Hello! Maybe it was not just I who has noticed, let's say, a little "slowdown" or maybe even an abrupt "stop" in general, when it comes not only to the mapping and modding scene, but to projects and community initiative in general as well. We have reached a point where nothing changes, everyday it's the same story, the same amount of maps in qualified section, the same amount of maps in ranked section, zero projects nor initiatives taken by anyone.

Is it the lack of motivation or the lack of a sense of reward? Maybe no one sees interest in starting something in our community because they feel either nothing good is going to come out of it, or nothing is going to come out of it at all, and the time and effort spent in said project will be wasted for nothing.

The lack of advancement here has become so noticeable, even people who were alright with the current system or just didn't happen to notice anything going on, have started to feel it is reaching a point where nothing moves, the absolute zero. This stagnation is worsening an already damaged situation, as osu!taiko is the mode with the most simplistic design per se, and as such, we are more likely to get stuck in quicksand when it comes to innovation, and our ways to escape require more precise and intense maneuvers than other game modes.

This does not mean at all that osu!taiko is dying or already dead, as some people may have hinted at. It just means we are lacking some kind of motivation, to push us further to do innovative things, such as starting community projects, reworking our RC (we are on it already, worry not!), etc. Stopping does not mean death. However, as a community and as a game mode, there is this need of advance that has driven the rest of game modes to innovate with really cool projects such as the "Community Mentoring Program" from osu!standard or the several Mapping contests said gamemode has held over last months. I have not much knowledge of the rest of the game modes, but from what I can see, they are also advancing when it comes to this.

Our mode, on the other hand, has fallen in a mud swamp and is stuck in there. The problem is, from what I have seen, there is no intention of escaping said mud swamp. It just seems like we all expect some sort of miracle, or some sort of external help to get ourselves out of this situation. But in my eyes, we do not need any of this. I believe we can most likely do it ourselves. Taiko people have undergone worse situations in the past (ask any old guys about this) and we still came out on top, so why not do this again?

For starters, I would like to copycat a bit what osu!standard had done with the Mentoring Project. It may not be as big, but it will sure come as, while not being totally innovative, something relatively new that doesn't really appear that much often. The project, as our community is way smaller, would not have that much success if there is no incentive to participate in it. That is why, it is up to the community: to make it a great success, or a great failure. We won't expect huge results coming up soon, but the idea is to slowly recover into a mode that actually does things. As of lately, the "but no one cares about taiko xD" meme has become somewhat true. It seems like not even ourselves care about taiko, and that is, in my opinion, what has us stuck in where we are at this moment.

What I would like with this post, is to try to make everyone involved with the Taiko community aware of the current situation and to get more collaboration from the whole Community. The Mentoring program thingy, I would try to organize. If someone wants to help, feel free to PM.

Also, please post with your feedback on what you think the current situation is and what would you do to improve it / any possible questions. I will keep subscribed to this thread.

we accidentally ended up mentioning that it would be cool to have a taiko mentor program in the current standard mentor program discord.
In case it comes to life, I'll be your first applicant as a mentee <3

Unfortunately I'm not so up-to-date with what is going on with taiko (or maybe there isn't much to begin with, seeing the post) so I can't do more than giving my eventual participation in case something happens :/

Indeed, currently the only event of importance running is the RC rework (and even that is slightly stuck). Thanks for posting

As said on our opening post - we would provide the infrastructure to other modes (osu!catch version of this is in start-up) wishing to host this program. All you would need is people interested in partaking - that is, a target audience.

I'm not a Taiko people so I might not post something huge, but usually analyzing the current situation between people is a good start. Guess this thread is a good beginning.

If there aren't much taiko maps in the ranked section as you think, then my opinion for that will be "start thinking backwards". When taiko maps first appeared, they were combined with an osu difficulty which is mostly refered as "Taikosu!". Are there any maps like this? None for years. Contacting some standard mappers who are interested in taiko community to resurrect this project might make taiko mappings gather some attention.

Also problems exist when ranking maps as far as I see due to insufficient members of Taiko BNs. Maybe the time could solve this, but if waiting takes too much, hopping into hybrid mapsets as the real Taiko diffs appeared would make more ranked taiko maps. Some BN members will refuse requests of hybrid mapsets, but I foresee it to be less harder than getting a taiko only map ranked.

I am a slightly newer member to the Taiko community but I too have noticed the smallness of the community. For instance I rarely find Taiko multiplayer games, the #taiko sometime has the most recent comment be posted almost an hour ago, almost no tournaments ran for taiko & other things.. Quite a shame as although I play all the game modes I think Taiko is the one I am developing the greatest love for.

I'd love to help out in growing the taiko community and if anything I can do to help let me know. Also mind putting link to the standard mentoring thread so I can see what it would be about?

Sonnyc wrote:

I'm not a Taiko people so I might not post something huge, but usually analyzing the current situation between people is a good start. Guess this thread is a good beginning.

If there aren't much taiko maps in the ranked section as you think, then my opinion for that will be "start thinking backwards". When taiko maps first appeared, they were combined with an osu difficulty which is mostly refered as "Taikosu!". Are there any maps like this? None for years. Contacting some standard mappers who are interested in taiko community to resurrect this project might make taiko mappings gather some attention.

