YodaSnipe wrote:
Max Combo is the only important thing gameplay wise, and spinners maybe (for SS scores). That's just how I see it as someone who typically lands on the top40 consistently.
Well, I respect your playing ability... but since being good at the game doesn't require being able to analyze the stats at all (or even numeracy), that part is irrelevant... but it does have still weight as a statement from experience. But such perceptions come with a large caveat in stats... they're tainted and can't be trusted much, because there all all sorts of biases that can make a pattern perceived to be true, even when it's false.
With Max Combo, you're somewhat deluding yourself... like addition, it's largely destructive of the information that goes into it. If I tell you that I have some numbers, and I added them together and got 777, what can you tell be about the numbers? Not a lot... you can perhaps do better with outside information, like making some assumptions about where I got the numbers or what numbers I'm likely to use, but you can never be sure, and the range of possibilities is immense. Max Combo works like that... information goes in and gets lost. Information can be remolded out it by using assumptions combined with other stats... but the information it contains is worthless without that. If it seems to be the most important, it's probably because you've chosen to put it front and center in your mind of a much larger web of things. It's when I questioned why it should be there that I started to realize that there were better alternatives for doing the same job and replaced it. After all, I don't care about slider ticks, so why should I use the stat that counts them?
So Max Combo is a bit like those old cereal commercials, where the "Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs are part of this complete breakfast", where, if you removed the bowl of CFSB, you'd still have a complete breakfast (or three) on the table anyways. You just want the CFSBs because that's what you're used to eating for breakfast. Which is fine, people are used to Max Combo, and with enough assumptions and other factors make it work satisfactorily for them, so they should probably be entitled to it (much the same way that a gambler is entitled to the Gambler's Fallacy, if that's what floats their boat). There's no reason to force people into adjusting to other metrics when they're already happy. It's not like it's important to actual play, and errors in judgement here are painless.