borborygmos wrote:

how about just look at the ranks of people and the range of those ranks can perform at, its not rocket science to see most people play ENH, but many more relevant people who contribute to this game play I+

xxdeathx wrote:

Pretty much this when I said what I said. I shouldn't have to go off topic to argue the semantics of my slightly incorrect word choice when the proof is in plain view.

What plain view? What logic? Prove it with data. I'm not saying any of you are wrong, but if people interpret the same source of data differently, then whatever you say means nothing to those seeing that data, unless you back it up with something more solid than your own conclusion.

Note: I never said anything about H diffs.

Monstrata wrote:

If such things occur, they should be brought up in the modding process anyways. The rules shouldn't replace BN's abilities to make sound judgements. I've never come across a poor mp3 edit getting past qualification anyways though .

Can't say I have either so point taken.

Ascendance wrote:

pishifat wrote:

Spread

Rules

All rules are exactly that: RULES. They are NOT guidelines and may NOT be broken under ANY circumstance.

1. If a hybrid mapset includes osu!standard difficulties...
   
   1. One osu!catch difficulty may be included. It must be at least an Insane difficulty.

Does this counter this rule now? t/292401

The current standing explains that catch the beat diffs on hybrid sets could not contain ONLY an X-level difficulty (Overdose). The new rule implies that only one difficulty can be added and it can be either I (Rain) or X (Overdose) level? Unless I'm missing something here, isn't this a bit counterproductive towards the growth of our mode, considering a good amount of hybrid sets have H-level (Platters) on them?

Also why are we limiting the amount of difficulties on a hybrid mapset? It's like we're being discouraged from providing content to our users. It's not like we've ever had a problem with too many difficulties in a set before in our mode, so there's almost no reason to enforce something on us like this. Our mode is dying, please don't kill it more. It's already bad enough that I have 1/2 of the ranked osu!catch maps in the last 2 months lol

Nope, it's not meant that way, just a case of bad wording again LOL
It's supposed to say pmuch the same as that old rule, so I guess smth like "..having only one osu!catch difficulty suffices when it's an Insane or lower" would work better

In the interests of fair and accurate discussion on the matter, I pulled some stats down for beatmap plays across all difficulty ranges of ALL approved, ranked, qualified and Loved beatmaps:



Make of that what you will.

Ephemeral wrote:

In the interests of fair and accurate discussion on the matter, I pulled some stats down for beatmap plays across all difficulty ranges of ALL approved, ranked, qualified and Loved beatmaps:



Make of that what you will.

Just checking, this is across all time?

Across all ranked plays, yes. You'll note that it adds up to almost the exact number of purported "total ranked plays" at the top of the page as well.

But then the consideration is that there are still some sets that may not have an Extra or an Insane at all so it's still not really a perfect representation of what the player base plays these days. (Since you mentioned all maps Im just gonna assume it includes the older maps before 2013, and back then we didn't have much Extra difficulties (or sometimes not even Insanes) compared to now.)

edit: ok so it is indeed all maps

Good point.

2014-present:


2015-present:


2016-present:

------

2008-2015:


2015-2016:


2016-2017:


2017-present:

It would be interesting to see how those numbers corresponded to Playcount. I would like to believe that the more dedicated players, people who put time in this game, will make up the majority of the Insane/Extra plays, and people just visiting the site / playing when they're bored for like 2 hours a month or something would make up the majority of Normal/Hard plays. All conjecture though of course.

I would prefer catering to more dedicated players in the community over people who just play once in a while.

A reasonable assertion would be that NHI-HIX spread would adequately encompass about 60-70% of the playerbase based on these statistics alone.

Easy difficulty outlier-status is easily explained by its incredibly high pass ratio compared to other difficulties - most easies are probably too easy for 95% of all players, even newer ones, and are frequently only ever played once or in very few numbers before players graduate on to Normal as the defacto "entry-level" difficulty.

blissfulyoshi wrote:

borborygmos wrote:

how about just look at the ranks of people and the range of those ranks can perform at, its not rocket science to see most people play ENH, but many more relevant people who contribute to this game play I+

xxdeathx wrote:

Pretty much this when I said what I said. I shouldn't have to go off topic to argue the semantics of my slightly incorrect word choice when the proof is in plain view.

What plain view? What logic? Prove it with data. I'm not saying any of you are wrong, but if people interpret the same source of data differently, then whatever you say means nothing to those seeing that data, unless you back it up with something more solid than your own conclusion.

