I've seen Roxas being back (kinda, and as he says he'll be fully back in July). Shira also is back which is no problem either, as well as PROGUY. Charles has stated in his userpage that he's working on your situation which is a really one of the nicest moves ever done for your community considering that the other modes didn't have such help.

For those people who want to be a BAT, if you claim everywhere you want to be one, simple as it is you will never be one. I will restate what I said at the very beginning:

I wrote:

mod more, be active, get 'noticed' by the higher powers and be clean

There's no problem aside from this you can be a potential candidate. If you fuck with one of these conditions consider yourself out. Roxas also stated other things about it. And if you want to find candidates, judge objectively the modding given by people.

Midge wrote:

And the issue with that is that the staff are seemingly ignoring mania at this point.

Another comparison with other modes, atm CTB situation is far worse. Almost every CTB BAT seem inactive. I think that only two of them are actually active. Taiko's situation used to be worse in TWC. We had no really active BAT for a month.

Bobbias wrote:

I definitely agree that finding BATs is much harder than people seem to think. It takes a lot of time and dedication to be a BAT, and that's on top of everything else. The mania community is pretty short on qualified people, to be honest, so it's hardly a surprise that we have so few BATs, but now things are beginning to be a problem.

Wholeheartedly agree with this. Becoming a BAT isn't something you get by snapping your fingers, it takes a lot of time, dedication and patience. Basically if a BAT goes all po pi po and start to do the fuck he wants disregarding the rules, then they can say farewell to the title. Modding has to be top notch, and so should be your knowledge of the mode. You need to know every trick behind your mode and all that stuff related to it, so your modding gets impact to the mapper. Also, as you said, the community is short on qualified people, but consider that the mode isn't even 2 years old! Sure it looks normal to you now, but the older people such as me were surprised. The surprising thing was the amount of BAT at one point, you had 7 in total where we Taiko people had 6 and CTB 4.

There's another problem that strikes us (and that affects every game mode, and even regardless of position), is that some BAT are more known than others which easily lead to overload for some while others don't have anything. This was the case for Love on his first weeks of promotion, who basically had not many requests while lots of people asked me for a mod req. PyaKura's post explains more in detail.

[Shi-Ra] wrote:

I know that there are alot of people who mod ONLY to become BAT...it'a bad motivation I think.

Not only it's a bad motivation, but what would happen after promotion ? This aspect also needs to be thought about it. There's a big difference between a guy who got to BAT, thinking about this position since the very beginning and a guy who got there due to him being 'noticed'. The latter will not care about such a position, he'll keep on modding whatever happened. The other will significantly drop in activity once he reaches the position.

Zare wrote:

Being in staff (should[!]) require(s) a minimum amount of knowledge in human nature, and so far I haven't seen any children who truly possess that.

As a friend of a guy who went in the staff (not here, but in another forum), sometimes you even have to make decisions against the people you like. Some children don't really have this notion of objectivity, and sometimes tend to protect their friends even though they are the culprits. They also have to be understood and voice their opinion properly without sounding like "This is my opinion, and this is the correct one. You guys are all wrong". Even older people sometimes tend to have this problem.


Stuff I have to add, and if it were to happen I'd be really grateful:
Since osu!mania basically cover many charting styles, I think the mania BAT has to understand all of them, should it be BMS, o2, IIDX, ITG, StepMania, PIU, Technomotion, PnM, or every other rhythm games in the same fashion. This community is the most diverse that has ever existed here due to it allowing every charting styles.