DanceDanceRevolution A (AC)

*internal Russian screaming*

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TO QUOTE: Maybe we'll get licenses for Australia and the Philippines now?

Philippines is part of ASIAN region, so they'll rely on KONAMI ASIA server. Licenses are always available for release here.

Hi. Me again. Here in Dave and Busters in Times Square, New Yor.k, NY, the arcade operators out itin offline mode second day in the row.

I'm very confused and need confirmation and sources that this is normal and that NO eAmuse in either just New York or the whole United States is also undergoing this.

Basically, I want to know if the machine is on Offline mode for no reason.

I was at Round 1 in Taunton yesterday and eAmuse was working fine. So it's not all US.

I also saw some Jubeat players from the Philippines (the cabinet still had HK as the region but the name of shop is from the Philippines)

I'm in Virginia and eamuse was down all day at the springfield d&b. Seems to be working today though.0

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I was at R1 Sunvalley (in Concord, CA) today and eAmusement was working.

Also, Sunvalley has one of the new DDR A machines!

According to my group chat, e-amuse is down at D&B in San Diego. Someone mentioned something about there being a new terms of service arcades had to agree to with e-amuse to keep using it, but it was unclear if that was true or not.

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One of the D&B techs in my group chat said that eAmuse was down since Konami was moving servers (I'm theorizing expanding for the Philippines and Australia launches of Ace), and they ended up taking longer than expected

Big huge catch-up post with replies:

Only until the next superboss comes out, which will probably be Ace For Aces.

jk

The primary reasons I'm excited are:
- This is the chart with the most steps in it ever, not counting long versions. I just want to see how far Konami's gone. And to the people speculating that we'll get our first 20 around DDR's 20th anniversary (a bit over a year from now), me included, it means that they have to top this.
- I'm hoping for Ace For Aces after this, and Ace For Aces is our first DDR song with split timing. That means the potential for never-seen-before gimmicks.

Agreed (and I saw that on iamchris4life's Twitter too). Personally I'm hoping there's an upcoming difficulty downgrade that drops Endymion from Extra Stage Level 3 to Level 2 (every 8 credits -> every 4 credits).

All very valid points. There's technically a workaround but it's stupid and expensive: you can purposely fail everything 7 credits in a row as fast as possible (wasting ~$7 for nothing), which gets you one attempt at Endymion every ~14 minutes instead of every ~83 minutes in an empty queue. In a 10-credit queue it's still formidable: assuming each player is allowed 10 minutes before the next player's up, this workaround gets you one attempt at Endymion every ~3+ hours instead of an ~impossible 13+ hours. And the fact that this is a workaround, and it requires giving up $7 for nothing every fourteen minutes, is acutely dumb. Incentives for increasing gameplay and therefore revenue are fine. Incentives for increasing 'intentionally bad' gameplay and therefore revenue, not so much.

Padding tends to work in general (see Boss On Parade, Nitro, all the Rinon's Adventure staircases) as at least it can be slowly stretched out one credit at a time, but a rule that says "hey you, if the line at your arcade machine is long, you must wait in line for 13+ hours to get anything more than zero done" obviously does not work.

I'd actually argue that part of it reduces revenue. To make up a plausible example, say I'm going for Endymion and I have exactly two hours of spare time. It takes about an hour and a half to get to Endymion. Whether pass or fail, I now have no incentive at all to keep playing the last half hour, since the 3 Heat Power I earn will just be lost the next morning. Thanks to the cooldown mechanic combined with Endymion's mechanics, Konami's lost 3 credits of revenue from me, that they wouldn't have lost without that combination of mechanics.

I doubt Endymion will make the record, but Ace For Aces if it follows certainly will.

That was the point of the analysis though - I honestly don't think FEFEMZ can pass Endymion without a drastic change in technique, which will be extremely risky to attempt and learn and hone under the current conditions.

If the mechanics need changing, it doesn't sound too fine to me.

100% agreed on that last point.

Is this referring to FEFEMZ and co. grinding for Ace For Aces two months ago, or something else?

But yeah, you get 1 Heat Power exactly at the end of every credit, so the fastest thing you can do is mine through credits as quickly as possible. I believe FEFEMZ and co. first tested out Tohoku Evolved before finding out that Pluto Relinquish was faster(?).

