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Deleting Old Ranked Maps vs Osu Seasons

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Topic Starter
Aqo
God damn I'm really bad at writing thread OPs. Every time I try to make a short OP I end up with a whole damned article.

TL;DR: (still long WTF)

Some people want old ranked maps to be deleted.
Reasons: Old maps discourage new players from playing osu, because they search for songs they like and end up playing bad unfun maps from 2009. Old ranked maps are often unrankable by today's standards, and would not get ranked if they were in pending today. So why are they still ranked.
Osu is a game that develops and improves over time, but ranked maps right now stay static and out of tune with the game's advancement.

Old players might get offended by losing ranking for old scores they gained on old maps. This was more relevant back when scores was the main ranking, but now with PP old players might change their opinion on this.

Instead of just deleting old ranked maps, why not give osu seasons like every other leaderboard game that exists today, and have maps re-ranked per season? This will shell out bad maps every 4 months or so. Per season, stats from last season would be displayed in account history, and the stats would be reset for the new season, so everybody would have their chance to re-earn their rightful spot on the leaderboard based on their current level.

Opinions? Would you like osu to have seasons?
i.e. instead of deleting old ranked maps, just make them become unranked as the level of mapping goes up.
Old scores gained on maps that became unranked would be kept in account history for previous seasons, but would not affect new seasons.
You'd need to regain top scores of maps that get re-ranked for the new season; this will keep the leaderboard competitive and skill-based over grind-based, following the direction of PP over scores, in conjunction with seasons.

Original OP (WARNING: LONG!):

SPOILER
I've seen some people mention wanting to have old ranked maps deleted. I'm sure everybody already has their own solid opinion about whether old ranked maps should be deleted or not, and personally I do not want to ask them to be deleted, I just want to shell some things out.

1. The reason some people want old ranked to be deleted is because, well, they're bad. Not only that old ranked maps don't follow today's ranking rules at all - a lot of them break length limits, don't have more than one difficulty, have hold sliders that are counterintuitive to play, etc - not only this, but a lot of those maps are plain BAD.

Examples for why many of them are bad:
(A) Terribly low AR for the speed the map goes at. This makes some of them practically easier to read with HR, and almost impossible to read without it.
(B) Completely inconsistent movement patterns. I'm not sure if distance snap simply didn't exist or mappers just chose to ignore it completely back in the day, but some maps have completely ridiculous movement patterns that require either memorization or being 10 times better than the map's "level" to play correctly with reading.
(C) The timing just doesn't match the song. Putting aside the fact that I think even over half of today's ranked maps fail to have a correct timing for the melody of the song, the situation today compared to old ranked is night and day - over 95% of the old ranked maps (I literally downloaded 200 of them and forced myself to play them to see and it was terrible) have horrid nonsensical timing on the level of "just put notes snapped to the bpm, song feels more intense at a point? PUT MORE NOTES! timing? what's that?".

Please say something if you disagree with this - I have yet to see somebody who thinks old ranked are nearly as good as today's ranked, and I believe most people agree that for nearly all old ranked maps, were they a new map today being in pending - it would not get ranked.

-----

So ok, unless you're going to say you disagree with the above, then we agree old ranked maps are bad. Is there a problem with this, though?

The main problem I see is:
New players who just start the game often prefer to just search for songs they know instead of playing whatever is the latest ranked. As a result, they end up playing random ranked maps from 2009-2010. And then you see new players basically just either (A) quit the game because it wasn't fun for them (B) complain that they can't improve (C) say osu is all about memorization (without FL)

Well that's basically it?

However another "issue" is that if you're a seasoned player and you decide to do score grinding or PP grinding to beef up your account stats, the nature of the system implies it's more efficient to play terrible old maps instead of improving your scores on fun new maps, if you want to boost your score faster. In other words, if you want to get higher on the leaderboard, you need to play unfun maps. Now I bet somebody will go and say "well, grinding score isn't supposed to be fun anyway". But you know, retrying good, new maps, *is* fun. However playing maps that make no sense just to get their ranked points feels stupid and like a waste of time, but it essentially means that if you rather play your favorite unranked maps for fun you will have weak ranking display on your account. Again, I don't know if you can actually list this as a problem, because /who cares/. Just play for fun, right? So I'll just throw this out here as a random "issue".

