We've noticed a lot of discussion about difficulty in DDR.  Tell us your opinions on the current state of DDR and how difficult it is.  Would you like to see more difficult songs?  Less?  How hard should the hardest songs be and what percentage of a mix's songs should they constitute?

Add Challenge charts for songs that have low difficulty Heavy charts.

Like 7 or lower Heavy charts should have Challenge charts. 

Honestly, I feel that most songs are too easy. 

I firmly believe that each mix should comprise of every song having a very easy Beginner chart and a slightly harder Light/Basic, then a mild Standard/Trick chart, a semi-hard Heavy/Hard/Expert, and then a very hard, but not stupid stuff like FAXX Oni, 9 or 10 foot Oni/Challenge chart.
I'm not saying that all charts are too easy. There are some great ones that don't need to be harder.

There are a LOT of great charts in the Ultramix song packs. Hopefully you can get those Stepchart makers to do more Arcade and PS2 charts.

Good charts:
CaptivAte
Super Samurai
Angelus
Saturn
Ur**** Challenge

Bad charts:
Anything that is a 5 or 6 on Heavy. These charts should not exist. There ARE a couple 6's and 7's that have OKAY charts, but there's ALWAYS room for more arrows.

Of course I'm not saying it needs more charts like CHAOS, because that was garbage.
IMO you should fix that chart and get rid of 95% of the stops.

Anyway, those are my two cents.
If you're short on chartmakers, go back and look in your inbox, I applied for the job back in '06.

PS Roll out e-Amuse already

For me, it's not so much having more difficultly overall, it's correctly identifying what difficulty a song should be.

Let me take two examples for DDR SuperNOVA2. First, Freeway Shuffle. It's a moderate BPM song that had a lot of potential for 16th clusters and overall difficulty. Most of the 'Expert' DDR players would probably listen to that song and think it should be stepped an 8 or a 9. Now take dream of love. Noone is going to expect that to be a very hard song at all. So, if Konami suddenly decided that it wanted to double the percentage of 9 difficulty songs in the next game, we certainly wouldn't want a 9 being made out of dream of love. 

Angelus, Blind Justice, CaptivAte, Stars*** (Retuned by HAL), and MARS WAR 3 are all examples of songs that were stepped well in relation to their music.

Now, songs that weren't stepped well in relation to the music: Freeway Shuffle (Had a lot of potential for 16th clusters and an 8 or 9 difficulty. While the steps were fun, they weren't very challenging at all) Raspberry Heart (A fast paced jun song that is basically a 6 on Expert) Venus (Once the chorus kicks in, it becomes awesome, but the beginning is strangely lacking).

But songs like Vem Brincar, Me Against the Music, and Every Day Every Night are fine, despite being a bit on the easy side, because they go with the music perfectly.

I would consider adding more oni charts to the game. For example, on Freeway Shuffle. I actually really like the Expert chart now, but it's just lacking in difficulty. Add an oni and I'd be very happy with the song.

Anyways, just my two cents. 

IMO, all the songs that don't have a ONI Chart before should have a ONI Chart that is a 9 or 10 step, just don't nuts and make all the 10s extremely stupid hard like Dead End Oni.  ITG has a few good examples in this.

I guess I am the only person in the world that doesn't like this idea. I like playing well-written 7s and easy 8s (which I felt SuperNOVA2 had a good share of). I liked the steps for Why Not,, Freeway Shuffle, Raspberry Heart, and Every Day, Every Night (NM Style). The problem I think is actually in the current harder charts; they are still challenging and technical but have sacrificed some of the fun in so doing. MAX300 is a perfectly fun chart, and is definitely a 10. Unreal is not a very fun chart. It is awkward and uncomfortable. Arabbiatta is not a fun chart. Pluto Relinquish Oni is a RIDICULOUS chart.

I probably am alone in saying this, but I would hate to see DDR go in the direction of ITG for difficulty.