Note: I never said anything about H diffs.

The fact that there are 10 million users and no more than the top few hundred thousand that are capable of playing insanes is not enough to support my original hypothesis?

there are more players who play ENH

That's the data and I see no need to analyze it to the point where you're convinced when most others are able to take it for granted

I think it's less an issue of easiness, and more an issue of sheer quantity. Every mapset that is not approval has an Easy difficulty, but the learning curve in progressing from playing Normals > Hards is a lot steeper than Easy > Normal (And Hard > Insane even steeper still). My point being, because there are steeper learning curves the harder you get, the more a player is likely to play more maps with similar difficulties. You might have to play ~1000 Hard maps before you've improved enough in skill level to properly play Insanes. But you probably would only need a fraction of those plays before progressing from an Easy to a Normal. Therefore, you wouldn't feel the need to "try" as many different Easy-difficulty maps.

It's why imo Easies are so untouched. Tbh I think the same holds true for Normal, but the number is offset by the sheer quantity of people who just play osu as a past-time like maybe for an hour every month or something.


But anyways. interesting statistics, thanks for sharing! I wasn't expecting Insanes to have that many plays. I always thought it would be the Hard or Normal difficulty judging from all the bundled beatmap playcounts. Reaffirms my opinion that a spread cap is unnecessary.

Important to note that the 2014-2015 discrepancy appears to be due to a change in the way beatmaps are recorded serverside, and is instead an aggregate of 2008-2014.

since spread cap of 8 isn't really needed here, would changing it so that it's a diff specific cap work better?
eg. capping at 4-5 insanes.
prevents things from getting spammy without limiting the max difficulty, eg if an a hyper or advanced was needed for spread

I think a rule limiting difficulties that are not significantly different would do well to address the bloat issue while still keeping things fair for creators. The difficulty (hah) then comes in determining what is "significantly" different.

As data displayed, the majority of plays can be found in the segment of Hard, Insane and Normal - and Expert difficulty being in the minority (together with Easy, which is clear because not all sets must have an Easy). The amount of Expert difficulties produced in recent history are in no relation to the amount of plays they actually receive. The excerise of increasing the set's amount of difficulties to add *even more Experts* (although they are not even targetted at who actually plays the set) just adds content bloat - a lot of the same, without a distinctive difference.

I debated with Ephemeral for a while and I can get behind two alternative proposals being made by fellow community members, one being to turn the set size limitation into a guideline, saying that "sets shall not exceed the amount of 8 difficulties per game mode, unless the exceeding ones are a significantly different approach of interpretation"

It is a middle ground between "we need a limit" and "whoever actually exersizes varied mapping and adds an actual multitude of map designs as alternative to their mapset, is allowed to do so, if the alternatives are distinctive enough from each other"

But I still cannot see any valid and reasonable points about the necessity of putting limitations of mapset size.
For building up difficulty of ranking and modding process? If a mapper meets difficulty on pushing their map forward, they will automatically reduce their mapset size. And if they do not want to do that, they take the consequences by themselves. Same for modders and BNs. And I dont think it is reasonable for the criteria to handle this scheme.

For the majority-minority issue? Actually there is no determined sign and valid reason to conclude if with this new guideline, more beginner friendly maps will be created. It might just increase the proportion of simple difficulties overall but not the total number of them. This cannot solve the problem you put forward at all and even might reduce the range of choices for more pro players. Also it is not sure if people who wanted to rank a huge mapset initially will make two sets instead, because of the limitation.

responding to things that i have a different view on and why if i deleted something from your quote you can guess that it's because my viewpoint is sufficiently explained in other posts on the thread

UndeadCapulet wrote:

update wrote:

Songs/maps cannot be modified to reach the minimum drain time. Abusing the 5 minute limitation removes its intended purpose.