-----

It still boils down to this: old ranked maps would not be ranked by today's standards. So why are they still ranked?
Lets look at this from a different angle: what would happen if they got unranked?

1. New players would not be able to find them as easily, and they'll end up playing new ranked maps. This might either lead them to enjoy the game more, due to more fun maps, or quit the game faster, because of not finding the songs they want to play on.

2. A lot of old players would lose a lot of their old scores.

On #2, I think that had osu still used the score system like it used to, there would be a lot of opposition for this. However now that the PP system kicked in, would losing those old scores really matter? Would players who grinded for hours to get an SS with HR+FL on some random map from 2010 be angry that their score achievement is no longer visible to the public? Does anybody even look at that anymore? <- I'm curious to see what old players have to say on this.

---

Here's an idea: instead of deleting old ranked maps, why not create leaderboard seasons? Start an osu Season 2, players would get to keep their Season 1 stats which would be whatever stats they had on the start of S2, but starting from that point onwards, all of your plays would count towards S2. Stuff like global accuracy, score, pp, etc, would be season-specific, and you'll be able to see people's current season stats normally like right now, while old season stats would be archived per account and visible on a small table in a small section that belongs to it.
Almost every single game with a leaderboard has seasons that reset stats per new season. Frankly I'm surprised osu didn't do this yet.

Every time a new season starts, maps would need to be re-ranked. i.e. re-reviewed for ranking. If a map was ranked for S1, it won't be automatically ranked for S2 until re-reviewed. The re-review should be much easier and faster than an initial review of a map in WIP state, because you'd be going over maps in their already final state. So the process would be as simple just play each map difficulty once, and if it feels alright, re-rank it. If there's a minor problem you could even fix it while re-ranking. (For example the background image for No.39... the map is good... just replace the BG image lol)

Even though map difficulties are completely different maps, I think just checking the top difficulty can be enough to judge if the map was mapped well or not. Maybe two diffs if it's a collab map. So re-ranking shouldn't take long... with an average of 3 minutes drain time per map (and it really is less I bet), you could re-rank 15-20 maps per hour alone. With a MAT team of several people, who are osu players anyway who spend time playing maps anyway, and it wouldn't take them any more effort than re-playing an old map and saying whether it's okay or not, you could re-rank a few hundreds of maps per week.

For simplicity, just keep the last 2 months ranked maps from Season X still ranked for season X+1, and MATs can randomly take time to play maps from earlier than 2 months and onwards back in the timeline to re-rank them, or if they just remember a fun map from their memory re-rank it after playing it once instantly.

How's this for an idea?
Frizz
Why would anyone delete old maps? They're still quite fun to play and they give you the whole new experience rather than playing today maps.

Also,
>bad unfun maps from 2009

inb4 didn't read the whole text
Topic Starter
Aqo
I found several gems in ranked 2009-2010. Fun old ranked maps do exist.
Sadly, they're not the majority. It's very far from it...
Ok, "fun" is relative, a better word would be, uh, maps that make sense? I think you know what I mean. An AR6 map with circles placed all across the screen in random timings completely unrelated to the song with random short spinners that even Auto struggles to clear, can surely be fun for somebody, but probably not for most players.
CXu
No.
silmarilen

CXu wrote:

No.
Kert
so CXute

CXu wrote:

No.
Vish024
None of that made any visible sense whatsoever.
Cho_old
Getting completely rid of them would be something I'd be against, but some kind of "outdated" or as you said

"instead of deleting old ranked maps, just make them become unranked as the level of mapping goes up."

Doesn't seem like that bad of an idea since it could keep newbies away from all of the "bad" maps. (Though expect all the people who thrive on the ego from their ranked score etc. to be offended by your idea.)
Frizz

CXu wrote:

No.
silmarilen
long answer:
unranking old maps that are unrankable by current rules would be a good idea, but nobody is gonna skim through 5k songs to find ones that are unrankable.
making seasons is just stupid because people dont want to play the same map all the time to get the same score all the time, and nobody wants to recheck all the maps for every season to get them ranked again
Topic Starter
Aqo
So basically you disagree with the idea of having to re-play maps you already played before and "beat"? I guess that makes sense.

