Liiraye wrote:
Editing maps is a personal investment of free time that grants you nothing practical in return in the end. Quality maps are in decline. Rules & regulations push creativeness further and further away from getting something ranked (this also concerns modding in a way).
The mapper knows this and they're effectively signing up to create quality content by their own volition. In regards to that, nothing's changed and the only reason for quality decline is the mappers themselves. There has never been anything in the rules and guidelines to stifle creativity, although I realise the the popular definition is "make something as outlandish and gimmicky as possible." That still doesn't mean that creativity's unwelcome.
That's also why I could also see something like the (HI) spread as people have proposed here for maps in the 5-6 minute range. That aside I think the OP in this thread displays excellent points and should be discussed at first.
This I'm okay with, as we've always had a 1-2 diff allowance for longer songs. It's when songs begin to fall into "normal length" territory that I see no reason for the mapper not to attempt a full spread. Maybe three diffs, but they'd better create a damn good spread.
lolcubes, the problem with tentative changes is that mappers can easily use them to get their way by whittling away the quality control, bit by bit. Moreover, people are more likely to cry foul if a limitation's reincluded, so once a change is in place, it becomes a lot harder to undo in an emergency. I guess that people generally do "get away with" omitting easy, but I'd say it's better to encourage mappers to go a bit further than doing the bare minimum. Easies take very little time anyway. Besides that, all I ever see in this kind of debate is a series of weak excuses for doing the bare minimum, when the mapper might as well put in a small amount of time to make their contribution as complete as possible.
Even if peppy doesn't want/need more players, they're still going to come--why not allow for that which eases the newer players into the game, especially if it means that they'll eventually contribute? In 2008, I found it impossible to get used to the gameplay, so I didn't think anything of the game until 2011, when I finally had a decent mouse. Even then, I was thankful for the easier diffs which I could actually manage, for just long enough that I ended up committing to osu! as I do today.
For an example of what I don't want the game to become, I once tried to play Toribash. Because of the steep learning curve, I tried it for a bit and ended up having nothing to do with the game ever again. There was very little to ease newbies into it. Let's say that osu! had never been based around full spreads and was only an open canvas for "creative" insanes as ranked maps. I don't think I'd have cared at all after even a day of commitment.
Other than preventing a bad snowball effect and keeping more open to newer players, the benefit of encouraging more full sets is that mappers actually have reasons to practice full sets, which would make them improve at making easier diffs. As soon as I
had to make full sets, my easier maps improved drastically and became a lot more nuanced--after struggling to make 'Teardrop' tidy and compelling, I came back with more experience and was suddenly able to make a set with which I was satisfied. Again, I must stress that people are already asking how they can make their single diffs rankable, so they'll end up asking that in more cases if they know they'll have more excuses for it. As it is, we don't exactly see many easies and normals which are made that well, so I hope that my point speaks for itself through what's already out there.