If a mapper is going to go out of their way to have the mp3 edited to reach marathon length, this rule won't get them to make a full spread. This rule is choosing between "have a 5 minute map for a song that isn't 5 minutes" and "have no map". As long as the actual play experience of the map is still pleasant, it is better to have the map than not have the map. There is never anything bad about having more maps.
There are plenty of songs that really don't fit for a full mapspread, but just barely don't reach minimum drain time. My 4:45 300BPM death metal anthem is not going to make for a good experience as a Normal difficulty. Requiring a mapper to design a full spread for certain songs that clearly don't need it isn't beneficial to rank quality.
To be honest this rule is almost unenforceable anyway since the line between user remix and mp3 extending is super blurry. Right now I can't add sounds to the beginning or end, but I CAN add sounds consistently throughout the mp3, call it an Edit ver. and rank it that way. People will always find loopholes to unnecessary rules.
It's also unclear whether separate songs are included in the "adding sounds to the end of the mp3" or not. Song compilations can be considered unrankable with this current wording.

If a mapper is going out of their way to custom-extend a mp3 to dodge a spread they do just that: dodge a spread and thus content they would normally have to provide to the game's different target audiences which is detrimental to a mapset's quality overall and not just plainly lazy.

The whatever diff they make out of it's quality would remain untouched if they made a full spread plus it would offer other target audiences something to play. You claim that some songs don't need a spread whereas I think at this point in the thread it's kind-of obvious that adding a spread will not be detrimental to a map's quality and if you let it influence your maps quality you should probably rethink why you are ranking stuff in the first place.

We went for explicitly listing what constitutes as abuse for the 5 minute draintime ruling on marathon maps to avoid the mentioned scenarios in mapping as well as mp3 editing for this purpose to get away with it, song compilations are a thing that would probably need talking about with this wording, i agree.

update wrote:

A mapset host must have equal or more drain time mapped than any guest difficulty mappers. This is to provide credit where credit is due. Drain times for collaborative difficulties must be listed in the creator’s words for via storyboarding.

change "for" to "or" fair
The mapset owner is in charge of not just mapping, but frequently also asking for every guest diff, finding mods, hitsounding, storyboarding, timing, balancing spread, and ensuring every other included difficulty is rankable. The set owner basically always deserves credit regardless of how much work they actually did.
If the guest difficulty mappers are okay giving mapset credit to a mapper who did "less work" than them, there should be no reason to not let them. If they weren't okay with it they wouldn't be in the set.
it has been agreed upon that the one hosting a set has extra tasks which he voluntarily takes over by hosting the set, but to be able to do so there needs to be some sort of failsave to assure that the mapset's host has contributed to the mapping side of a set that he hosts unless we want to see people ranking gd-only sets again.
This minimum effort that someone has to put into a set in order to claim to be the host has been decided to be the amount of draintime they mapped to leave out wiggle room for ambiguity. obviously mapped objects would not work as a measure because then it'd dictate that more dense = better so the only component that went into this rationale was the draintime someone mapped.

I think as a rationale this makes a whole lot of sense because it aims to avoid people going for ranking with content that they cannot even claim to have done the majority on.

update wrote:

Usernames indicating possession of a guest difficulty should be consistent between multiple mapsets. Varying nicknames for one user makes interpreting who created a difficulty confusing.

If the mapper doesn't care whether they're credited or not then that's entirely on them. The real username will be in tags and description anyway for users to find them so it doesn't matter what nickname they use in the diff name. This is just a "No Fun Allowed" rule that doesn't affect map quality in any way.

To be honest this can be said about every diffname rule/guideline. Is it really necessary to police them so strictly? With the new star rating the map difficulty can be somewhat reasonably determined without any difficulty name, so I don't see any reason to carry over old rules.
At least an explanation as to why you're using a different alias every goddamn set without changing your username for no other reason than lolz would be nice. This guideline is intended to bring forward more clarity about who a guest diff indicating possession is actually crediting because with recent developments this became quite unclear in some cases

Minimum draintime rule should talk about abusing the 5 min because the extend your song to get 30 seconds thing is actually encouraged

for anyone wondering a few of the compelling reasons for the first guideline were given by https://osu.ppy.sh/b/765299&m=0
second guideline shoudl not only recommend but require clear and appropriate relation to a song

requiring one or two difficulties if you do a marathon length set to encompass the majority of the playerbase if you are doing an expert level difficulty is something i could agree with.

