Frostmourne wrote:
not everyone can explain the mod in documentary way. At least, I'm not native English speaker and I know my English is bad.
But there are still some of mappers that are completely unable to reply what they want to reply in English. Seriously, English is hard
Ah, I'm glad this finally showed up. As I said before in this thread, there are people who are able to speak both English and their native language in pretty much every language here. They can help mappers who aren't very good at English. I will concede that, if your native language doesn't have any similarities with English (which is why learning English for French and German people is easy), it's a pretty tough language to handle. However, even if you write something like "my English is poor" in your signature, you're acknowledging that your level isn't good enough; it's also up to you to improve it. This is an English-speaking community after all, and we are ready to make efforts, but they have to come from both sides.
Reading through this thread, I've seen one major thing coming back: People don't mind speedranking if the map is "good". Unfortunately, either your definition of "good" relates to "rankable", or the standards for a good map have abnormally low. 99.9% of the time, speedranked maps have nothing special about them - like I said, they're rankable, but not
good. This brings up another issue that's quite important to me, and people are trying to solve it, and it is getting better, but we're not quite there yet. It seems that people are satisfied with a map that has nothing "unrankable". And that's where I disagree because, you can still make a rankable, yet boring, uninteresting, and overall half-assed map. As people said before, quantity over quality. Is it really that great of a thing to have many maps ranked? People will think "oh yeah, I know this mapper, he's got lots of maps ranked". Wouldn't it be better if people thought "oh, I know this mapper, he made X map, that map was awesome"? Many people love Shinxyn as a mapper, despite him not having a great number of ranked maps. But that's only because some of his maps were great, and that's why people remember him.
A good map should be a map that stands out, that people want to play not because it gives them points (and possibly pp), but because it's fun and they enjoy playing it. To me, it should feature these elements:
- Readability.
The ability for the player to sightread the map without any problems. No map should require for any player to open the editor to understand how the map works. It has to be straightforward, and it has to make sense. - Flow.
This one is a bit of a pickle to explain. It's what makes the map that you're playing not feel like you're trying to keep up with it, but rather to feel like you're playing along with it. - Creativity.
Half of the map copypasted and flipped horizontally, vertically, etc. isn't creative. I'm not saying copypasting should never be used (it should be used) but you have to constantly come up with new patterns in your map. If you use the same techniques over and over, people are bound to get bored with it. - Consistency.
This is a rhythm game, after all. A map should be as accurate to the music/beat as possible. And it should be obvious for the player what part of the music is reproduced in the map. Hitsounds are your friends!
That's about it. Though sometimes, even that isn't
enough to make your map stand out. Which is why it's important for any mapper to playtest the map they're making. If they find it dull, we will find it dull as well. If you don't playtest, you won't be able to pinpoint yourself the parts that need to be worked on, readability issues, hitsound issues, beat placement errors, and so on.
If you can make your map stand out, more power to you. Especially if you're unknown. Most people don't care who's mapping the map, especially if they don't know the mapper; if it's good, they will like it. Only these maps can be speedranked. Your other average mapset, with a substandard spread, uninteresting mapping and whatnot, despite being rankable,
should go through a proper modding process in order for it to reach the level of these maps that stand out and deserve to be ranked.
