Ephemeral wrote:
the knock-on effect of allowing such a technique would increase its prevalence in map usage for a nominal time afterwards - i've seen this happen countless times in controversial standard mode mapping techniques and i am certain it would happen in osu!mania as well.
The knock on effect should be combated by proper modding and proper review by the BATs on what gets ranked in the first place and should not be considered in whether or not the rule should be invalidated.
Ephemeral wrote:
you said it best - we're not about to open a can of worms and introduce potentially exclusive techniques into accepted mapping standards when the only people that can benefit from them are the top 0.1% of players.
Osu cultivates a system where players are effectively pitted against each other the moment they play a ranked map, via the ranking system. Within a competitive environment, raising the skill ceiling is only a good thing, as the higher the skill ceiling, the more effectively you can rank top players against each other. Saying that within a system, something that "only effects the top 0.1% of players" is a bad thing is ridiculous. The top players are as important as any other subgroup of players, and deserves to have the chance to play maps which test their skill, however good they are at the game.
The other reason I think that your reasoning here is flawed is that if people DO make maps which use all 7 keys, even if they are targeted at the pros, and popular with the pros, they are excluded from factoring into a player's ranking. This has a knock-on effect of disincentivizing playing those maps in the first place, because people care too much about their rank to play stuff that won't have any impact on it.
Ephemeral wrote:
if negotiated properly, an approval mapset may suffice to cover application of this "rule" in conventional mapsets where it is appropriate for the track and not overused.
I'd like to see Approval used more widely, but it seems like the general trend has been to try to remove Approved as an option in the first place (hence the "approved is only for marathons" rule), which I also happen to disagree with (but that's a whole other can of worms).
If you're going to say that Approval is an option, make it very clear with a rule stating that it's possible, because as it stands, "Approved Category is only for Marathon maps." which clearly states that the only reason something may be Approved is if it exceeds 6 minutes, and thus counts as a marathon.
I was going to write more about approval, but instead, I'll mention this: the current climate seems to indicate that maps are effectively either Ranked, or Graveyarded, which means that anything that does not meet the ranking rules is immediately lumped in with unfinished maps and maps of terrible quality. This is only tangentially related to the issue at hand, but if we are going to keep the 6 key limit, and Approval the way it is, there should be some better way to separate complete, quality maps which don't meet the ranking guidelines but don't deserve to be lumped in with the rest of the garbage that is the graveyard.
I'm not saying that we should somehow incentivize that sort of mapping behavior, because I agree that the majority of maps should be targeted towards as wide an audience as possible. However, the current system effectively penalizes people for not making a rankable map in the first place, which in turn penalizes people for experimenting or creating unique maps that break some rules, but are worth being noted. If you're some random nobody that doesn't actually know anyone, it's effectively impossible to get an audience for anything you do, even if it's worth being seen.
For a game that is community driven, there are an awful lot of rules or systems in place which hurt the community here.