peppy wrote:

The second-time factors are to rewards certain gameplay attempts over others — specifically devaluing the over-valued mod additions.

But isn't this taking map heuristics like OD into account? Higher OD on the same map -> everyone got lower accuracy -> everyone got lower PP regardless of quality of performance. This also applies to SS scores of course.
Also I would like to ask: Is accuracy taken into account as we see it (in %) or as an absolute offset in MS?

Also: Those "overvalued" mod additions are necessary to rank high anyways there days. You will find a very small amount of maps where the top6 doesn't consist of mod users. And to get really high amounts of PP only top6 scores really are worth something.

In the end this attempt wouldn't devalue the mods but the diff in my opinion. SS or high accuracy are easier to achieve on the lower diffs while one can still rank high with mods. Again, indirect usage of map heuristics. However in the completely wrong direction. Easier map + same contention -> better pp.


If I got some base facts about pp wrong please correct me.

peppy wrote:

Easier map = exponentially less pp = doesn't matter.

Would you mind telling us how the system detects easier maps if not through contention / map heuristics?

peppy wrote:

Think stuff like sparsity of scores relative to highest SS, ratio of SS to S to poorer ranks, pass ratios.

Also consider that it isn't all about finding the most insanely hard maps (though this would be optimal); higher played maps should inherently be considered more because they are more prominent in the community. It doesn't matter so much if they are "only" hard, because if you are a good player you will also be able to do well in these maps. That said, I do plan on making continual adjustments until a consensus is reached that we have a long-term usable solution.

For speculation, I can tell your the currently highest pp-ranked map is http://osu.ppy.sh/b/21010

Thanks for the inside info.
I once again was too stupid too read your edit:

@Lybydose: thanks for the examples provided. I found an edge case which causes hards to get highly prioritised where they shouldn't be. Will make amendments which will propagate tomorrow.

Hoping to see things go better tomorrow. :>

Tom94 wrote:

Would you mind telling us how the system detects easier maps if not through contention / map heuristics?

peppy wrote:

Think stuff like sparsity of scores relative to highest SS, ratio of SS to S to poorer ranks, pass ratios.

Also consider that it isn't all about finding the most insanely hard maps (though this would be optimal); higher played maps should inherently be considered more because they are more prominent in the community. It doesn't matter so much if they are "only" hard, because if you are a good player you will also be able to do well in these maps.

Sparsity of scores cannot be used to evaluate difficulty or anything at all because of the simple reason that not everybody plays every map. It was already mentioned multiple times and yet it seems like you choose to disregard this.

Lybydose wrote:

the "Hard" difficulties are more worthwhile to play for a number of reasons:

1. Large number of scores from "average" people playing that difficulty because they can't pass Insane maps. Thus, high "contention".
2. Very few "pro" players bother to even play the Hard, so it's very easy to rank top 10 or better with only HD or HD/HR or DT at < OD7.
3. It's very difficult to get top 10 on Insane maps AND get high accuracy, because this usually requires playing HR or DT on something that's OD8 or higher.

You said you've taken Lybydose's post into account, but when saying things like "because if you are a good player you will also be able to do well in these maps" it seems like you don't fully comprehend what was being said. There are maps that almost nobody can "do well on", a few examples:
http://osu.ppy.sh/s/29691 - 323117 plays, 12 FCs
http://osu.ppy.sh/s/41686 - 240405 plays, 7 FCs
http://osu.ppy.sh/s/34097 - 190070 plays, 15 FCs
http://osu.ppy.sh/s/32661 - 62063 plays, 10 FCs
http://osu.ppy.sh/s/48979 - 44550 plays, 9 FCs
http://osu.ppy.sh/s/37292 - 49767 plays, 12 FCs
http://osu.ppy.sh/s/45528 - 37345 plays, 6 FCs
http://osu.ppy.sh/s/34348 - 122467 plays, only about 30 plays with over 90% accuracy
http://osu.ppy.sh/b/142772&m=0 - 43564 plays, very few people with over 95% accuracy
http://osu.ppy.sh/s/27712 - 155553 plays, 11 FCs
http://osu.ppy.sh/b/138008&m=0 - 44496 plays, 23 FCs
http://osu.ppy.sh/b/152199&m=0 - 56798 plays, 21 FCs
http://osu.ppy.sh/b/127047&m=0 - 109244 plays, 19 FCs
http://osu.ppy.sh/b/119021&m=0 - 87665 plays, 24 FCs

