Guide to Shuffle Stealth

I wrote this a long long long long long time ago when DDR Max 2 was the newest mix. It is ancient but the discussion came up on the ZIV chat so I thought I'd dig up the original text and put it up for all to enjoy. The writing is a bit outdated...please forgive that.



Re: Shuffle Stealth AAA

Hem, yes it is possible. This is Whistle Song Light, but still on Shuffle Stealth.

http://aij.ddruk.com/images/aaronshufflestealthaaa.jpg

EDIT> There, I still had it archived:

Guide to Shuffle Stealth
By: Aaron Chmielowiec
(Note: This is in rough form)

Shuffle Stealth?!?! "That's Impossible!", I hear you say. Bwahaha... not quite.

Shuffle is not as "random" as you might think. First off, shuffle doesn't randomly change the direction of each arrow individually, nor does it randomize on each bar of music. Rather, all the Left, Down, Up, and Right steps are changed to a different mapping throughout the entirety of the song. (More on this in a moment)

However, it's not even *that* random. Based on numerous (i.e. a *LOT*) of playtests, it has been found that there are only 8 mappings used in DDR Max/Max2 (possibly for 5th and before as well, but I haven't confirmed that yet). Here are all of the 8 possible mappings (there
is a reason I grouped the answers the way I did; read on to find out why):

Original : Left, Down, Up, Right
Pattern 1: Left, Right, Down, Up
Pattern 2: Up, Down, Right, Left
Pattern 3: Left, Right, Up, Down
Pattern 4: Down, Up, Right, Left
Pattern 5: Down, Left, Up, Right
Pattern 6: Down, Up, Left, Right
Pattern 7: Right, Left, Up, Down
Pattern 8: Right, Up, Left, Down

That is to say, if you select "Shuffle", and you happen to get pattern #4, all "Left" steps will become "Down" steps, all "Down" steps will become "Up" steps, all "Up" steps will become "Right" steps, and all "Right" steps will become "Left" Steps.

(i.e. the mapping Left->Down, Down->Up, Up->Right, Right->Left)

O.K., so there are in fact only 8 possible mappings that could come up; that's still only a 1/8 chance you will get it, and memorizing a translated step pattern is still a shot in the dark, right?...Not quite

Take a very basic song, "WWW.BLONDE Girl" on Light difficulty. All steps are individual (only one at a time) with the exception of a "Left and Right" jump near the middle. You could choose to step on two arrows at the same time to increase your chances of getting it. Heck, you have doubled your chances, right?...It's even better than you think.

You see, look at Patterns 1 and 2; see how Left and Right map to Left and Up in both cases, and how Down and Up map to Down and Right? You can play both of Mappings 1 and 2 at the same time, and the "Left and Right" jump will become an "Up and Left" jump, so you have both patterns
covered! Sweet, right?

Note how Patterns 3 and 4 share the same characteristic. Cool.

Now look at Patterns 5, 6, 7, and 8. You can get all of these at the same time since there are only 2 unique possible mappings for each step in these four patterns. That's 50% of
the possible shuffle patterns tackled at once!

Before you get too excited and go about memorizing the translated steps, not that while "in theory" one of patterns 5,6,7, or 8 will come up 50% of the time, it does not seem to be the case,...but perhaps it is just my dumb luck.

Also, please note that this method will only work for the simplest of songs. For anything even moderately difficult, you may find yourself going back to the 1/8 chance by memorizing the steps for 1 of the possible 8 mappings (Or I suppose, having printouts of all 8 possibilities
and reading one of them while playing if you want to be cheap). Still, it's better than nothing; at least you have a chance.

Last edited by seishinbyou on 25-10-2002 08:42 AM GMT

---

Or if it's a song with just 4th notes and you want to be really cheap and lazy, just bracket jump to hit all 4 panels every beat.
Kinda stops working when you have a song with 8ths though.

---

Kyzentun: not necessarily - if you can bracket easily (or FC Dynamite Rave/Captain Jack), 8th note quadjumps will be a piece of piss (but tiring)

---

Nope, the ALMOST window would mess you up there.

Hmm, I've played songs on "all fours" and have managed to get combos in the past lol

---

It's bpm dependant. If I cared, I'd work the math to figure out the bpm for where the almost window starts overlapping with the fantastic window for the note 1 8th earlier/later.

---

Also remember that at the time I wrote that originally, "bracketing" was a completely unheard of concept. People joked about it but nobody would actually do it. Not for any serious play anyways.

I don't remember the BPM where certain windows start overlapping either, though I do remember some old notes and posts about it over the years. I might try to dig that up

Of more interest on overlapping window is the "trick" the Japanese players used to do with Maxx Unlimited's Step-Jump parts (where the jump used one of the steps in the previous 8th step); doing a single jump between both 8ths and have both register as "Perfect". It wasn't reliable and tricky, but doable. It worked at some slower BPMs too, but it was increasingly hard to pull it off. Back in the day Godai/ZzeezZ/James was messing around doing it when him, the online community and some of the Muthos crowd were discussing it.

---

Ah, I'd only read Dukamok's trick for doing fast stepjumps. Yours sounds like a way of doing a set of "step, step, jump" a 2 jumps, where his was a way of doing it as 4 steps.
For those that don't know, Dukamok's method is to step the 4 arrows in the set 1.5x faster than they actually are. So if you have "step, step, jump" with 1 16th between each, you step it as if it was a 24th burst. You hit the second step a bit early, but you still get a fantastic on the first step and the jump.
A little bit more refined is to only apply this to the second step and the jump, and step twice as fast as the spacing. So in the example, you'd do the second step and the jump as a 32nd triple, netting you an FFC if you pull it off perfectly.
I know a local player that uses this method for dealing with 8th step jump streams at 140 bpm. His foot rhythm is 16th triples, but due to the way the timing windows work, he still gets fantastics on the jumps and the steps between them.

If I seriously wanted to pass FELMO, I'd retrain to use this method.

---