Competitive play

Does anyone have any ideas/systems for how to allow people of different skill levels to play head to head?

I'm thinking something along the lines of handicap bowling, where it's more about consistancy and improvement and actual score is only really a tie breaker.

Obviously I also want to mix up songs all the time, so thoughts on how to fairly pick songs would also be nice.

(I'm only talking scorewise here. Not freestyle.)

First, put the person with the lower skill level in a sealed room with a DDR machine, and don't let them out until they're as good as the more skilled player. ;)

Sorry, I'm no help. I've never even been to a tournament.

Maybe something like for every miss you lose a certain amount of points? It won't work if you do it on the ones you get right. Do you mean just someone playing on Standard and Heavy? Off-topic but is there a difference between Miss and Boo? Or are they just random?

Here's how it would be done.

You play by percentage. Say you have a player who plays on Trick and one who plays on Maniac. The trickster would pick a song and play it on Standard and the maniac would play the song on Heavy. Lets say that the song on Trick has 260 steps and on Maniac it has 400 steps.

After the song is played both players full combo the song. The Trickster (coined that phrase from www.10kcommotion.com) receives 250 perfects and 10 greats and the Maniac receives 380 perfects and 20 greats. Who wins? The Trickster because 96.2% of his/her steps were perfects and 95% of the Maniac's steps were perfects.

And the difference between a boo and a miss is that on a boo the arrow is still hit, just horribly off beat, and a miss is when the arrow isn't hit at all. I don't know, however, which one does more damage.

But Kel - What would be the motivation to play on a heavier difficulty level then?

I think there would be like a separate division. Like for me, if i would play the songs on heavy i probably wouldn't qualify because i usually get about 20-40 greats depending on the song, but i know people who get 0-7 on ANY song. So i would do better if i were in the Standard Division. Those who SDG (single-digit 'great') songs would be in the maniac division.