How Do People Get SUCH High Scores?

[Dexy]

I just went balls out on the first level on the hardest difficulty dancing whenever I had the opportunity and got a bullseye at the end, but only managed about 1.25 million while the high score is somewhere in the 1.6 million region, how are they able to get so many more points?

[Xphere Omega]

Well, it's the REAL (tiny) flaw of this game.
You should try at low or medium difficulty most of the time for high-scoring.

Besides that, you need to do tighter dancing judging by your score.
...and don't forget to jump over the checkpoint.

[Dexy]

Oh I thought you'd get a higher score for a higher difficulty because there's a lot more obstacles.

[Avienus]

People are animals. I held a first place score for a few seconds then was easily outdone by 400k moments after. I don't know! But you're right, higher the difficulty means more obstacles which means more points.

[Dexy]

Originally posted by Solstice:

People are animals. I held a first place score for a few seconds then was easily outdone by 400k moments after. I don't know! But you're right, higher the difficulty means more obstacles which means more points.

But it also means less opportunities to dance, so I guess you'd have to test through all difficulties whether you'd get more points from dance spam or obstacles.

[queendvs]

I just got first place for the World 1 boss level. I did it on easy, and had to dance my ass off. I would say if I got it perfect, I could improve the score to at least 600,000. I'm going to hold off though unless someone else beats my current score.

I think that for some levels easy will be the way to go, while there will be others that you will get more points by playing through and "perfecting" them on hard. I might start recording vids at some point so I can more easily figure out which difficulty is best suited for maximizing certain levels.

I also think that you could intuit that levels with a large amount of upwards steps would be suited for hard mode score maximizing as there would be not enough room to dance frequently.

[Xphere Omega]

Yeah, I think either dancing score should be halved or Perfect+ bonus score for higher difficulty should be doubled or both.

[queendvs]

Yeah, I agree. I mean it is kind of funny because this same sort of thing (Easy being the better option for mazimizing your score) happened in Bit.Trip Complete. In Bit.Trip Complete you actually got the highest scores on Easy for 5/6 of the games because the amount of points needed to mode up happened quicker in each game (this is excluding Runner of course).

I was hoping that in this one in order to get the best score you'd need to do it on Hard mode, but I guess you could argue there is more planning needed now that it can vary which difficulty is best for each level.

[Ged]

I think it's a lovely setup, as it gives strong players an incentive to play easy mode, where it often substitutes as "score attack". I held a few top scores yesterday, but I have a job and work to do so expect them to be gone next time I look! And no desire to pick up repetitive strain injury...

[Dexy]

I actually don't agree with the concept of being able to get the high score on the lowest difficulty, in all seriousness less skill and reaction time is involved. It's really down to 'who can mash <dance button> the fastest' as opposed to 'who's the best at dodging / deflecting the most number of obstacles while also knowing where they're able to dance without running into something'

[queendvs]

Originally posted by Dex:

I actually don't agree with being able to get the high score on the lowest difficulty, in all seriousness less skill and reaction time is involved. It's really down to 'who can mash <danceb utton> the fastest' as opposed to 'who can dodge / deflect the most number of obstacles while dancing at every opportunity they get the best'

I definitely agree with you about the mashing. And as Ged said, my fingers/hands start to hurt after too much of said mashing. I've heard some people say you don't need to "mash", but I can never get as high a score otherwise. Although as I said before, I wonder if easy will always be the best option for score maximization or if it will only be best for levels that give you large empty spaces to dance while on said mode.

[Dexy]

Originally posted by queendvs:

I definitely agree with you about the mashing. And as Ged said, my fingers/hands start to hurt after too much of said mashing. I've heard some people say you don't need to "mash", but I can never get as high a score otherwise. Although as I said before, I wonder if easy will always be the best option for score maximization or if it will only be best for levels that give you large empty spaces to dance while on said mode.

Sorry if my post was misconstrued (so I had to edit it), but I wasn't disagreeing with the fact that easy mode IS the best for high score purporses, I WAS disagreeing with concept of it, high scores should be reserved for the highest difficulties.

[queendvs]

Originally posted by Dex:

Sorry if my post was misconstrued (so I had to edit it), but I wasn't disagreeing with the fact that easy mode IS the best for high score purporses, I WAS disagreeing with concept of it, high scores should be reserved for the highest difficulties.

Hahahaha. I understood what you meant and was trying to say that I also wish maximizing wasn't dependent on how well you can "button mash". That annoys me. Plus, the fact that it hurts my fingers/hands after about 20 minutes is another knock against it.

Sorry that I wasn't more clear. >_<

[nom]

The easiest solution is to simply separate the scores by the difficulty used. Eg., if you get your score on "easy" then you are only compared to all the other people who also played on "easy"....

[queendvs]

That's a good point. Gaijin did that for the leaderboards in Bit.Trip Complete. That would also make it so that to be the "best", you'd need to maximize your score in each difficulty level.

[Bingobango]

I only play on the hardest difficulty and I have the top scores on 5 levels in world 2 and 7 in world 3. I've begun making high score clips for each level. Here's the playlist for the levels I've done so far: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL26KtElv6VKFwoJ9t18m2d_-IcUYRVNtr&feature=view_all

I don't think playing the easier levels will give you a score advantage. I'm not 100% sure of course but it would seem silly for this to be the case.