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[Proposal] Spread ruleset draft

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Monstrata
@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).
Okoratu
@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
celerih

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.
Ephemeral
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.
Illyasviel
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.
Nao Tomori
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.
iYiyo
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 ;)
DeletedUser_4329079
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.
Stjpa

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)
DeletedUser_4329079
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.
Ultima Fox
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?
7ambda
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.
Nao Tomori
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.
7ambda

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.
stealthpaw
Changes look good. :)
_Meep_

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
Shmiklak
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?
Athrun
But why?

Why must we have a limit? If you take a look at beatmaps like Monstrata's Zen Zen Zense and VINXIS' No title, there's a huge spread of difficulties. The point of this, is that it caters to everyone's taste.

By having a limit, you're giving certain players the finger, especially when one does not enjoy certain quality of mapping.


A small reminder that a similar suggestion was placed on the table. You saw how much backlash there was from the community. I feel that you're not even listening to us at all! Isn't the point of these changes, a reflection towards what the community really wants? Not about your own tastes, but a mix between everyone's own opinions.

A poll should be held for this, honestly. What's the point if you don't understand the community?
Akali
You should be removing restrictions, not adding more. Most work hours put into this game is content creation and people do it being paid only with recognition, not even going by their real names but rather as anime girls sitting in their avatars. All the 8 difficulty limitation does is fulfill some people's need for "clean" sets, does nothing for players and limits community aspect of the game (cooperation required on creating big sets). You might say that these extra extras are redundant, but what's even more redundant is building additional sets of the popular song with easies, normals and hards being virtually the same. BNs might hate checking so many diffs but no one forces them too and it's between the mappers and BNG, big sets DO get ranked which means they are open to it. Keep the things as much of free market as possible please.

What I would like to see is removal of approval category (it doesn't mean anything at this point) just let the 5 min songs be ranked, adding 4 minute 2 diff possibility (like HI, HX, IX etc) would be great as well - lot of songs fall into that category due to the structure popular in electronic music that makes for great beatmaps and I don't think reducing number of easies and normals in the game on those would be that bad.

Agreed on ban on editing the mp3s (but could give people some slack on 4:58-4:59 drain time, judged case by case).
Dianthus
Why limit maps per mode to 8? It's not like there will be many maps aiming to get ranked with over 8 difficulties per mode anyway, and these few extra .osu files and leaderboards don't really take that much space. Seems too restrictive for me, especially when there's a popular song that has multiple guest difficulties.

Of course, I'm not saying that there should be no limit (there will definitely be at least one troll dude who tries to get 20 difficulties of Gory in the House or sth ranked), just that more should be allowed depending on the song and mappers' mapping quality.

So, to compromise, it should be a guideline, not a rule.
Liyac
Mapsets cannot include more than 8 total difficulties of a single game-mode. The highest difficulty of a game-mode is not required to fit within a reasonable spread, so long as no levels of difficulty are skipped.
I can see where this is going in order to prevent maps to have 26548 extras. Except, a lot of the statement is pretty vague. Reasonable spread could mean a lot of different ways. It's a pretty restrictive rule to say the least and making mappers create multiple of sets to counteract this rule would make things tedious for both sides. More BN searching, waiting, two sets of the same song and same gamemode not allowed to be qualified at the same time, yeah. There has been large ranked mapsets out there with reasonable diff spreads (sweet dreams, hitorigoto) and some semi questionable (tokyo). I guess a solution to this may be capping the sr of each diff (ex. 6 extras, 6 insanes, etc allowed at a time). Only problem with this solution is that extra's can range to a multiple of different sr's. Maybe a new diff icon could be made for 7 star maps, but that may be a hassle too.

