14's trolololololololo

If you're referring to only official ITG charts, as opposed to Edits or DDR charts.. Quasar & FascinationMaxx don't joke around, for 10s.

I suppose I'm comfortable with passing any 11-block, including Monolith, while I have no such luck with Bloodrush still.


Lead 11s :3

hmm I thought the ITG difficulty ratings were based on DDR difficulty ratings, which is just pretty much a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the hardest...

low 12s

It was something that Foy told me at some point.  I couldn't go into anymore detail as far as how extensively he meant it, but it makes a lot of sense to me.  Rock climbing goes from 5.4 - 5.15 and possibly higher, except that at the 10 level and up, you add a letter grade of a-d as well with 'a' being the easiest and 'd' being the hardest.

In my personal opinion, I don't feel like ITG and DDR directly line up with difficulty rating.  ITG 9s and 10s feel more difficult than DDR 9s and 10s.  And DDR stops at 10s while ITG continues up to at least 13s on officials.


Since ITG doesn't divide up 12's at all, I think you'd have to say that you lead 11's if you can pass any 11 that came your way.

Back in my heyday, I could lead 12s. These days, I'm out of shape, so I'd call myself an 11 leader. But I'm pretty darn close to getting back to nailing 12s.

I too thought the difficulty ratings in ITG were more based on those of (pre-X) DDR, though ITG is usually about 0.5 blocks higher (i.e. a hard 9 on DDR would just be a solid 10 on ITG).

I'd say I lead 11s no-bar.  The only one I remember not being able to pass yet is Battle 2 (from Final Fantasy Mystic Quest) which has 1/16 note foot-switching, though I've since passed that.  With bar, I'd say I lead 12s.

I suppose I would lead 11's.

I'm sure there are a few out there that might cause me trouble on a virgin run, or if it's an incredibly gimmicky/stupid chart, but otherwise I can usually handle it.

I'm also assuming I'd be attempting said difficulties after warming up. I don't know how it would relate to rock-climbing, but obviously in ITG most people don't just start off on their hardest level they can play.

Absolutely.  Trying to climb around your limit right off the bat is a great way to tear tendons and be out of the sport for months.  It's amazing how many people don't warm up on ITG considering how physically demanding it can be.

He and I have talked about it as well. It does make more sense than one would initially think.

In all honesty I think I would be leading 13's or 12's though. Maybe you can grade me better than I can haha xD

Well Keby, if you can breeze through Karma Chameleon.. the "13-footer" [cough] from FlashExclusives& FriendsV2 then I personally think you were pretty accurate with Lead14 : )
as said several posts back.

maniac mode, all catas

oh nice, I am stuck on exorbitants 

You are a styler so it's fine. Good to see another heavy stepper on here.

It would be interesting if players could be rated and graphed relative to how good they are at playing certain kinds of charts. It could have categories based on the content of the stepchart (similar to the groove radar in Max, Max2 and Extreme but with hands, accuracy, stamina, endurance, doubles, complexity, etc). Each player could be rated on how well they score on charts that reflect different levels of the aforementioned categories.

Something like this would work well in the situation Tricksy describes in her first post; where some players can do fine on a chart that would give other player some serious trouble and vice-versa.

I'm mostly saying all this 'cause I think it'd be awesome to be able to see all of our playstyles in graph form.

If there was some reasonable way of categorizing charts (even with just 1-3 and Rebirth, that's a lot of content and some of the categories are somewhat subjective), it wouldn't be hard to parse USB profiles to get scores and match them up with those categories.

Actually, I'm about half way through writing a profile parser, since I want to edit Acme's machine profile and move/merge scores for songs that aren't in the same pack they used to be.  That said, I could easily write a program that would mash a players' records (machine and player stats use the same exact file format, I believe) up against a list of categories and calculate all kinds of useful statistics by category.  It'd be a little more work to compare players with one another, since that requires gathering profile data in one place, but it would be entirely doable.  It'd definitely be a fun project, but I honestly don't know if/when I'll get to it; it's just important to note that it's not all that impractical a task.

There's really only 3 aspects to any song: Speed, Stamina, and Technicality (hands/stomps, crossovers, tricky rolls, foot switches, slowdowns/gimmicks, mines, etc). Timing permeates all songs, so can't really be considered its own category.

A song like Determinator isn't really technical or Stamina intensive, it's just very fast. Queen of Light isn't fast, nor stamina intensive (relative to other 10s), but it's technical with hands. Half of Flash's charts aren't really technical or really that fast, just really long and stamina draining. Then you have harder songs like Dragonforce which are both fast and very stamina intensive (and for some 15/16s can be technical at parts too) or something like Nemeton, which isn't really fast but so technical with foot switches that it's somewhat stamina intensive.

I really don't think it would be hard to categorize all songs based on this (and I've already thought about this before this thread). I'd even say just rate each aspect individually on the same scale as normal and say the overall difficulty is about the average. So Determinator might be Speed 13 (or 15 if you're me -.-), Stamina 11, Technicality 10, so it's about a 12. Something like Nightmoves is like a Speed 10, Stamina 11, Technicality 12, so it's about an 11. Other songs like Utopia might be more well rounded, I'd say it's about 11/11/11.

Anyway I already pretty much watch what people are good at according to this scale (though I of course pay attention to different types of technicality, i.e. I pay attention if someone seems to suck at crossovers vs. hands vs. whatever). Makes for good picks in a tournament setting, and it keeps me aware of my own strengths and weaknesses relative to other people. Just my thoughts

I feel that timing or accuracy should be a category (maybe not for a song, because as you said, that's a core part of the game by default), but as a player statistic. Obviously, some people have much better accuracy across the board than others.

