How Does YouTube Perceive Difficulty in Rhythm Games? 

It's like how Flight of the Bumblebee gets so much attention despite not being anywhere near the most impressive piece for an instrument.

*posts good score that you worked forever for* “Bro your girlfriend must be happy haha” “Wow rip any girls that date him” “This video must be your best pick up line”

"world record" is the universal clickbait for anything

HeY sTrEamEr plAY RaP goD hEY STreAmEr PlAy ReaLiTY cHeCk ThrOuGh thE SkUll, it;S tHe HardESt SonG iN ThE GaME

I thought this video was going to be about how the RU-vid algorithm learned to classify rhythm game songs by difficulty by analyzing the videos or something. I dunno I'm dumb.

I swear you could upload straight up jumptrills and mashable patterns and most casual viewers would think youre a god

Vaxei's titles are great. Just the song name, star value, and some data about the score in the most hilariously laid back way.

I feel painful, this is actually telling a lot of facts... They asked me to do something 40+ kps, while I can only do Long Note and Accuracy + Ratio.

more notes on the screen = harder, right? *ar11 intensifies*

Wait till you see Beat Saber viewers on RU-vid. 95% of them still think Reality Check Through The Skull is the hardest level in the game

I feel the perfect example of this is the Rhythm Heaven series. Compared to other rhythm games, it's songs have a very low NPS but is still difficult because there's no clearnote chart, the best the player gets is audio ques, paying attention to the rhythm, and the rare visual que.

even if people take the initiative to educate people on these sort of games, people wont care at all, their just here to watch, and make the "he's prolly asian" and "i bet ur gf loves ur fingers" jokes.

Its frustrating to see streamers whose sole focus is basically farming for fluke scores on things that casual players would find impressive. These types of streamers generally have a much higher viewer counts than people who are genuinely putting in work, or those who are objectively better at their game. I think another aspect of this is that many of the "top" players in rhythm games play content that is just plain not relateable to average players. For example, I can probably count on one hand the number of people who understand the difficulty difference of getting a 99.25 on an ITG 19, and getting a 99.50. And while currently there are less than 10 people globally who maybe can 99.00 a 19, the average FA player getting 100% on tech 11's will always get more viewers. Its easy to understand perfection, and its easy to understand a difficulty you can probably do yourself.

I’m a relatively new Clone Hero player with fantastic speed, but almost no technical ability. When I see high NPS I think “I can do that, and so can anyone else.” However, when I see Randy speed up disc songs, Frosted transitioning perfectly between complex tapping methods, or Ace hitting notes with a 2 frame window, I think to myself “Only this player and their skill set can achieve this accomplishment, that was amazing”

with the rise of fnf, this has become extremely relevant

I guess you could say the same with any niche interest, like rock climbing or even juggling. You have to try it yourself to comprehend the difficulty

yeah clickbait is becoming. really harmful channels like bandoot just kind of putting "THIS IS THE MOST IMPRESSIVE BEAT SABER LEVEL EVER" without any mention of the song, the person who made it or the things it was derived from (looking at the extra sensory maps) it just kinda hurts, especially when the community that's being disregarded is very small and could use the attention

This reminds me of school talents shows. I competed as a pianist but the other pianist won because his muddy same-note piece was faster :

I actually had this happen to me not in rhythm games, but in speedrunning. I uploaded a video that was a run that would be top 10 without a core mechanic and some dude said this isn't what people want to see, I waved him off cuz I didn't care and just wanted to push myself in a unique way. Just something I took away from this video.

I think a really good demonstration of this is Rhythm Doctor - where there's rarely more than 3 notes on the screen at a time (the final boss in the game is literally one repeated note at 2 different constant speeds), and yet some rhythm game players struggled with it, due to the game's different musical concepts and variations.

my brain is not fast enough to comprehend rhythm games, so i just see non-repetitive patterns and think "hmmmm, difficult"

The worst thing about rythm game difficulty perception is having irl friends that discredit your score because it "looks so easy it's just spamming"

this happens in skateboarding too (and everything else ever) where "flashy" stuff like tres are the most impressive despite being relatively easy

I'm trash at osu! but when I show my gameplay to my friends bc they want to know what kind of game it is, they're like: "wtf dude you're so good!!" Aahaha... no I'm not.....

nothing makes me sadder than seeing a new 4k/vsrg player asking "how do I increase my NPS?"

well, not all good players are entertainers. There's a difference

what i understand from this: bunch of notes isn’t actually too hard it’s just pressing button fast but more complex sequences are much more difficult because you have to like process what things to press

It's so funny how the "godmode" thing is now primarily associated with whitecat, when it was actually popularized by uploads of plays by cookiezi during his prime and the likes (or even earlier) Just shows how much of a dominant and impressive force he's been and continues to be in the game

Despite the fact it’s not a rhythm game, I think this is the same reason that videos of spam challenges got so big in the geometry dash RU-vid community.