I think new boss songs should be slightly harder than ITG13s on Oni, and that more non-boss songs should have 10-foot charts.

That is all for me. 

Too many charts are horribly made.  Some could also be a lot harder, however, they aren't.  So many songs have potential to be harder so I think we might as well just add challenge charts to most songs (because most songs only have heavy).  No more songs like CHAOS either, that was just stupid.

Also, if you're going to make harder things, change the rating system already.  You've already changed it for IIDX for goodness sake -_-

DDR Universe and DDR Ultramix 4 were good difficulty-wise. That's a good way to summarize my feelings about difficulty. Time for some tl;dr:

There are a good amount of songs in SN2 and Universe 2 that I thought had missing oni charts. For example, Unborn and that one drum n' bass song that was a 5 on Heavy in Universe 2. The Prize charts for Freeway Shuffle and Raspberry Heart in SN2's Hyper Master mode should've been oni charts, because they would have fit perfectly.

I'm going to say this flat-out: one of the stepchart creators for SN2 had no idea what he was doing. Shades of Gray was probably supposed to be similar to Dual Love in UM4, but it ended up being an extremely weak chart, and absolutely not an 8. Venus was probably supposed to be only slightly easier than Unreal, but it was steppped like an 8. Ur**** Oni was probably supposed to be around the same difficulty as Xepher, but it was nowhere near that. Sunkiss Drop... 'nuff said. Either that guy needs to be fired, or the difficulties should not be predetermined by someone who (apparently) doesn't even step the songs.

Overall, the average difficulty of the songs needs to be higher. In the mixes before SuperNOVA, the overall  difficulty of the new songs was raised with each mix, but in SuperNOVA and SN2 only the 9s and 10s are harder than the previous ones (thus making the number difficulties unreliable (the songs I mentioned in the second pararaph don't help that,)) while the average difficulty of the rest of the songs has gone down. The licenses in SN2 shouldn't have been almost all 6s and easy 7s. The songlist wasn't really helpful though (Le Freak, Got To Be Real, and Say Goodbye? Why?) The songlists for upcoming DDR games should be more like UM4's and Universe's: a varied list of licenses with only a few pop songs and none from before 1990, very few songs with heavy charts below 7, and more than half of the songs with heavy and/or oni charts over 7.

 I do realize however, that work on the next set of DDR games as far as the stepcharts (and therefore difficulty) are concerned is probably finished.

All songs need Oni charts of at least 8 feet in difficulty.

Short answer: There should be an extensive range of difficulty options for every player, which means that there should be an extensive range of ultra-difficult songs available that DDR currently lacks. Every song should have an oni chart of at least 8 feet, and if a song's oni is too easy then make an additional "groove radar special" to fix that. The distribution of difficulty should be naturally determined by how hard the charts are and song difficulty should not be planned out beforehand. The maximum difficulty range should equal or surpass 15-footers and the maximum difficulty of each subsequent release should equal or surpass that of the prior release.

Long answer: There was a very large discussion about this at http://www.ddronlinecommunity.com/forums/3/forum_topics/54 which posters should review for a better grasp of the points that have already been made on the issue.

Since I don't feel like paraphrasing I'll just repost:

"There's not a good argument against having difficult songs. The timing on DDR is already extremely hard compared to more popular music games such as Guitar Hero, and timing affects every player, while hard songs only affect those that somehow manage to venture to that difficulty. Yes, IIDX's timing is harder, but Stepmania on judge 7 is harder than IIDX and that doesn't make DDR's timing any less difficult comparatively. Arguments such as "well, if you put hard songs on the game, it will ____" are really just guesses because conclusions such as those have no R&D/statistical data to back them up.

