Osu! has so many ranked maps, it's kind of ridiculous that one would literally have to play them all in order to get the maximum possible points. It may be easy for people that have been playing since the beginning, but it's daunting for new players. Downloading all of them could fill up a hard drive. In time, the situation will only get worse.

My suggestion steals from my favorite game, Magic the Gathering. In Magic, the "Standard" format only includes cards that were printed in roughly the last two years. There are also other formats that include all the cards ever printed.

I suggest that Osu should have two separate player rankings. One can be the way it's always been, including every map ever ranked. The new one should only include maps that were ranked in the past, say, 6 months.

It might be easier to rotate them in blocks of 1 month each. For example, on September 1st 2009, all the maps that were ranked in March 2009 will rotate out.

No. If you care that much about having the highest score, then you would (hopefully) also have the dedication to play so many maps. It's not even that hard to get high points, anyway. Once one is able to play the hardest difficulties, the points will come a lot easier and they'll have 1-2 billion in no time. ;X

Disregard this. >_>

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This idea is actually sort of interesting. It would certainly keep the top ranks changing.

The only potential problem I see is the rage from highly ranked players that have spent a lot of time getting their ranks and being pushed out for not playing as much now :/

-1 Support

Disregard this. <_<;

I've thought about this as it is a huge problem for the future of the game and the community. This rotation system is a nice concept, but the downside is that we'd lose a lot of great maps that people really enjoy (as you know, people tend to play ranked maps, but not so much anything else) and also players would be robbed of their hard earned score. Rotation is easier to put in the game than some of the other solutions though, and it's better than a lot of other ideas. Then we'd have to think about allowing maps to be re-applied for the ranking process though after they have been demoted from the status.



The solution I like the most so far is building "tournament packs" of the best songs, having a pre-determined amount (50-100?) songs in each pack, only using quality maps for these packs. The main idea here is that the game would have regular automated tournments (weekly? monthly?), which of course first requires tournament integration into the game itself. Each tournament would feature one of these packs, and only songs from that pack are played in the tournament. The pack number for the next tournament is revealed after the previous tournament, so people have time to train on the maps. This still gives an edge to those who play more than others, as they have played atleast some of those maps before, but it still makes it possible for newer players to train on a limited selection of songs at a time and allow them to compete if they are good.

With this system we'd first of all have the monthly(?) tournament rankings, which is one way to rank people who are active at that time. In addition you could also have separate ranking lists for each tournament pack just like you have the one ranking list for all ranked maps currently. This way you can compete on ranking lists for a smaller selection of songs in addition to having the current ranking for all maps ever ranked, making it possible to climb ranks even for newer players. The total ranking for all maps should not be removed though, as otherwise the community might be split totally to groups who only compete in a few of the song packs and never touch the others.

^THAT sounds like a great idea, Gemi. I'd love to see a separate tournament-style ranking system someday.

Derekku Chan wrote:

The only potential problem I see is the rage from highly ranked players that have spent a lot of time getting their ranks and being pushed out for not playing as much now :/

silasw wrote:

I suggest that Osu should have two separate player rankings.

This would just be adding another ranking system, not replacing the old one. (I think)

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peppy wrote:

Yeah, exactly as you say Gemi. I didn't really consider the rotating out part - was just answering more generally, but the system you detail would be how things would work.

/me is happy

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This is an interesting idea, I wouldn't mind seeing it happen. I'd want it to be a separate ranking, though - it'd be a shame to throw away the current one after all this time!

(As an aside, I'm totally ready for Lorwyn to rotate out. Fuck vivid lands and fuck faeries.)

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Yeah. I also think a monthly scoreboard would coexist more peacefully alongside the current scoreboard, where a "maps from the last 6 months" scoreboard would be kind of sketchy and awkward

LuigiHann wrote:

I was just thinking, what if instead of basing it on when the maps were ranked, it was instead based on when the scores were achieved? That is to say, for example, a second leaderboard showing who has scored the most points in the current month. That would have an even playing field without limiting the players' options. On the other hand, you could just have it be a leaderboard for who has scored the most points on all the maps ranked in a given month. I just like the idea of having the leaderboard heat up over the course of a month, and then at the end, somebody is the winner (for that month). It'd be very competitive

Doesn't that basically encourage playing as much as humanly possible, rather than being good at Osu?

I'm leaning toward Gemi's idea, kinda, except with a ladder instead of a tournament.

