I tried the 2019 WDF for the first time yesterday using the PS4 camera. I danced to 7 songs in a row without interruption.
Today I tried it for the second time, but was disconnected after the second dance.
But there was a problem even worse than the disconnection.
I had finished the second dance, Toy. It showed me my scorecard (breakdown of perfects, supers, goods, and okays). I was pretty happy with my dance and wondering if I'd hit a new high score.
But on the next screen, which was going to show the leaderboard along with my score, I instead received the disconnect error message.
That's so FRUSTRATING. I completed the entire dance. I saw the table of perfects, supers, goods, and okays. But the game can't tell me what my SCORE was? Why not?
It's one thing to get kicked off the dance floor. But it's another thing to invest a few minutes in a dance, work up a good sweat, and not even get to learn what your score was for your effort. (Even if the game had been using some predictive algorithm to try to determine my score relative to other dancers, considering possible lag issues, once the disconnection occurred, it should be able to tell me my actual score without any issue. Unfortunately, the game just isn't designed to show me my score in this instance.)
If you have already completed the dance, if you're getting disconnected, the game should show you your score. We're sorry, but you have been disconnected from the dance floor. However, since you completed the dance, we can tell you that you score was _____. That would be a nice consolation.
But that wasn't the end of my troubles. When I got back into the game a few moments later and returned to the WDF, I saw that the next song was already in progress. I don't like to start a dance late, so I waited patiently for the song to end. But when it was over, I discovered that a tournament had begun. So great, I missed out on the first song of a tournament. I don't like to dance in a tournament when I miss part or all of the first song, so I just quit the game. (Theoretically, if I just wait 7 minutes, that should be enough time for the next two songs of the tournament to end. However, there had been a tournament in progress yesterday when I joined the WDF, and it took more than 10 minutes before the tournament actually ended. Must be a lag issue.)
Another crazy thing is that after the first dance today, Sugar, although I finished in second place for the dance, the player who finished first (it seemed like the Russian alphabet was used) had a score of 0 displayed. Very interesting.
Last year and this year both, you can be in first place during the dance, finish with all perfects from that point on, and not even finish in the top two after the dance is complete. I'm guessing this is some lag issue, but it can feel disappointing. Theoretically, if you're in first place and don't make any mistakes from there on, especially if there are no gold moves, you probably shouldn't lose, if all the data were in sync. But the funny thing is that you can wind up with 13100 and lose to a score of 13300. Come on, I had a few supers. The person who hit 13300 had a virtually perfect dance. The game must have known after my first couple of supers that I wasn't going to finish first.
My speculation is that there are lag issues. If so, how serious are they? One thing I don't like is when I just miss a tournament. After the first song, if I wait 7 minutes, the third song should be about complete, but very often the game is trying to get me to start the third song 7 minutes later when I return. There's no way the second song took 7 minutes. So either it was trying to get me to start the tournament a few minutes early or it's trying to get me to join the third dance of the tournament a few minutes late. Either way, the game's behavior is trying to "create" lags, when it seems like the game should be programmed to try to eliminate lags. (Outside of tournaments, the game could skip an entire song for certain players in order to try keep everyone better in sync.) Then of course there may be data delays, connectivity issues, etc., at home, on your network, or even at Xbox, Wii, Switch, or Sony's end, or Ubisoft's end.
To be fair, the WDF is far superior to the 2015 Wii U WDF. Back then, it would clip everyone else's scores, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, so much so that everyone who didn't realize what was happening thought that they were way better than everyone else (once they learned how to hit 5 stars on most of the dances). Just before 2017 came out, the 2015 WDF showed marked improvement. I'm guessing you tested out some way to make it better, and based on the 2017 WDF it showed tremendous improvement. My point today is that it still doesn't seem to be perfect. Evey version of JD mentions a "revamped" WDF, but since 2017 it has scarcely changed.
