Add negative approach rates to difficulty adjust mod "extend limits".

[Nyanaro]

Currently when clicking the "Extended Limits" option when customizing the "Difficulty Adjust" mod, the maximum approach rate increases to 11 as it is with AR10+DT normally, but the minimum option is still 0, despite normally being able to go down to -5 with AR0+HT.

While I would be somewhat happy with the extend limits approach rate option being expanded to -5 to match AR11, I would really enjoy if it were possible to bring it down even further, down to -50 for example (or some other really low number). Currently there exists custom stable clients as well as McOsu which let you do this.

TL;DR
Let users decrease approach rates to far below 0 when using the "Extend Limits" option for the "Difficulty Adjust" mod. :)

[Rekunan]

somewhat related: #16732

[Bubbleman532]

Would be great to see how feasible this is, a lot of top reading players enjoy pushing these limits

[peppy]

Does this also mean there's going to be -OD, -CS, etc.? It feels very weird offering one but not the others, and setting arbitrary limits per difficulty slider. If not, I do wonder if this should not be its own mod, rather than difficulty adjust having out-of-bound limits.

Something like "Infinite Approach" which starts at AR0 and offers localised adjustment. Although I can imagine the next issue is that players would want to use it alongside Difficulty Adjust, and compatibility support between them will be a pain.

[Nyanaro]

While I'm only concerned with approach rate myself, I don't see why CS and OD shouldn't get access to negative values. (-OD is a bit silly, as this is a rhythm game after all, but who am I to judge)

I'm sure there are people who want to play with those as well.

[isakvik]

There is likely to be significant performance degradation with very large values if we just allow anything.

It's a performance consideration in the same way you might want to support maps with 1000 sliders a second, but it's not really a case worth optimizing for, even if allowed. Anyone pushing the envelope on how many objects are rendered at once would probably be aware that they're doing just that, and would be okay with an FPS drop.

Does this also mean there's going to be -OD, -CS, etc.? It feels very weird offering one but not the others

It's not the most elegant solution, but there's merit to AR specifically because it's so tied to players' perception of the game that challenging it becomes its own rabbit hole of adaptability and improvement, so it matches what people would actually use (like the reason why this thread exists in the first place).

Anyway, made a PR last night (#24736) adding this to Difficulty Adjust, allowing down to -10. It's not really pushing the limits of what the game can do at all (and it's the simplest viable implementation), but it will allow players to explore the reading space a bit more.

[bdach]

in the same way you might want to support maps with 1000 sliders a second, but it's not really a case worth optimizing for, even if allowed

You'll say that, but we want the game to be able to handle as much as can be thrown at it. Many hours in the past were spent using centipede as basically a performance benchmark for lazer. There are several loved maps that are - to put it mildly - pushing envelopes in terms of how much stuff is on screen (mania bar line spam, catch banana spam) and we're inevitably going to get reports about those too as soon as we push lazer out to more users.

You can call it a point of pride if you will, but in practice, it often pans out that looking away from that sort of stuff results in user reports anyway (and rightly so...)

[isakvik]

Of course you want the game to be as smooth as possible for every case, since it allows for more flexibility in what you can actually put in the game, but performance as a reason not to implement excessively low ARs is more like an ideological point of "not allowing bad performance in the client" rather than letting the players figure out where the bar of expectation of reasonable performance should be.

But yeah, you do have much more experience dealing with community complaints than me. If allowing stupid ARs at all through this setting would invite a flood of reports from say, mobile players, then there's much more of a reason to optimize further before implementing it.