Just because I am defending pp farming does not mean I think I am skillful because of it or deserve my rank because of it. I am well aware that there are FAR MORE than 50 players who are better than me, and I will by no means try to claim otherwise. I like to THINK I am a pretty good player (and that's what it comes down to: opinions), but I don't shove it in people's faces or let my arrogance get out of control. Any ranking system that exists is bound to be farmed or exploited in one manner or another. You're free to judge and criticize any of these players as you please. I'd just appreciate it if generalizations about us were avoided.
First off, I am by no means saying that the pp system is accurate. Every ranking system that is released will have some flaws, and someone SOMEWHERE is going to have a qualm with it EVEN IF it's nearing perfection. Now, not ALL hards are highly contested. I've just found that the maps that give good pp tend to have a lot of scores to beat. That seems to be a trend in pp maps. Maybe the maps were riddled with pro highscores BEFORE people found out it gave pp. Maybe they weren't. We'll never know. Some hards I've played have been truly difficult to get a top 6 score on due to the amount of people playing ar10.8+ or HD FL DT on that map. My point is not EVERY hard is easy to get a highscore on. And people seem to be quick to conclude that it's easy to get scores on those maps.
Here is my reasoning behind the legitimacy of everyone farming:
So, a player happens to stumble upon a pp map. Horay, he gets 100 pp and shares the map with all of his friends. His friends proceed to envy the ranks he got and attempt to set scores on the same map. If all of that players' friends were skilled players, there would be a handful of hard-to-beat scores on the leaderboard of that pp song. So now you, in turn, stumble upon the same map. If you're not skilled enough to beat the scores these skilled players set, the song won't yield as much pp. So if all the skilled players were farming, it would be increasingly hard to farm pp. Naturally, there are exceptions. For instance, anything that's easy to SS tends to give unfair amounts of pp. Pro players setting scores on these wouldn't make the system any more/ less difficult to farm.
And lastly, (yet again, in my opinion) you can't just compare every player in the top 100 (or should I even deign to say the top 250) to a pro player like thelewa or happystick. The differences will be astonishing, and a random top 250 player's accomplishments would pale in comparision to something thelewa could do with ease. Pro players like that are known for their consistency. That's what sets them apart from people who get occasional amazing plays. If those people are capable of making those amazing plays their achievements are by no means undermined by the fact that they can't make those amazing plays consitently.
So pretty much my point is that people tend to underestimate the difficulty of hard farming. While it may merely sound like justifications I do I have some very valid reasons why they are difficult. There are always exceptions to the matter and there are still quite a few easy maps that yield incredible amounts of pp. I'm not going to go out of my way to deny that. I just implore you guys to keep in mind that hard farming isn't as easy as people make it out to be.