Dance Dance Revolution: MARVELOUS!! > PERFECT!

Raydere

It's been 9 years since the "MARVELOUS!!" judgement was introduced into DDR, and it still pinches at my nerves.

I mean, I understand introducing a judgement that's between Perfect and Great (with Perfect remaining as the highest possible step judgement and Great being left as is) would get confusing as hell, especially for people going back to older versions. But isn't it funny? That it's possible to be better than perfect?

glennmagusharvey

I should disable that in Stepmania.

DYRE

Does it really matter?  You know exactly what it means.

glennmagusharvey

Wait...

I should file-switch the "marvelous" and "perfect" graphics in Stepmania.

Even better.

DYRE

Or you should just leave it as it is for authenticity.  And because switching them would be silly.

glennmagusharvey

Okay, fine, I'll just disable Marvelous scoring.

...whenever I get around to reinstalling Stepmania.

DYRE

Incidentally, I wish there were a game with Stepmania's basic game mechanics, but osu!'s everything else.

Stepmania's scoring systems all suck, there's no way to pause the game during a song, restarting a song requires quitting back to the menu and choosing the song from the list again, online multiplayer is unintuitive and not as well-integrated as in osu!, no in game online scoreboards, there's no real guarantee that any given simfile won't be complete garbage, etc.

On the other hand, DDR gameplay is fun, especially in solo (6key) mode.

Kraken

"Marvelous" is better than "Perfect" because it is truly awe-inducing how you just put your very spirit and soul in your rhythms, which is far more deserving of praise than the cold sterility of perfection.

Raydere

osu! scoring is absolutely retarded and the second worst thing imported from Ouendan, after the lifebar system. Screwing up in mid-song is bad enough to warrant a restart, but screwing up in the beginning or ending is okay.  I'd rather have a scoring system that's balanced and equally penalizes mistakes regardless of where you mess up, such as ITG's, DDR SuperNOVA's, or Pop'n's.

DYRE

But DDR scoring (which Stepmania uses by default) doesn't even do that.  You get more points for notes that occur later in a song, regardless of how well you've been doing up to that point.  The only remotely sane scoring system that Stepmania supports is Pump it Up scoring, which does at least function properly, but doesn't really reward being able to keep a combo (or punish for not keeping a combo) like it probably should.  Also it's boring, but I guess scoring systems don't really need to be all that exciting.  Admittedly, osu! scoring is probably too extreme about punishing misses/rewarding combos.  Probably the best would be something like osu!'s Taiko scoring (or, similarly, Guitar Hero/Rock Band scoring, although obviously without Star Power/Overdrive), where you do get more points for having a long combo, but it maxes out after 100 hits (so you lose a lot of potential points by missing once in the middle of the song, but not half or more of the possible points you could get like in osu! standard).

Maybe you could even have songs start off with the player at the maximum score multiplier, so that missing the first note is just as bad as missing later notes.  Though that still doesn't change the fact that missing the last notes doesn't really matter so much, but I'm not sure that's something that necessarily needs correcting.

Raydere

Most people who play DDR competitively don't use displayed score. They use a alternate scoring system that's used to deterine grades. The specifics differ between versions, but it's consistently accepted that:

• Perfect = 2 points


• Great = 1 point


• Good = 0 points


• OK = 6 points

Ask anyone who plays in DDR tournaments. Most if not all of them will tell you that displayed score in DDR and Stepmania doesn't mean shit unless it's SuperNOVA (percent of grade points times 1 million) or SuperNOVA 2 onwards (percent of grade points times 10000).