abraker wrote:
post
My argument isn't really that "FFR and Etterna are dying due to lack of low diffs and the same would happen to o!m" or any type of doom posting, following from my original post I'll highlight my main points for ease of discussion:
- After many years interacting with charters/mappers from all 3 games (FFR, Etterna,
and o!m), it's pretty clear to me that, left to their own devices, most competent charters/mappers will completely ignore lower level content (or more specifically, content they or their peers don't consume). Obviously there are still exceptions like myself (in fact, you included my own ranked map as an example).
- Playcount statistics on o!m show that the majority of the playerbase is consuming content at the range primarily covered by spread RC (normal~hard). This is actually also valid for FFR and Etterna, but I'll cover those afterwards as response to what you said.
- Completely removing spread RC would act against the best interests of the playerbase at large, and I believe that RC should prioritize acting in favor of those players.
Also some extra points to make my position clear:
- I'm
not claiming things are completely fine as they are, which is why I support relaxation in the first place.
- I'm
not claiming easy diffs will cease to exist or the game mode will die. I
am claiming that removing spread RC completely without any other change will impact negatively both the quantity and quality of available lower diffs.
- This is
not about making more content for some idealized new player/beginner, current spread RC doesn't even cover Easy which is what most players would start with. This
is about making things better for the majority of the community who happens to be playing primarily maps in the normal~hard range.
Anyway, I think the argument that there's already enough content in that range (or even that, assuming an ideal scenario, the influx will stay the same compared to now) is misguided as data suggests that there should be even
more if possible.
Considering the benefits of ranking for the mapper (immortalizing your work, leaderboards, exposure), I think the ranking process can and should require mappers to put in some extra potentially undesirable work for the sake of the community. The problem with the current situation is that the currently required extra work is too much for most mappers, which ends up hurting the ranked ecosystem even on the lower end of difficulty as mappers end up doing no extra work at all.
Also in regards to other things you mentioned:
Thing about FFR and Etterna is that the games themselves are not as accessible as osu!mania is.
The fact o!m is more accessible only makes it more important that there are systems in place to provide more content for this segment of the playerbase.
My point is that a beginner would not find those games easily, and if they do it's not beginner friendly from the get go, therefore it makes sense they don't have many easy charts.
Following from what I said in my earlier points, I'm not even talking about content for complete beginners, just what covers the bulk of the playerbase. Aside from scale, the core demographic in both Etterna and FFR actually isn't that different from what you observe in o!m, as I'll present next.
lengthier elaborationEven with skewed demographics, the median player level in EtternaOnline is ~13.5 which corresponds to the MSD rate from roughly 3* o!m rice maps, and you also see playcount/difficulty statistics in etterna packs similar to what I mentioned for o!m.
FFR is a bit harder to present proper evidence because lifetime statistics aren't as useful, but for a long while I've used the
Recent Plays to gauge site-wide player behavior by checking it from time to time. For reference, using data from when I was writing this post (
image), out of the 25 latest plays, median difficulty of the charts played is 51 (roughly a 2.5* map), 17 of the plays are on files with diff less or equal to 60 (roughly 3*), and only 4 plays are on anything close to a 4* (around 80 on ffr) or higher, with one being a mashed score. While anecdotal evidence like this isn't conclusive by itself, I've been observing similar trends for years on the site.
I'm well aware there are some other confounding variables I didn't cover both in favor and against the data I'm presenting for either game, but my goal isn't to write an academic paper on this topic.
To conclude, if charters in those games aren't making enough content in the difficulty range we are interested for the o!m context, it has nothing to do with a lack of an audience that benefits from it.
And as an extra more off-topic matter:
off-topicEven I searched for guitar hero like games back in late 00's I did not find anything, and wasn't until 2014 when I came across osu! by recommendation.
It's funny that you mentioned this because in Brazil there was the 2007 game Guitar Flash that filled the gap for people in a similar situation and some of the top br players (Lothus and SillyFangirl) actually played Guitar Flash before o!m. On a similar note, FFR was actually fairly popular in the early/mid 00s serving a similar role during the DDR fad, and died down mainly due to the site going dark for a long period, iirc around late 00s.