Also problems exist when ranking maps as far as I see due to insufficient members of Taiko BNs. Maybe the time could solve this, but if waiting takes too much, hopping into hybrid mapsets as the real Taiko diffs appeared would make more ranked taiko maps. Some BN members will refuse requests of hybrid mapsets, but I foresee it to be less harder than getting a taiko only map ranked.

Taikosu! maps, in my opinion, do not work very well as they need to be properly hitsounded and converted, and our way of mapping has evolved in such a manner that a standard map for, let's say, an Inner Oni difficulty (Extra counterpart) would not be of sufficient quality to our standards.

Not only are we short on manpower, but also on the motivation side. We lack any kind of incentive to do stuff, both us and regular mappers/modders. Hybrid sets also present a huge problem for us as of now, since most osu!standard BNs refuse to icon a standard+taiko hybred set in fear of screwing up (which is totally understandable). I really see no fix for this apart of either getting more BNs or making current BNs focus on hybrid sets (which would then remove attention from taiko-only sets, and that would also be a poor choice for our numbers).

Edgar_Figaro wrote:

I am a slightly newer member to the Taiko community but I too have noticed the smallness of the community. For instance I rarely find Taiko multiplayer games, the #taiko sometime has the most recent comment be posted almost an hour ago, almost no tournaments ran for taiko & other things.. Quite a shame as although I play all the game modes I think Taiko is the one I am developing the greatest love for.

I'd love to help out in growing the taiko community and if anything I can do to help let me know. Also mind putting link to the standard mentoring thread so I can see what it would be about?

Not much we can do on the tournaments thing... apart from some people who are really interested in doing so.

Here is the link to the standard mentoring thread: t/506906

it would be better to finish the new RC before starting anything linked to mapping/modding as this would be accurate only for a short amout of time. not trying to attack the council or idk, i think that's just comon logic (well, not gonna lie, the point was to rewrite the thing "fast" and still no news after months).

in my point of view about all of that (as a player/mapper during his free time), i dont feel like anything has changed in taiko since i started as i do not really try to do anything "community" related (unless ranking maps i guess?). by saying that i mean that many people might just be like me so that's why you dont see many "project" unless it comes from people with plenty of free time. same about that mentor thingy, you need to find people who got time and the will to teach stuff to others, which seems rare.

i dont really see what you can do with such a small playerbase tbh, also one should rather learn how to play the game mode before getting interested in mapping. we lack plater much more than mapper, looks like BN are flooded by request already and end up refusing most of them to be fair for the others. i could only agree with Edgar_Figaro about the lack of multiplayer room but same problem.

so yeah i believe playing events are more important than mapping events right now

edit : id love to see new options in the editor tho, like being able to stop notes while already on screen (like in mania/authentic taiko games).

Nofool wrote:

it would be better to finish the new RC before starting anything linked to mapping/modding as this would be accurate only for a short amout of time. not trying to attack the council or idk, i think that's just comon logic (well, not gonna lie, the point was to rewrite the thing "fast" and still no news after months).

I do agree and thereby apologize that the RC has been paralyzed because of my inactivity (won't give further details though as it would be just derailing the thread). That is also fixed (new manager) and so we should start really soon enough.

in my point of view about all of that (as a player/mapper during his free time), i dont feel like anything has changed in taiko since i started as i do not really try to do anything "community" related (unless ranking maps i guess?). by saying that i mean that many people might just be like me so that's why you dont see many "project" unless it comes from people with plenty of free time. same about that mentor thingy, you need to find people who got time and the will to teach stuff to others, which seems rare.

About the mentor thing, I'm willing to spend some of my free time if that means bettering our situation in any case

i dont really see what you can do with such a small playerbase tbh, also one should rather learn how to play the game mode before getting interested in mapping. we lack plater much more than mapper, looks like BN are flooded by request already and end up refusing most of them to be fair for the others. i could only agree with Edgar_Figaro about the lack of multiplayer room but same problem.

so yeah i believe playing events are more important than mapping events right now

edit : id love to see new options in the editor tho, like being able to stop notes while already on screen (like in mania/authentic taiko games).

I kind of see your point in the "players try to start mapping too early" but that is something we can't really control, users are free to start mapping as soon as they want to, which is probably causing some problem

The question is, how do we get people to play more and learn the mechanics of the game before they start getting interested in mapping? I would like to throw some brainstorming here, since I pretty much agree on that. Having playing experience helps a lot in this mode, as you are much more familiar with what patterns fit and what patterns do not (I could name a handful of people that, even having little experience mapping, have created really well structured maps).

Thank you for posting!

I've not really played Taiko for a long time and I'd have to lie if I wanted to title myself a Taiko player.

My experience however has been, that opening up a Taiko multi-room with a friend quickly caused many people of any rank to join (even though we were just playing scrub-muzu-level when we were alone in the room). The main-thing seems to be just opening that ducking room and getting to play. I did that for like 5 times with a friend and it always ended up like this.
I suppose most people just check multi for Taikolobbies, see none and then they proceed to play Single.