Additionally, DDR is being promoted as a fitness tool across hundreds of gyms nationwide, and it currently fails at that goal. I have mild asthma (I don't need an inhaler, but my lungs feel like they're crushed if I exercise too hard) and I've gotten to the point where 10 footers don't exhaust me anymore. In my opinion, DDR is a very efficient exercise tool because you know exactly how many steps are in a given song, whereas if you run or do any other form of exercise, the amount of exertion is more dependent on how you're feeling at the time. DDR not only places a psychological demand on the player to finish the song, but it also requires a given amount of exertion.

Part of the reason they probably don't have many harder songs is because 1) they follow a pyramid structure, 2) each boss song is really not that hard, so they have to force it to be hard with gimmicks and excess arrows. 

Regarding 1), the "pyramid structure" is opposed to "natural distribution"--with a pyramid, you have one really hard song at the top and the easier songs get more common as you go lower on the pyramid. This is extremely inefficient and unnecessarily grandiose, because with natural distribution the charts of a given song are just stepped as appropriately as possible and the difficulty is distributed accordingly. The end result tends to be an equal distribution of difficulty--that is, 10% 8-footers, 10% 9-footers, 10% 10-footers, etc.

Regarding 2), Dead End would be one of the hardest songs on DDR if they used the full potential of it, but it's a 9, while songs that are comparatively easy such as Pluto Relinquish or Legend of Max are forced into the 10-footer mold just because they sound dramatic. The people that make these "boss songs" aren't exactly changing their musical style very much, so as they continue to make music and the stepchart makers continue to best each past "boss song" the songs have to get more gimmicky with more excess arrows.

Finally, I don't see anything based on BPM or note reading as a legitimate form of difficulty. At best I think it's a distraction, because it's just an intellectual exercise, and at worse I think it worsens the game by putting focus on elements it shouldn't put focus on. The reason for this is because it's entirely mental and does not translate into anything physically--you can have bag display at 60bpm or 600bpm, but regardless your body would be doing the exact same movements. Every song should really be on C400 or C500, such as in this video where there are obviously BPM changes yet the scroll rate remains the same. I think this anti-physical mentality from the higher ups is a problem that hampers the game's development."

(I encourage you to view the original thread because virtually every possible critique of this post has been made there.) 

TL;DR on the bottom. 

There isn't a problem with difficulty in DDR, there's just inconsistency with chart difficulty values and their quality. There's plenty of stuff on SN2 that should be rated tougher/easier than what they should be, and there are simply some garbage charts like Arabbiata. As much as I like crossing over and figuring out different ways to step on the pads, going 220+ BPM with step-jumps is not the way to go. NGO is like this as well.

It seems to me that DDR is trying to up the difficulty to keep up with ITG players while they're going a completely different and unbalanced path. As opposed to adding simple 16th streams there are faster BPMs with step-jumps that go into awkward crossovers. It's difficult but it isn't fun. I enjoy playing some of the tougher 10's and some 11's on ITG because their charts provide the right amount of challenge and enjoyment. I like charts like Maxx Unlimited, Xepher, and Paranoia Respect for the same reason. FELM is superior to FAXX not just because it's easier but because it's better made with respect to the player's ability.

There's nothing wrong with trying to make things harder, just make them fun. Sure, you could always add a chart that's just cruel like PSMO did to Extreme, or HDVO did to SuperNOVA, but you can't just dump arrows into a chart with ridiculous crossovers like what Paranoia Hades is like. Pluto Relinquish Oni is a good example of how to do this the correct way.

Imagine playing IIDX 16 BURST (or whatever name it is) and all the new Anothers are 12's (13's?) that are built like Mei, Nageki no Ki, and Icarus that have Sense 2007 scratches...and all the Hyper Charts are in the 6-9 range. Nobody would want to play it anymore because the difficulty has become so skewed and there's no way to work to bridge that gap unless you've played simulators. It's become that way with DDR. For the next mix there should be just one ridculous boss song and any other 10's should be playable like MAX 300 or Unlimited. Hell, make them like Sakura if you have to, just make them fun.

