This queue is for all the mappers who value the quality of their set through all difficulties.
My impression is that many modders and BNs and QAT don't thoroughly check on Easy-difficulties as they're "boring".
However, due to the strong restrictions forced on you while mapping an easy difficulty any wrong step has also strong negative repercussions on the player that are commonly ignored by better players when playtesting as they can compensate for suboptimal or even bad patterns with their considerably higher skill.
The average new player can't compensate and due to their lack of skill and accuracy some things will just feel entirely wrong and unintuitive.
On top of it, the relation to the music is oftentimes obfuscated by loud hitsounds for experienced players due to their pinpoint accuracy. At the same time new players will often experience hitsounds in their actual feedback function instead of an additional layer of representation because they are not good enough yet.
This queue is relatively simple and your map has to meet 3 requirements for me to take a look at it:
1. It has to be bubbled or qualified
2. It has to be an osu! standard map
3. It can't be an approval mapset - if you're mapping an easy diff for approval you should already know what you are doing
I will then proceed to look at the Easy and maybe also the Normal-difficulty and mod it with the main focus on the following points:
My impression is that many modders and BNs and QAT don't thoroughly check on Easy-difficulties as they're "boring".
However, due to the strong restrictions forced on you while mapping an easy difficulty any wrong step has also strong negative repercussions on the player that are commonly ignored by better players when playtesting as they can compensate for suboptimal or even bad patterns with their considerably higher skill.
The average new player can't compensate and due to their lack of skill and accuracy some things will just feel entirely wrong and unintuitive.
On top of it, the relation to the music is oftentimes obfuscated by loud hitsounds for experienced players due to their pinpoint accuracy. At the same time new players will often experience hitsounds in their actual feedback function instead of an additional layer of representation because they are not good enough yet.
This queue is relatively simple and your map has to meet 3 requirements for me to take a look at it:
1. It has to be bubbled or qualified
2. It has to be an osu! standard map
3. It can't be an approval mapset - if you're mapping an easy diff for approval you should already know what you are doing
I will then proceed to look at the Easy and maybe also the Normal-difficulty and mod it with the main focus on the following points:
- Optimal rhythmic design - this means that the rhythmical configuration of the patterns used is as good as the restrictions from the difficulty allow it
- Intuitivity and consistency - this means that a well-fitting pattern will be reused at least once for the same musical pattern
- Meaningful variation where possible - this means that a well-fitting pattern will receive variations that are easy to grasp for the player if a pattern would get overused. This is not always possible as in some cases any variation already plays significantly worse than the original pattern.
Hitsounds- I will only look at these when the difficulty is already of high quality as changes to the rhythmic design tend to mess up the base you built your current hitsounding on.