As for the 8 difficulty spread limitation: I think this thing is already being really lenient (but probably only because i know all our alternative ideas for this lol), but if we want it to work as a guideline then we should remove the sentence that states that the highest level difficulties can be out of spread and would allow reasonable high-end spread to be one of the reasons to break the guideline

Additionally if we see sets that are top heavy with a lot of redundant content bloated into them a problem then allow a maximum of <N> diffs around the same difficulty to allow <N> distinct interpretations though we would then need to define what constitutes as such because if the majority of the rhythms and concepts used in a map are identical it'll become really hard to draw the line, this would need definition of further extra tier difficulty levels along with standardizing naming schemes for them which goes along xexxar's idea which he posted but never really bothered to answer my concerns from 6 months ago on

Also @Monstrata: contrary to popular belief I do actually sleep (a lot more on weekends, by the way) so just concluding / asserting that we are completely inactive when it comes to dealing with this thing is ridiculous

Ephemeral wrote:

Good point.
2014-present:

2015-present:

2016-present:

------
2008-2015:

2015-2016:

2016-2017:

2017-present:

Thanks Eph!, I love it.
I knew about this behavior looking in amount of plays in my loved set, but I did not spected that hards were the most tbh.
That explains why hitorigoto have a lot of plays...

Data > Opinions! <3

Okorin wrote:

If a mapper is going out of their way to custom-extend a mp3 to dodge a spread they do just that: dodge a spread and thus content they would normally have to provide to the game's different target audiences which is detrimental to a mapset's quality overall and not just plainly lazy. The whatever diff they make out of it's quality would remain untouched if they made a full spread plus it would offer other target audiences something to play.

Again, mappers that extend mp3 to 5min are not going to be making a full spread because of this rule. It's just not going to happen. They'll just pick a different song to map. Extending mp3 can't be detrimental to a mapset when that mapset wouldn't exist at all without the extension. Between 1 map and 0 maps, clearly the 1 map is the better option.
Keep in mind that not everyone has enough friends to gather mods/gd's/bn's for a 4:58 ENHIXU set, only a small handful of even well-known mappers can make that happen. Limiting the kinds of songs that can be reasonably pushed forward is definitely detrimental to the quality of the ranked section.
From my personal experience as a new player, experiences I've had with irl friends getting into the game, and just talking to less skilled players, in general maps above 4 minutes are not appealing to new players. They're just too long and exhausting, constant focus on not failing for 4 minutes straight is a skill only Insane/Expert players, and maybe some Hard players have developed to begin with. Making a rule forcing mappers to appeal to a target audience that would never find the map appealing is not beneficial to rank quality.

Okorin wrote:

You claim that some songs don't need a spread whereas I think at this point in the thread it's kind-of obvious that adding a spread will not be detrimental to a map's quality and if you let it influence your maps quality you should probably rethink why you are ranking stuff in the first place.

Feel like I may have implied something by mistake here. I didn't mean to say the rule would be detrimental to map quality, just that it wouldn't improve it. It does nothing at best. It only punishes "lazy mappers", reduces the diversity of songs in the ranked section, and doesn't provide any major benefits outside of this.

If you really think it necessary to restrict mp3 editing to this degree, then please instead implement something closer to what Shad0w1and suggested here. This would lead to more maps for more players to play that would actually be played. Seems like a reasonable compromise.

Okorin wrote:

it has been agreed upon that the one hosting a set has extra tasks which he voluntarily takes over by hosting the set, but to be able to do so there needs to be some sort of failsave to assure that the mapset's host has contributed to the mapping side of a set that he hosts unless we want to see people ranking gd-only sets again.

I don't see how gd-only sets is a bad thing. All the gd-er's are aware and consenting to being in a set that the host didn't participate in. They are the only people who should be concerned about getting credit for their work, and they're still in the set. If they don't care, why should we? Is it just an issue of staff not wanting to give contest/BestOf rewards to someone that didn't map anything? Because the rewards are still given in the case of someone who only mapped an Easy for their ENHIIXXU4K5K6K7KTaikoCTB set. There's little difference between rewarding this and rewarding a gd-only set.

Okorin wrote:

At least an explanation as to why you're using a different alias every goddamn set without changing your username for no other reason than lolz would be nice. This guideline is intended to bring forward more clarity about who a guest diff indicating possession is actually crediting because with recent developments this became quite unclear in some cases