I've mentioned this in other discussions, but the 1-10 scale just doesn't work well with DDR. I'd recommend bumping it to the 1-100 just to make things sane for the current hardcore players, but I think 1-15 would work best for everybody else.

On a side note, when do we get to see the Oni charts for Ecstasy, Candy*, Maximizer, basically everything that was in the Universe games put into the arcade versions? I certainly hope they'll show up for the next one, as they're good charts and will add value to the overall game and competitive scene. I agree with some of the above posts and add Oni charts to some existing, easier charts. It doesn't have to be right away and you can add them over time, keeping them fun is a bigger priority than making them hard.

TL;DR feel free to make charts hard but don't forget to make them fun. 

I agree that difficulty has to be based more on speed of the notes rather than BPM changes and stops. There needs to be more emphasis on stamina draining (like the 8th note 400 BPM stream in Pluto Relinquish) than on messing up one's vision (like the rest of Pluto Relinquish). The next step from PSMO in DDR Extreme should have been a 170 BPM song made up of long 16th note streams, not FAXX and HDV.

I argee as well that future harder charts should be based off Stamina and 16th note Streams.

No more charts that are heavy in "Stops" "BPM Changes" and "Stepjumps", lots of people in the community do not like these types of charts.

I agree with a lot of what ranatalus said. 

While I have gotten satisfaction in the past with passing harder charts on DDR, these days I have passed harder things through other games (like keyboard charts on the local ITG machine, examples being Holy Orders, Heaven, One Winged Angel, etc, or things like dignity crazy on pump).  On DDR, it seems like all the new 9s and 10s are either very difficult (like Pluto Relinquish heavy or oni, holy crap 400bpm cross-over eighth note run) or not difficult but awkward and unfun (like Unreal, Paranoia Hades oni, etc).

At this point, I still continue to play DDR because the sevens and easy eights keep me hooked.  I LOVE Why not, Raspberry Heart, A Thing Called Love and I think these charts are really really fun to play.  They're not difficult or annoying, they're just fun (which is why we all began playing this game, right?).

I think my favorite charts ever in DDR games are songs that aren't particularly difficult to pass, but they are rhythmically challenging and hard to score well on and AAA.  My best examples of this are songs like L'amour et la Liberté, Tears, Rain of Sorrow, Memories, i feel..., and Vanity Angel.  These charts are my absolute favorites in DDR, and while I've already AAA'd them all (some multiple times), I keep on coming back and playing these songs over and over, whereas some songs I AAA and I never want to play the song again.  I'd absolutely love to see more charts like these.

I'm not even sure of my point of this exactly.  I think I'll leave with this: I don't really want to see harder charts go into DDR.  At least, I'd like to see a normal difficulty curve instead of Pluto Relinquish Oni being drastically more difficult than any other song in the game.  When 6th mix came out and Max 300 was the hardest song in the game, there were still songs that would help you get up to the difficulty of it like So Deep and Fantasy.  Also, I'd love more sevens and eights because those are my favorite parts of the game, and I'd especially love to have more sorrow songs.

-I would love to see 9+ feet challenge charts for Freeway Shuffle, Sunkiss Drop, Venus, Raspberry Heart, Poseidon, and any other awesome songs that got an easy expert chart. SAGA and Poseidon have potential for really fun 10-foot charts!

-I would also love to see some offsync portions of existing charts (the 16ths in the middle of afronova turned to 12ths, all of the 180 BPM stuff in Healing-D-Vision re-quantized to 12ths, etc.). I know the old charts usually aren't edited for nostalgia's sake, but I really hate playing swing-beat songs (or 3/4 portions of songs) where I have to purposefully step early or late to get perfects.

-Please don't put anymore of those jumps into fast streams. NGO challenge has too many jumps with 8th steps immediately before or after, and hitting the same arrow twice (or, ridiculously, 3 times for jump-step-jump's) at the equivalent of 548 BPM just doesn't mix well with the community. This also goes for the 8th streams that lead into jumps on Paranoia Hades. Even worse: please don't make anymore charts with a random jump in the middle of fast 300 BPM 8th streams, like near the end of Paranoia Hades.