All of those are popular maps and yet nobody can seem to FC them (except for a few top players, who had to work very hard for it) or get high accuracy. With a system that gives extra point for FC and SS or even S you're basically telling people "don't bother playing maps that are actually hard, you won't get rewarded for those at all. Instead go ahead and play many easy maps with a popular song where a lot of new players had bad plays".

sparsity of scores relative to highest SS... using sparsity of scores makes no sense at all if you ignore who those scores are coming from and the amount of retries. Easy maps (and by this I mean, all of the [Hard]s and all of the low-bpm and low-od [Insane]s) are going to have way more plays on them, simply because more people are going to try playing them at all (compared to actually-hard maps), and yet those more-plays will usually be lower quality plays for the same reason - that they're being played by newer/inexperienced players. The end result is that those easy maps reward a ton of pp because pp thinks that if a lot of people tried a map and did poorly on it it must mean that map is hard; but no, it usually just means that map is easy and thus more accessible for a bigger playerbase.

Also, since the system doesn't take into account amount of retries taken to get a score, low OD maps are waaaaaaay easier to get pp on than high OD ones, because if you just grind a low-od map enough times you will be able to get good accuracy on it for free, meanwhile on a high OD map you won't get good accuracy no matter how much you retry until you actually get good at being accurate.

There's also the fact that high end players would usually not want to play the easier maps at all because they're boring to them, which means that getting a high-rank on those is again waaaaay easier because even if the amount of plays is really high the true contention you're dealing with on those maps is very low - by this I mean, there's less players you actually have to pass for that high rank because there's less players who actually play good enough to get that top rank who care to actually play that map and get that top rank on it. If you told WW, Niko, Silvia, etc, to play a bunch of [Hard] maps and try to aim for a top rank on those they'd be able to get it very easily and that would knock out a ton of people who previously had top ranks on that [Hard], but since the top players are not going to waste their time on playing maps that don't challenge them for a rank it means that other mid-range players can get a top rank on those maps for free.

peppy wrote:

The cases you mention where Hard is worth "more" than insane (I checked the provided ones) isn't actually a huge difference

Just don't know how you can say this. There is a huge difference and the examples people have given shows it clearly. All of those combined:

1. PP not taking into account amount of retries
2. Top players not bothering to play every single low-difficulty
3. Most players choosing to play low-difficulties over the higher ones, even if they do poorly them, because they'd do even poorer on the higher ones

Means that if you want to get high PP, you need to play low difficulties where the superficial contention is going to be high due to amount of plays from players who can't handle even that difficulty, and you can just grind those difficulties again and again until you get a good score on them, because even if a better player tries that difficulty he might only try it once, possibly get a random 1x100 or even a miss due to not caring, and not really care to fix that because that map isn't fun for him, and then somebody else who grinds that map for 50-100 times would get a higher score/rank but that doesn't mean he can play better.
Meanwhile on maps where top players are actually going to care to retry a lot, getting good acc or anything close to a top rank will be near impossible, and that means those maps are essentially pointless to play if you want to be ranked unless you're already a top-30 player who can contend with all the other top-30 players who have many retries on those maps.

If you actually want more examples for this, you don't even have to search hard because it's everywhere, just open any top-50 or hell any player at all profile and look at their top plays, there will usually be [Hard] maps there that were probably easy as hell for that player to get a top rank on, and the only reason he bothered to do it is usually because he liked that specific song or whatever; meanwhile a bunch of A/B ranks from actual hard plays that player is capable of doing on maps like what I listed in the earlier part of this post give that player nothing, even if he had to work much harder for those and they take a lot more skill.

;;

To sum this all up: the premise of pp was that it would let you just play whatever you want normally and then rank you correctly based on that.
In reality, pp only ranks correctly (and even that not very) the highest top players who all contend on the same few hardest maps. For everybody else, to get PP you basically need to find maps that are not hard enough to interest the top players, and yet have a popular song that attracts a lot of the general mass to play them, and then grind those maps until you get a better score on them than everybody else who cared enough to grind them.