What about the point of unranking old maps that are not up to today's standards, though, do you agree with this notion or not? Or do you think it's okay that 90% of the ranked maps before 2011 are not rank-liable by today's standards and that they should be kept ranked forever?

If the issue is finding someone to go over them and find what to keep ranked and what to unrank, I don't mind even doing that myself, I can clear 200 oldmaps per week and submit reports to MAT team of what maps are legit and what maps have issues, along with specifically written down report of what's wrong per map (problems with timing, difficulties, score settings, unrankable elements, etc)... it honestly doesn't take that long to do.
CXu

Aqo wrote:

What about the point of unranking old maps that are not up to today's standards, though
No.
Ohrami
Both of these ideas are horrible. Please stop posting. If you don't like 2009 maps, you don't have to play them.

Also, introducing "seasons" would make extremely good scores not nearly as important. I just, what. Are you on drugs or something?
eldnl
I know that the oldest maps are not that good, but that's completely subjective, I would agree to delete some maps, but will be no more than 10 maps, which are extremely senseless and boring.
Topic Starter
Aqo

Kyou-kun wrote:

Also, introducing "seasons" would make extremely good scores not nearly as important.
Isn't it the opposite? Good scores would be extremely important when you have a limited time to get them; people who manage to get more of them in the shorter time span of a season would rank higher than those who can't, which will be a truer display of your skill at a point of time instead of how long you played.
silmarilen
just saying guys, if a song follows the ranking rules or not is not subjective.
its not about if the song plays nice, its about if it would actually be rankable if it was made today
thelewa
The problem is that a huge amount of beatmaps would have to be unranked, and each one of them would have to be inspected before unranking. Unranking only a few maps is not an option because people will then complain: "Why did you not unrank THIS map too?!".

Besides I don't even think that BATs are allowed to unrank old maps at all. Peppy doesn't most likely want it to happen either.
Frizz

Aqo wrote:

What about the point of unranking old maps that are not up to today's standards
Anyone who wanted to unrank old maps are disrespectful to old mappers. Seriously, stop with the whole "unranking old maps" idea.
Wishy
It is true indeed that some players end up playing old shit maps from 2009 and quit the game since it's not fun, got two friends that stopped playing since they searched for a few songs and ended up playing old maps that just sucked, got them back to play after I showed them a few new maps but yeah most old maps are so bad... seriously went to one of those friends I'm talking about house's, wanted to play osu! and lol all the maps he had were so damn old and bad no wonder he played for less than an hour.
Ohrami

Aqo wrote:

Kyou-kun wrote:

Also, introducing "seasons" would make extremely good scores not nearly as important.
Isn't it the opposite? Good scores would be extremely important when you have a limited time to get them; people who manage to get more of them in the shorter time span of a season would rank higher than those who can't, which will be a truer display of your skill at a point of time instead of how long you played.
No. It's not the opposite. Making time matter is even more ridiculous. How long it takes you to get a score doesn't affect how good the score is.
Gon
Think of the old maps as legacy; how osu! has progressed over the years. It's also wasted effort for people who actually took time to score on these maps... think of the consequences, seriously. New maps are being shat out every single day, I'm going to go ahead and assume that the BATs/MATs are busy enough as it is.

Aqo wrote:

You'd need to regain top scores of maps that get re-ranked
You know if I get a ridiculous top score on a certain map i'd prefer if it -stays- there and I don't have to play it again (until it gets beat of course), and move on to other maps. What's wrong with the current system?
TheVileOne
Just no. You shouldn't delete old maps because it's not fair to the mapper who made the map and 2 I don't think it's necessary to remove old maps due to unrankability because that means any map with unrankable issues would be game for deletion and that means the classic ones. 3. It's not fair to players like ShaGGoN, and WhiteWolf who got a great deal of their recognition playing these old maps. 4. osu! doesn't need seasons. That will means older maps that aren't played as much anymore will have empty ranking boards, and that removes the fun of trying to beat a score that's been there for a year. I mean by the time a year goes by, the scores will reset and that long standing score would have been for not. And 5. We would need an army of BATs to rerank literally over 10,000 songs each season. 6. It's not fair for inactive mappers and mappers in general. I shouldn't have to deal with making more changes to my map after it has been ranked. No mapper should have to deal with that bullshit. 7. There would be no way of updating older season scores if the map undergoes changes for a new season, which would be unfair for the players with scores from the old season. They would be forced to play the song all over again and regain their score. 8. In what order are the BATs to rerank these songs. How long would it take? What are us players supposed to do in the mean time?
eldnl

