Expert + ruined it.

[JessyJams]

I don't care if this isn't popular, but take it from someone who routinely scored in the top 300 on expert before expert +.. Expert + isn't fun.

Yes, Expert + is very hard, as it probably should be, but it's come at a great cost to enjoyment for those of us who found the old progression fun and enjoyable, but not the new expert + wall grind.

The issue is that the very mechanics of the game are now being abused to provide an extreme challenge. Why am I forced to swing through walls to hit blocks? Why am I now having to resort to only moving my head to avoid the contorted wall mechanics when, in fact, the fun of expert was that I could use my whole body?

There is no progression between Expert and Expert +. Expert doesn't train you properly for Expert +. You must either fail over and over and over again, or use the incredibly underdeveloped practice mode that feels more like work than fun. Instead of decent smooth progression, we get a number of toggles that we need to mess around with to find our sweetspot. Unfortunately, we're penalized in score for doing this despite the fact that our score wouldn't be competitive anyways if we weren't masters of the song.


For me, Expert + has ruined the "meta" of beatsaber. It's created a slippery slope of impossible to scale difficulty(due to sensor limitations) to cater to a market I don't know exists. Rather than expand with higher tempo'd songs, or create more interesting patterns, it's now devolved into a mere block orgy reminiscent of the worst the modded song community has to offer. To do so, it had to abandon reasonable and rational level design . Songs are no longer in tempo. Walls are no longer body movements but gimmicky fake out mechanics that routinely force you to abandon common sense in order to succeed.

This started as a light saber dance game. Now I have to cut my own arms off with my sabers and let walls cut my arms off too. It makes no sense any more.


If there NEEDS to be this much added difficulty, for the 0.00001% of the playerbase who cares about it, could it atleast be loyal to the core mechanics of the game? Can I not be forced to swing my arm through a wall ? Would it be too much to not put in wall mechanics that ignore the fact that I have a body wh ilst only caring about the head?

It's way too gamey now. It's clear that the developers listened only to the most extreme, mechanics abusing players in designing expert +. These levels are made entirely for those who abuse and sidestep the limitation of the input to achieve results. Just not fun.


Angel voices Expert is an example of an excellently balanced song. It's designed entirely around expert, with fast and slow parts that are clearly custom made for the song. While I don't care for the song itself, it is by far the best level design so far. Then, suddenly, they do a 180 months later only to give us Expert +, the complete Antithesis of Angel Voices Expert.

Does anybody else feel that Expert + was a step in the wrong direction?

EDIT: This is girlfriend of MCKE, we share this account. Base expert+ is just poorly mapped. Its passable but not fun. Custom songs in expert+ like Overkill, Nuclear Star, Etc are awesome. Don't get discouraged by his post, he stopped after 70 hours into the game. I'm almost at 300 hrs in. Expert+ and ++ are all I play at this point, I love the game!!! Sure some mechanics are super gimmicky but I don't care. The devs and modding community have put alot of work into making the game better for everyone and has taken the maps to a whole new level of physically intense game play. Keep on trying and practicing, if a song annoys you move along and come back later. The core OST isn't great, but you are not forced to play it if you mod the game. I brought that point up before but a certain someone only wanted to play the OST because "its the only score that should actually count". Nah, no thanks, boring!
Anyways, see you guys on the leaderboard!
-JS

[Mr Teatime]

i agree that the vanilla Expert + are just bad and you are right these gimmicky tricks are not fun.
But i also want more difficulty, with fast levels and fast movement. I think the songs of the 100k contest, from beastsaber are a good example of how to make good and difficult levels.

[Alternity]

Expert+ is exactly what it should be: A hard challenge. It's not meant to be fun if you don't like challenges. To be honest, whining about this is like whining about songs that are in the Impossible tier in Rock Band. Also, seeing the number of scores on the E+ leaderboards, there is clearly enough people that can beat those for sure.

Also, just a FYI, the Expert+ maps weren't done by the devs but by custom mappers from the modding discord, mappers that have a pretty good reputation in the modding scene.

[Crazy Coconut]

Expert+ difficulty was there from the start, if i'm not mistaken. Technically was there as possibility. At least I saw it in BeatSaberEditor that are used to make all those custom songs.
And I don't exactly follow you here. If you don't like it - don't use it, isn't that the point? It's like complaining about extreme graphic settings (which your PC can't handle), for example. Because that was done purely to irritate, of course, and not for people who has appropriate hardware and can enjoy top notch image quality.

Take Payday 2, for example. Initially there were 4 difficulty levels with highest of them ('Overkill') being perfectly usable after some getting used to it. Then they added 5th difficulty level ('Death Wish'), which was insane from sheer amount of effort you had to use to complete it. Yet now there are 7 levels with one of them ('Death Sentence') even harder than 'Death Wish'.

Point is - there are people with better reflexes and lower reaction time than you. Expert mode is boring for them, which lead to such ridiculusness as Megalovania (google it on youtube - 'Reality Check Through The Skull'). Even for me those 'out of the box' songs became boring pretty quickly despite me not able to master them (I have Samsung Odyssey headset which doesn't have external trackers, which not exactly good for Beat Saber).