A problem I also encountered in this context though is that the skillgaps in Taiko are much more frustrating in multi when that newly joined 2k guy picks that 4* Oni and unlike in standard you will get entirely rekt by it and not have much fun just because pattern reading and speed play such a huge role.
But eh, I should just get good I suppose.

Hi,

I've been playing taiko for several years now, but I've never really participated much in the osu!taiko community because it always seemed really slow to me in general. Before playing taiko, I played DDR a lot. I think a lot of community problems in osu!taiko can be apparent by comparing taiko to other rhythm games. At least to me, there are three big things that seem to really discourage new players from participating:

First, taiko is kind of hard, but not in a "fun" way. Almost every rhythm game will fail the player mid-song if they can't keep up their life bar, but taiko is the reverse - unless you manually quit out, you will play through the entire song no matter what. In other rhythm games, for players just learning to pass a new song, a certain part can be a common source of death, and to finally surpass it is an immediate reward of adrenaline and satisfaction - this is missing from taiko. Personally, when I'm working on a new song and there's a big deathstream in the middle, if I fail the deathstream, I'm left with either uncertainty if I have enough health to pass or just a loss of motivation to continue to play the song (because I don't think I have enough health to pass). To me, it's certainly different from using NoFail, and I would much rather not use NoFail and persist through the difficult section than use NoFail and see the rest of the song. I think a lot of people feel the same way. On the other hand, not failing the player mid-song also makes it easy to pass. I've played a lot of songs that I've passed by just completely losing all health halfway through and then climbing back up to the pass threshold.

This isn't something that really needs to be changed, though - I think it's like that for a good reason because of how taiko has non-linear stream complexity. It just kind of sucks because it takes away a lot of the intrinsic reward for just passing a map - and getting that perfect balance of HP Drain is really hard and not many maps will have it just right. Anison Sprint, for example, was a song that frustrated me for the longest time because I could manage a 92% accuracy or better but still fail because of the HP Drain. If a potential player gets discouraged by this kind of thing, is there really anything we can do about it?

The real difficulty in taiko is that taiko has that non-linear stream complexity, by which I mean more complex streams can't just be summarize as, "Oh there's more notes." It's not just more notes faster, but it's also parsing these notes and understanding which hand presses which note at which time - whereas to compare to DDR you ultimately only have to figure out which note at which time. In DDR, I never really had the case where I saw Left and pressed Up instead because I misread it - either I could read a stream, or I couldn't; in taiko, I can see dddk d k d and misread it as ddddk d k d - and then the whole stream is off-balance from that one miss. And even at my rank where I consider such a pattern stupidly simple, it could still totally happen. I think this kind of thing turns a lot of people off because they feel the game is hard because their eyes are lying to them, rather than that they just aren't fast enough/accurate enough.

Second, osu!taiko is kind of garbage. There's a leaderboard, so players of all skill levels are encouraged to care about their rank, but the SR for taiko sucks. This is kind of beating a horse that's already dead, so I won't go too much into it - but I think a lot of players would be subconsciously aware of how bad the SR is, if they pay attention to it at all.

Third, there's not really any structure for a taiko community outside of osu!taiko. It's not a widespread enough rhythm game that it brought a community to osu!taiko like osu!mania did - most elder players are Japanese, whom if they have their own community it's already pre-established and probably won't mix with English-speakers aside from sharing osu!taiko maps and consuming 50% of the top like 500 players. From my knowledge, TnT isn't hugely widespread popular in Japan, and the whole rest of the world's upper players is barely equal to Japan's top players? It speaks a lot to how few players there are of other nationalities.

I don't mean to sound too defeatist about it, or anything, but there are certainly a lot of factors working against the community, I think. Hopefully a lot of this can be solved with osu!next, which as I understand is eating up pretty much all of osu! development time right now, but until then we're just kind of SOL.

On another note, I think the mentoring thing would be really good, because I think taiko is a ton of fun once you can play into Oni territory, but it's really hard to build the fundamentals to reach that point - although, I still worry about the players who just find the mode less fun because it's not as inherently rewarding to play.

e: I forgot to mention, as far as mapping goes, I don't really know exactly where the issues are. I think we don't have enough modders, from what I understand? What I can tell you is that I have a lot of songs that I would love to turn into a taiko map but every time I open up the editor I just instantly stop caring because the osu! editor looks so obtuse and then promptly give up.

Appelkatt wrote:

e: I forgot to mention, as far as mapping goes, I don't really know exactly where the issues are. I think we don't have enough modders, from what I understand? What I can tell you is that I have a lot of songs that I would love to turn into a taiko map but every time I open up the editor I just instantly stop caring because the osu! editor looks so obtuse and then promptly give up.

Honestly the maps are one of the things that has really appealed to me in Taiko as the PP formula encourages mappers to map longer maps. Sure longer maps exist in standard but I feel like I see 50 versions of the same TV size map over and over as it's combo based scoring metric and long maps are just frustrating to keep combo on for that long simply to have to restart because you missed a note 4 minutes into a 6 minute song. Taiko on the other hand is about ACC & Strain so people seem to map longer maps so more players play their maps. I just enjoy playing long maps and Taiko is full of them

Interesting, please keep posting.

