If pp (or rank score, or any other value used for rank) went up noticeably whether or not you did well, then lowdiff farming wouldn't be avoided (unless the scaling from difficulty increases extremely fast with difficulty, for example, the easiest map in the game gives 1 point, a mid-tier map gives 10^35 points, and a top-tier map gives 10^45 points). The purpose of the decrease of pp gain rate from plays is limiting the amount of pp obtained from playing many maps of similar difficulty without increasing the difficulty over time. If the difficulty calculation of the pp system is accurate, then players will keep getting pp as long as they increase the difficulty (or performance) of the maps they play (because of that, a good difficulty calculator for osu!mania maps is very important for making the pp system better).Tear wrote:
Ranked score was better than pp, because it didn't pretend to be a proper ranking system. It was a motivation to play because it was going up no matter if you did well or badly, doing well just made it go up faster - unlike pp, which awards you points at first and then slows down, leaving players frustrated and demotivated. Why do we need a proper ranking system? Just a quick look at a few leaderboards tells you who's the best at the game. To fix lowdiff farming, ranked score could be scaled just like mania charts were.
Looking at beatmap leaderboards of hard maps can give you an idea of who are the best players in the game, but you can't use that method to know the skill ranking of players that aren't as good as those top players (a well designed pp system should be able to give a good idea of that).
