The case-by-case basis comes to a head often though, frothing and filled with anger. Having a solid rule in place would be preferred so that we we don't have very wild variations on interpretation of the guideline. People push the limit way too far and pretty much invalidate the point of even having sliders when you have large velocity changes and no ticks. You don't have to even ply the slider. You just click the start and the end. The path means little except eye candy instead of the gameplay element of something that you should be following.
Let's see if we can condense your examples at least, because I feel that leaving things as they are will just lead to more unneeded heartache.
As an aside, I'd prefer to not have combo colors used just to show a gimmick of the map and have them be a representative of the phrase of the music instead.
So a lot of the visual examples can pretty much be summed up by "note density."
Flow is a little more tricky since there are a lot of different styles, and wording a hard line rule to encompass that is rather difficult. I think they would also factor into the note density aspect, though there are always outlying cases with this sort of thing.
The aural tends to not work very well in my experience, as usually if the song is suddenly going to get quiet, there is pretty much zero cue for the player that has never heard the song before to intuit that this will happen AND that the map will be translating that in a drastic manner in terms of pace.
So perhaps something along this line:
Let's see if we can condense your examples at least, because I feel that leaving things as they are will just lead to more unneeded heartache.
As an aside, I'd prefer to not have combo colors used just to show a gimmick of the map and have them be a representative of the phrase of the music instead.
So a lot of the visual examples can pretty much be summed up by "note density."
Flow is a little more tricky since there are a lot of different styles, and wording a hard line rule to encompass that is rather difficult. I think they would also factor into the note density aspect, though there are always outlying cases with this sort of thing.
The aural tends to not work very well in my experience, as usually if the song is suddenly going to get quiet, there is pretty much zero cue for the player that has never heard the song before to intuit that this will happen AND that the map will be translating that in a drastic manner in terms of pace.
So perhaps something along this line:
Sliders cannot be visually identical on screen but have large speed changes without having a slider tick visible, or the hit object density changes proportionally with the speed change to give a visual cue. This is to aid in the readability of your map.