Editing Demonlist (Pointercrate) (section)

==Reception==
Though the Pointercrate website's interface and feature suite were met with general praise, since moving to Pointercrate, the Demonlist has received significant criticism, including by Riot.<ref>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzbrsWacNd0</ref>

===Impact===
====Players====
The creation of a centralized Demonlist paved the way for a new era of competition, achievement, and drive for most of the community, whether players were trying to claim the top spot on the points leaderboard or create the hardest levels. The rise of 'list grinders' created abundant friendly competition in the community. The points system allowed players to improve the goalposts they could strive towards. The phrases 'hardest Demons' or 'top X Demon' became much more impactful due to streamlining the categorization of the hardest levels. The creation of the Demonlist led to an increase in content focused on challenging levels, and much of the community began tuning in to watch the skill ceiling pushed ever higher. In addition, the guidelines imposed by the Demonlist are effectively treated as empirical in the modern community, and gameplay that violates them is dismissed as illegitimate. The rise of mods has created a consistent base for what is and is not considered cheating.

====Level creation====
One of the most widespread criticisms of the Demonlist is a perceived oversaturation of ranked levels.<ref>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDtS2HXlE0M</ref> Between [[Update 2.1|Updates 2.1]] and [[Update 2.2|2.2]], nearly 500 new levels were placed on the Demonlist at an increasing rate per year; around 100 of these levels after 2020 were placed approximately in between Zodiac and [[Plasma Pulse Finale]], respectively #1 and #12 at the time. Numerous Demons are accused of being created with the primary intent of receiving placement on the Demonlist, including [[Avernus]].<ref>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebXs-Q5Rtw0</ref>

Towards the end of Update 2.1, players began to note the ever-escalating difficulty of the Demonlist; Main List level difficulty officially began to exceed that of popular formerly impossible levels, starting with the placement of [[Silent Club]] at #15. With prohibitively difficult gameplay elements such as frame-perfects and extreme straight-flying becoming more prevalent in List levels, players began to question the accessibility of the Demonlist. During the release of Update 2.2, the four top Demons, Avernus, [[Acheron]], [[Silent clubstep]] and [[Abyss of Darkness]], received significant criticism from victors for their lack of enjoyment.<ref>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWyNtYYpjy8</ref><ref>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBKR6aUorzA</ref><ref>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57aQ3EmSqQ4</ref><ref>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZwCXjVdqz0</ref>

===FPS bypass===
The invention of the mod FPS bypass, which allowed users to play at any frame rate (during Update 2.1, where on vanilla, higher frame rates than 60 were only achievable by having a high refresh-rate monitor and using VSync), sparked a three-year controversy in which players debated whether the tool should be considered illegitimate. Some time before it was allowed on the Demonlist, the player PoweredByPie created a method to trick the game into thinking a player was using a higher refresh rate, allowing higher frame rates with VSync. This method was known as 'piepass'. However, despite technically still allowing behaviour not possible in vanilla (specifically, eliminating the need for VSync increased precision, as VSync adds an extra frame of delay), FPS bypass was deemed visually indistinguishable. 

The Demonlist's guideline against FPS bypass was finally lifted on 25 November 2020, permitting its use up to and including 300FPS. On 11 April 2021, the maximum allowed frame rate was increased from 300 to 360, and it remained at 360 for the rest of Update 2.1. The cap on FPS was due to a variety of factors, including that it was not too unreasonable for players to be able to run, 360Hz monitors started being sold to consumers, and because 360FPS was a friendly value on many common refresh rates (i.e, 360 is evenly divisible by 60, 120, and 180).

Unlike Update 2.1, Update 2.2 locked the physics rate to 240TPS, rather than a physics rate which scaled with the frame rate (specifically, 4 physics calculations per frame on Update 2.1), and includes its own version of an FPS unlocker, so for any record achieved in Update 2.2, any FPS is permitted.

===Click Between Frames===
On 8 April 2024, community member syzzi released a mod titled Click Between Frames (CBF), following an earlier mod, Zero Delay, created for Update 2.1, which removed the extra frame of delay caused by a vanilla bug affecting discrete graphics cards, which has since been fixed as of Update 2.2. CBF was created in response to the drastic changes in how inputs and physics work introduced by Update 2.2. To put it into perspective, as described in a previous section, the physics calculation rate in Update 2.1 scaled with the frame rate, resulting in four physics calculations per frame. As the physics rate increased, the unusual gameplay behaviour became more pronounced. One primary example of this is the ship, which was considered incredibly 'floaty' at higher frame rates because rotation was much slower. At a certain threshold in Update 2.1, roughly 1,000FPS, the ship and wave game-modes would even stop rotating entirely (which is why many 'Impossible Levels' feature the bug during their showcases). On top of this strange behaviour with physics, the player's input rate also scaled proportionally with the frame rate. In the later years of Update 2.1, the top-playing community was set on using 360FPS due to the rules of the Demonlist. This implementation meant that for those records, the player's input rate would be 360TPS, and the physics rate would be 1,440Hz.

Once Update 2.2 was released, RobTop decided to lock both the input and physics rates to 240TPS/240Hz. This decision set the top-playing community back because it led players to discover that the game felt both less precise in terms of input and harder to control in terms of physics. Specifically, the 240Hz physics rate in Update 2.2 mirrors the 60FPS physics rate in Update 2.1. The clear downgrade prompted the Demonlist to address these issues quickly, and on 23 December 2023, physics bypass was permitted for usage up to 360 physics ticks per second. This decision, however, was incredibly controversial because, first, it ignored the deliberate reasoning RobTop had for locking the physics rate to 240Hz, and second, it did not work as 360FPS did in Update 2.1, since the physics rate only ran at 360Hz, not 1440Hz. Even internally, the Demonlist team was not entirely comfortable with the physics bypass, and it was seen more as a band-aid fix for a fundamental problem that would persist.