There would be two ranking systems: the "global" ranking system, which is basically what it is now, and the "ladder" ranking system. The "ladder" ranking system takes only into account ranked scores achieved during a specific ladder. Each ladder has its own scoreboard. (Hopefully there will be a steady enough stream of maps being ranked that there will only be one ladder board per map.)

If we are going with Gemi's "only these maps per tournament/ladder" idea, we could have multiple ladders occuring at the same time. We could have Easy mode ladders, Hard/Insane ladders, themed ladders, CTB ladders, Taiko ladders, ladders for certain mods... There would perhaps need to be a ladder commitee arranging the maps to be put into each ladder (so we don't get really Easy maps into Hard/Insane by accident, for example).

I think tournaments would be nice, but not as nice as a ladder for this kinda thing because people can join a ladder any time they want and still fare well.

strager wrote:

I think tournaments would be nice, but not as nice as a ladder for this kinda thing because people can join a ladder any time they want and still fare well.

This is a very good point, and I am 50/50 on which of the following I like more:

A) We have a "ladder" ranking for each month, basically a ranking list for all song played that month (you can allow all ranked maps, or just certain packs, doesn't matter) and when the month is over the ranking list for that month is locked and archived. It would work just like the current ranking, but it only counts scores from that month. This way anyone can play when they want and if someone plays very well for a few months he will have his name visible on the ranking list top spots even if he some day later stops playing osu and starts to drop on the all time ranking list that we have now.

B) Arrange an automated tournament every month and rank the participants in a list. This places some play time requirements for the players as each round of the tournament needs to be completed at a certain date, but it has the aspect of direct competition against other players, which is a plus. It's also more entertaining and enthralling since you need to do well on each play as a mistake could cause you to lose, where as in the usual ranking style you can just replay the maps over and over again.

Now that I think more about this I actually think that we should probably have the monthly ladder system and also have automated tournaments now and then, but probably only a few times a year instead of having one every month.

Your "A" was kinda what I had in mind.

Your "B" I would have arranged manually, with signups and everything, like a real tournament.

strager wrote:

Your "A" was kinda what I had in mind.

Your "B" I would have arranged manually, with signups and everything, like a real tournament.

There's no point in manual tournaments in an online game when things can be done automatically. It's more efficient for everyone when you do an automated tournament. The players sign up easily through the game, the server decides the pairing or groups of players who play against each other, the players play their assigned songs when they happen to have time to play, results are calculated and players eliminated/progressed in the tournament automatically and new pairs/groups are assigned, etc. A manual online tournament is a pain in the ass for everyone, especially the organizer.

By "manual" I mean "manually started." That is, someone hits the "start tournament with X players and X maps" button. Of course the tournaments would ideally be automated. ;P

Bump on this whole tournament idea. It needs more attention! Perhaps a different topic [title]?

strager wrote:

Bump on this whole tournament idea. It needs more attention! Perhaps a different topic [title]?

Has been on the list for ages, and will probably be done at some point. It's just such a huge thing that there's probably a lot to do before peppy gets to it.

Better to hammer out the details now, and not when peppy's working on it. (Not to say peppy's opinion sucks, but the community would probably like some say in how things work.)

Not to derail the current conversation, but it seems to me that doing a monthly or ranking system based on achieved rank would make more sense than one based on ranked score.

Since the rankings would be reset every month, a set of maps would develop wherein you could maximize the amount of points you could get while minimizing the difficulty. For example, a map like Innocent Starter (http://osu.ppy.sh/b/5061) has a lower overall difficulty than Blazing (http://osu.ppy.sh/b/31680), while giving nearly 5 times more points. A point-based system clearly favors maps with higher maximum points, regardless of difficulty. If only maps limited to a certain time frame for each month were counted, there would be no "set" that everyone would play once a month to maximize score, but would still favor playing higher-scoring maps as opposed to lower ones.

However, a system based on rank achieved at the end of the month on each song would give each map the same amount of importance, where it is just as hard to get high ranks on a map regardless of difficulty or maximum score. Ranking would be calculated as who has the lowest score, where average rank gets divided by the number of maps played. This stresses playing many different maps as well as getting consistently high ranks in them. (Perhaps further separated into groups based on average star rating of songs played, but this may end up being too complex.)

My two cents.

Rank sounds like a good idea.

Resolved/implemented/added.