To put it bluntly, if you want PP you need to farm it. This is just a farmable stat that requires you to farm a few select maps instead of farming many different ones as was with scores. That's it.

---

PP should completely ignore the total amount of plays on a map. This stat is more related to how popular a song is and has nothing to do with contention. If you really want to know how contended a top rank on a map is, you need to check how many top contenders had a lot of retries on it. One map can have 100,000 plays and only 50 of those come from players with the ability to S that map, while another map can have 30,000 plays but 20000 of them would come from much better players than the previous case; the latter should reward you way more, but in practice it's the opposite.

A map like http://osu.ppy.sh/s/48979 is very popular amongst top players, but even getting 80% accuracy or passing it at all is hard for the large majority of the players, and most inexperienced players wouldn't dare to play this at all - in reality it's very contended, and yet PP is just going to ignore most of people's plays on it (due to low accuracy and falling much lower in the ranks under all of the top players' scores on this). Meanwhile there's a ton of old maps with 100k+ plays on them but very few plays from top players (and even if there's a score from a top player, it's probably just an FC he did while setting a minor goal for himself, and not his actual best potential for a play on that map if he cared to practice to rank on it) that give a ton of PP despite realistically much lower contention.

peppy wrote:

I have a suggestion though Aqo: do you want to become the ranking system yourself? Wire yourself in and rate everyone from 1 to 1 million? , updating as close to realtime as possible? This will likely make you happy, though I doubt you'll have time to play anymore.

I play for fun, not for rank. 90% of my plays are on unranked/unapproved maps; I wouldn't care for rank at all if it wasn't for people who, now, look at profile's PP and use that to judge the value of a person's post. It just strikes me odd how you ignore people's constant reports on issues with your system. I tried to point out the key issues and explain them thoroughly to make it as clear as possible just in case other people's posts weren't clear enough for you, but when you reply with messages like:

A lot of what you are saying is incorrect what is? (and is in fact already considered, or contradicting yourself contradicting where? I said the same things 3 times in different ways, and linked a ton of specific rank/score information for you to work with ), but I am not going to join the conversation as I find it counter-productive.

It feels like you're just trying to dodge the issues. Could you stop being vague please? If anything I said is incorrect, then point it out specifically. Everything I wrote is based on actual numbers and information that is publically available and everybody sees. If any of this is wrong then publically shown information must be wrong? Then please show us the hidden numbers you're working with?

Like somebody already said - if PP really wasn't farmable, there would be absolutely no reason to hide how it works - because it would mean that even if we knew how it works we'd have to just play better to get more pp and it would be impossible to farm it.

Right now, you're choosing to hide how PP works, and people have a lot of known ways to farm it (i.e. pick a map for a popular song, grind a low-diff with mods, +pp get). This only leads to one conclusion: PP doesn't work, and PP is farmable. Sorry peppy, it's not that I don't have trust in you, but some of your decisions make no sense and it seems like you try to round corners and avoid certain topics/points. If the huge recent surge in threads with people (and I'm not talking about the new players, this thread is filled with output from top-100 material, look at the previous pages) complaining about PP and even pointing out specific problems with it is not indication for you that something is wrong then I just don't know what to say.


And no, I'm not expecting more replies from you, peppy. I'm hoping to see the thoughts of other players on the matter though.

Thanks, going to go over that spreadsheet over the week.

I'd just like to point something out that just occurred to me, which is related to how scoring and the PP system works with taking into account only good plays and not bad ones:

We have Player A and Player B, playing a map.

Player A first played that map with 89% accuracy and a few miss, and then proceeded to retry that map again and again for several hours, having about 50-100 retries on it, until eventually getting an SS on it. Even despite getting that SS, if Player A kept playing that map he would most likely get 95%-97% accuracy on an average run.

Player B played that map and had 98% accuracy on his first try. He thought he might try going for an SS on it, so he played it again, then getting about 98% again, maybe slightly higher. He then decided this map isn't very fun for him, and moved on.