Wishy22 wrote:

It is true indeed that some players end up playing old shit maps from 2009 and quit the game since it's not fun, got two friends that stopped playing since they searched for a few songs and ended up playing old maps that just sucked, got them back to play after I showed them a few new maps but yeah most old maps are so bad... seriously went to one of those friends I'm talking about house's, wanted to play osu! and lol all the maps he had were so damn old and bad no wonder he played for less than an hour.
They can't say that the maps are shit, because they don't know the good maps, anyways, new players just want to play the songs that they like, even if they are old.
Sakura
If the issue is that old maps of certain songs are pretty bad, and people will play them because they like the song, the solution isnt to unrank them so that the mapper fixes them, instead make a better map of the same song that everyone can enjoy!
Minty Gum
I understand what's being said here, but I'm going to have to agree with everyone who said no. I worked so hard to get my very few scores in the top rankings of certain songs... urgh... ;_; I don't want it to become a monthly thing. A map that's still good but say, a year old, will have mostly empty scoreboards like mentioned above. Ruins the challenge and fun of getting into the top scores if there's a bunch of C's and B's in the scoreboards.
Mithos
I believe how this idea was presented will stop it from flourishing. I believe it should be something like this.

For maps that are over 2 years old, they get a little button ingame that players can press that provides a "nomination" or "vote" towards the unranking of a map. Every 6 months, a BAT member or four will look at the list of beatmaps with multiple votes on them, and re-evaluate them. If they do not meet enough standards to be ranked, they are moved to a "legacy" section of beatmaps.

A legacy map has a few properties of a ranked map. The map can still receive new high scores in the rankings, and will still add score in the total score rankings. The new features include a notice before downloading the map on the website that explains that legacy maps might not follow all of the beatmap rules and are older than the current ones. Also, they do not contribute to PP. They get their own search section, much like approved and graveyard.

Perhaps in the rankings, there could be a total score with legacy and a total score without legacy, so the players who hit high ranks with older, forgotten maps don't get insulted but newer players do not have to grind to have a chance at the high ranks.
Frizz

Mithost wrote:

For maps that are over 2 years old, they get a little button ingame that players can press that provides a "nomination" or "vote" towards the unranking of a map.
inb4 players being butthurt for not being able to pass old Insane+++ maps and wanted to get the map unranked
Ohrami

Mithost wrote:

Also, they do not contribute to PP.
Stupid.

Your whole post is suggesting the addition of a superfluous feature, but this is the stupidest thing in it.
Azure_Kite
I think Sakura has it in the bag, here. You're looking at this from the wrong perspective, as though there can only ever be one copy of the same song on osu! or something.

If a beatmap from '08 or '09 isn't good in your opinion, you have the ability to make a map that does meet that specification. In my opinion, Removing/trivialising older maps that are a part of osu!'s history is akin to slapping the mapper in the face.
Topic Starter
Aqo

Frizz925 wrote:

Anyone who wanted to unrank old maps are disrespectful to old mappers. Seriously, stop with the whole "unranking old maps" idea.
That's not true. There's a difference between respect and ranking. Back in the day mappers didn't have resources to make maps like today, there was less of a knowledgebase to work with and thus it was much harder to come up with good techniques. Everything was on experimental level. I'm sure the mappers back in the day put as much effort into their maps as today, but it's inevitable that many of them just came out less good due to the circumstances. Unranking those maps is not disrespecting the mapper, it's moving with the times instead of being stuck in the past.

eldnl wrote:

Wishy22 wrote:

