theowest wrote:
I just think it would be pretty interesting to see. Maybe not replace objects but add it somewhere. There are tonnes of examples where knowing the exact max combo would help.
If you're incapable of knowing what those might be, here's a few I can come up with
- Very hard to get full combo so you can't fully trust the online ranking
- Unranked beatmap
- Not logged in
- You simply do not want to go into the editor just to check it out
- To get a gimps of what the max points might be (based on experience)
- It difference from objects in the sense that some objects can create a lot of combo. (sliders for example)
- Nobody has yet received the full combo yet (newly ranked beatmap)
Most of those aren't reasons where knowing the exact max combo would help... they're reasons why it might be inconvenient to get the value. Which are pretty much the same reasons you might want for displaying any stat that isn't easily accessible (like, say, AR). But they're not reasons why it's so important to know and should be much more conveniently displayed (over a different stat that could use that space... like, say, AR).
As for the two reasons that aren't that:: Yes, sliders can add more to Max Combo because of tick marks. This is quite important (as I mention above) in CtB. It isn't particularly useful in standard to know the tick rate unless you're looking for an easy combo achievement. Sure, high tick rate introduces more opportunities for jumping the track on a slider... but a lot of that comes down to the shapes and speeds of sliders in the map. You need to play the map to know if it matters at all.,.. even then, I don't think people care, most people will play tickless sliders like they're made entirely of tick marks, unless they're dancing. The other place where this comes up is the other reason, which leads us into scoring potential.
If potential score is the only real reason you want Max Combo, then it sounds like what you really want is Max Points being displayed. The variability that can come with high tick rate (the other reason) just further clouds things... long ticky sliders aren't real points unless there's a lot of Objects in there to convert the combo you built into real points. You essentially need both, as well as knowledge about the order of things in the map. It doesn't really improve the ability to estimate that much over what you can do with the other stats (length, difficulty, objects, circles, etc)... displaying Max Points is simpler and much more accurate for that purpose.
Here, let me try to give another real reason for having Max Combo displayed. There's no count during play of Objects... the count is Combo. Knowing what the Max Combo is gives a measure of how far through the objects you are in a map. There's a meter to show how far you are in time, but that's a separate thing... you can be 3/4 through the song's duration, but only 1/2 through the Max Combo, and that's (a) useful to know and (b) something that Max Combo is far more suited to than Objects, because it's in the unit you have available during play. And if you drop the Combo, Max Combo is also useful for the same reason, it's in the right units so you can estimate what percentage of the maximum score you can still get based on the Combo count where you dropped. So it's not entirely useless, it's just much more useful during play... when I can almost always read it off the scoreboard (it's conveniently close to the Combo counter), Displaying it on the other screen won't help me with the special cases where it isn't easily available, unless I checked it on the way in (and I pretty much never do)... but that's just me.