Who do you think is a more skilled player, A or B?
And who is PP going to rate higher?

Only rewarding good plays and not penalizing for bad plays is one of the main factors that lead PP to rate farming over skill on a lot of the maps. While it's understandable that penalizing bad plays might be demoralizing for all of the players who are not used to competitive ranking boards, the system has to work in a way that makes sense when going with the decision of only taking into account good plays (this is related to worth of SS/S/etc, on different levels of OD. An SS on low OD usually means no more than "farming" and not actual "skill" with the current system and the nature of what maps players choose to play. Rewarding extra for high-accuracy on a system that ignores retries basically rewards extra for farming and for playing easier maps).

Lybydose wrote:

http://osu.ppy.sh/b/64909&m=0

This one is funny because while it's called [Hard], it totally feels like your average Insane to me.

But yeah, it's in my top 3 best performance too for some reason. ;_;

peppy wrote:

https://docs.google.com/a/ppy.sh/spread ... oY0E#gid=0

brb farming

Tom94 wrote:

Having SS earns you a higher map rank over non-SS.

Nah, if you get a SS but spin poorly, non-SS ranks could beat you on the spinner.

Aqo wrote:

We have Player A and Player B, playing a map.

Player A first played that map with 89% accuracy and a few miss, and then proceeded to retry that map again and again for several hours, having about 50-100 retries on it, until eventually getting an SS on it. Even despite getting that SS, if Player A kept playing that map he would most likely get 95%-97% accuracy on an average run.

Player B played that map and had 98% accuracy on his first try. He thought he might try going for an SS on it, so he played it again, then getting about 98% again, maybe slightly higher. He then decided this map isn't very fun for him, and moved on.

Who do you think is a more skilled player, A or B?
And who is PP going to rate higher?

Who is the more skilful player, you judge by yourself.

No one is going to earn pp just sitting there playing nothing, however good they might be.

JappyBabes wrote:

peppy wrote:

https://docs.google.com/a/ppy.sh/spread ... oY0E#gid=0

brb farming

inb4 countless FL ranks pop up outta nowhere

peppy wrote:

making public is not yet possible due to the complexity. i am constantly moving towards that direction, and you will likely see more information as time goes on and the process is refined. people complaining is fine, but we are already in a better state than "ranked score ranks", and i am constantly looking for improvements to the calculation. as i previously said, keep up the feedback, but try and keep it constructive.

here is a fully editable spreadsheet with the top 1000 weighted maps. you're free to leave comments beside beatmaps you feel are out of place or not getting the love they deserve (or follow up in this thread).
https://docs.google.com/a/ppy.sh/spread ... oY0E#gid=0

Now everyone will farm pp doing somehow high-weighted hard diffs S:

@Aqo You must realize that this isn't a potential skill rankings, it's a ranking based on your performances.

Also, airman isn't even on that spreadsheet.

JappyBabes wrote:

@Aqo You must realize that this isn't a potential skill rankings, it's a ranking based on your performances.

Also, airman isn't even on that spreadsheet.

spreadsheet is flawed in general, i know of a few hard maps that will be top or near top on many top 100 players that arent on this list

edit: equally looking at tom94's tops, he has a hd+hr SS on a map that is 327 on this list, lower ranked than a hd+hr non SS of a map that is 409 on this list. the map weighting is lower, hes rank 1 on both, and his acc is higher on bulletproof, so why does the lower weighted map give more pp?

nrii wrote:

JappyBabes wrote:

@Aqo You must realize that this isn't a potential skill rankings, it's a ranking based on your performances.

Also, airman isn't even on that spreadsheet.

spreadsheet is flawed in general, i know of a few hard maps that will be top or near top on many top 100 players that arent on this list

edit: equally looking at tom94's tops, he has a hd+hr SS on a map that is 327 on this list, lower ranked than a hd+hr non SS of a map that is 409 on this list. the map weighting is lower, hes rank 1 on both, and his acc is higher on bulletproof, so why does the lower weighted map give more pp?

Afaik the "best performance" tab isn't ordered. I believe ppy once said something about that.