Great video, really sums up what the issue with viewers who might not understand what actually makes something hard in rhythm games over what they do understand and what keeps their attention. After thinking a bit I'm almost certain I've been one of these people for rhythm games I'm not as familiar with, but I also think I've become more mindful of challenging rhythm as my experience has grown. Not sure if there's really a good way to prioritize better plays over the ones viewers want to see but who knows what the future will hold.

I was playing 4k mania at school today. I‘m not a really good player, still struggling on passing low 3 star maps, but when I played some 2.6 - 2.8 star maps in front of them, they say "You‘re insane" and "HOW DO U DO THAT" I played a LN map, and they said it looks easier than the streams maps I played, when I didn‘t sweat much on the stream maps and nearly failed the LN map

9:34 thanks for putting in a beat saber clip

osu has to be the biggest culprit of perceived difficulty. everything looks super easy until you load up the map

This video has become much more relevant now with the popularity of friday night funkin.

There is this idea that when osu players play hidden with fast bpm normal viewers think they memorize it from finish to last but as someone whom plays alot of hd dt its reflex or reading

When it comes to guitar hero especially people seem to only see the rhythm games for the "memes" as the game doesn't interest them, this can be extremely off-putting arguably alot more than just someone clickbaiting their title a bit for views. But that is probably a seperate issue overall, top players want recognition for their achievements and for some despite what they do will get overshadowed, the overall thing to take from this is we can complain about this all we want but nothing is going to change because there will always be ignorant people on the internet.

One thing that always comes to mind is having a 2 min song in ddr with only one arrow. It would be the easiest song and the hardest song!

I think RU-vid looks at difficult scores based on how blown their minds are

This video expresses my thoughts perfectly you don't even know LMAO. Interesting that you mention newer players gravitating toward these higher nps songs themselves since they'll receive more gratification (from both themselves and others) than if they were playing technical charts. This is very true for the Clone Hero community specifically right now. Very, very rarely is there an upcoming player that focuses on or even plays highly technical charts. But yeah very well thought out video Mr. Etienne

A lot of my buddies who don't know the game (CH) say they just get lost when there is very complex and fast sections. I'm like, "holy fuck that was nuts" because of my knowledge of the game, but they are mostly like, "Wow that's a lot of notes." And they really just don't understand how much time it takes to hit some of these sections. Or they don't care to learn. It's a hard thing to explain. Good video :)

Before when I was playing Groove Coaster, my mindset was "I have to be perfect on these hard songs so I can be a good player too." Though, I wasn't really having fun. I think that's important with everything, you should value the entertainment you get out of what you're doing.

While the evidences and arguments presented in the video are accurate and reasonable, i think it's gonna be very hard or even nearly impossible to teach the viewers about rhythm games' knowledge and insights, since most of them aren't really interested in rhythm games and only watch them for entertainment, hence don't want to dive deeper in.

Etienne just debunked the entirety of robeats videos

This has gotten a lot worse the the video has gotten more relevant with the FNF community

RU-vid thinks that if you can hit chord jacks at 90 bpm you will ascend into god hood

at first I was like yeah higher nps means harder. But now I realize I was including different patterns in that thought. I didn't know that people literally only looked at how many notes and ignored the pattern

Very great video on the topic. It's funny because even as a rhythm game player myself (Osu!Taiko) there are things within the community as a whole that I miss when watching other games. This really helped put a few of those things to light and helped me understand some more general concepts with in the genre as a whole.

This was obviously already been a thing before but Friday Night Funkins popularity turned this into a much more toxic issue. With many casual players labeling tons if high skill players as elitist for even bringing up the notion that Friday Night Funkin has poor charting and isn't as hard as people perceive. Especially with the poor hitmap code in the base game. It really exposed the ignorance of the casual audience even though rythum games are fairly widely known and popular after being around for decades.

Damn whitecat and his neverending godmodes! /s

9:13 my man obama chilling in the corner

Okay, comment from osu!std player who knows one osu!mania pro player - I cannot understand what is going on in high end mania. At all. I can keep up with Taiko to some extent (when it isn’t 300+ bpm at least, can’t read that shit), I understand CtB... kinda, but I can’t understand mania. This video is very good in this way. It actually is relatable for me, and works for my friends watching me playing standard once in a while. Good job, man, good content

IIDX has the best scoring sytem IMO, when you reach a certain level of difficulty it's all about how high of a score you can get rather than how perfect you are. you can get a higher score by missing a bunch of notes as long as you hit them accurately compared to someone who gets a full combo but has shit accuracy.

