Thanks for creating this thread, I've been moaning about loved for the last few months.
Eph you and I have very different views of what "loved" should mean. It seems that to you that kudos mean as much as favorites regarding loved status (which I can never agree with). If we're going to be forced to use kudos then I love the idea of x kudos = y favs if. I think making kudos optional is much more true to the category. Kudos don't belong in the loved category and you probably know that, so let them be optional. Use a formula that weights kudos vs favs to accomplish this.
kudos + favs * x >= y
(after reading through all the posts it appears monstrata reached the same conclusion with the EXACT same values I had in my mind)Now just play around with the values of x and y until you find a nice outcome (and no please don't make x anything below 1, favorites SHOULD be worth more).
Another problem is the fact that the system is RETARDED for non-standard maps. There aren't going to be any mania maps that fit the new requirements after like one cycle if the requirements aren't made more dynamic somehow (I have no solution to this).
Now that we've gotten the "include kudos" version of the category out the way, I can give my own opinion and some better ideas:
Mappers shouldn't be able to strive for loved status and they shouldn't be able to get a map loved with minimal community involvement.Involving kudos is
retarded. ( I disagree than rankable maps shouldn't be loveable, that's not what the section is about, the effort a mapper puts towards achieving ranked or loved and the style of that map is completely unrelated to whether the community wants a scoreboard or not).
Loved is NOT a way for mappers to make their first steps into the community, it's the communities way of letting enjoyable maps in.There are a lot of people who seem to think that loved should only be for unrankable style maps. While I would love this (all of the best maps in the sections are IMO the innovative unrankable ones), I don't think it's right. It's fallacious to think that this is a "this or that" scenario, in reality we should be asking "why can't we have both?". Legitimately, why the fuck can't we? In a proper system I believe that unrankable and rankable maps that the community loves would both float into the loved category without intervention from mappers and modders, we just need to set that system up.
Which brings me onto the discussion of what the loved system should actually be comprised of. For one it CAN'T involve kudos. Kudos just take all of my opinions and aggressively shits upon them. Involving kudos means that mappers must be actively involved in trying to get their map loved, they must ask for kudos from modders or dump enough of their own kudos onto their map. This does NOT show what the community wants, it shows what 4 or 5 modders want.
I can see 2 reasons that kudos are required. I believe that the people running the system aimed to solve the issue of a big circlejerk group moving their favorited beatmaps around from map to map in order to bulk move maps into the loved category (which is a legit problem). The obvious solution to this also allowed the elimination of the long standing issue of how useless kudos are. IMO this is a budget solution. I don't believe that favorites alone are an acceptable solution (it's abusable) but I also don't believe kudos are the solution. I've never seen anyone mention the abusability of favorites publicly but I'm pretty sure it's been discussed behind closed doors, so I'll propose a solution (if we're going to use favorites that is). Limit the amount of favorites a player can REVOKE in a given period of time (revoke one per week or so). Arguably this could be annoying, but people shouldn't be mass unfavoriting maps anyway if they really are a persons favorite maps. It's a simple and more effective solution than shitty kudos dumps and it stands as my favorite, simplest solution. With this limitation introduced, loved CAN be entirely based on favorites (which would be far better IMO).
But to be frank, I don't think any of the above solutions are good enough in the long term. I believe the solution should be a more seamless system integrated directly into the client. Essentially I don't believe a perfect solution should be the goal until the new client is released. Some thoughts on how the new client should handle everything:
Once a week people are awarded a certain amount of points based on their stats (let's call them vote points (vp)). Each player would be given vp based on multiple factors (arbitrary formulas like a players pp in a mode divided by 1000 plus maps modded in the last week divided by 2... etc..). vp would be MODE SPECIFIC and each player would receive a different amount in mode specific vp based on their stats related to the game-mode. Players would be able to vote on maps that they want to see loved using these points, once a week. A live list of the 100 most popular maps (by vp) would be available in game to make the process even easier. Every week to highest x amount of maps from each mode would be moved to loved (x being scaled based on the number of vp used that week in each given mode). At the end of the week, vp is completely reset for players and maps and then re-distributed.
I think a proper solution is a long way away and tackling this issue is going to be difficult, that doesn't mean the current system is acceptable though, something temporary needs to be done and I believe the system should be entirely based on favorites for now.