Tom94 wrote:

Afaik the "best performance" tab isn't ordered. I believe ppy once said something about that.

i've had friends play maps that are my top's and they also appear at the top of their list, it has to be ordered by something

i also had a marisa map on my top, then dropped 2 ranks on it and it moved down by 1 and then off. pretty sure it is ordered by pp.

I actually assume it's ordered as well. My list has been absolutely the same for a long time, until I SS'd Jutenija, when suddenly it came out on top (and gained quite alot of pp for it).

While the spreadsheet might be "flawed" in our eyes, keep in mind that we don't know how pp is calculated, and from what I can tell those maps probably have a much higher contesting rate than others, thus the pp earnings are bigger. I might be wrong though.

I haven't really done anything lately, but my Best Performance is moving itself around lol, and those maps seem kinda old so I don't think contention played a role in it. So idk, doesn't seem to be related to best pp on my list, but I guess we'll see some day.

Aqo wrote:

We have Player A and Player B, playing a map.

Player A first played that map with 89% accuracy and a few miss, and then proceeded to retry that map again and again for several hours, having about 50-100 retries on it, until eventually getting an SS on it. Even despite getting that SS, if Player A kept playing that map he would most likely get 95%-97% accuracy on an average run.

Player B played that map and had 98% accuracy on his first try. He thought he might try going for an SS on it, so he played it again, then getting about 98% again, maybe slightly higher. He then decided this map isn't very fun for him, and moved on.

Who do you think is a more skilled player, A or B?
And who is PP going to rate higher?

You are basically trying to rank people by using one song. The thing is you really can't do that. Even in a perfect pp calculation world, you still need an average of at least several maps. It doesn't really matter if Player B played a few times, got a good score, got a little less pp than Player A, and moved on to either just take a break or play/rank on other maps. If Player B is truly better, he would then be able to get much better scores than Player A on other maps, in which case his PP would clearly show (though I'm still assuming a perfect pp calculation world). Obviously, right now, that may not be the case, but I'm just saying that you can't attribute this to one map... It doesn't matter if on one map a "worse" player obtains a higher rank than you. Secondly, the computer cannot measure your emotional state, and calculating pp by play count is WAY too unreliable. So much crap happens in the real world that could make your play count skyrocket for certain reasons or another (whether emotional or physical (e.g. you are tired or you are depressed, or your mom is being an ass, not that my mom is )

Aqo wrote:

We have Player A and Player B, playing a map.

Player A first played that map with 89% accuracy and a few miss, and then proceeded to retry that map again and again for several hours, having about 50-100 retries on it, until eventually getting an SS on it. Even despite getting that SS, if Player A kept playing that map he would most likely get 95%-97% accuracy on an average run.

Player B played that map and had 98% accuracy on his first try. He thought he might try going for an SS on it, so he played it again, then getting about 98% again, maybe slightly higher. He then decided this map isn't very fun for him, and moved on.

Who do you think is a more skilled player, A or B?
And who is PP going to rate higher?

I don't think someone who can only do 89% can magically get a SS even if playing for 3-5 hours

I think, by tring to get the SS, player A practise a lot on his limits(?), so player A will get more pro, but player B just brush score, and stays the same skill

so pp system is in order to encourage people play for skill~

Really aqo, you're not getting the point. ar3sgice mentioned it already, but I'll have a go at it too. Person B is to not gain more PP than another simply because he is on a higher level than person A, as how well you can do on a map is limited. Rather, its up to said person to if he wants his performance rank to reflect how good of a player he is, its up to him to play and score well on harder maps in order to prove that he is a more skilled player, but the score on a map of said level shouldn't give more or less depending on how long it took for a person to achieve a perfect score.

You know what the irony here is?
Just because this list is now revealed, everyone will play those maps, meaning other maps will receive even less attention. Haha.

inb4 conspiracy theory!