It is true indeed that some players end up playing old shit maps from 2009 and quit the game since it's not fun, got two friends that stopped playing since they searched for a few songs and ended up playing old maps that just sucked, got them back to play after I showed them a few new maps but yeah most old maps are so bad... seriously went to one of those friends I'm talking about house's, wanted to play osu! and lol all the maps he had were so damn old and bad no wonder he played for less than an hour.
They can't say that the maps are shit, because they don't know the good maps, anyways, new players just want to play the songs that they like, even if they are old.
If the timing on the map is bad and doesn't match the song, or if the movement is randomly too easy or too hard instead of following a consistent rate, especially on beginner difficulties that they start on, it discourages new players from wanting to play osu. The fact they don't know what's a good map is even worse - the end up thinking all maps are badly-timed and nonsensical from the little experience they got, and this is what makes them lose interest in the game and want to quit.


Sakura said something very clever and that's probably the best compromise. But that would take a while.

---

It seem like most opposition is basically for -

1 - people with scores on old maps don't want to lose them
2 - people assume mappers would get offended by having their old maps unranked
3 - unpractical execution, i.e. either takes too long to unrank all and re-rank some, or only un-rank some but all the ones you need to

for 1... not much to say. Move on. It's just a number. Isn't it enough for you to know of your own accomplishment?
as for 2, I think it's more offensive for mappers that made a great map in recent months and it sits in graveyard for weeks because no MAT/BAT looked at it, while there's many maps that much less effort was put into making that are already ranked simply because their song was more popular.

I, too, agree that it's sort of unpractical to convert all improper ranked into unranked, at least instantly, but if you do this over time you can get it done and this is only why considering doing this with some method as early as possible would be better.
Either way, Sakura's solution is the best compromise.
Mismagius
this thread tl;dr'd: people who played wizards in winter and want their accuracy back

really didn't wanna post here but just gonna say that I disagree with this so much that my heart is torn apart by just looking at it
Wishy

eldnl wrote:

Wishy22 wrote:

It is true indeed that some players end up playing old shit maps from 2009 and quit the game since it's not fun, got two friends that stopped playing since they searched for a few songs and ended up playing old maps that just sucked, got them back to play after I showed them a few new maps but yeah most old maps are so bad... seriously went to one of those friends I'm talking about house's, wanted to play osu! and lol all the maps he had were so damn old and bad no wonder he played for less than an hour.
They can't say that the maps are shit, because they don't know the good maps, anyways, new players just want to play the songs that they like, even if they are old.
Actually you can, MANY old maps are horribly done and it's not rare that the timing is wrong or that the map doesn't really flow well with the song at all, plus stupidly low AR makes the map REALLY hard/uncomfortable to play even for new players. But aside of that, they indeed didn't know what good maps were and because of that they assumed all maps were like that, then when they tried some recent maps they found out they were playing shit maps and got into the game. :)

Thing is I guess many things were different back in 2008/2009, like no snapping, accuracy = AR or stuff like that I don't really know about.

Btw, those old maps (except a few) are not only super easy to FC but also super good to farm PP since you can get top scores like it's nothing since most plays are no-mod.
Mara
Am I the only one who finds 2008-2009 maps fun over the current maps?

Shit.
winber1

Blue Dragon wrote:

I disagree with this so much

Aqo wrote:

for 1... not much to say. Move on. It's just a number. Isn't it enough for you to know of your own accomplishment?
I know my IQ is over 200, and I can do anything I want, but I just sit in class doing absolutely nothing, not giving a shit about life. I then become homeless. I know of my own accomplishments and the amazing creations that could have helped humanity that I have invented in my lonely house, but no one else knows about it.

This season business is really just nonsense. In fact it really gets rid of the competitiveness of osu! because everyone knows that their score will just be erased and thus very few would even care to try.

