Time for my contribution to this.
Main sections organized by increasing order of importance. Read bolded sentences for tldr.
Mods
Vision Mods
These are HD, FI, and FL.
As someone who play with a HD skin (not using the hidden mod), and is completely unable to play nomod otherwise, I think if the HD mod still stays the same (it shouldn't), then the 1.06x multiplier should be fine. This is due to the fact that playing with a lane cover which effectively moves up and down is not particularly easy to play, and results in those intentional misses in order to sometimes bring the cover down. On the other hand, if the HD mod gets fixed to become static, then I believe there should be no multiplier. This is due to the fact that (with the exception of slowjams (not something to discount)), most high level players don't even look below a certain point on the screen when playing. This is why people play with a cover, in order to hide the visual clutter that lies below a certain point where people pay attention. While there may be some merit to giving a score multiplier simply for the ability to deal with slowjams, this is such a rare occurrence overall, that I don't think it really should warrant any bonus.
Misc.
The remaining mods are not really worth commenting about yet, as the score mutlipliers they provide is more relevant when talking about the pp system, which is not the main topic of concern at the moment. As a side note though, playing a song with DT is close to playing an entirely different song, which no amount of score buff could fix as a problem (it would be too little or too much). In addition, with HR, the timing window for a 300g is reduced, which impacts the score by a large amount. Therefore, that mod would probably also require a significant buff. Of course, for tournament play, none of the non-vision mods actually matter that much, so lets just ignore this for now.Long Notes
LN End Window
After playing around with this a bit, I believe that this timing window is currently a little bit too small. Considering how it's inherently harder to time releases over holds anyways, I think this should be increased to something around a 2.0x multiplier instead. (Obviously, this would require much testing. A more statistical approach to do this would be to analyze replays that we already have, and the spread of the LN release timings compared to LN holds, given easier maps (since LN heavy maps would give somewhat inaccurate results)).
HP
An unintended side effect of this LN change is the fact that people can now lose HP for failing to release a note on time, something which did not happen before. In addition, there are now double the chances for people to miss an lose HP, which would result in maps getting harder this way. There probably needs to be a look into the side effects of this, especially for higher level maps, but this is also probably not as relevant for tournament play, except for possibly the final few rounds.Score
I won't be doing as much number crunching for this part as some other have, mostly since I don't have the energy for it.
ComboAs Shoegazer has already pointed out in
his post, mania is not really a gamemode where people single-mindedly focus on FCs, and thus,
having this quadratic (it's quadratic guys) scoring system will not work in this game mode, unlike std and ctb. Instead, we tend to focus on aiming for higher accuracy instead, with overall scores being decent.
Players in this mode will (unless they are attempting to FC) not care about a random miss somewhere in the middle of the song, especially in a slow part. It's just a single miss, and won't significantly contribute to the final accuracy of the play. Instead, we only really care when we either miss a large number of notes in a burst (in which case we just flailed the burst), or when we are constantly missing throughout some section (lets say a stream of some sort).
In order to fix this, there should be diminishing returns on each note at some point, rather than an quadratic increase in returns instead. This could take the form of a logarithmic curve, or there could be a system similar to taiko instead, where the bonus increases up until a certain cap, where it no longer grows.
On a side note, one of the things I like about the old "combo" scoring mechanism was the fact that you still lost combo for not hitting a 300. This continue to penalize people who are mashing through some section of the song, but can retain combo nonetheless (for example, jumptrilling rolls or jumpstreams a la PLANET//SHIPPER). I'm not sure if this should stay or not, but it is worth keeping in mind to some extent.
AccuracyI like the direction that this is taking, where scores are really calculated exponentially off of accuracy instead of linearly.
The exponent is a bit too extreme right now however, as the score dropoff is quite extreme for even taking a small hit in accuracy. People have already ran numbers on this, and this would also obviously need testing with combo as well in order to determine what a good balance point is.
Which leads me to my final point.
Combo and Accuracy BalanceSee this screenshot?
This is the extreme example of someone who has terrible accuracy, and yet can somehow FC the map. Where would we put him in the grand scheme of "how good is this score?"
This is where the balance between combo and accuracy must be considered, and only after finalizing the individual scoring metrics within each section. As of right now, I think the balance of the 2 sections is extremely off, especially with the current combo scoring system in play. However, since that is subject to change, I will refrain for saying much more for now.