Also, I would like to remind that this involves everything from playing to mapping/modding and various projects ongoing.

Any concern/feedback about the situation is welcome (including about the BNs' situation -> *prepares the 10km thick barrier*)

Ayyy Dr. Raiden~
From a high ended player's view, what I have been seeing is lack of hype in taiko. Either that's in tournament or just daily playing. Japanese players are obviously dominating everything. I have no rope to raise my rank as obviously Ik some Japanese are going to rape me shortly after anyway. It is hard to hype a tournament when we clearly know who is going to win in the end as well... And personally I have no good suggestion other than ones that would provoke exclusion or racism... But anyway, just telling you problem.

Second problem I would say is, yes, we have lots of taiko mapper, but we lack in quality mapping. Yes, even myself. It is very easy to start off mapping taiko comparing to other game modes, but to be good and precise it definitely needs lots of repetitive practice and training in order to do so. Inexperienced mapper would tend to think their map is perfect, and ask BN to bubble it despite having lack of realization in the lack of quality (Yes, that's myself again). Which leads to the next problem.

The BN after checking through too many maps that requires too much improvements and lacking in quality, would shortly grow demotivated to check more maps; thus, why BNs tends to be demotivated and taiko tends to have small amount of maps ranked. A lot of times people shit on BN due to the fact that they don't check their map, or reject their map check. I believe it is worth looking from another perspective. Just imagine having to deal with tons of people asking for NORMAL MOD with NO RETURN everyday, while when they actually check it, the map has shit load of flaws. No matter how motivated of a BN you are, you will grow tired shortly after. Another factor that would affect lack of ranked map is the lack of player base, which again isn't something that we could change.

I suggest that if you want to open taiko mentor thing. You should also open one for taiko mapping mentor, I believe we have more problem in terms of mapping than gameplay; thus taiko mapping mentor is more practical.

S a n d wrote:

Ayyy Dr. Raiden~
From a high ended player's view, what I have been seeing is lack of hype in taiko. Either that's in tournament or just daily playing. Japanese players are obviously dominating everything. I have no rope to raise my rank as obviously Ik some Japanese are going to rape me shortly after anyway. It is hard to hype a tournament when we clearly know who is going to win in the end as well... And personally I have no good suggestion other than ones that would provoke exclusion or racism... But anyway, just telling you problem.

Totally agreed on this, but we can't really do much beside trying to increase our non-japanese playerbase. Which is hard. The original game comes from Japan, after all.

Second problem I would say is, yes, we have lots of taiko mapper, but we lack in quality mapping. Yes, even myself. It is very easy to start off mapping taiko comparing to other game modes, but to be good and precise it definitely needs lots of repetitive practice and training in order to do so. Inexperienced mapper would tend to think their map is perfect, and ask BN to bubble it despite having lack of realization in the lack of quality (Yes, that's myself again). Which leads to the next problem.

Again, I totally agree. While being the most simplistic designed game mode, this also comes with the consequence of the flaws being much harder to detect. I believe some guidance to newer people (if we have the time and motivation to do so) would at least solve this in a way, for newer generations of both Taiko players and mappers/modders.

The BN after checking through too many maps that requires too much improvements and lacking in quality, would shortly grow demotivated to check more maps; thus, why BNs tends to be demotivated and taiko tends to have small amount of maps ranked. A lot of times people shit on BN due to the fact that they don't check their map, or reject their map check. I believe it is worth looking from another perspective. Just imagine having to deal with tons of people asking for NORMAL MOD with NO RETURN everyday, while when they actually check it, the map has shit load of flaws. No matter how motivated of a BN you are, you will grow tired shortly after. Another factor that would affect lack of ranked map is the lack of player base, which again isn't something that we could change.

I can only post the "thank you.gif" here. Many people assume that having a ranked map is some sort of a right, and thus become a bit too self-entitled. But I really do not know how to talk to them so they remove that silly idea from their minds, without them going at me saying I'm an arrogant bastard who thinks is someone just because of a yellow badge on a sub-forum in here. I've tried, just without any success for now. But worry not, I will not give up.

I suggest that if you want to open taiko mentor thing. You should also open one for taiko mapping mentor, I believe we have more problem in terms of mapping than gameplay; thus taiko mapping mentor is more practical.

As I mentioned to you earlier, it was only for mapping. Sorry for any misunderstanding with that.

If you would look at the maps of everyone it may would be better, but to me it seems like the nominator ignore every map thats not of famous mappers and nominators themselves. i know maps where the mapper spend much time for making a good map or at least they try to do it. they start modding spend all their freetime for their map and noone of you even want to look at it.
then on the other hand, there are mappers that make halfassed maps (*sry but it pisses me off), spending some stars receiving 1-2 mods where they ignore nearly everything and its ranked immediately... why? just because the mapper is a nominator.
and yes you know which map i mean, its just ranked.

all that is demotivating people, or at least me. cause I know as long as i'm not famous or have connections, I can do whatever I want noone will ever notice.

and thats why modding in total, in the current state how it is makes definitly no sense.(exept learning a bit due to seeing many maps/or for the known mappers to incrase each others maprating)

just my opinion, i may be wrong.
but thats what i see as mediumplayer ranked about 1k.

always if i feel like yeah make a map try to rank it start modding again, a short time later i realize... why? noone will care as long as they get their own maps ranked.
*i really get the feeling that its like that

i know i shouldnt give up cause nothing will change then, but well i just make my own maps for me and my friends and as long as i see everyone likes it im happy.

i don't know how that mentioring system should work. i would like to hear more about it, and test it for sure
but i dont think that the quality of these mappers is the problem. for me it is the way how the BN/Nominators work.

