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Junior Member
my 3 year old randomly thrashing around keeps beating me??! What's with the switch??
I play this with my three year old, five year old, and 8 year old (I am a 5' 9" adult). We use the joycons. I watch them carefully as we play and they only vaguely or loosely match the motions but are not on beat and are often wiggling around in only a vague representation of what's happening (depending on their age - the 5 and 8 year old actually can do sort of well). But I dance to the songs repeatedly hitting every move exactly on the beat. They frequently beat me, even the 3 year old wiggling around totally off beat. The scoring seems to be totally and completely arbitrary and not remotely represent how the moves are actually being done .Is there something I am doing wrong???? Help! The dancing is fun, but it's a big hindrance to enjoying it and getting into the "game" aspect of it when the outcomes don't seem to remotely resemble anything actually happening. I want to love this, but it's not really fun when the score is meaningless. I could just watch videos of people dancing and try to copy them if that's all I was going for. To test things out, I started sitting down and just flicking my wrist around. My score seemed to improve. I watch and my kids get a "super!" on moves when their arms were going down when they should have been up and I get an "ok" when I'm matching the person on the screen.
Does this have something to do with my limb length?? When I try to hit moves sharper or harder or bigger that does not seem to solve it (which makes sense, I guess, because it's not like my toddler is hitting things hard or sharp or going big. He's waving his little arms around). I did beat them when we did the song baby shark!! It does not strike me as a coincidence that this is the only one I reliably win, because this song consists mostly of just holding your hands together and moving your wrists up and down in the motion of a jaw (whatever is going wrong with the accelerometers with my bigger arm motion as a taller person would be less a factor in a song like that because everybody's motion would be more similar, no matter limb length/height??)
It has to have something to do with my size, but i'm the height of an average man, so it seems weird the game just does not work with adults? I'm just bamboozled, with how totally random the scoring seems to be, that anyone buys this game or can remotely tolerate it. Is there something going uniquely wrong with me, or is it just understood that this is really random/arbitrary crap? For awhile my 8 year old was laughing hysterically about beating me randomly flicking his wrist around sitting down. I did try to just bring my arms in closer to my body and just go "smaller" with my arm movements, and I felt like maybe my score was increasing, but they are still beating me pretty reliably.
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Member
Do you remember how much you and your kids score? Maybe we can give you tips.
About getting a bad scoring at moves maybe you are holding the joycon in a wrong way. Make sure to do grab it like the game tells you. Wrists movements and intensity affects scoring too.
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Member
The scoring can definitely seem funny, contradictory, frustrating at times. It seemed that way to me when I was new to the game and really had no idea what was going on. Now, a few years later, I feel like the scoring is actually pretty good, far better than I had realized in my first couple of years playing the game.
I started playing Just Dance 2015 with my daughter, having never danced before. In the beginning, she was WAY better than I was. But now I "see" the dances much better, I realize that I wasn't actually doing most of the dances quite right, and have much more experience with what the game seems to be looking for.
I've seen all kinds of weird things. One time, I was playing a dance over and over, trying to hit a stubborn gold move with Wii U, and while I took an X, I heard a vibration behind me, and realize that a remote sitting motionless on the couch registered the gold move. Here, I was trying hard as I could to do the move correctly, and a remote sitting idly got credit for doing it right. In Just Dance 2017, during a video challenge, my opponent stopped dancing about halfway through, grabbed the Wii remote cord, and started spinning it in a circle. She hit a surprising number of perfects and still managed 5 stars. It's sometimes funny what "wrong" things can score well on certain songs.
I think partly it has to do with "penalties" that come in a variety of forms. There are many different things that different moves in different dances are looking for, and penalize you if you don't meet the condition. Different moves can look for totally different things. So if you're not meeting that criteria, you can take an X or OK, being penalized for some mistake that you don't realize that you're making. Another person may be doing the move in a way that seems visually wrong, but if the other person isn't making the specific mistake that the game is looking for on that move, they can score higher on that move than someone who visually doesn't seem to be far off, but who is making that particular mistake.
Switch and other forms of remote dancing appear to favor smooth motions on many moves, in general. Even how tightly or lightly you grip the control, things like that can factor in. Timing isn't the only thing that matters. There is also technique to some extent, but it may be more relative motion in some cases. And there are many interesting things it can measure, like change in speed, stopping at the right moment (whereas other moves may specifically check that the motion is continuing).
When I take X's or OK"s, I experiment with the move, trying to see if I can figure it out. I also look more closely at the coach to see what I might be missing. Every time I figure out how to turn a stubborn Ok into a consistent Perfect, I learn something about how the game works and another way that the game tries to judge if a move is made correctly or incorrectly. Over the years, there have been many times where I finally discovered that I wasn't doing the move properly, and when I finally made the correction, my score improved. Sometimes the game impresses me with what it was looking for, or the level of detail that it was able to pick up.
As I've learned to do the actual choreography better, copying everything the coach does more closely, syncing up better, my scores have improved. I realize now that in the early days I was doing many things wrong. Looking back, many of the scores on dances that I was struggling with make sense now. I prefer Xbox Kinect now, but have still tried Switch occasionally. When I was first dancing, I wish I had realized how important it was to try to make smooth motions when dancing with a remote. I also wish I had learned sooner to try to learn the full-body choreography sooner, and not get so caught up focusing on my right hand that I wasn't doing the whole body dance as well as I should have. The higher the score (especially, in the 13,000's or high 12,000's), the better the scoring seems to work. The lower the score, the game is detecting that there are important mistakes being made, and when two different players are making important mistakes, the game may have trouble judging which mistakes are worse than others.
Happy dancing, and good luck.
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Community Manager
Hey ErinAshley2021,
Thanks for reaching out about this.
If you're able, can you record some short clips so we can see the differences in scoring and send them to our Support Website?