. Despite the fact that new players achieve AAAs on 110s, then 2 years after on 113s, then 2 years after on 116s... that D3 player's surroundings in terms of files and milestones dont change. However over time, it definitely gets harder and harder for him to "theoretically" reach the very top. So yes, divisions/milestones can and should be an extandable thing over time, as long as we dont make them super small in terms of level range where a player in low DX and one in low DX+1 are considered potentially comparable (otherwise the concept of milestone wouldn't hold).

Originally Posted by s1rnight

especially since d1 has... mysteriously disappeared

This is tourney related and not relevant to this thread. D1 was removed from the OT because of a lack of participation in that level range.

[Lights]

Originally Posted by s1rnight

well, its relevant to specifically how divisions are classified... simply it is a post stating "equiv is not a necessarily good way to mark divisions". certainly we could add another category on top, and so on, but largely it does seem to me that the same divisions have been shifted up one, and that this may just continue (especially since d1 has... mysteriously disappeared?!)

(i know that this is specifically a "LEADERBOARD D9" and not a tournament division, though...? i'm assuming that the equiv system goes a long way to picking people for tournament divisions, though!)

Ultimately, no matter which way you look at it, there is a massive gap between a low d8 player (say, 102) and a low D9 player (say, 108). Equiv system being flawed or not the difference here is large enough that, in a competitive environment, the matchup is going to tend to be incredibly lopsided. This change isn't directly impacting tournaments right now, but at least recognizing the difference between D8 and D9 is step 1.

Don't be so quick to write off how far players have come, D9 today is very much breaking new ground that, up until now, hasn't been achieved on FFR such that a Division at this level was worth considering.

You give the example of Dossar, at high D7, getting a strong score on Death Piano, but for a variety of factors that is an exception to the rule. Death piano is a very niche kind of file that appeals to one particular skillset. One which dossar was prodigiously good at. If you look at the culmination of top player scores on every other high level file, you'll find a much different story.

[s1rnight]

ok, thats acceptable to me...! (i do like poking around though lol. so i might test a few of these statements)

(specifically the factor i am trying to rule out is this one:

)