S a n d wrote:

Ayyy Dr. Raiden~
Japanese players are obviously dominating everything. I have no rope to raise my rank as obviously Ik some Japanese are going to rape me shortly after anyway. It is hard to hype a tournament when we clearly know who is going to win in the end as well...

^This is very true

- My Opinion -
I can agree with almost all your Points, Raiden, experienced these myself as a mapper in the lower quarter of the community.
The lack of motivation is just a massive hole, and i think the Mentor program will help, but not entirely fix it.

Ive seen people just quit mapping after several months not because 'their maps are bad' or 'they cant improve', they mostly just dont WANT to improve.
But this is where i see the Mentor program helping, being a kind of general help for newer mappers, with them VOLUNTARILY expanding their mapping/modding skill and knowledge.

From the Modding side, however, motivation is just at a Stopped point, and the best bet to get your mods, is through *Mutuals*(that mod frequently), which most Starting mappers do not have all that much, further demotivating them and take their initiative to rank or even map something. Results in a Downward Spiral of Demotivation

I call myself blame on this, doing this myself, taking mods and modding seldom myself.

I support this, and if we can really make this work, hopefully we can get out of this rutt.

Im prolly the first one to take a mentor :^)

Ps: And people seem to be quite rankwhores, atleast in my circle, and that i think needs a change of mindset. Hope the Mentor Program helps there too

PPs: The situation of the BNs/Modders cant be quite ignored too, a new system about BNs should be considered.

Estaryo wrote:

If you would look at the maps of everyone it may would be better, but to me it seems like the nominator ignore every map thats not of famous mappers and nominators themselves.

This isn't inherently a problem. The ones that get ranked maps more easily (aka famous mappers or nominators) have earned their way into gaining the trust of other nominators, and thus it is way easier for them, represents a less dense workload for the nominators. And even they can get a nomination in exchange. The problem itself is at both sides fault:
- The newcomers for not putting enough effort before giving up and instead blaming it on the system
- The experienced ones for ignoring such thing ^
In the end, you can't really blame the nominators. Believe it or not, our workload is substantially big, given how small our team is. Some people just happen to see it from the outside and don't think we have a real life, or already pending requests from waaaay before.

My point of view on this matter is still the same as before: as a newbie/amateur mapper, put more effort, socialize and work your way up. That is an example. Observe other modders, mod a lot and improve over time. Arm yourself with tons of patience.
However, this time I guess I am willing to take some time, and start trying to help people do this.
My only obstacles for this matter are time, and the willingness of people to accept that their creations might not be as ready as they thought they were. Aka learning to take criticism.

i know maps where the mapper spend much time for making a good map or at least they try to do it. they start modding spend all their freetime for their map and noone of you even want to look at it.
then on the other hand, there are mappers that make halfassed maps (*sry but it pisses me off), spending some stars receiving 1-2 mods where they ignore nearly everything and its ranked immediately... why? just because the mapper is a nominator.
and yes you know which map i mean, its just ranked.

I would like not to include personal attacks on this thread, honestly. So I'll just not respond to that.

Half-assed maps normally don't get through qualified if the community cares enough. So, if you feel a map is half-assed, you should rather mod it and report it instead of complaining right after it is ranked. Another one of our problems is the "let's complain but do nothing about it" culture we have somehow developed. The other modes are not even close to the lazy nature we've gained.

all that is demotivating people, or at least me. cause I know as long as i'm not famous or have connections, I can do whatever I want noone will ever notice.

and thats why modding in total, in the current state how it is makes definitly no sense.(exept learning a bit due to seeing many maps/or for the known mappers to incrase each others maprating)

just my opinion, i may be wrong.
but thats what i see as mediumplayer ranked about 1k.

always if i feel like yeah make a map try to rank it start modding again, a short time later i realize... why? noone will care as long as they get their own maps ranked.
*i really get the feeling that its like that

i know i shouldnt give up cause nothing will change then, but well i just make my own maps for me and my friends and as long as i see everyone likes it im happy.

The thing is the following: every "famous" person has earned said title out of hard work and patience. No one becomes famous "because yes". This is a common excuse many people use just to blame others, and I'm already trying to remove that silly idea from everyone's minds. But it is so deep in people's minds that said job is certainly not easy to do.

i don't know how that mentioring system should work. i would like to hear more about it, and test it for sure
but i dont think that the quality of these mappers is the problem. for me it is the way how the BN/Nominators work.

Both are the problem. For me, it is roughly a 60-40. I do agree the way we work is not the most optimal one, but nothing has been suggested so far. Staff memebrs are already working on something and moddingv2 should somewhat solve these problems.