I don't think that popularity should have any effect on the ranking at all.

think about it. if a map is popular, many top players have ranks on it, with mods. yes, if I now play that map, my rank isn't that high, and it would be higher if there weren't that many ranks on it. but does it make me a worse player? no, of course not. your effort is the same, whether the map is popular or not, it doesn't change the actual difficulty of your accomplishment.

a little example here: we take one map, and every player plays his best on this one map. after everybody has done that, we freeze time.
what we now have is an almost exact ranking of skill to that point of time on that specific map. sure, some people played the map more often than others, and luck and momentum is also a random factor, but overall, it is pretty accurate.

in reality, not everyone will play his best on every map, or even play every map. so you might get ranks on maps that you wouldn't achieve if everybody played this map with everything he got. but still, this doesn't make you worse, or others better. it just shows that many people didn't played the map, or only played them no mod.

long story short: the ranks of other players (and so your rank) on a map should not affect the PP, because it takes no additional skill to play a map many others played before you.
I hope my point is somewhat clear, as I had difficulties to really say what i wanted to say

The reason it exists is because if a song is popular, a rank #100 will be worth more than a rank#100 on a non-popular song. On non-popular songs it's easier to get higher ranks, and so rank #1 on some map not many people like to play is not nearly as hard to achieve then #1 on a very popular map (because a lot more pros start playing the map). With that in mind, a rank #10 on that popular should be worth a lot more than rank #1 on some map no one really cares much about. Removing this will probably cause a lot of weird pp changes, probably for the worse (because there are a lot of maps where not as pro people have #1's or top 10's that could mess up the pp rankings)

winber1 wrote:

The reason it exists is because if a song is popular, a rank #100 will be worth more than a rank#100 on a non-popular song. On non-popular songs it's easier to get higher ranks, and so rank #1 on some map very people like to play is not nearly as hard to achieve then #1 on a very popular map (because a lot more pros start playing the map). With that in mind, a rank #10 on that popular should be worth a lot more than rank #1 on some map no one really cares much about. Removing this will probably cause a lot of weird pp changes, probably for the worse (because there are a lot of maps where not as pro people have #1's or top 10's that could mess up the pp rankings)

Just gonna quote this to spare myself some typing. I'm gonna be acting as if the pp algorithm is really simple here, for clarity reasons.

To continue on this, let's take two maps, for example, Bad Apple's hardest diff and a map the simply completely copied that map and got ranked anyhow. We now have a map that get's weighted the same except for the fact that the original Bad Apple has a crazy amount of plays. Now you friggin love Bad Apple so you play both maps to SS but you have a principal distaste towards mods, so it's just gonna be a gold SS.

On the original Bad Apple (I'm gonna be pulling numbers out of my ass now) this would land you on #1230. On the copy-cat map, you're #60. If the popularity of the map wouldn't be taken into account, the new map would be worth a lot more points, you've made it into the top 100 after all! This shows that it wouldn't be fair to treat the maps that way, since you've preformed equally on them. With a modifier for popularity these ranks should give more or less the same amount of pp (again, I'm kind of pulling that out of my ass, but I think that's the ideal reasoning).

The problem right now is that your ranks above 500 won't even get considered. But peppy already told us this will be changed somehow, we just have to wait how exactly this will turn out.

"tons of FCs with high acc, why is it here? because osu"

I really did saw a nightcore at top rankings... But this...

suddenly, 8 new scores appear in the top 40 of lonely dreaming girl

I wonder why it can happen that you improve your score but lose pp? It just happened to me on a song which was in my Best Performance list. I improved my rank and I lost around 20 pp. (I also lost 0,01 accuracy, maybe that's the problem)

lol someone deleted everything

Blue Dragon wrote:

lol someone deleted everything

Yeah. As long as people act like this I doubt anything good can happen out of all of this. :<

Just as I was beating those unfairly high players, this happens... Someone must have had it saved, other than peppy.

// and it's back.

roym899 wrote:

I wonder why it can happen that you improve your score but lose pp? It just happened to me on a song which was in my Best Performance list. I improved my rank and I lost around 20 pp. (I also lost 0,01 accuracy, maybe that's the problem)

Ok I improved the accuracy now, too and the PP got way higher now.

