This was posted in the mania thread so I figured I'd quote it here for relevance.
Tear wrote:
There's one very simple change that would makes all modes of osu fun, addictive and still rewarding:
Disable pp weighting.
Let it accumulate as you play. Even if you didn't do your best, you still get a few points. Unlike score, pp goes up exponentially so lowdiff farming would be severely reduced.
"But I can just play all the easies in the game for #1!" And pros can play all the insanes for #1, what's your point?
Any attempt to make an objective skill rating is doomed to fail, so why not make the game fun instead? Note that pp without weighting is identical to DJ Points in LR2 and IIDX. Also note that my solution does not render Tom's work obsolete at all, pp as a measure of a score's worth is still used to reward skill and make you go up faster than playing easier stuff.
Honestly I agree. The idea that you can not only objectively measure, but also quantize and compare each player's total amount of skill against one another is... Well, ineffective and inefficient.
First of all, with all the mods out there, it's really hard to compare. Does a 90% Big Black HR FC require more skill than an FL SS on the same map? Some will say yeah and some will say no - there's no real consensus on what requires more skill than the other, especially considering that most people tend to be biased with their ideas of skill (people who are good at streaming calling steams overrated, people who are good at jumping calling jumps overrated,
every human being to play this game calling DT overrated) and thus their suggestions will always be in favor of their bias.
I think it'd be a good idea to drop the weighting entirely, or at least make it so that all the scores that are visible in your top performances (the top 100 or so) are weighted 100%, and scores start scaling down to 0 after that. This game is rapidly losing its fun factor due to it being too stressful to actually make any kind of progress. I remember when I FCd an Insane with HDHR for 99.17% worth 167pp and 2pp got added to my total. That was fucking depressing, especially considered that a day before I got +1pp for not even FCing a Hard with EZ while playing multi with lower ranked friends.
Osu is still a
game and games reward you for your
performances,
NOT for your skill. Yes - this means that someone with 200 average performances should be ranked higher than someone with 10 absurd performances. That's simply how games, and rankings work. I've never seen any ranking that was based off of skill anywhere. If you're a boxer, you could be the most talented boxer in the world - if someone happens to hit your soft spot and knocks you out, you'll lose and they'll be placed higher than you -
regardless of how good they are. It's that simple. We need to stop chasing after some kind of ideal of ranking skill because that's impossible. Even if skill
were measurable, it's a variable thing. There are days where I play really really good and days where I play really, REALLY bad. I've repeatedly outplayed 3 digit players in multi in the past - consistently beating them at beatmaps of their own skill level - and I've also had my ass handed to me by 5 digit players on some really bad days. It all depends, it's not a constant thing which can be measured nor are one's past performances an actual reflection of their skill.
Even
attempting to do this doesn't lead to much good. The only thing we've wound up with is overly inflated maps that some people can do easily and others can't do at all. I've done stuff harder than Koigokoro while I can't do Koigokoro at all. Yet my friends who can't do the stuff I did are ranked higher just because they
can do it. So, really, what kind of "skill" ranking is it when your skill is measured by very specific maps (in particular ones with long spaced streams or with jump spam - regardless of how hard these actually are to play)?
I'm sure that a bunch of people will jump out with counterarguments but you can't deny that every other game in existence will reward you for every performance in some way or the other while osu only rewards you if you FC the Big Black with DTFL during an earthquake while finding the cure for AIDS and arguing with your girlfriend about why she doesn't look fat in that dress.