In regards to the mappers, I believe they should have some more conciousness on the situation. It's been already thouroughly explained but it seems nothing is getting resolved when it comes to such attitudes.

Thanks for posting.

well i may am a bit harsh with my first post. but that were things that had to been said from my side.

sure i know BN's etc. have much to do.
and its okay they can get higher priority because of that.

my problem is just i dont know how to move forward on that way that will end in getting a map ranked someday.
i mean mapping/modding till starrating incrases... its not working if your map is still too bad.
you cant know if your maps are good or not, i know it from my first map i made. i received some mods but all are different, dont know who is right and who not. sure i could mod all the day and night. but i dont think thats helping as long as i have no way to get the important information about my own maps. if they are good or not.

sure i could do more, and im a person who would like the get constructive critisism so you could learn and improve. but how to get that?... thats the most difficult problem i have.

i didnt mean to blame bn etc. bout that... but theres a gap between mappers, i mean all qualified maps are from known mappers and i just cant believe that the rest is so bad. *(i know i have said this before, ignore it)

EDIT: i would really like to have something like spend 10-20 kudosu and you will get feedback from a good mapper/person who should know how it should work
EDIT2: i didnt mean to attack anyone. if you got it like that then sorry for that, i should have written it on another way then.

thoughts on mentoring: i personally feel like mentoring is sorta wasted effort in terms of fixing this rut that taiko is in (but i wholeheartedly respect that you're trying, any effort is better than none). mentoring might help but how many people can you generate of spark of genuine interest in at a time? theres only so many people who are willing to learn, and probably fewer both willing and able to teach. how long till they burn out like the tna? anyway the people who sign up would be the 10% who already have the drive to improve. there'll only be a difference if you come up with something that interests the 90% who currently don't give a damn.

Estaryo wrote:

well i may am a bit harsh with my first post. but that were things that had to been said from my side.

sure i know BN's etc. have much to do.
and its okay they can get higher priority because of that.

my problem is just i dont know how to move forward on that way that will end in getting a map ranked someday.
i mean mapping/modding till starrating incrases... its not working if your map is still too bad.
you cant know if your maps are good or not, i know it from my first map i made. i received some mods but all are different, dont know who is right and who not. sure i could mod all the day and night. but i dont think thats helping as long as i have no way to get the important information about my own maps. if they are good or not.

sure i could do more, and im a person who would like the get constructive critisism so you could learn and improve. but how to get that?... thats the most difficult problem i have.

i didnt mean to blame bn etc. bout that... but theres a gap between mappers, i mean all qualified maps are from known mappers and i just cant believe that the rest is so bad. *(i know i have said this before, ignore it)

EDIT: i would really like to have something like spend 10-20 kudosu and you will get feedback from a good mapper/person who should know how it should work
EDIT2: i didnt mean to attack anyone. if you got it like that then sorry for that, i should have written it on another way then.

I didn't intend to look defensive on my response either, so, sorry about that.

The mentoring process is supposed to fix that. When you get stuck on who to ask, that is when the mentor thing kicks in.

Invective wrote:

thoughts on mentoring: i personally feel like mentoring is sorta wasted effort in terms of fixing this rut that taiko is in (but i wholeheartedly respect that you're trying, any effort is better than none). mentoring might help but how many people can you generate of spark of genuine interest in at a time? theres only so many people who are willing to learn, and probably fewer both willing and able to teach. how long till they burn out like the tna? anyway the people who sign up would be the 10% who already have the drive to improve. there'll only be a difference if you come up with something that interests the 90% who currently don't give a damn.

While I totally agree on this, that was exactly the point: to reward those that are actually willing and interested in improving. If everyone else is not interested or not willing to improve in any way, sadly that is not up to us. Surely, we could make something to interest people, but we are no mind readers. If people don't tell us what they want (except wanting all their maps ranked and whatnot >_>) what else can we do? We are not super humans.

Thanks for the interest, once again.

i agree that i gave up too easily, but who can blame me. when you're told my maps suck especially when you put a lot of effort into it, it brings you down, and you dont want to keep felling like that, so you stop.

if i were to know exactly why my maps suck (lack of structure = ?????) it would help me to make better maps in the future

Raiden wrote:

While I totally agree on this, that was exactly the point: to reward those that are actually willing and interested in improving.

The intrinsic reward should be that of improvement and community involvement. Bring the fun out and more apparent, and make it out to be partaking in the community. There should be no required extrinsic reward.

I honestly think the mentoring is a great idea after reading through it. I'd love to learn how to map so I'd probably sign up for the program

What I think Taiko needs more than anything else though is more players. I think half of players I talk to didn't even know other game modes exist, or if they do have only played auto-converts (most of which are terrible) and never think the mode is any good as they never play any of the well made mode specific maps.

I try and tell all my friends how much fun Taiko is and try to get more standard players to give Taiko a try with limited success. I think a sort of Taiko outreach program might be the best way to get more people to play Taiko and ultimately cause more of the community to evolve. I think what is great are hybrid sets that include Taiko difficulties into standard sets as it increases players unknowingly downloading Taiko maps . That being said only having a single 4-5 star Oni or inner Oni isn't a great way to get new players into it as its too intimidating. I think people guest mapping Futsuu maps for standard sets might be a great way to get people into Taiko. So that might be a strange goal. Find people mapping standard and try and see if they'd be cool with you guest mapping a Taiko map for their set and have it be Futsuu. Sure you can add the oni as well but I think having the lower difficulty is important for attracting people to our community.