These problems mostly apply to geometry dash as well. It all really comes down to these types of rage games (They're all rage games imo, you can get to the last part of the level and messup a bit and fail) since they look way too easy compared to the actual difficulty of them. Heck this is why npesta is such a meme and people dont like osu/think they need a trackpad or smth to be good (well good enough to beat any map)

The real difficulty in rhythm games is being able to find and afford the ones you like to watch

this video is really necesary and very well done, good job etienne, many casual players should watch this XD

Same goes for the people getting impressed by music instrument playing. Some things are so much harder then they seem while others are fast but require little technicality

just getting back into rhythm games after being away from them since ~2015 these videos are amazing rhythm games have def needed content this good

Ok now... How do we get this video spread to other people's recommendations?

yo your audio quality has really improved, you're making some great content keep it up :D

For violin its tremolo, basically just spam the bow as fast as you can and it sounds way more impressive than it is

Its almost like how casuals viewed a Max 300 FC as something amazing back in the day. When in retrospect, people who actually played DDR new that it wasnt even something to bat an eye at. I used to get praise at the arcades back then because everyone standing around watching thought it was the most impressive thing ever. To me, max 300 was always played in my warm up sets because the patterns aren't difficult, but enough to get the blood pumping.

"Yeah I'm a pro rhythm game player" "Oh what game do you play?" "Friday Night Funkin"

Sometimes I would really wish there exists some kind of 10-min-ish all-rounded basic introduction video on rhythem games so that everyone can refer to it to clear up casual viewers' misunderstandings. I guess it requires a lot of work, an impartial mind, and the ability to produce educational yet intriguing video. Wouldn't that be epic.

I appreciate you including the GHOS7 pass from taichi in beatsaber. I spend a lot of time hanging around streams in that community and still see people try to request that horrid map constantly!

I really like this video and the points you put out do make a lot of sense. It's toxic for the community when people go from stream to stream requesting songs just cause x streamer played it and people who just grind shit to get views and shit from casuals or new people to the community

Ok, world's fastest gamer But seriously, great points made here. I'd like to also mention how alienating it can be for someone who IS aware of these points in various high level gaming communities. Going into any other game I guard my words carefully because I'm aware that the laymans perception is often innacurate in terms of judging the difficulty or skill of a game or player. More of an isolated personal case tho.

I think a lot of these issues could be solved by doing some more editing on score videos, like commentary tracks, including failed attempts at hard sections, or including text highlighting difficult patterns. Of course this obv would take a lot more work, and it could be off-putting to non-casual viewers who can already tell what's impressive about a score.

I think a good example of this is the 100 meter dash vs parkour, and attempting to use speed as a judgement. Yes, the person doing the 100 meter dash is moving faster, but parkour requires different techniques and decision making, which are difficult, and not represented if you use speed as a judgement. (not that the 100 meter dash is easy, proper technique is important there too)

i love how you added taichi playing ghost in beat saber, fits really well with the topic of the video

I can't believe I'm months late but I hope more people see this video. A lot of communities don't understand these things you explained. (Especially the FNF community who think mods with just a bunch of random notes are the coolest)

LeafgreenHD is who started the “World Record” thing in the Clone Hero Scene. Before that, it was simply “first place”.

Here's all you need to know: If Jonx #1 did it, then it was impressive -Jonx #1

Same thing for deathstreams in taiko. Very fast deathstreams but with same colors repeated for a while are MUCH easier than slower ones with color variation every max 4 notes, speed is simply a difficulty factor.

"Players should be comfortable with expressing their unique skills" This was why I left the SM/Etterna community (among other reasons such as veterans quitting). I had a skillset that made me shunned as a "one-dimensional" player, and eventually, it made the game unfun for me. I still miss playing the game but I'm not ready to dive back into playing the game anymore

"Nps isnt difficulty" Damn this sounds like fnf charts.

As a pretty good beat saber player (top 3000 ish), I can say the casual player can really mess up a high level player, with “play rctts”. It also somewhat hurts to see insane accuracy scores, like 99s or 98s neglected. This mostly happens when people come from casual channels, (tempex and others), with a much lower understanding of the games mechanics. Luckily, we do have great channels like the Cube Community, who display great tech, acc, challenge and speed scores.

I'm reminded of a video that the algorithm feeds me labeled "DDR Level Asian" and it makes me sigh because it's pump doubles.