-Just my two cents, but for infinite variety in stepchart difficulties, add some feature that allows the player to load their own edit charts into the machine. Or even better, their own custom songs + charts, via the StepMania format. I honestly couldn't forsee the custom songs + charts option actually following through, but at least a system that loads your edits, please. Like with a PS2 memory card.

This may be off topic, but...

I want a new style of Extra Stage. Remember in Beatmania IIDX 13 DistorteD, CARDINAL GATE? I want something like that. That would be a nightmare to everyone, and I like nightmares when it comes to gaming.

 Oh, and make some song a LOT harder... like 11/10 hard.

It just seems like that many of the newer boss songs are getting more and more stupid.

FELM expert was good. The BPM gimmicks in beginning are fine. It only takes a couple of tries to get used to and the rest of the song seems okay. Challenge, on the other hand, was a load of crap. Those jumps are completely unneccessary. The expert chart was as hard as it should have been and a challenge chart shouldn't have been implemented

Pluto Relinquished expert was actually really fun. The runs went with the bass drum so it wasn't just doing its own thing. The challenge chart was just messing with your head with the crossovers

Healing D Vision...well the chart for that song sucked in general

Chaos, as hard and retarded as it was, actually fit the song. Listen to the song and try imagining it without the stops. It just doesn't feel right to me. When you're playing, it feels more natural to actually work with the music. The stops are all there for a reason. Of course, everyone probably thinks that the song sucks overall, but oh well.

Which brings up my next point: playing certain songs on C400-C500 just ruins the chart. There are some charts that actually have bpm changes that work. Innocence of Silence deserves its slowdown in the middle. It fits the mood and overall bpm of the music at that point. Tap your foot to the song; when you get the middle part, the song definetly drops to half bpm.

 Your body should match the music you're playing. Everything shouldn't be so straight forward all of the time.

 The newer hard songs should be difficult, but also fun. No one will want to get better if the charts get to the point where it's pushing past the limits of the human body. Rhythmic 16th runs can be really fun if done right and aren't too bad once you get used to them.

 Pretty much, I agree with ranatalus

As others have said in this topic, the problem with DDR's charts are that there is way too much of a gap in them.  90% of the charts in DDR are 7 and 8 footers that are incredibly basic, and for the most part have charts that look auto-generated.  Of the remaining 10%, 5% of the charts I would say are decently challenging 9-10 footers that are actually fun to play and rather well made.  The other 5% are horrible horrible "boss" songs that are complete trash that use gimmicks to artifically inflate the difficulty.

I speak for a lot of people on this, but if Konami is really listening to us, then for the love of god STOP USING SO MANY BPM GIMMICKS IN YOUR 10s!!!  I know it's kinda redunant to say this, but please look at ITG's charts to see how their tough songs aren't necessarily boss songs, and how they have a wider range of difficulty than DDR does.

"I speak for a lot of people on this, but if Konami is really listening to us, then for the love of god STOP USING SO MANY BPM GIMMICKS IN YOUR 10s!!!  I know it's kinda redunant to say this, but please look at ITG's charts to see how their tough songs aren't necessarily boss songs, and how they have a wider range of difficulty than DDR does."

Quoted for emphasis.

The overall skill of players is much higher than it was around the time Extreme came out, but the arcade mixes since then haven't reflected that at all.  Yes, the boss songs are harder, but the difficulty curve is way out of whack, especially compared to other Bemani games where the harder charts make up the majority of the songlist, as opposed to being in a small minority.

We want more challenging, fun charts, but not with artificial difficulty inflation like stupid awkward steps (16th turns/crossovers/double steps at high bpms etc) or bpm changes and stops that you have to memorize in order to score decently on the song.