And I don't even want to think about this unranking business. I doubt peppy would ever agree anyways. Majority of very old maps may not always be up to par, but they serve many purposes. Some people even like them, and you can't just say goodbye to thousands of scores, unless we legitimately implement the seasons, which really won't happen.
Tanzklaue
I find some old maps stupidly fun to play, even though they are badly (or more correct oddly) timed, don't follow the current mappingrules or are just plain unfair (ninjaspinners!). but still, I like to play some of them, and they are also part of the history of osu!
C L Z
no
Stefan
I disagree witht the idea of a second season since they would be many problems.
TheVileOne point out many of them. But there's another reason why I would delete like 0,5% of the old maps. (I don't know how much would be this.) It's not the old maps are unfunny or bad at mapping. I took some maps as example:

Kana Ueda - Pumpkin Ondo: This map is quite funny. Follows the rhythm nice and something like this would be not worth to unrank.

Team Nekokan - Can't Defeat Airman: You all know this map. The HP-Drain is ridiculous, the spacing is horrible and the spinner might kill your Hands. And there is also the common break bug. So maps like this aren't funny, but not because of the spacing. THis is only my own opinion. But I'm not sure if it makes fun to strain their wrists at this kind of spinners. About the HP-Drain. There's two misses required to lose half of your Life.

Trans-Siberian Orchestra - Wizards In Winter (Insane/Impossible): Also well known, because for the Ninja Spinners. So the Ninja Spinners make it impossible to pass the Map with S (and I don't name about SS). Even if the Map is from 2007, this is something that should be not. Because just of these Ninja Spinners it is stupid. Because the rest of the two diffs is nice and would be fine for this time.

So my three comments to this maps goes to my opinion. I don't know how do you think about them and at similar maps. But the last two are extreme example.
BeatofIke
I agree with Gon, TheVileOne, and Sakura. I wouldn't want any old maps to be deleted for any reason. Old maps are nostalgic and part of history of osu!
Also, osu! does not need seasons. osu! is fine the way it is.
Bittersweet
Depending on map, i enjoy playing it way more than most of new maps. Sure i say "omg, that timing/pattern/whatever is so retarded" but its in middle of a laugh and i find myself having a great time. There are obviously some maps that makes me rage and all, but srsly, we have new maps enough for you to just ignore old ones if you don't like them.

(It would be my worst day on osu if some maps like Love Shine or Scatman ever get unranked)
Mismagius

LunaticMara wrote:

Am I the only one who finds 2008-2009 maps fun over the current maps?

Shit.
I agree completely.
Xau_old
shut up dont delete Wizards In Winter im 1st on insane :(
bomber34
I can say that i played (when i started osu! in feb. 2011) old maps a lot. I loved them. Each one was different in its own kind. They were hard yeah but new players are no accuracy whores like some players are :(
They are part of osu!
It would be a shame to delete a part of it.
Btw there are really fun maps from '07 - '09 :P but that is all subjectiv.
Maraiga

Blue Dragon wrote:

I disagree with this so much that my heart is torn apart by just looking at it
CXu
Deleting the old maps is like deleting the variety and creativity of osu! \o\
No really, most of the new maps are almost identical. Old maps are different from each other, so being able to play one of them doesn't mean you can play every other one, like the case with newer maps.

Aka. they're fun.
Natteke
Let's delete maps that I don't like ok? RESPECT MY AUTORITAH
silmarilen

silmarilen wrote:

its not about if the song plays nice, its about if it would actually be rankable if it was made today
gonna post this again because people still dont get it
Natteke

silmarilen wrote:

silmarilen wrote:

its not about if the song plays nice, its about if it would actually be rankable if it was made today
gonna post this again because people still dont get it
implying people knew what ranking rules will be in the future.

If you don't like a map, don't play it.
Nobody cares if some noobs quit, it's their problem, not mappers' problem and nobody is going to delete maps that mappers spent their time on just because they're old and some people don't like them. I said some people because there are people (me included) who cherish these maps as something that reminds them of good ol' times.

tl;dr gtfo
silmarilen
im not even supporting it myself, im just saying that he didnt suggest it because he doesnt like the maps.
eldnl

CXu wrote:

Deleting the old maps is like deleting the variety and creativity of osu! \o\
No really, most of the new maps are almost identical. Old maps are different from each other, so being able to play one of them doesn't mean you can play every other one, like the case with newer maps.

Aka. they're fun.
This guy ♥
Mara

CXu wrote:

most of the new maps are almost identical
Sadly, this is true.
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