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Song Difficulty Ratings

With the original, the difficulty category of the song didn't always do a good job of conveying how hard the song would be for any given instrument. Some songs are just difficult on one instrument while others might be hard across the board. It is just a fact of music that writers don't normally consider the difficulty of the music they create (except in as much as it needs to possible for some musician to play it).

Rating the difficulty of each instrument in each song on a scale of zero to six and putting the song in an overall difficulty class seemed like a really good idea. Except Harmonix did a horrible job of rating difficulty per instrument. Because of this the difficulty ratings mean absolutely nothing.

Everlong. Great song. A beast on expert drums.

It is true that different people are good at different things, and thus sometimes it will be easier for one person to play something than it is for another. But even so, it escapes us just how the ratings could be this useless.

Well, there are a couple cases where you know what you are getting. With a rating of zero, the song isn't going to be that hard to play. If you are looking at five devils, it is incredibly likely you'll need to practice quite a bit as it is going to be hard. But everything else is a crap shoot.

Honestly, people tend to like playing songs they like, so difficulty rating isn't a make or break feature. But if we are going to get it, there is no reason not to do it right. As it is, its just a disappointment.

As it isn't really clear how these songs are rated, we can't really comment on how things went wrong. But we do have at least one suggestion for how things could be done that might help.

It might be helpful to have different difficulty ratings for each difficulty level per song. The difficulty doesn't always translate when you move to a different level. Everlong is a perfect example of a song that is almost simplistic on hard but really deserves its five devil rating on expert. Actually getting this information to the gamer might be difficult, but unless the information is useful, it doesn't matter how accessible the data is.