Yup, that's exactly why I'm hoping for an Extra Stage Level 3 -> Extra Stage Level 2 drop, which cuts the time between attempts in ~half.

Agreed x2.

The only thing I can think of is that it would give the original player a bad name, because now they have an 'illegitimate' high score permanently saved onto their account visible to everyone.

Technically four times, if you count Egoism 440, or even five times if you count Max.(period)'s EES and ES conditions as separate.

With a big if attached to it - if both players have unlocked Endymion. Less of a problem for , more of a problem for - if you're grinding for a pass, you need to play with someone who has also unlocked .

There's a workaround for this if the two players have at least three accounts between them:
- Player 1 plays 3 credits alone (3, 0, 0)
- Both players play 4 credits together (7, 4, 0)
- Player 2 switches to Player 3's account and they play Endymion (0, 4, 0)
- Player 2 switches back to their own account; both players play 3 credits (3, 7, 0)
- Player 1 switches to Player 3's account and they play Endymion (3, 0, 0)
- Player 1 switches back to their own account; go to step 2

Now both players can play Endymion twice in 9 credits, or once every 4.5 credits on average. Heck, a player with a machine to themselves could do this alone if they wanted, spending double the money to get double the attempts at Endymion. (Doesn't work so well with a long line - what's the Versus Play etiquette again?)

And for all eight players, she or he has unlocked Endymion, if we're talking about going for that.

I suppose one could say that lowering the difficulty requirements for Ace For Aces is Konami's way of encouraging more people to play Endymion. I was going to say that Konami probably has the contents of every difficulty downgrade and unlock cycle predetermined in advance of the game's release, but there are a few potential/partial counterexamples:
- When people found the 'exploit' to play Valkyrie dimension on CUT2, it was patched in the next difficulty downgrade.
- Hate to be bringing it up like this, but the Tohoku natural disaster didn't happen until four months into X3's release, meaning that Tohoku Evolved's composition, charts, development/programming, and event integration with the remaining four Evolved songs were all newly added into X3's unlock cycle within two and a half months.
- We had our first Over The "Period" difficulty downgrade less than half a month after it was revealed, which is unprecedented. I don't think that would have happened so soon if people didn't have so much trouble on the first note(s).

Neat question!

Here's a few things that have been done before:
- roppongi Evolved ver.D was an EES that was randomly selectable 1/4 of the time. Being brand new to X2 AC and featuring a bunch of stops (during a 7/4 time signature, no less) and a surprise 340 BPM speedup that none of the other versions had, it surely would've taken quite a while to learn and pass...had it not been for the Order course loophole that allowed someone to see the whole chart with a normal lifebar on day 1 if I remember correctly. A random version selection probably falls under "strictly limiting how often you can play it" though.
- There's the madness that is Boss Rush episode II (first to reveal Chaos), Boss Rush episode IV (first to reveal Fascination Maxx and Healing-D-Vision), and Boss Rush (Ver.SN2), all of which feature one or more ridiculously difficult gimmicks. Even if you've memorized the stops of Chaos, episode II forces you to sightread massive 16th note crossovers and stacks of 32nd note jumps...on 1x. It's extremely easy to enter that song with a full lifebar and fail halfway through. episode IV gives you the joy of sightreading two 18s back to back with four (or fewer) lives and NO healing in between, and of course ending with HDV's ludicrous crossovers. Don't forget that this literally appeared on the debut date of SN1, jumping up from PSM being the previous hardest chart! And finally, (Ver.SN2) gives you two 18s back to back, two 'break' songs that are no slouch on 1x, and the legendary Pluto Relinquish just in case you desired crossovers over 10% faster and triple the length compared to HDV. The boss course lifebar mechanics give you at most six lives to pass three 18s, and if you lose any on Pluto (happy 32nd note reading!), there's no healing for Relinquish. And remember that in all three of these, Goods break combo costing you a nice 25% of your health (bye-bye pad mashing) and Almosts are a thing to punish mistiming even more (without them, if you mess up and hit an arrow way early, nothing happens and you have a chance to quickly step again). All of these songs/charts/courses were playable every credit, but the courses at least took on the order of multiple years to pass.
- For a much milder example also involving low speed mods, there's Dance Drill Course 7 from DDR X, which featured bag and Max 300 locked to the same speed mod. No battery lifebar though, so the easy strategy is to just learn enough of bag to mash through it on a low speed mod, so you can play Max 300 at whatever speed mod you desire.
- The quirkiest example is probably TRICK from DDR Extreme, which forced on Boost, Brake, or Wave on successive songs, followed by Max 300 on 0.25x. Add in the 4-life battery bar for a bad time.

