SteveRowland wrote:
But I think it shouldn't give any score multiplier for increasing AR nor reduce for for lowering it.
"I want a difficulty-reducing mod that doesn't lower my score." AR greatly affects how a map plays. If a map was made to be played on AR8 and you can't read it well enough to play it, you shouldn't be given the option to just change it. I've argued it at length in this thread. AR plays a huge factor in the aim component of the game.
Anyway, unranked would be great for that. Eliminates the need to have AR-changed versions of maps sitting around and makes spectating/multiplayer easier when trying to play them.
p.s. AR9 on 140bpm? What the heck is the current generation of players being raised on that AR9 is needed for something that slow?
For HP, while I would appreciate lowering HP on some of the maps I can't pass, there already is NF for that and that one is pretty well balanced (0.5 score and -10%pp). While often even 0.5HP can be the difference between passing and failing a map, it would essential do the same thing as NF - a binary pass or die scenario. So I'd say there is no need for that.
Agreed. Might be fun to play around with as an unranked thing (people could change Airman's drain to a reasonable number and see how hard it "should" be to pass!), but as a ranked mod, it should probably be equivalent to nofail and therefore pointless outside of extremely silly bragging purposes ("I didn't need nofail! I could pass the map just fine on hp0~~~").
CS - allowing increase of CS would be good and it could even give a bit of extra score multiplier, lowering CS should be penalized a lot though, there are map that are mainly hard thanks to their CS so allowing getting top ranks on those by lowering CS would be bad.
You kind of hit on the difficult thing about changing cs here - cs often determines how a map or how its hard parts play out. Some patterns that are difficult at the cs chosen for a map may become absolutely trivial if you lower the cs juuuuuust enough and penalizing properly is basically impossible with the way multipliers work now without intentionally overtuning. This brings back something I've said repeatedly in this thread - hard rock is a TERRIBLE mess of a mod, but it's okayish (and the game is probably better for its existence) because it's standardized. Either you play the map or you play a version of the map with a specific different circle size (and AR, OD, HP) for 1.06x the points. Take it or leave it. Implementing user-chosen CS opens up weird edge cases of trying to change CS to exactly the right value to just barely not ruin the map and I don't think that's a good thing for the game. A fun thing to play around with on an unranked mod (which is exactly what this should be), but a really silly thing imo to have as part of the competitive aspect of the game.
OD - increase of OD has no point and should not award anything extra, it doesn't make anything more "comfortable" to play like the other stats. Lowering OD could be a thing but just like CS heavily penalized (or even unranked to avoid the free SS's)
OD is the one that would probably make the most sense as a ranked mod since OD doesn't change how the map plays outside of notelock scenarios (or if your timing is so early or late that it causes you to miss notes), but it would be another balancing nightmare. If you increase the OD on an all-slider map, you've increased the difficulty by a trivial amount, for example. If you increase the OD on a really fast map, you might suddenly find it possible to pass due to decreased notelock. Overall, would, like the others, be best as an unranked mod.
In asking for this (or components of it) as a ranked mod, you're asking for a
more messed-up version of hard rock, which is already a really messy mod that changes map settings in a way that's arbitrary relative to the map (not arbitrary relative to the map settings but you're playing the map, not its settings) in such a way that its difficulty boost is inconsistent enough to sometimes cause a map to be
easier for players. I hope you understand just how crazy that is. A mod that would let you tune map settings to exact values you want would be so much worse. HR is only really palatable because either it's on or it isn't. Having a mod that would allow you to turn HR halfway on or to turn it on twice over or to have certain components of it on or anything in-between would be terrible. Needs to be unranked for sure.
When i started playing earlier this year, easy and normal difficulties were too easy while hard were too hard so I went with normal+HR and then soon switched to normal+HRDT which is for most normals ar9 (as their base is 5) xD And then I just kinda transitioned into insanes at ar9.
) so I like putting my reflexes into the front lines. Unlike lower AR which tests your ability to read like when you read note sheets for playing instruments. Its like a completely different game for me playing low or high AR and I just really enjoy the high ones, that's all there is to it.