Also, I feel there are too many different technical aspects in a song to group them all into one broad category. Some technical hurdles involve only your feet (Afranova, B2U Orchestral Groove, etc), others involve gameplay gimmicks (Chaos, POST, etc), and still others involve freestyle-like use of hands (Queen of Lights, Eternus, etc). Personally, I don't see all these songs being appropriately combined into a single category. Someone could be great at technical foot challenges like Afranova, but then fail Queen of Light or get utterly confused by the gimmicks in a stepchart like Chaos.

That's my 2-cents.

Yeah, I have to agree that a technical category is nearly meaningless given the breadth of the concept - statistics based on such a broad category are good for very top-level statistics, but the most interesting finds always happen when you can drill down.  Even stamina breaks down a bit as a single category, because there are a few distinct styles there - for example, skill with long 16th note runs at 130-140 (It Feels Just Like That Night, Pistolero, Crazy Loop, etc.) doesn't directly translate to skill with repeated shorter bursts of 16th notes at 180-200 (Infection, Disconneted Hyper, Remember December [ITG1], etc.).  My three rounds against Andrew at the two-division tournament demonstrated it well; I couldn't come close to his scores when he picked from the latter, but his pick for our third matchup was Fleadh Uncut, which is slower with much longer stream, but was still a stamina 10 like his other picks had been and he lost.

There is a difference in the footspeed involved, but I don't believe footspeed alone explains the discrepancy in my scores between the two subcategories; I'm extremely consistent and very competitive on charts like Love Fighter and Black or White, which have 24th note runs approximately matching the speed of the 16th note runs in those faster charts, yet not only is my timing much worse on those faster charts, I find them to be significantly more tiring.

It is definitely the case that speed, stamina and technical challenge are good top level categorizations, but it would be much more meaningful to drill down to more precise classifications.  Setting up that way might mean that it makes a little more sense to say that "stamina" encompasses speed and endurance (possibly with some way of distinguishing two or three different endurance types, per my comments above).  This is a pretty natural split to make in my opinion as it puts the only top level boundary between generalist abilities and specialist skills, and then both sides can be split into subcategories independently of one another; general ability would have many, technical skill could have a huge number, possibly broken into their own sub-groups, since it might make sense to, say, treat BPM changes as a single category as well as breaking it down into the different kinds of changes - half/double BPM changes, stuttering, actual tempo changes, stops, etc, since those throw people off in different ways.

I'm not sure if it makes sense to have a rating for gimmicks at all.  You can't really be "good" at telling where the gimmicks are in a chart you've never played; that has no skill involved, only memory.  Eventually they'll reach It Was His Sled status--everyone will know exactly where the gimmicks are and they'll become irrelevant.  The only minor way they might be a "skill" is being able to pick up after a long stop that's not a specific number of beats (not ITG, but the MAX series definitely comes to mind here).

I would disagree to an extent.  Obviously people are going to be much better at gimmick charts they've already played, but some players are even better at sightreading gimmick charts than others.  I think what it comes down to is adaptability; you may not know exactly where the gimmicks are in a chart, but being able to figure it out fast is a real thing.  This is also why some players seem to be much better at challenge tournament type stuff than other players who are otherwise the same skill level.

A real life example: Ben and Tony have been very closely matched in every tournament they've played in together thus far, but if you have those two go head to head on a new chart with gimmicks, Ben consistently scores ~10% higher than Tony. 

How hard was the new song they played on?  Because if it was a harder chart, that would favor Ben.

Maybe there is a bit of truth though; it's not so much about being able to anticipate gimmicks as it is about being able to recover/adjust to them quickly on new charts; on charts that have been around for years though, the "gimmick" difficulty is probably pretty close to 0.

I agree that gimmicks as a rating category make perfect sense.  Given infinite time, everyone will learn every gimmick and they'll become moot, but since we operate with limited amounts of time, scores on gimmicky charts are tied to a player's aptitude with specific gimmicks as well as how much they've practiced.  Furthermore, practicing one skill usually comes at the expense of time that could have been spent practicing others, so time spent on gimmicks is time not spent on other types of practice.  Also, the point about older gimmicks is amplified by ITG having an open song list - the Acme machine has nearly 2000 songs, IIRC, and that number will only go up.  Sure, you can study a gimmicky chart and play it until you can quad it, but can you practice every gimmicky chart until you can quad them all?

Basically, gimmicks are definitely an attribute of charts as well as something that come players embrace while others avoid, so it's reasonable to believe that there may be interesting statistics if gimmicks are considered.  If nothing else, assuming the statistics were being calculated by a program, then the time it would take to include a few useless categories wouldn't really be that significant, so there's no loss in applying more categories than necessary.

In some cases though, even being able to adjust to gimmicks may not be enough.  Say there was a never-before-seen chart whose BPM was listed as 80-320.  You really can't tell what this means; say that your optimal reading speed is 480, and you take it to mean "160 most of the time, with occasional half and double speed bursts", which makes the most sense so you select x3 as your speed.  However, the chart really ends up being 80 bpm for the first 10 seconds, then speeds up to 320 for the rest of the song.  You're then stuck playing at double the speed you're used to playing, which makes it extremely hard.  Even if you decided to err on the side of safety, compromised, and chose x2 as your speed modifier, it would still scroll at 640 which is 33% faster than you're used to and it would screw you over.

(edited my old post, but saw there's a reply so I decided to break it off)