This is just one thought I had to try and get more standard players aware of Taiko

I mentioned it in my big post, but there's not much incentive for a new player to continue playing Taiko. One of these reasons is that auto-converts are seriously lacking in quality - we have a healthy population of Kantan~Muzukashii, but because of the obscurity of the mode most that try the mode out will think it's lame and boring.

A few things that might help with this:

1. More hype for really great plays. A lot of people heard about osu! because of the recent 799.99pp meme thanks to shigetora, and it's made a lot more visible because you can see a bunch of his great plays easily from YouTube, thus giving a potential player a great view of top-level play. We don't really have anything like that for taiko - n1doking recently dropped a best taiko pp play and most people were arguing the legitimacy of it because lol HDFL is stupid. This doesn't really reflect well on the community. I don't think there's a particularly easy solution to this, because at base it requires an active and excited community. I can be excited for my own personal great plays, such as recently making a 300pp play, but I feel in comparison to The Great Nippon Masters it's really not that great of an accomplishment and that I wouldn't have much merit sharing it with the community. We also certainly don't want to hijack or step on the toes of the standard community, because then they might meme us to death (don't scoff at the meme death, it's very real).

2. Less obfuscation for new players. We have a TBT, but it's tucked away in the forums that new players probably barely touch. For a potential player to find out that auto-converts are regarded as lower quality, they have to go out of their own way to discover the taiko community, rather than being guided. This is a problem that standard doesn't suffer from nearly so much, because a) the osu!Standard channel is on auto-join for launching the client, and b) osu!Standard has gained popularity from outside of osu! itself, such as having a subreddit that reaches /r/all occasionally and streamers for other games like League of Legends playing osu! on stream, and c) osu!Standard doesn't suffer from the problem that "some ranked maps aren't good for play at all" except unless you want to argue about farm maps but that's upper levels of play anyway.

A lot of (2) can be resolved by having more support in-game, which goes back to my previous post where I said that frankly osu!taiko kind of sucks as a client, and I don't think we can expect many improvements until dev focus is freed up from their LAZER project.

I joined 11 months ago yo osu! , and immediately fell in love with taiko. since then, i have noticed that the actual active members ranges from 0-15 at it's largest. we need to fix this.

<33
--weiss--

As someone who is like a ghost nowadays, I just wanted to give some input, since my state is something that I can see happening to more people.

I am trying to be objective in my discussion posts, so please take no offense to this post. ╭( ･ㅂ･)و
Also, I always tend to look at any negative points of the discussion first, since they are easy to fix if necessary.

Anyways, here are a few thoughts of mine on why mentoring is not a good idea at all:

1. What is an accurate definition, or even a qualification of a mentor? I am not trying to discourage people from doing this, but for a system to be in place, a clear vision is necessary. While anyone can be someone's "mentor", who is exactly capable of doing that, or what are the benefits?
   
   Learning is fine, but learning on your own mistakes is best (in my opinion). This doesn't mean that it's wrong to learn from other people's mistakes, of course, but what I am trying to say is that usually following in someone else's footsteps doesn't really produce desired results for either the mentor or the person under them. It takes a lot of energy, mutual understanding and not to mention time for someone to properly coach someone. I don't think many mappers are willing to go through all that, but I could be wrong.
2. How does the mentoring system benefit everyone? If by any chance you could define what a mentor should be doing, and how is one qualified to be one, how does everyone benefit from this system?
   I doubt there could be so many mentors that every mapper could have one, and taking more than one person to coach at a time is insane if you consider how much time is necessary.
   Even if everything is working as intended, not many people would benefit from this system, really.
3. Taiko only has one-dimensional maps, which heavily limits on what you can do with them. I am mentioning this, despite it being somewhat unrelated, because I find this very important. Basic rhythms are not that difficult to make, however new mappers can't even handle that, and explaning everything about rhythm and why it works is so much for someone to handle. You could really write books about it. Connect it to the problem above, and you will easily burn yourself out as a mentor.

These are just what comes to mind at this moment.

Now, this post isn't really constructive, so let me add a few suggestions to make it so:

1. Since everyone seems to be focused around mapping here, mapping contests are obviously a way to go. And by that, I mean official mapping contests which so far happened how many times, 2 or 3? I don't even know. Obviously taiko is not popular enough (I beg to differ though) so every now and then only the standard mode gets more focus on.
   
   Mapping contests are amazing, because every map gets judged by several people. That's feedback. Feedback is really really important for improvement. And in this way, you get it for free.
2. More frequent tournaments. Currently, there is twc only, and maybe a localized tournament for Japan or NA or something.
   I know that tournaments are difficult to handle since you need dedicated staff, but this is exactly the engagement which brings many individuals together.
3. Music making? Not everyone can do this, but I know that some can. Do a community collab that some make music and some map it?

Just a few thoughts that came by while writing the post.