Once syzzi had created CBF, it was recognized as a brilliant solution to bridging the gap between Update 2.1 and Update 2.2. The way CBF works is by recording the precise time of an input, determining where between the previous and current next full physics step the click occurred, and when the next physics step runs, it applies the click with a small deltatime offset in the physics calculations, allowing the game to run at the same physics rate as vanilla, with essentially uncapped precision (depending on the player's device's polling rate), and with the same precision no matter the frame rate. The release of the mod prompted discussion within the community about its legitimacy, particularly regarding existing Demonlist guidelines (such as the allowance for physics bypass). The list team conducted a poll to gather community consensus, and the mod was ultimately permitted for all records in June of the same year and subsequently disallowed physics bypass, as CBF provided equal or greater benefits without physics-related bugs. A further explanation of the team's reasoning can be found [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ef43PV5jxMDOKsXWdhGS6r6iwqdce4GVG278vpNnOo4/edit?tab=t.0 here].

Despite CBF being a seamless solution on the surface, that did not stop the mod from having one of the largest running controversies in the modern game. The primary issue that prevented the unanimous adoption of CBF was that RobTop refused to rate levels verified while using it. This stance created an unfair system within top play, where verifiers would be stuck using, all things considered, a much worse input system than the players who were completing such 2.2 levels for list points. As a result, many Extreme Demons during this time featured 'CBF Blockers', which were mechanisms created with triggers that took advantage of CBF inputs not occurring on the physics steps, which would either block the usage of CBF while completing the level, like with [[Nullscapes]], or significantly buff the level for people using CBF, such as with KOSETSU. These CBF Blockers were both understandable for creating an even playing field between verifiers and normal players, and also very distasteful for forcing players to ignore the progress made to properly continue the flow of top play after the setbacks caused by Update 2.2.

These tensions following the allowance of CBF on the Demonlist would pervade the top playing community, and this eventually pushed the Demonlist to attempt their own solution, under the assumption that CBF would not be allowed for use during rated verifications. Following a poll on 25 May 2025, the Demonlist officially began moving forward with Rated+, a separate tab in Pointercrate's Demonlist and Stats Viewer intended to allow unrated levels to be placed and completed. The primary goal with Rated+ was to standardize the usage of CBF across all players, as to remove the tension in the community surrounding it, but that was not its only goal, as the separation from RobTop's rating system had been a long-discussed topic in the past usually concerning instances where top levels take unreasonably long to be rated after their verification, such as [[Crimson Planet]] and [[WcropoliX]], and instances where presumably rate-worthy levels just are not rated in general. Rated+ started active development a couple of months after its announcement and was essentially finished sometime between October and November in the same year. For the months after it was ready to be deployed to the site, it sat in stasis because the site owner, stadust, was increasingly busy, and it could have been released at any time.

On 19 January 2026, RobTop updated Geometry Dash to Update 2.208, which featured his own personal implementation of CBF, known as Click Between Steps (CBS). The initial version of CBS featured several stark differences from syzzi's CBF, such as each click creating a brand-new physics step, which ran counter to his philosophy of a locked physics rate in Update 2.2. It also shifted the alignment while playing levels, meaning the input system still ran on the same thread as the game. This version was met with harsh criticism, as players compiled extensive evidence of its various bugs. Just one day later, on 20 January 2026, RobTop released Update 2.2081, which seemingly addressed most concerns and intended to change CBS to feel more like CBF. After extensive player investigation and confirmation from a lead developer of the widely popular mod loader Geode, it was discovered that the updated version of CBS, while running on a separate thread, similar to CBF, and maintaining the constant 240Hz physics rate, caps precision at 480 input ticks per second. Although this version of CBS is still worse than syzzi's CBF, it seems that RobTop intended to add the feature to justify his future decisions regarding CBF.

On 29 January 2026, following the rating of many important unrated Extreme Demons such as [[Through The Gates]] and Khorne, RobTop decided to rate [[Ashley Wave Trials]], which was the first Extreme Demon to be rated as having only been completed using CBF during verification by Zoink.

===Rated+ abandonment and comeback===
The combination of both addressing the most pervasive problem in top play (the unfairness with CBF) and the decision to rate a large number of important unrated levels meant that Rated+ had lost a significant portion of its incentive to be deployed as a feature of the Pointercrate Demonlist. On 31 January 2026, Rated+ was temporarily retired. Click Between Frames now, comfortably, stands as the primary input method for top play. On 14 May, the Demonlist team revisited the Rated+ project, running a poll on whether unrated levels should be eligible for the list and how to implement it: adding unrated levels directly to the current list, adding them to a separate Rated+ tab, adding cosmetic unrated levels, etc. Most people agree that unrated levels should be included on the list and that a Rated+ tab should be implemented for both rated and unrated levels. That was also confirmed in the poll, in which 50.2% of players were keen on adding the Rated+ tab. This change to the Pointercrate Demonlist will be one of the first in a very long time.

Most members of the community agree with this decision, as the Rated+ tab will be useful for players and maybe even for RobTop, who could check Pointercrate to see which list-worthy levels remain unrated.