I'm guessing another issue is that many dancers lurk around, checking in after each song to check scores or see who is dancing, skipping dances they don't like, such that if there are any lag issues (again that was speculation on my part), if there is some predictive element to the WDF scoring, it must be a real pain to have dancers sitting on the sidelines who can hit nearly perfect scores, not knowing when they will finally jump in and actually dance or how long they will choose to stay.
I would be in favor of taking tournaments off the WDF, making a separate venue for tournaments. For example, if you go to the Tournaments section (which doesn't currently exist), there might be an Hourly tournament and a Daily tournament. For the Hourly tournament, there might be a few random songs, and you could dance to each song as many times as you wish and it would add your best attempts together. The leaderboard would show "the best scores so far." Maybe when the tournament is over and all the scores are in (including any lags), there would be a leaderboard that you could pull up (available until the next tournament ends). Even players not in the tournament could potentially check out the leaderboard (unless that creates some other problem, in which case the program could simply require completing the tournament first).
For a big tournament, like the JWDC, this may alleviate some of the issues of having hundreds of players on the WDF doing the same dances at the same time. It could also potentially alleviate some connectivity issues. You wouldn't really have to be "online" and "connected" to participate: You would just need a connection sometime after you finished to submit your score and see the leaderboard.
I admit, it's a cool experience to feel like you're dancing alongside hundreds of dancers at the same time, and to see your name moving up or down the leaderboard. The WDF offers this experience, and could still offer the usual Song Vote experience even if you adopted something like my idea for tournaments. If you're going to be disconnected, it's really frustrating if it happens during a tournament, so this might be another reason to move the tournament experience off the dance floor.
But if you can improve the issues with the WDF, or at least show me my score when being disconnected after a dance, that would be great. Thank you.
I'm sorry. My first post was long enough. But I just went on the WDF and feel the need to add a little more.
When I went back on, it was playing Havana (Alternate). When the song was over, there was a song vote for Mad Love (main version) and OMG alternate. After the song vote, it showed the Mad Love (main version had won the song vote). Then it shows a new screen, saying that the community had chosen Havana Alternate (which had been the previous song, already completed I had thought). But then yet a totally different song showed up, and I danced to Where Are You Now (Alternate). I got disconnected again, after the dance was complete, after seeing my scorecard but not my score.
So I tried one more time. The next song vote was for Bang Bang Bang (Alternate) and Where Are You Now (Alternate). Okay, sow now the previous dance makes sense, the WDF is just a bit confused about the order and timing. But the next song that came up was yet again totally different, it was Mad Love (Alternate, not the main version showing in a previous song vote). I had a pretty good dance to Mad Love Alternate, probably because it had come up yesterday. But even though yesterday I finished in the top 3 for this dance, today I was disconnected.
However, when I checked the song list outside of the WDF, it showed a new high score. :-) THANK YOU! So now I see that if you do beat your old high score on the WDF and get disconnected, it can save your score (even though it would be nice if it showed your score first). But there is a little problem with this. Sometimes my Xbox Kinect score is better than my PS4 camera score (but only sometimes). So if, for example, my high Xbox score is 13,100 and my high PS4 score was 12,900 and I hit a score in between these two values on the PS4 and get disconnected, I would have no way of knowing that I had improved my PS4 score. I really wish you wouldn't show me my high Xbox scores when I'm dancing to PS4 (or Switch or Wii U). I wish you would keep my different platform scores separate. (I also wish you would separate Move players from Camera players from Phone players. The best score of the week should be different for each mode of game play, since the level of difficulty is different with each mode for different songs.)
A week or two ago, on either Switch or PS4, someone had a high score of 20,000 for Dancer of the Week on multiple songs. Then another time the Dancer of the Week was level 1 on multiple songs (there is no way you can be level one after dancing to multiple songs, as your level increases very rapidly in the beginning). A little glitchy. Thank you for letting me share.
I see that an announcement regarding WDF issues (including those I had described) has been posted in the News section:
https://forums.ubi.com/showthread.ph...p-Other-Issues
Thank you, Ubisoft, for this update, the information, and the coming fixes.