But I also have another question: When only scores in the top 500 are considered, is also only the accuracy of these scores considered?

roym899 wrote:

I wonder why it can happen that you improve your score but lose pp? It just happened to me on a song which was in my Best Performance list. I improved my rank and I lost around 20 pp. (I also lost 0,01 accuracy, maybe that's the problem)

Nope, I had the same issue even though I also improved the accuracy of my record. I guess it's some weird bug or something like that.

roym899 wrote:

I wonder why it can happen that you improve your score but lose pp? It just happened to me on a song which was in my Best Performance list. I improved my rank and I lost around 20 pp. (I also lost 0,01 accuracy, maybe that's the problem)
Ok I improved the accuracy now, too and the PP got way higher now.

Well, that's nice for you then. PP can still decrease even with improved accuracy though.

Aqo wrote:

I'd just like to point something out that just occurred to me, which is related to how scoring and the PP system works with taking into account only good plays and not bad ones:

We have Player A and Player B, playing a map.

Player A first played that map with 89% accuracy and a few miss, and then proceeded to retry that map again and again for several hours, having about 50-100 retries on it, until eventually getting an SS on it. Even despite getting that SS, if Player A kept playing that map he would most likely get 95%-97% accuracy on an average run.

Player B played that map and had 98% accuracy on his first try. He thought he might try going for an SS on it, so he played it again, then getting about 98% again, maybe slightly higher. He then decided this map isn't very fun for him, and moved on.

Who do you think is a more skilled player, A or B?
And who is PP going to rate higher?

Player C realized that under the new Aqo replay point rewarding system, he should play the map a 1000 times on a machine disconnected from the net until he could do it in his sleep. Then he moved over to the connected machine, played it once and SSed it, scoring beau coup de Aqo-PP.

Factoring in number of plays is Capital-B Bad. It just encourages silly and aberrant player behaviour. People shouldn't ever feel obligated to hide their practicing or to avoid the online aspects of the game. People shouldn't be punished because their machine lags more than someone else's and costs them more replays. People shouldn't feel that they need to always be in top condition and ready to play seriously whenever they play... they should be able to kick back and play casually, even if they're drunk or sick in bed or playing offhanded for fun and can barely get through songs.

Yes, Player A might have gotten a bit lucky. But that's okay, the system doesn't need to penalize bad play to correct for that, decay will eventually take away any points that Player A cannot reproduce again easily. Plus, while Player A was playing that map a 100 times, Player B could be scoring well on many maps, or doing what A is doing and scoring an SS on a much harder map. All told, Player B probably outscored Player A in PP during that time period, even if Player B didn't get more PP on that one map.

Only rewarding good plays and not penalizing for bad plays is one of the main factors that lead PP to rate farming over skill on a lot of the maps. While it's understandable that penalizing bad plays might be demoralizing for all of the players who are not used to competitive ranking boards, the system has to work in a way that makes sense when going with the decision of only taking into account good plays (this is related to worth of SS/S/etc, on different levels of OD. An SS on low OD usually means no more than "farming" and not actual "skill" with the current system and the nature of what maps players choose to play. Rewarding extra for high-accuracy on a system that ignores retries basically rewards extra for farming and for playing easier maps).

That's not farming. Farming would be if you could just keep playing new maps and have your PP grow without end. You can't do that in the new system, because the weighting curve will cut you off after so many maps, and the only way you can get more PP then is to score higher than your previous plays. It might look like you can farm, because if your PP is built on junk already, playing low level maps can stoke things up a bit and look like farming. But it's ultimately self defeating... eventually you'll need to post better and better plays to advance. Plus, better scores means that you get to add more of them together (because the weighting function won't push them under the threshold until later)... it's bonus squared. Sure there is a bit of an issue with PP being "soft" for lower values... where a player might be able to advance quicker in the short term with lower level maps, but another player playing higher level maps will be actively becoming a better player, and will ultimately be able to score higher.

Besides, the problem you seem to be going on about can be addressed better (and without destroying the game) by addressing OD. I'm sure peppy has already considered that low OD makes high accuracy less impressive and the bonuses involved might need to be tweaked accordingly, because that's pretty obvious.