Songs/maps cannot be modified to reach the minimum drain time.
I don't agree with this rule as much either. Supposed this rule does get published, will people actually take the time to make sure the mp3 is not modified? If someone gets caught doing it, what would happen? Telling a mapper to make a full spread of the modified mp3 that's barely 5 minutes would just be excessive and stressful. There's mini songs I would love to try mapping but the original mp3 being less than 30 seconds, so what then? As some people mentioned earlier, it really depends on how abused the modified mp3 is. If its 20 seconds of fireworks to meet the drain time, then yeah, I could see this rule being implemented. But if the mp3 is something like 4:58 drain time and one little loop could meet the approval mark, this rule could be a disaster.
7ambda
why are people complaining about the minimum drain time thing

just get people to gd other diffs if you really don't want to map them
eh - - -
hey...
Its slightly offtopic my comments question , but still part of the Ranking Criteria.

I would like to know if it is possible to remove one rule for Ranking that has been made a few years ago


"Sliders are not allowed to change speed midway" , something like that.


The gimmick used by val1080 or other mappers.

Is it possible that at some point players can map this again ?

I hope some way it can be possible to map this again for Ranked maps , its beautiful ^^
7ambda

Californian wrote:

Supposed this rule does get published, will people actually take the time to make sure the mp3 is not modified?
p/5602195

p/5287081
zev
If you are going to prevent people to edit their mp3 and avoid making a fullspread, you will need to provide a solution for them, just restricting more will lead to nothing.

Akali wrote:

Agreed on ban on editing the mp3s (but could give people some slack on 4:58-4:59 drain time, judged case by case).
for those songs that range from 3:59 until 4:59 songs no one wants to map,
I feel like you kinda need an in-between rule for those?

give those the possibility to go approved with an additional difficulty that must somewhat lower than the top difficulty and always be under 5.25

-There will be people naturally will making Easy diffs cause that's the easiest and quickest to make if they are tired of making the top diff already, or they'll just go with normal or hard if the song is too complicated for that, or they will want more freedom and don't mind mapping an Insane.
-songs like UNDEAD CORPORATION - The Empress would actually be a decent choice to go for rank, and Frederic - oddloop would be cool to map!!!!
-You will naturally overall get more variety in length of songs to pick from in all kinds of difficulties.
Zexous

zev wrote:

for those 3:59 4:59ish songs no one wants to map,
I feel like you kinda need an in-between rule for those?
No point in making "in-between" rules - when does it stop? If you make a special case for 4:55 to 4:59, then the losers with 4:59 songs become the losers with 4:54 songs, so on and so forth. There's a cutoff, and as with all cutoffs, inevitably some people are gonna just barely miss it. That's just how it is, no matter where you put the cutoff.
zev

Zexous wrote:

zev wrote:

for those 3:59 4:59ish songs no one wants to map,
I feel like you kinda need an in-between rule for those?
No point in making "in-between" rules - when does it stop? If you make a special case for 4:55 to 4:59, then the losers with 4:59 songs become the losers with 4:54 songs, so on and so forth. There's a cutoff, and as with all cutoffs, inevitably some people are gonna just barely miss it. That's just how it is, no matter where you put the cutoff.
I meant from songs which length are from 3:59 until 4:59.

you'll render a lot of songs not worth to map if you do place the cutoff wrong though.
-zilva-
Instead of mapsets with more than 8 diff spread we will have multiple mapsets with fewer diff spread from the same song. How is the later better than the former?
We lack the reasoning behind this. If its a matter of time, then why 30 seconds songs should be treated the same as 4 minutes songs.

idk, this decission seems too arbitrary.
Cyclohexane
(holy shit some washed up alumni making a post about a game he doesn't even play anymore surely his opinion is gospel and should not be questioned)


This change seems fair to me as long as we stop locking difficulties behind a certain skill limit (ie. normals shouldn't have 1/4 streams, easies can't have too many 1/2 in a row, etc etc) and allow more freedom for mappers to build a spread that, instead of trying to cover the global difficulty scale focuses on covering a certain part of it. I made these photoshops back when this was initially discussed and my opinion really hasn't changed.

to put it more plainly, i'd push for a future where one mapset can have an insane diff that's easier than another's normal, because they focus on different sides of the global diff scale.

and now here are the aforementioned photoshop graphs. behold.







these shops are like my pride and joy this is like my third time posting them, won't somebody tell me to shut up