Then why isn't the gd'er fully required to put their username in the difficulty? I think it's way more unclear to have "Insane by Kibbleru" than it is to have "Quibboo's Tragic Love Insane feat. Kibb by Kibbleru".
But as I said already, any diffname restriction is unnecessary in my opinion, because star rating shows map difficulty to a reasonable degree for the average player to have a reasonable expectation of difficulty. We've just recently had multiple cases of the mapping community rejecting mappers' silly Yuri Imouto with a Sword diffname, showing the RC limitations aren't helpful (these were all rankable) or needed (community can oversee itself to ensure nothing too ridiculous is ranked). This isn't exactly the most serious game out there (our lord creator peppy makes this clear enough), osu! is just a fun hobby, so what's wrong with a teeny bit of fun? Diffname affects map quality literally 0%, restricting in any way is excessive imo

---

In regards to 8diff as a guideline, I don't see how that's enforceable. There's no clear line for what makes 2 diffs of the same level distinct enough experiences to say "this set is unrankable under this guideline, while this other set is perfectly rankable." It would be case-by-case, heavily swayed by the current atmosphere of whatever was recently ranked, inconsistent, and lead to unpleasant community interactions.

In regards to 8diff as a rule:
It's been said the rule is intended to break up top-heavy sets, but the current implementation would be breaking up sets with an even spread that are just really big, like Hitorigoto, the most-played map since it was ranked. Why are we removing sets clearly approved of by players?

And I still don't see how top-heavy sets is a bad thing. It's still more maps being ranked. More maps is never a bad thing. Loctav used the term "content bloat", but breaking up the Expert diffs into other sets would create even more bloat, since now there are also multiple low diffs, across multiple sets, which requires multiple downloads, and makes it harder to find a different song when browsing through newly ranked. If anything we should be encouraging mappers to combine their sets for player convenience.

Since 2015 Insanes have been the most-played difficulty judging by Ephemeral's numbers. There are plenty of sets that are Insane-heavy as well as Expert heavy, that this rule would cut out. This is yet another way the rule would be going against the playerbase's desires. Really disagree with a rule that goes against what both players and mappers like.

When I started playing I remember hating easy difficulties because they felt like they didn't follow the music at all so I moved on to stuff that was a little harder and didn't ignore most important sounds.

So you guys are bringing back a rule that was widely rejected by the mapping community a year ago (the restriction of the number of difficulties). Also rip 4:30-4:59 minute songs, I'm most sure they will not be pushed for ranking as much anymore if this gets implemented. I'm more or less negative about these two rules and I hope they will have the same fate as the previous time the first one was proposed.

I support her ^

@Oko, I'm not talking about you, or pishi, but look at how active the other people are, as well as how similar the spread council's views are. It's more a comment about the council lacking diversity and varying opinions. At the end of the day, we're going to take everyone's comments here "into account" and push forward the rule based also on our thoughts and considerations, and what we think of people's opinions. I don't want to have to be the only person saying "the vast majority of members in the community are against it". I already know the counter-arguments that will try to make light of the discussions here like: "but the mapping community is a very small minority, we should take their consideration lightly and also consider the statistics which cater more to the player-base, even if they didn't voice their opinions".

Also, please stop using these statistics as a way to dissuade people from mapping Extras. Statistics are easily manipulated, this is one such occasion. You have to remember that Extra's cater to a different playerbase than Normals/Hards. Also, Extra's are a lot harder so obviously they have less play count since they aren't as accessible to new players. Insanes and Extra's because of their difficulty, are obviously much more popular with dedicated players in the community. You also need to consider that. Additionally, you also need to consider that aside from these "content-bloating" arguments, mappers also prefer to map Insanes/Extra's because they allow you a lot more creative freedom and enjoyment in mapping.

I really think the content-bloating argument is being unnecessarily discussed like it's a very relevant issue. You can discuss that, but also consider other factors please. We've had no limit to difficulties for a long time. There's no need to fix something that isn't broken. If mappers wish to create more content for the game, out of their own time, they should be allowed to.

The ranking criteria should cater to the mapping meta. We add rules and guidelines to nudge people in the right direction to providing higher quality maps. The difficulty-cap rule, and the song-extension rule both do nothing to producing higher quality maps or mapsets. They are only there because the RCC doesn't like them. I've only seen arguments from criteria members about how its "low quality" which is subjective, and clearly not a view reflected by the majority of the community. I remain unconvinced that implementing these rules in any effect will produce higher quality maps. The only arguments I've heard so far is that "too many difficulties clutter the song-select and difficulty-selection screen", and "abuse of mp3 extension can lead to poor mp3 edits". The first is honestly very frivolous especially since Renatus already gives every player joining the game an "overbloated" mapset to begin with. The latter is something BN's and modders should be able to comment on. It is extremely rare anyways (actually I don't even know any examples of poor mp3 editing, only mp3 editing abuse).