That's not to say the PP system is ideal. It would be nice if a player could feel that a 560th place SS rank Hard/Insane was worth something and didn't feel that they'd have been better off underplaying their ability on the Normal map for a top-40. An ideal system would recognize that a player capable of one was capable of the other and their ranking would be set accordingly without making players ever feel they should or need to underplay. But that would require an excellent objective measure of difficulty, which is a very hard problem... the PP system approaches from a more subjective angle, which is a good approach to the problem given the constraints and difficulties posed. The weighting function is an excellent approach, as is the decay, they make a solid statistical approach to calculating a variable that's expected to trend. The top-500 cutoff is a bit ugly, IMO, but I can see why it's there, even if it does contribute to underplay behaviour (one suggestion to alleviate this a bit would be to consider having SSes be eligible at any rank... past 500 they're probably not worth much anyways (and might well be worth 0 if too far down), so it's not like you can farm a million 500+ rank SSes and have them count for much given the other limitations). The fact that you can lose PP on a map when you improve a score on it is also less than ideal.

Lybydose wrote:

suddenly, 8 new scores appear in the top 40 of lonely dreaming girl

9 now, +6pp thx

ROFL just as expected. Now that everyone knows high weighted maps every noob can go farm good ranks on simple maps and get loads of pp for nothing. Gj publishing the list...

Jordan wrote:

ROFL just as expected. Now that everyone knows high weighted maps every noob can go farm good ranks on simple maps and get loads of pp for nothing. Gj publishing the list...

and what's stopping good players doing the same and beating the "noobs" ranks?

btw you could already do this by checking people like sette and shadowsouls top ranks, full of hards you could dt for easy pp

nrii wrote:

and what's stopping good players doing the same and beating the "noobs" ranks?

laziness

Jordan wrote:

ROFL just as expected. Now that everyone knows high weighted maps every noob can go farm good ranks on simple maps and get loads of pp for nothing. Gj publishing the list...

i thought the point of online games with rankings WAS competitivity

Blue Dragon wrote:

Jordan wrote:

ROFL just as expected. Now that everyone knows high weighted maps every noob can go farm good ranks on simple maps and get loads of pp for nothing. Gj publishing the list...

i thought the point of online games with rankings WAS competitivity

funny, I thought the point of games overall was fun :/

jokes aside, leaking this list was probably not the best thing to do, since now, like lolcubes said, everyon will farm these maps, making other maps even more worthless.

plus some bored cracks could get behind the alggorythm, but that's really unrealistic.

Is there a "sliding scale" for points distribution vs number of unique players instead of a flat cut-off point e.g. rank #1000?

Some maps have pretty much everyone playing them making the chances of getting into the points zone very slim and a lot more demanding. Even if you do really well there's already another 4000 that have done slightly better, it can put you off spending time at the map. Perhaps the reward makes up for it but idk because I don't rank high enough

How does the system handle maps with few scores (<500) but high difficulty with plenty of the top ranking players?

Note my curves should actually be curvy.


Note: I understand this could be unworkable nonsense

Tanzklaue wrote:

plus some bored cracks could get behind the alggorythm, but that's really unrealistic.

why would anyone do that anyways? the list of highest pp ranks is there.

Blue Dragon wrote:

Tanzklaue wrote:

plus some bored cracks could get behind the alggorythm, but that's really unrealistic.

why would anyone do that anyways? the list of highest pp ranks is there.

but it is and it isnt, the list goes some way but is flawed imo, either with high rank maps that dont give much, or maps that arent even on it that give a fucking shitload
edit couple examples:
http://osu.ppy.sh/b/86377 #782 on list and giving insane amounts
http://osu.ppy.sh/b/134550&m=0 just took #2 on this and its in my top 4 top ranks, not even on the list
http://osu.ppy.sh/b/48506 #741 on list yet kyou-kun's top ranked map, ahead of her f.i score which is map rank #206

this isnt to say the list is wrong, but i get the feeling there is more to it than just this list

nrii wrote:

Jordan wrote:

ROFL just as expected. Now that everyone knows high weighted maps every noob can go farm good ranks on simple maps and get loads of pp for nothing. Gj publishing the list...

and what's stopping good players doing the same and beating the "noobs" ranks?

btw you could already do this by checking people like sette and shadowsouls top ranks, full of hards you could dt for easy pp

This is like score farming. Boring. That's what stops at least me from doing it. The original aim of PP was to reward good scores, not a certain set of beatmaps. :>