Stepmania Online

For this explanation I am going to ignore the idea the idea of cheaters because this wont be about solving that problem. This will just explain an idea that would be possible to implement with the current backend server code.

If you are familiar with the average ranking system on ffr it takes the rank you have on every song in the game and finds the average. Unfortunately for smo there is eventually going to be an absurd amount of unique files which will cause this to never work. The solution is to have a pre-determined set of songs that will count towards average ranking.

This can be accomplished by adding a "ranked" column in the database next to songs that will count towards your average rank. The songs that will be "ranked" songs will most likely be limited to popular packs. There will then have to either be a forum post or a newpage that lists which packs are ranked. There could also be a statistic on the song page that lists whether or not that song is ranked.

Once this system is in place we could determine the average rank by adding up your ranks on all ranked songs and averaging them. Once that value is available we would add a "top 20 average ranks" tab on the left margin underneath or above "top 20 songs".

Idk. What about just making an average rank out of all the songs people have played. There won't be a set system, but it will be some kind of average.

Because then the best average rank would likely be determined by a users unique songs played instead of skill.

I like the idea of getting an average score for each user and generating a list from there. The average score would be the top score of every song the user has played. No need to add columns to DB or anything all the data is already present. Now generating that data on each page request is silly of course, I would think just setting up a background process to feed the list into memcached would be very simple. Which could then be flushed to page cache occasionally.

Would be much less work then the proposed ranking system. What do you think about that Izzy?

I don't agree with that because it wouldn't be competitive. Someone could play one song and do well and be the highest rank. There is already plenty of average statistics, but they aren't a good way to determine skill.

Yeah, I see what you mean there.

So what about this...

We have a list of Songs that are considered SMO Songs official Songs that will count towards Rankings.

The problem with this is all that is sent it song title, artist, and subtitle. We would have to count all the steps in the stats for each player to make sure they are playing a file that has the same amount of notes. Not really that big of a deal since they will be weighed by DP, so the easier songs will be less points and whatnot. So maybe can avoid doing that.

So from that we can get a ranking system similar to groovestats.

I think we should all vote on songs to get compiled into an SMO.net Official Pack for ranking. Maybe 100 Song Pack or something like that? Then over time we can addon to it and whatnot.

We can subtitle all the songs so they are will not get mixed up.

I think that could be a good idea. That would make it really easy.

Yeah, having certain "official" songs for SMO to rank on would be a wonderful idea. Although having these sort of songs leaves me with a few questions about how this would be handled:
- How many should there be?
- How difficult should the files be?
- Should it include a file because it's popular (like a dump file?)
- How should we go about adding new files to this official list, if we ever do?

Once all of that is decided, we could have some sort of a community vote, and the winning files could all be put into some sort of official SMO pseudo pack to allow for quick downloading of them. No reason to have these songs scattered around in several packs, and have players with few packs confused of where to obtain them all.

Awesome idea, we have a community vote for songs thrown into the pack, then change the subtitles/names of the simfiles to show that they are ranked (add a unique character in front of the song title or something).

The scores record themselves and you generate an average, just need to make it so that if you haven't played a file yet that your rank is last place for that song.

Also, we need a keyboard ladder, and a pad ladder.

Having different ladders would be cool, but like Izzy said there is nothing we can do about people playing on keys a raping it. Then again some people are really good on pad

I think this is something we should work on soon. I like the idea of a smo.net pack. I think it should be based on most popular + votes, maybe 50/50 there?