@Monstrata
yeah but that extra playerbase is smaller what's your point none of us are trying to stop high tier content in this game, otherwise the current proposal would say that all diffs need to be in spread

the content bloating is a relevant issue and so are other factors, but i'm also open for different approaches of the issue that you claim does not exist

@UC
comparatively adding a full spread for something to the ranked section would not be detrimental in comparison to just adding one diff. Your argument is based around people being lazy, but the same applies to 3:30 mapsets or the sort of thing that isn't long enough to tastefully extend it as of now, people won't map songs that are long because they hate spreads. This is a thing that already happens so using that as your main argument seems kinda weird considering it is aiming to disallow a thing that shouldn't have been allowed to begin with

overall it's not like we're lacking dedicated people, in fact the entire ranking criteria except for approval is centered around having people not be lazy shits with their creations which this idea - in the grand scheme of things - aligns with. also im pretty sure loctav was talking about the amount of content hitting ranked at the same time, not in separate steps and thus flooding people with seemingly arbitrary things to choose from

Loctav wrote:

As data displayed, the majority of plays can be found in the segment of Hard, Insane and Normal - and Expert difficulty being in the minority (together with Easy, which is clear because not all sets must have an Easy).

I mean looking at the numbers overall yes this is true, but from 2015 onwards this is plainly wrong. If you look at the current meta, Hard, Insane and Expert form the majority. If you look at 2016-2017 you can even see that Expert difficulties received more plays than Hards, and for 2017 alone Expert and Hard are similar in amount of plays, with around 8 million more plays each than Normals.

So yeah, your argument of no one plays extras doesn't really apply here. It's obvious that these days Hard, Insane and Expert are the more important difficulties. I understand that you dislike sets with a lot of difficulties since a lot of them feel pointless and repetitive, and even though I agree I don't see how these are a necessarily a bad thing. They aren't necessary but by being there they're not doing anything negative. They serve as bonus difficulties, simply there for those who want more from a same song or mapper. No one wants to see content for the game limited.
Also here are some fun facts


This graph's statsisn't perfect, it's not all ranked maps, but it does show that Experts get the most plays per map. Experts diffs aren't pointless. They get the third most plays and are played the most times as opposed to hards. The stats earlier by Ephemeral aren't perfect because they don't take into account that there are more hards and experts.

Any additional beatmap in a set adds strain to the review phase (aka: modding, qualifying, etc) as it is extra work for the modding/BN community to check before giving their approval. There is definitely the potential for the increasingly "bloated" top-heavy sets we've seen over the past few months to begin creating serious overhead during said phase, and the rule was introduced as an effort to try and stem that.

People need to be acutely aware that the people suggesting these changes are not doing so with ill intent or out of the means to shape things to their personal tastes - these rules arise out of issues that are eminent and growing within the mapping and modding communities. Of course, debating the reach and influence these rules might have in the future is fine, but understand as well that you're very correct when you say that nobody wants to see content limited - that includes the people behind this rework, as well.

I think the main issue is not bloating and stressing BNs/Modders with large mapsets, but rather that it doesn't feel rewarding modding them.

If the argument for banning them is that it's tiring for BNs to check them, you have to realize that BNs are the ones choosing to check them in the first place. If it was actually such a pain in the ass to check them then BNs will simply ignore those giant sets until people stop trying to get them ranked because BNs don't want to check their amazing 13 diff set for a 1:30 song. There's absolutely no reason for anyone to feel obligated to nominate that kind of thing. There's also no reason for this kind of set to define a RULE due to how uncommon they are in the first place. IF people were EXCLUSIVELY mapping 15 diff sets then it would be a different story but if you look at the pending section for even 30 seconds you will see how few of those things there are.

About the diff limit

ErunamoJAZZ wrote:

I propose make this a guideline, where if any mapper wanna broke the guide, must to justify this very well

I would love to see something that makes ranking 4:00-4:59 min songs a little easier. They are almost non existent in the game.

Default wrote:

I would love to see something that makes ranking 4:00-4:59 min songs a little easier. They are almost non existent in the game.

Shadowland had a really good suggestion imo, but it got ignored (page 4 if you are curious)

That has been suggested multiple times in the past and I find always find the same arguments against it which are pretty weak in my opinion.

