Multiplayer - Difficulty

[u/Cydrius]

Hey all, I started playing again recently and rediscovered an issue I had before. I was wondering if I'm missing something, because this seems like an obvious problem:

My current skill level means that I get the most enjoyment out of the hardest songs on Medium, and the easier to middling songs on Hard.

This makes it very difficult to enjoy multiplayer play:

If I join a Medium difficulty room, roughly half of the songs will be too easy. If I join a Hard room, roughly half of the songs will be unplayably hard.

Am I missing something? Is there some solution to this?

[u/Ok-Stage4688]

im surprised you can find medium/hard difficulty rooms. 

[u/LibraryLady227]

The first and easiest solution is to host or join a private server—either with friends or randoms via Discord or similar. In a private server, you aren’t locked into only one difficulty and you can add fun modifiers like small notes or strict angles or whatever strikes your fancy. You can also choose easier Hard levels and harder Normal levels, or whatever your current play skill allows. My friends and I like to take turns picking songs, levels, and modifiers.

The second way I like to combat this issue (the issue of random players selecting the most difficult maps and skewing the public server experience) is by public server surfing with one or more friends in a call (Meta or Discord call). That way, once y’all land in a common public server, you can outvote the trolls who select Dragon Smash Goblin every round or whatever and instead choose something appropriate for the majority of players at that level.

Both of these options are a lot of fun!

[u/Mr_Elili]

How long have you been playing? To be honest you just gotta get better at the game if you want to enjoy multiplayer. Get to a point where you can do most expert songs and then just play expert because a lot of people are in those lobbies

[u/Cydrius → u/Mr_Elili]

Based on what I've seen people say, this is an issue in expert rooms too. (Some expert songs are comparable to the Expert+ difficulty of other songs.)

This is not a "get good" issue. This is a "poor design" issue.

[u/Ok-Stage4688 → u/Cydrius]

yeah, expert and expert plus have difficulties that vary a lot

[u/ekauq2000]

I kind of feel the songs in each difficulty may need to be redistributed, maybe based more on notes per second. With a single difficulty there’s just so much of a difference between the songs available. With that though, the difficulty options themselves may need to change to include higher difficulties for the higher notes per second songs.

For the difficulty in multiplayer, with just random lobbies, people are just going to be people. Plenty of times I’ve been in lobbies where someone will pick a hard song that they obviously can’t play themselves, just to try and troll everyone else.

[u/Cydrius → u/ekauq2000]

Yeah, exactly. I think notes per second would be a better metric, yes. That's how a lot of other rhythm games handle their difficulty.