The dan system is anything but an arbitrary system. It's potentially perfection in measuring skill on a universal level. Not only due to how it's a pure and simple milestone players strive for and achieve with no convoluted system such as this PP here behind it. You clear it or you don't. And to top it off you can make multiple dan scales to cover different areas of skills. You don't get anything more simple, straightforward and efficient than global milestones. It's not about being better than others, it's about having goals everyone strive for together. It's the exact same thing as personal goal, except they're global.
And yes of course everything becomes relative. Your achievements, your skills and your goals all become relative to the game itself. But when deciding what game people should play on a competitive, end game level. Those arguments become superfluous since they can be said for any game. All you're basically doing is coming with explanations on how people come to tolerate the for-mentioned shortcomings, indirectly agreeing that there "are" shortcomings that makes mania inferior to other games.
These things I denote as shortcomings aren't derived from comparisons with other games. It's just objectional observations.
Long notes:Expand-We can't "miss" the releases.
-Long notes can be pressed at any time, even after having falsly released the exact same note.
-They renegerate so much HP they're not even intimidating in most cases.
-Dat combo thing they got going on.
Everything here is tailored to literally PROMOTE spam play. Is there any logical explanation as to how mania's longnote mechanics are better than say o2jam? And don't say our visions of how good LNs should be is influenced by this mutual agreement that o2jam is the king in LNs. We had sm, bms, canmusic, djmax all predecessing o2jam and it still got recognized that way for a reason. It's just a simple you gotta hit and release at the right time or else you miss. With mania's longnote system you develop bad habits which impedes your performances in o2jam (it's not that bad to surmount them though). Yet o2jam players that come here completely wreck the game. From a "general" VSRG gamer's perspective. This means a lot.
There's no denying o2jam is the better game for LNs, just take the time to look at those mechanics comparatively.
Normal notes:ExpandAs you seen in the video, there's no penalty for overpressing. And the timegates are horrid enough to hit notes a 1/4 beat ahead. You don't even need a sense of rhythm to play this rhythm game. There's so much technical junk I could throw here but I'll just shorten this by pointing out that OD10 actually makes some songs easier simply because it also shortens the 50 gate, a gate whose only purpose is to prevent spamming by being so big. This 7k key press thing actually doesn't work for FDFD OD7 because of the 50 gate, but flip it to OD10 and you're set to clearing it with an extremely minimal miss count. (I mean like, bellow 10). This just goes to say that these mechanics were just thrown into this without even thinking about what their purpose was, they were thrown in here because other games have them and unfortunately implemented poorly because of it.
Clearing / HP bar / ScoreExpandSome people could say mania isn't about clearing, it's all about score. But what would be the point of even having an HP bar if that were case. All that HP bar does is make people believe they're better than they actually are. Allowing them to "clear", "pass", "beat" a song, (terms that mean that your performance was good enough for next level) when you've missed over a third of the notes. It's ridiculous. Sure HP 9/10 are decent, but no one uses them since the community got used to enjoy spamming everything. And for those who say it's all about score.... The scoring system's multiplier breaks it. You get plays where you clearly did better, missed less, better accuracy, bigger combo, yet fall short in score.
Players have a hard time figuring out a medium to measure their improvements. The PP system makes their rank rise even if there's no improvement involved. The scoring system is superficial. And the ranks are all over the place, you can clear with a D or an S. What's the most common question that showed up on my guide and Entozer's map thread? "Uh should I move on when I clear or when I S or etcet". The game itself doesn't even know what it wants to be and makes the new players feel lost.
Here's a story since I'm boredExpandThe following is a true story
Once upon a time there was little boy. He found this game called osu!mania and really enjoyed hitting notes. His scores were pretty bad but that's ok, he was just starting out. He couldn't wait to get better and kept playing. He got curious about high level plays and found the overjoys. As a joke he went on to try them and simply spammed as fast as he could. His fingers were pretty fast to start with since he plays piano. To his surprise, although he failed, his score was very similar to the beginner maps he played earlier. Thinking this was prediction of skill, he kept playing those maps the exact same way. Spamming overjoys, he eventually came to pass them and even B them. Proud of himself, he thought he was ready to show off his skills to the big boys in LR2. But his world got flipped upsidown the second he started playing. He couldn't even clear level 1s let alone the aforementioned overjoys. Thinking it was just a matter of getting used to the game he kept trying. But alas he was getting nowhere.
Depression and frustration hit him so he started cheating.
The end.
No but in all honesty, there's no way you can honestly believe mania plays LNs better than o2jam or single notes better than LR2. But here's the catch. LR2 longnotes are quite crappy, and o2jam's single notes are also quite crappy. Currently there's no games out there currently capable of calling itself a game with mechanics brilliant enough to challenge every area of skill the
most efficiently as a possible. But there are games that can call themselves the best in specific fields. Where o2jam reigns over longnotes and LR2 reigns over control/precision. I'd say mania reigns over spamming (and maybe accuracy for those 1'000'000 score farmers, but very few do that). So hey if spamming is the skill you value the most then mania might actually be the best game out there for you.
For me, I'll jump from game to game depending on what skills I want to train. I'm not bound to any single game nor do I feel the need to defend any of them. There's things I hate and things I love in all of them, and I use all of them to my advantage. Seems to be the logical thing to do.