Sieg wrote:

When people trying to pass their shit to the ranked status they should think about how to be more friendly to the player base. Ranking system is all about this and shouldn't be adjusted to encourage laziness or whatever you talking about.

How is a rule that makes it harder for these songs from getting ranked any friendlier for the player base? It just ends up discouraging mappers from trying to rank them and reducing song diversity as a result, which many players find quite frustrating. It's also better to have a few high quality difficulties than a thousand uninspired ones.

About the 8 diff limit rule:

I feel like the creators of the draft need to think about the people this will effect the most: the mappers. The thing with large mapsets is that people aren't creating them left and right, not everyone and their mom is creating a 17 diff mapset. Instead, you're limiting the few and far between maps that, most likely have justifications for those extra modes (different styles, high sr cap, etc.). Also I've seen the argument that low quality ENHIs are made for these mapsets, and thus we should restrict them, however the people who will have those additional difficulties will most likely go and create their own map, overpopulating the ranked section with even more maps of the same song, as well as more of what is believed to be low quality ENHIs. Lastly, this change has been proposed and shot down before, so why try to bring it back up in a revised ranking criteria if the community has already rejected it?

I actually think difficulty amount limitation can be a good thing, but not as a total number limit.

1. If mapping styles are extremely similar for the same difficulty icon (i.e. https://osu.ppy.sh/s/320118 and https://osu.ppy.sh/s/596704), then the number of diffs of that icon should be limited to one; however, if styles for the same difficulty icon do noticeably differentiate (i.e. https://osu.ppy.sh/s/115193 and https://osu.ppy.sh/b/928371), then multiple diffs of the same icon should be allowed.
2. Top diff is exempt since it can be considered an Ultra, or because it's the hardest difficulty by star rating.
3. Exceptions can also be made if the issue is spread balance.

How do you define extremely similar? That's way too subjective.
Top diff being exempt means that its a 9 diff spread instead of 8 diffs, hardly a difference.
Agree that number 3 is an absolute necessity if this rule is forced through despite the fact that there is massive community backlash against it.

Naotoshi wrote:

How do you define extremely similar? That's way too subjective.

There is no way to define it, but that's definitely a better alternative than having a hard limit.

Changes look good.

Naotoshi wrote:

How do you define extremely similar? That's way too subjective.
Top diff being exempt means that its a 9 diff spread instead of 8 diffs, hardly a difference.
Agree that number 3 is an absolute necessity if this rule is forced through despite the fact that there is massive community backlash against it.

I guess if difficulties in a spread are similar in difficulty.
Let's say extra diff 1 and extra diff 2 are both 5.4 and 5.6 stars respectively while diff 3 is 5.8.
diff 1 has only one stream in the song even though theres a sound that calls for streams later in the song, because he prioritizes vocals at that part
diff 2 and 3 have 2 streams, mainly because the GDers felt a need to map them even if the prominent sound are vocals
there may be a need to delete either diff 2 or diff 3 because they are practically the aame rhythmically and don't contribute to having a better spread, they just idle there as another difficulty to play.

idk if this works as an example

I really cannot agree with this new limitation of numbers of difficulties. Why can't mapper map as many diffs as they want to? For example, let's say... about my mapsets. I like making such big mapsets concluding this https://osu.ppy.sh/s/589073 I done it because I'd want to let more people map the song they might like and do not create another set. Why can't we just keep the RC without this limitation? Making many sets of the same song isn't really that good imo. And if people want to map the song, I usually allow it them. And in this case, making such big sets is a cool idea too, even having my own difficulties and GDs have different types of mapping styles in a single set. I would suggest to change this rule that the same mapper cannot make more than 8 diffs because style of these diffs would be about, or almost, the same. At least turning it into a guideline would be sufficient for everyone. Also when people make more and more sets, for the same song it takes much space on osu! servers, like in the past years where there are separate mappers mapped their own MIIRO mapsets and a ton of them got ranked. So imo, making big sets is more optimized variant.

Also this suggestion was rejected by most of the community before, so you are going to add it again for another reason? If you wanna be hated by community then do it, I don't actually mind. But I always believed that osu! staff listens to community and doesn't do what it want for everyone to play this game much more enjoyable. I trusted that it does what community wants. Also even if it will be added, will it start working immediately? Will I have some time to rank my map which was created before this rule was added, like after six months in effect?