tl;dr Like it or not, it seems like the most effective way to make a song hard to complete without restricting it to once every X credits is to put undesirable mods on it and put it at the end of a boss course, preceded by songs that also have undesirable mods on them. I know they removed both courses and Encore Extra Stage from DDR 2013 because they didn't want skilled players' credits taking too long, but they managed to compromise with EESs by making them restricted to certain event periods and only once every X credits. They could easily do something similar with courses (if five or six songs every credit is deemed too much, just limit all of them to four songs).

I highly doubt they actually expect no one to pass Endymion, given that it's supposedly not even the final boss of the event, just a prerequisite for Ace For Aces. If no one passes Endymion, that would be the first time an event concludes with no one having even seen the event's final boss, which would be a huge bummer.

I'd love to see an Attack PFC Extra Stage also! This idea was tossed around a bit during the days of discussing Over The "Period".

isn't the 19; that's .

The grind to reach Endymion for the first time is much worse than the second time. The first time, you have to unlock all 6 Worlds of Baby-Lon's Adventure and all 11 Worlds of Rinon's Adventure, which takes a minimum of 85 credits. The second time, you 'only' have to refill your Heat Power, which takes 8 credits. I've measured 1 Normal Play credit at 10 minutes and 1 Premium Play credit at 13 minutes on average, so reaching Endymion for the first time takes literally 18+ hours or 3 days of uninterrupted gameplay. Reaching Endymion the second time 'only' takes 1 hour and 20 minutes of uninterrupted gameplay.

To answer the lottery comment literally, you'd have a much better (and much less expensive) chance at success grinding for Endymion than grinding for the lottery. Let's over-extrapolate and say that Endymion gets unlocked for normal play after 11 months (Valkyrie took 7 months and OT"P" took 9 months). If some arcade is open 8 hours a day, and some hypothetical person always hogs the machine and somehow continuously plays it 7 days a week for 11 months, that's 48 credits a day or a ridiculous 16,060 credits ($16,060 spent) before Endymion gets unlocked and that person can pass it. On the other hand, if you buy 50 lottery tickets every day, most lotteries have odds of around 1 in 10^8, so you'd expect 1 win every 2,000,000 days or 5,000+ years, after having spent $0.1 billion. Have fun with that.

Not sure if those [s] tags were supposed to be "strikethrough" or "sarcasm", but for some people, they've already met their score goals on everything except Endymion, or Endymion has the easiest score goal left. Then there's also the the desired recognition for being the first to ever pass or see a particular song/chart.

The issue could be argued as "encourages players to throw away their credits rather than play the game, as it's faster if all the player wants is Endymion".

Fungah! and iamchris4life have both said that they don't want to bother with Endymion, at least in its current state. If I'm remembering correctly, Fungah!'s made 3 attempts at it, iamchris4life's made 0 attempts, HO4KETI's made 3 attempts, BROSONI's made 2 attempts, and FEFEMZ's made 7 attempts.

If past trends hold, ~56 days is when Endymion will be playable exactly once every credit for the first time (so not normal play). But if what the designers said during DDR 2013 holds, then once every credit also means that Encore Extra Stage will no longer be accessible, and there'll have to be some other way to reach Ace For Aces.

Once every credit doesn't necessarily mean dropping from Extra Stage Level 3; it could stay Extra Stage Level 3 and just stop draining Heat Power or something.

The thing about difficulty downgrades is that so far we've only gotten them for the 'first phase', and none for the 'second phase' (Endymion vs. Endymion). That's why I'm hoping that once the first phase has gone as low as it can go (Endymion -> Ace For Aces), there's some time left for the second phase to get a true difficulty downgrade before the whole event ends (no more EES). And the only reasonable thing I can think of is Extra Stage Level 3 -> Extra Stage Level 2, while it keeps draining Heat Power.

That would actually be a bad idea, since then CUT1 could be used to pass Endymion easily. CUT mods (and other note-removing mods) have never themselves disqualified a player from meeting a requirement; only the fact that they remove too many steps has.