I hate to be negative or to crush people's dreams, but please think about a goal and the means to achieve it. It goes a long way, and makes things much faster if you need to push an idea.

P.S. you don't need to reply to this post to answer the questions, you just need to ask yourself.

I'll go back to hiding again, before someone exorcises me. ╭( ･ㅂ･)و

good point on the feedback part, one of the mentoring system's issues is that you only got the feedback of your mentor instead of severals. but to build your own mapping preferences (still in a "quality way") your need to get opinions from different "experienced" people rather than ending up doing "what your mentor would have done".

about the mentor himself, i think so he should be able to teach general things like spread/density regardind the music/.. and stuff rather than going too deep in patterns detail as this becomes a bit subjective (that would not be an issue with several opinions).

another issue would be for BN who chose to become mentors. those are kind of seen as people up to help anyone on mapping stuff instead of being dedicated to only one person.

i can think of other ways to actually teach someone how to "properly" map but in the end those systems would die some week after because it's entirely up to the "experienced" guys who could be part of it (like tna). i see no benefits at all for them so such system can hardly survive.

Nofool wrote:

good point on the feedback part, one of the mentoring system's issues is that you only got the feedback of your mentor instead of severals. but to build your own mapping preferences (still in a "quality way") your need to get opinions from different "experienced" people rather than ending up doing "what your mentor would have done".

about the mentor himself, i think so he should be able to teach general things like spread/density regardind the music/.. and stuff rather than going too deep in patterns detail as this becomes a bit subjective (that would not be an issue with several opinions).

another issue would be for BN who chose to become mentors. those are kind of seen as people up to help anyone on mapping stuff instead of being dedicated to only one person.

i can think of other ways to actually teach someone how to "properly" map but in the end those systems would die some week after because it's entirely up to the "experienced" guys who could be part of it (like tna). i see no benefits at all for them so such system can hardly survive.

I understand these concerns.

The main objective of a mentor is not to forcefully introduce his/her own way on the mentee, but rather help them with general issues that may arise and try to get them unstuck on whatever thing they get stuck with, so that in the end, the mentee can follow his/her own way without any need of a mentor.

And actually, the BNs are actually considered as "gatekeepers" for what passes to ranked and what does not. Our 'duty' is not to "help people inconditionally" like a NGO or like some sort of philantropists, but to ensure the quality of the beatmaps passing to ranked section. We are the ones deciding what becomes official content of this game, after all.

edit:╭( ･ㅂ･)و

Bring in Taikonator.

On a serious note, mainly in response to lolcubes, I'm currently helping in the osu!std winter mentorship program and I can tell you that there have been remarkable improvements on peoples' mapping abilities thanks to all the mentoring. This has not only been stated by the mentors but by the mentees themselves as well. In addition, there's no shortage of people wanting to mentor others. Currently we have 31 mentors willing to help newbies learn how to map. Some have even gotten their first ranked maps thanks to this. I don't see why the same wouldn't work for Taiko?

Clearly it's going to increase the amount of mappers for the mode in question, since many people struggle with different mapping concepts (rhythm for example) and can lose faith in their own mapping ability. This is when a mentorship is of a lot of help because mentors have the experience and capability to teach these concepts in a fairly comprehensible way. The results speak for themselves.

MrSergio and some other mentors have picked more than 1 mentee so teaching multiple at a time isn't impossible either. I think it'll be especially easier with Taiko because it is arguably the easiest gamemode to map right now with less concepts that people have to learn in order to make quality maps. Also the mentees themselves will be of course applying these learned concepts into their own maps, so it's not like they're simply copy pasting a mentor's work. Once they've gotten the hang of it, they can apply it on any map.

I think Taiko mentorship would increase the amount of mappers and therefore maps as well, so in conclusion, I see it as a viable option to boost the gamemode's popularity.

Appelkatt wrote:

2. Less obfuscation for new players. We have a TBT, but it's tucked away in the forums that new players probably barely touch. For a potential player to find out that auto-converts are regarded as lower quality, they have to go out of their own way to discover the taiko community, rather than being guided. This is a problem that standard doesn't suffer from nearly so much, because a) the osu!Standard channel is on auto-join for launching the client, and b) osu!Standard has gained popularity from outside of osu! itself, such as having a subreddit that reaches /r/all occasionally and streamers for other games like League of Legends playing osu! on stream, and c) osu!Standard doesn't suffer from the problem that "some ranked maps aren't good for play at all" except unless you want to argue about farm maps but that's upper levels of play anyway.

A lot of (2) can be resolved by having more support in-game, which goes back to my previous post where I said that frankly osu!taiko kind of sucks as a client, and I don't think we can expect many improvements until dev focus is freed up from their LAZER project.

I vaguely recall Vulkin planning to do a storyboarded taiko-tutorial with the tutorial-song but dropping it due to difficulties with storyboarding.
I think that this certainly could help newer players and when pushed forward by the Taiko-community i could definitely see peppy bundle it with the game.
I mean when I first wanted to try Taiko I looked for a tutorial and found this: https://osu.ppy.sh/b/70167&m=1
Well, trolled, fml. Since I was lurking in the forum anyway I found TBT of course but that might be a good project to actually start off.