Tbh I'm a relatively new clone hero youtuber and I completely agree with what you have said. I have tried technical songs and I have tried tappy songs, i have tried fcs vs high scores, and people tend to go for the speedy fcs the most

the fact you used Kierans spacetime attempt cracked me up hehe

I love Cpol's thumbnails. For the crazy plays he completely changes his thumbnail layout and just has a few question marks to signify it as insane. For osu! a lot of the plays look so easy when youre watching but if you combine it with actually reading and clicking its so fucking hard

Due to the technical gate causing most people to have not played it and the perceived difficulty of it being physically active nearly every Beatsaber video I've seen has commenters expressing amazement at the players skill. granted the 400pp+ stuff is actually bonkers but even for the easier stuff too. Also accuracy and swingthrough are only tracked via points too so you could theoretically get a FC that is like 50% of the total possible score meaning that there is a much smaller accuracy focused group too. Also I guess it just fits the whole concept of aesthetically looking really impressive. cool vid.

Thank you! Yes, this all my struggles, I do consider myself being at a pro level of rhythm play (sure, not as crazy as some others, but Iv'e got my skills) and I really want to prove myself to everyone that I do have such skills and deserves to be in the pro players.... I tried once so far (technical limitations, I don't really have the material to capture gameplay so.... I have to do with what I have...) I did some videos on Cytus 2 on my channel, hoping to get some recognisations but.... well guessing because my channel is still well... on the begginings, doesn't help much and I don't know what else I could do... Cytus is probably the game I'm best for aside.... one execption, Harmoknight (not really well known at all....) but I'm ranked 3rd on the cyberscore leaderboards on there... all your points you showed I agree with and even would say: having too many notes is actually bad because it just end up in note spamming (looking at you freedom dive hidden hard in Cytus 1...) TL:DR I agree with the points you made in the video and currently am struggling to show my own skills to others to prove myself...

Great channel and video.

I know I believed many of these misconceptions about clone hero until I tried the game and then realized just how hard some of the really easy looking patterns actually are and how easy some hard looking patterns are.

tbf in the case of osu and speed players, nps of streams makes a large part of a play impressive. For example, zestiny and aetrna both have plays that are difficult and are perceived as so because of the sheer speed of how many notes there are.

8:02 Didn't expect you to show EGHD's play on BUCHiGiRE Berserker here, nice!

1:06 fnf "hard" mods be like

i’m a cytus 2 player and I’d like to bring up another form of difficulty misperception that occurs specifically in C2 and has very few other analogues. that’s with the song CODE NAME : SIGMA. It’s a Chaos 15, which is the highest possible rank a song can get (althoufh the difficulty range among them is pretty wide). there’s one section at around 350 combo in it that will fool non experienced players into thinking it’s really hard- because the line moves at around 400 bpm. now i don’t know if this is universal, but I was extremely intimidated by this when I first saw it in a video. even though it’s an extremely easy pattern (literally just quarter notes), the sheer fact that the scanline moves so fast (the song even has the vocal cue “speed up” right before the drop) may trick people pretty hard, when the actual hard part of the level comes around 700 combo right near the end. idk i just thought this was an interesting case where note density is not what lends difficulty perception, but the unique mechanics of cytus doing something weird (Compare that to the song Revelation, which has a similar extremely fast part, but one which is charted really dense and ends up being one of the most technical and tricky patterns in the game, but w/e)

6:53 Fun story from back in the time: For I thought the famous GH3 Song was called "The Devil Came To Georgia First" because of the "First FC" part, GHPhenom put in his title.

Me, before getting into rhythm games: Man, Freedom Dive is very scary =m= Me, now playing Taiko no Tatsujin (Arcade): Freedom Dive buffed my triceps.

I consider myself a top American player of an obscure rhythm game called Neon FM (the arcade version is incredibly rare but I have one locally). It's basically a drum simulator you play with your fingers and has 5 large buttons. Anyway I've recently noticed it's often harder to hit songs with the scroll speed slowed to 3 (it's normally at 4 when under 50) than ones set to like 8. The faster speed is more tiring and impressive looking but the slower one is a lot more awkward. ' Just my two cents ...

Idk about the jacks part, watching Chris PFC the triple 16th jumps in DEGRS was the most incredible thing I've ever seen in DDR.

Whenever I want to flex my osu skills, I just play speed or stream maps. They’re easy to me, but look impressive to people who don’t play.

I saw the title and immediately thought of "Beethoven Virus DDR Level Asian"

We need the Part 2 because FNF lol

exactly, I may not stream me playing clone hero but I still like to sit down and play it, I've become really good at tapping sections because that's how I like to play (having mainly played Rock Band and having gotten used to solos being able to be tapped rather than strummed), the patterns part is also true because I can hit sections that are insanely fast but they are so easy in terms of notes being hit that it's just second nature

Thank you for putting taichis ghost run on beat saber . i feel like that game needs more clout

The PP system is litterally broken ;_;

I realized that forgotten 1x rate (dan 10 shoegazer) looks impressive to people when its not too hard at all

I THOUGHT I knew what all those words meant, hold on let me get a thesaurus