(wishlisting) AAAA grades?

Am I the only one with this opinion, or does anyone else here think that it's time for DDR to get some AAAA grades?

The main thing causing me to ask this is how DDR A seems to have finally fixed the frame-segregated timing windows that have been there since the start, making it so there are no longer any "magic BPMs" that are required to get an MFC. All a sufficiently skilled player has to do now is step accurately and consistently, rather than losing a run because of frame rounding errors. This can perhaps best be seen on Dr.D's Youtube channel, where (if I counted correctly) he had 28 MFCs spanning six years before DDR A, and now he has a total of 170 (142 new ones) spanning the three months after.

If I recall correctly, several years ago one of the top pro Japanese/Korean DDR players had also quipped in an interview that they would like to see AAAA grades.

(At this rate, I wouldn't object to Ridiculous timing becoming a thing either.)

I mean, a perfect million and a big, shiny glowing "MARVELOUS FULL COMBO!" thing gets the point across just fine...

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AAA is fine as a cap.

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AAA is fine. No need for a AAAA. Maybe an S?

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AAA works as-is. The number 4 doesn't feel as natural as 3.

If they really were going to add a new grade, it would be fitting alongside the new grading system.

AAA+ would be a more logical conclusion than AAAA.

Remember a time when a "AAA" rank meant you had to get a "Perfect" or better for EVERY SINGLE STEP? I miss those days.

SuperNOVA 2 ruined everything.

Back in my day, the highest grade you could get was an A — an A+ if the teacher believed in plus-minus and thought your work was exceptional. These goddamn millennials and their need for ever-stronger positive reinforcement...

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I do agree with wrsw, though. Have a AAA+ rating. Only problem is a AAA isn't even exclusive to a PFC, or even an FC at all, so that creates another grading problem altogether.

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The issue basically comes down to the fact that Marvelous Timing is better than Perfect - back in the old days, a PFC was easy to score, because it was the perfect score - the 1,000,000 points (times ten to the whatever magnitude, depending on game) of it's time, and the maximum value was AAA.

The issue is they had to devalue perfects to make marvelous timing - and switching the PFC to and MFC for the AAA would've been too harsh. Thus, 99% became the AAA - and you have to be *pretty* perfect, though not entirely, to get that.

But let me put it in an easy to understand example:

A while back, I had an idea: AAA- would be for 990,000 to 999,000, AAA for 999,000 to 999,999, and AAA+ for 1,000,000, which would make even a single great probably derail the 999,000 and thus the real AAA.

The problem with this is that you could get a PFC, but if you have a really bad MA (triple digit perfects), you will lose the AAA, even though you got a PFC, which shouldn't happen. (And before you say that doesn't happen, you should know I regularly get less marvelous steps than perfect steps. I have a pretty bad step consistency.)

That's why the AAA threshold is where it is - they needed a scoring threshold where even a bad MA PFC was still a AAA, but this meant that now you could sneak a great in or two and still make it, especially in songs with higher step counts.

And before you say "Decouple grades from scoring", I'm going to point out that it's pretty obvious Bemani wants to base grading off scoring, so I don't think that's really a marvelous argument.

I'm renaming this grade to "ALL PERFECT/MARVELOUS".

In DDR A, AAAA is referring to "ALL MARVELOUS".

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