Rock Band has impossible songs, Osu! has impossible songs. Why Beat Saber can't have it?

[Alternity]

Just a FYI, I also use WMR and I have no trouble beating the E+ maps, aside from the few that I still can't beat but it has nothing to do with tracking. I just beat the K/DA E+ too.

[Crazy Coconut]

I did't say anything about beating them. I said about mastering them. Like, SS rating would be harder to get on higher difficulties on WMR due to it somewhat losing tracking on controllers that being out of view. With Beat Saber score mechanics you simply must follow all the blocks with your WMR headset to slash them properly. Which is not always affordable on Expert or Expert+

[Alternity]

I don't understand the issue. If you keep your head straight you should be able to see all the blocks at all time.

[Crazy Coconut]

Yeah. Until they come too close. More than once I scored less (or totalyy missed) on blocks in opposite corners of the grid due to not perfect tracking of WMR in such circumstances.
Also, I'm not some kind of bird to keep my head always straight regardless of my body position.

And is that a coincidence, that one time I played with VIVE, game suddenly go easy on me and allowed to beat a couple of my personal records on first-second attempt? Resolution, though... After WMR, VIVE looks kinda grainy.

[Stove]

I play this game a lot. I've played my fair share of e+ maps and I know what feels like good mapping and what feels gimmocky. Some really good expert+ maps in my opinion are twiststep, honesty v2 and sidetracked day. All of those songs are really hard, but all of them are hard because they throw interesting patterns at you. The patterns feel weird at first, but as you learn how to move through those maps it starts to feel more and more satisfying.

The official exptert+ maps, again, just feel really gimmocky. They were all designed to feel unique from any other song, but the way this was addressed wasn't the best. They threw in a bunch of color switching notes, notes that are extremely far from each other, and notes that just feel like they have zero flow whatsoever. The result for all official expert+ maps are pretty much a mess, even considering they were made by respected mappers. I assume when the developers paid these mappers to make the expert+ maps, they really pushed them to make unique stages and this is what caused the flowless maps we see now.

The main difference between official e+ and good e+ maps is how they handle patterns. The official maps don't really have patterns, they just have a series of jump notes that make you swing your arms really fast, and like OP said they make you do silly things just for the sake of a challenge. They are extremely overmapped for this same purpose, just for a little extra challenge, but this completely takes away from the fun of the game. If you go into practice mode for a few minutes, you can memorize exactly what weird hand motions you have to make in order to beat the song, but this is exactly what we hate about these maps. Instead of relying on pattern recognition, you have to go into practice mode and just remember how to beat the song. Where's the fun in that? Beat Saber is fun since you see yourself progress, not because you memorize how to beat a song.

The songs aren't "impossible" because they're really hard, they're impossible because they're poorly designed and more artificial diffuculty comes as a result of that. Everyone who just says "get good lol" doesn't understand what I described above. We have all beaten the e+ maps, but that doesn't change the fact that they're poorly made.

tl;dr: the official e+ maps are overmapped and have no real patterns, forcing you to memorize how to not lose and removing all fun from the game

[Vespertellino]

Opprinnelig skrevet av McKE:

It's clear that the developers listened only to the most extreme, mechanics abusing players in designing expert +.

Did they listen to someone though? The charts are terrible and awkward to play even if you're good at custom expert+ songs.

[Maddin]

I don't really see the issue though? I mean if you don't like the extremity to which expert+ goes, just don't play it. I for one am happy that expert+ exists, as I already begin to beat Expert maps even though it is only my third day of having the game. Similar to my sister who can reliably beat hard maps after the first day.

So I'd say an Expert+ market should exist, not many people play for perfect scores though. My tracking isn't all that great so no matter my skill, I couldn't reliably hit the blocks as of now, thus the score is only a secondary aspect for me.

[Vespertellino]

Nobody is saying they're to be removed, we are discussing the quality here

[Crazy Coconut]

We do?

Opprinnelig skrevet av McKE:

Expert + ruined it.

Opprinnelig skrevet av McKE:

Does anybody else feel that Expert + was a step in the wrong direction?

The very first post here.

[Vespertellino]

Well it was wrong. Yay.

[JessyJams]

Opprinnelig skrevet av Maddin:

I don't really see the issue though? I mean if you don't like the extremity to which expert+ goes, just don't play it. I for one am happy that expert+ exists, as I already begin to beat Expert maps even though it is only my third day of having the game. Similar to my sister who can reliably beat hard maps after the first day.

So I'd say an Expert+ market should exist, not many people play for perfect scores though. My tracking isn't all that great so no matter my skill, I couldn't reliably hit the blocks as of now, thus the score is only a secondary aspect for me.

I'm by no means unable to play Expert +. It isn't the raw difficulty. I'm managing just fine getting through the songs. It's the manner of the difficulty. So far, it feels like a frustrating slog do to the following issues that are exacerbated from expert, or entirely new problems.