I'd bet money at this point that Ace For Aces is what follows Endymion. If Konami really is waiting for someone to actually see that before they loosen any requirements (plausible), then we're in trouble - as I posted earlier, I can't reasonably see FEFEMZ even passing Endymion let alone AA+'ing it in its current state, even with CUT2 on. With Jumps Off though it would be easy for FEFEMZ to pass.

I'd argue that "few people are experiencing this terribleness" doesn't stop it from being terrible and changeworthy.

Beat me to it, and that's an excellent point.

aside: This is part of why I'd like mod courses to come back. Without them, it's really hard to make something that a thousand people can play but not beat. (Usually, if it's accessible enough for a thousand people to be playing, the best player can beat it easily. And if it's hard enough for the best player to not beat, it's probably not accessible enough for a thousand people to be playing.)



Copyright laws are stupid and complicated. That's about it.

Presumably because they want to drag out the climax for as long as possible by making it stupid hard and then introducing multiple difficulty downgrades, but this would entail too long of a period where no new DDR songs are being released.

If you look at it from the perspective of, say, the OST, then Endymion and Ace For Aces really are (currently) the ending songs, because the OST doesn't include licenses.

(bold mine)
This, pretty much.

Multiple people beat me to it, but again: we don't know whether this is "Konami chose not to buy the license" or "The licensers chose not to sell the license".

Given that the US already has eAmusement, creating an offline patch that's pushable would actually be more work for Konami.

The U version is using eAmusement and they are always online in the same way as the Asia region releases, otherwise it would be impossible for players to store any account information at all from credit to credit and the whole entire Heat Power & events system wouldn't have worked from the start.

I think this is backwards - Konami's never shut down any eAmusement servers on their end; it's the arcades on that don't think it's worth it to pay the eAmusement membership fee, and so we don't get it. I specifically remember back during SN2 that Konami offered eAmusement to the US, and the arcades (rightly or wrongly) said "no, that's too expensive to be profitable for us".

All that Konami's done since the end of X2 is stop making workarounds for arcades who choose not to get eAmusement. Workarounds in this case refer to SN2/X/X2 unlock codes, which Konami had to newly make for only non-Asia region cabinets. So any X3s in the US were severely crippled by having no unlocks at all, while DDR 2013 and 2014 didn't work at all in the US because they couldn't boot without eAmusement and there weren't any workarounds made by Konami this time.

In other words, it's a case of "since Konami won't support non-eAmusement cabinets, we get the game if Konami is willing to sell eAmusement and the arcades are willing to buy eAmusement". There's evidence that Konami's perfectly willing to sell eAmusement everywhere, and it's the arcades that aren't buying. Konami isn't refusing to sell eAmusement.

I just felt like people would think I was being sarcastic, so I scratched that part out, but I see it did the opposite.

in this world, there are some things you should never do, like making a long-ass post, calm down
also i agree with the discord post

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That's pretty creative. Not sure why people would set up a third account and go through the trouble of clearing 50+ Extra Stages on the new account to unlock Level A to make this possible, but yeah.

Since we're borrowing someone else's Extra Stage Level 3, I suppose.

Didn't the song play out as a tribute to a disaster from March 11, 2011, an event before X3 was released? I would presume they had time to plan this out in that case.

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You never need to unlock anything on the third account; it's always paired with either the first or second account and piggybacks off them.

OOPS, blame Bemaniwiki for listing only month and day (not year) on their unlock tables. Just remembered that the release was in 2011, saw "5/30" as Tohoku Evolved's reveal date, and screwed up from there.

CLUB SYNERGY SM MEGAMALL, an arcade just a train ride away, got their prissy white all-new DDR A Cab.

I agree with the post as well. Oh wait, that's me. +1

Scratch-offs work differently from standard lottery, New York state lottery also functions differently from other lottery in other states, my chances of winning through the lotto are far better than passing ENDYMION .

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And here's the proof:




Let me just say:
It took us 5 FRICKIN' YEARS to get a brand-new DDR game here in the Philippines, and now thanks to Quantum Amusement being signed up to eAmusement, it's now a reality.

Hmm interesting, it seems like their region's menus/prompts are in English too.

I'm guessing this is the shipment that we heard about earlier this week or so?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCsub0WgnC8 done