p3n wrote:
We want to avoid spreads like N I I I. We also never intended to rely on web icons to evaluate the qualitiy of a diff spread. Depending on the BPM and nature of a song the SR completely fails to capture the actual difficulty of beginner or medium maps. Things like beat placement, readability, and usage of established gameplay elements will always be judged by the modding community and the BAT (or equivalent).
This.
EDIT: I try to make my point a bit more detailed.
Providing another example of spread problem i faced :
https://osu.ppy.sh/s/153776The spread is perfect, but the star rating is inaccurate due to the high bpm. I think we're having problems with both the web icon and the star rating.
So additionally, I would like to add a bit more on the icon-spread/star-rating-spread thing. Since quite a lot of unnecessary unqualifications happened these days,
Ranking Criteria wrote:
The difficulties in the mapset must be in a consecutive order.
a consecutive order does not always mean a consecutive web-icon-spread, please see the 4-diff spread example below,
it's a perfect spread from the SR side. But it's a bad spread according to the web icon(
E H I X).
That's totally weird, isn't it? Actually we will never know if the spread is good or bad until we actually check through the patterns in the diffs.
Mentioning this with p3n's point above and fycho's point below as well. Most Insane diffs are over 4.5 stars nowadays(especially on high bpm songs, 170~). As far as i know, the new star rating system values a diff depends on the physical difficulty for players to achieve it. So the SR varies with different bpm. Two Hard diffs containing exactly the same objects in 150 bpm and 220 bpm will have totally different star rating. While it does not mean the pattern usage is anywhere different. I don't think star rating is perfect atm.
Then, is it really necessary to have everything with 4 diffs or even more
according to star rating? I will never know.
But yeah, if we're going to word a guideline. We must have a specific description about the case(4.5 in this case). With the star rating being inaccurate and not reliable. We can't really word anything depends on a not reliable source. Plus if it's a guideline instead of a rule, then it can't force anyone to do anything about the spread. Guideline does not lead to unrankable stuff so sadly they're quite powerless.
tl;dr:
I believe spread can be manually checked and judged by modding community and BATs from case to case. Do not be too relying on star rating. They're not perfect. Personally, I do not think we need such guideline.