For example, I am hitting my remotes together far more often. I had to buy impact sleeves just because of Expert +. I've never had this issue before- even with the well mapped mod songs. Many patterns are either too tight or require the controllers to be in the same place at the same time, or extremely close to it. You can learn to adapt to this in many cases, but hitting my controllers together shouldn't be part of the learning process. That is entirely not an in game challenge to overcome. There are numerous reports now of people breaking their controllers because of these mappings. Fortunately I got sleeves before it became a problem.

The walls are gamey now rather than believable. There are numerous instances where the collision detection must be gamed in order to hit blocks that was either nonexistent or very rare in expert. Sometimes you have to swing through a wall to hit blocks, and the collision detection isn't so fabulous as to be very accurate with multiple simultaneous collisions.

Phantom misses are far more prevailant. Some expert levels were already testing the sensor precision. It's bonkers now. It is possible to get around it, mind you, but that's a bit besides the point. There's clearly a lot of variance among remotes, and the more they are used the more sensitive they become. They didn't take into account the nature of the sensor's limitations in designing Expert +

Overall, the challenge of expert + often feels cheap and contrived. The songs aren't in tempo as they were with expert. It's clear that the songs weren't designed with expert+ in mind. It had to have been an evolution based the modding scene. I mean, there are songs where there's no music playing, yet I'm swinging at blocks at the same speed as when the music is at maximum tempo. Where's the ebb and flow?

Expecting someone to just not play a mode is a poor expectation. It's akin to people saying you don't have to beat every boss, or get every item, or [insert game mechanic here]. The meta of Beat Saber will always and only be the hardest difficulty. Expert is extinct now. To play it is to achieve nothing.

My expectation was to have more songs like Angel voices, which was brilliant. It was a song designed for expert clearly. Now, I will say that they probably did the best they could with the songs that are there, but really, they should have mapped Expert + patterns to entirely new songs IMO. I don't want to call them lazy. They make a good game, and it's clear that they put a lot of effort into Expert +, but it might have been premature to do.

At some point, I will have S+ in all Expert + like I did in Expert, and then I will move back to the modded scene. All I want to say is that my experience with Expert + so far has not been very positive for the reasons stated above. I think they should take a step back, realize the platform limitations, understand that my sabers have arms attached to them, my head unit has a body below it, and map songs uniquely to Expert + that belong in expert +

[JessyJams]

Opprinnelig skrevet av Lemos:

I play this game a lot. I've played my fair share of e+ maps and I know what feels like good mapping and what feels gimmocky. Some really good expert+ maps in my opinion are twiststep, honesty v2 and sidetracked day. All of those songs are really hard, but all of them are hard because they throw interesting patterns at you. The patterns feel weird at first, but as you learn how to move through those maps it starts to feel more and more satisfying.

The official exptert+ maps, again, just feel really gimmocky. They were all designed to feel unique from any other song, but the way this was addressed wasn't the best. They threw in a bunch of color switching notes, notes that are extremely far from each other, and notes that just feel like they have zero flow whatsoever. The result for all official expert+ maps are pretty much a mess, even considering they were made by respected mappers. I assume when the developers paid these mappers to make the expert+ maps, they really pushed them to make unique stages and this is what caused the flowless maps we see now.

The main difference between official e+ and good e+ maps is how they handle patterns. The official maps don't really have patterns, they just have a series of jump notes that make you swing your arms really fast, and like OP said they make you do silly things just for the sake of a challenge. They are extremely overmapped for this same purpose, just for a little extra challenge, but this completely takes away from the fun of the game. If you go into practice mode for a few minutes, you can memorize exactly what weird hand motions you have to make in order to beat the song, but this is exactly what we hate about these maps. Instead of relying on pattern recognition, you have to go into practice mode and just remember how to beat the song. Where's the fun in that? Beat Saber is fun since you see yourself progress, not because you memorize how to beat a song.

The songs aren't "impossible" because they're really hard, they're impossible because they're poorly designed and more artificial diffuculty comes as a result of that. Everyone who just says "get good lol" doesn't understand what I described above. We have all beaten the e+ maps, but that doesn't change the fact that they're poorly made.

tl;dr: the official e+ maps are overmapped and have no real patterns, forcing you to memorize how to not lose and removing all fun from the game

Precisely.

Hard is good. I like hard. What I dont like is almost breaking controllers, or smashing my knuckles, or having to treat walls like they're illusions.

As you mention, practice mode and no fail are almost requirements now. I used to shun no fail. I'd feel the song out as I went. SUre, I'd fail, but I learned based on the beat. This, for me, is no longer possible. It's pure rote memorization now. It's not because the devs aren't good at mapping, it's because the mappings have betrayed the songs in order to artificially inflate challenge.

Plus, why does it track my failures? That's frustrating. Talk about negative reinforcement. Game Dev Psychology 101, people don't want to be reminded of their failures, they want to be rewarded for their successes. I absolutely don't play songs w/o practice or no fail now till I have them down because of that. Call me vein. I don't care. Seeing how many songs I've failed isn't fun.