I would like to disagree with everything these people are saying about In The Groove. It's definitely not the direction DDR should go in.

As people have said before, the main problem in SN and SN2 was that the difficulty curve wasn't "smooth" or "balanced." The Challenge steps for Fascination Maxx, Fascination, Healing-D-Vision, Pluto Relinquish and NGO were completely ridiculous in comparison to the rest of the game; they were so much more difficult than every other song, even among the 10s. The ratings are another problem; Pluto Relinquish Challenge and MAX 300 are NOWHERE near the same difficulty, yet they're both rated 10.

Also, keep in mind that the majority of people posting in a thread like this are the seasoned, obsessed, and sometimes extremely cynical/critical experts. Not everyone who likes DDR wants everything to be really hard, but there's a good chance that only the people posting here are the people who want it to be really hard. You aren't going to get many votes from the non-experts, so just try and keep it balanced.

I certainly don't want the game to become much more difficult. I don't prefer ultra-hard stuff, but I do play the 10s. I tend to play everything. The steps that are the best on DDR are the steps that FIT -- for the most part, something should be about as hard as it sounds, with a few exceptions for variety. The key is variety, but it seems like everything on SN and SN2 is either really hard or really easy. Where is the stuff in between like on previous (pre-Extreme) mixes?

Since 6th/7th/Extreme (arcade) were the most popular versions of the game with this community, why not look back at those versions and emulate them? If you use Extreme as the mix to judge all others by, I'm sure they'd all be very successful.

Regarding BPM changes and stops in songs: I felt they improved from SuperNOVA, but still need to be dealt with a bit more. The BPM changes in HADES make sense, and are well put: no need to change. The slowdowns in NGO have steps that I have no idea what they're going to. NGO is really an overall bad song, since it shouldn't even be in DDR. Pluto is like Chaos, but at least the stops make sense this time. Pluto Relinquish is cute and all, but has way too many dumb speed changes. TMP is perfect in regards to using BPM changes.

I know that Konami likes to use BPM changes/stops in boss songs to make them harder to pass the first times players see it. But look at TMP. I thought that was an exellent chart to use for EES. The first ~90 steps of the song are relatively easy for an EES, but then it begins to use 16th clusters, that I think probably threw off a lot of the players who had never seen the chart before. 

Also, DDR=/=ITG. We don't need a sudden boost in difficulty with every song having a oni of at least 9. What we need is a general rise in difficulty every game, which DDR (In my opinion) has never really done well before when it comes to <8 charts. I can kinda see that SN2 was trying to do that with 7s like SUNKiSS DROP and 8s like CaptivAte ~Chikai~, but the ratings were so messed up in the game that it's hard to tell what Konami's intentions were. 

"But look at TMP. I thought that was an exellent chart to use for EES."

In a way, I disagree. It used to be that the OMES/EES song was something less challenging, made difficult only by the "break combo and fail" aspect of it. The previous OMES charts (Candy*, Kakumei Oni, DDR Oni) were fun and cool songs, not just a second Boss. Now, it seems that EES songs are made in a way just to laugh maniacally at the player for failing because they are difficult to read/impossible to pass first time playing them (like Chaos). I enjoy Chaos, and I feel it was a good song to create because it makes you practice the mental aspect of playing more than just the physical, but as an EES song I feel it was created just to make people fail, which isn't particularly nice.

Definately i would love to see the majority of DDR to be more difficult.  The boss songs are pretty hard, but as quoted before they are just bpm gimmicks, which is boring and frustrating after awhile.  What DDR needs is harder songs like 12+, i totally agree with HAIR when they said that ITG had more of a variety than DDR in difficulty ratings.  To sum it up i would like to see harder songs in DDR in the future with a good variety of much harder songs 10-14's as challenge steps on EVERY SONG, and keep the 7/8 footers to heavy mode so there is a variety for everyone:)

I'm going to agree with the people saying no ITG. Please, no.