I've said this before - the map length idea is supported by the map not being any harder at any given time. It's just longer, not harder. That's how I see it. Sure, it's harder to SS/fc/etc. but, as I've stated above, that's not because the maps hard. It's because it's long. As your last paragraph says, the pattern difficulty is a separate idea and when I think of how hard a map is, I really only think about it in that sense.Tess wrote:
Sure. I already admitted to not having been very clear about what I meant, and I do tend to get ahead of conversation sometimes, so that wasn't really great on my behalf. I also meant to imply that I take your opinion less seriously (not that it's less valid) because your lack of experience in said subject - meaning that I believe that, had you had more experience with it, you would've thought differently, which is enough of a basis to not take an opinion as seriously, to me. I don't entirely disregard it though - I did try to see your point, and I do see what you mean, I simply disagree.
You still didn't really answer my question directly, but it does turn out that what you think makes a map more or less difficult is the patterns used + the speed at which the patterns are played. Though this is true, OD and map length are still a part of it. For map length - your argument is that, if you play a 3-minute 5 star map twice in a row, that's the same as playing a 6-minute 5 star map. This couldn't be less true. First of all, the 6 minute map (provided that there is twice as much break time as in the 3-minute map) would be a lot harder to FC than it would be to FC the 3-minute map twice in a row. The combo is shorter, the amount of focus and stamina required is less and you don't have as much time to fuck up. Osu is about trying to get as close to SS'ing a map as you can, so that you can get the most points (be it score or pp) out of it. This means that both combo and accuracy are incredibly important, and it's also why they're weighed so heavily. Secondly, it would also be a lot harder to get good accuracy on, because the lack of breaks can make it easier to run out of stamina and start losing consistency. The longer a map is, the harder it is to SS it, this shouldn't be news. I think people should stop separating all aspects of difficulty and cherrypicking one of them instead of combining them all to form a more global idea of difficulty.
However, if you were to say that star difficulty is only an indicator of pattern difficulty, then I'm willing to see your point. I haven't heard of this though - "star difficulty" is known to be an indicator of a map's entire difficulty, not part of it. If it's not going to be a global indicator (like most people think it is), then perhaps it should be renamed to something like "pattern difficulty" or whatever else works. Right now it's just confusing, I know of a lot of people who don't understand that a 4.8 star map gave them more pp than a 5.3 star map. If it was depicted as only a part of the map's difficulty (just like OD, CS, etc.) then perhaps it would be easier for people to form a global idea of the map's difficulty for themselves.
For simplicity, I don't disagree with star difficulty including od, ar and map length because it is mostly used as an indicator of pp and should probably reflect this.