Bottom line: less difficulties in a spread is fine as long as you don't restrict these difficulties on the global difficulty scale
Yoshimaro

Californian wrote:

There has been large ranked mapsets out there with reasonable diff spreads (sweet dreams, hitorigoto) and some semi questionable (tokyo).
What is questionable about the Toyko spread, lol... musical elements are represented as different mapping elements in pretty much every difficulty, ranging from patterning, flow, and even the CS lmfao. Those difficulties are comparable, sure, but not the same at all. Every mapper designed their own landscape of the map, and they each play differently enough to bring new elements to the spread, so what's wrong with that?

Anyhow, my stand is the same as Akali's. I personally condemn this whole restriction adding thing, it's a pretty good way to demotivate the community that is producing the playable content.
Moonlit
It feels like the creators of this ruleset are seeing problems that mappers and players are not, and trying to sell the difficulty number limitation as a necessary solution.

Can someone please define "bloat" and why it is/could be a problem for members (mappers, modders, players, staff) of the community?
Athrun
Adding on, it would seem that the ruling of the 8 diff limit is due to the fact that certain maps are being farmed for pp.

Reconsidering it, it doesn't seem such a bad idea. But then, I look at this: https://osu.ppy.sh/s/489855

This isn't a pp farming map, and yet, if something like the limit is held on, then this mapset will NEVER get ranked. Killing guest diffs? I think so.
N0thingSpecial
Personally not against the idea of putting a cap on the amount difficulties allowed in one set, as it encourage thoughtful spread design.

But I do think it is contradictory on how players progress, not just osu I think majority of good single player games focus on its "end game content", in which players will spend 10% of their time figuring the game out, and then they will spend the remaining 90% of their time, working on reaching out to the highest possible skill cap one could possibly achieve in game.
Even well designed paid rhythm games will focus more of it's creative effort into more challenging charts, examples include deemo's DLC, cytus's hidden charts, lanota's more expressive playfield movement when designing harder charts.

You might say osu is different and you can rank the same song multiple times and you would achieve the same amount of creative insane and extra difficulties, but that's extra effort from the mapper WHO CREATE CONTENT FOR FREE, to make easys and normals to complete the set, which is more discouraging for mappers to rank songs for the effort required, it's a basic concept that the more resource something takes to make, the less it would be produced. And it puts osu at a disadvantage more than anything, and the limitation you put on are not the ones who make uncreative low quality maps who rank small sets anyways, you're limiting the ones who are willing to go through the tedious creative process of ranking something of quality.

Just another perspective on this matter
Myxo
Less is more, and spending the same time creating a lower amount of difficulties with high quality than creating a huge amount with lower quality is worth a lot. Getting a lot of GDs is likely to reduce the quality of a mapset as a whole, since GDs can make a spread less polished (lower difficulties) or lead to very similar maps in one mapset (higher difficulties), which is worthless for the players (not considering getting double PP) and just creates more work for the modderns and Nominators checking the mapset.

I personally follow this mindset for my own mapsets and I think it's reasonable, but I don't think the 8-difficulty-limit will necessarily lead people into this mindset. Instead, it might just demotivate them as the general consensus from the community seems to be. This is why I personally suggest making the hard limit a guideline at best.

Instead of limiting the amount of difficulties people are allowed to make, we should try to think of ways that motivate people to map fewer difficulties, apart from the fact that it will be easier to rank the mapset. A possibility would be to allow for higher difficulty gaps between two consecutive difficulties (preferably for longer songs, which would solve some other mentioned problems, too) as long as the spread is linear, to encourage people to make small spreads that still cover a wide range of skill levels.
LwL

pishifat wrote:

[*]Single-mode mapsets must include a reasonable spread of at least two difficulties. The lowest difficulty must be at least a Normal which complies with their respective mode’s difficulty-specific ranking criteria.
[*]Hybrid mapsets without osu!standard difficulties must include a reasonable spread of at least two difficulties per mode. The lowest difficulty must be at least a Normal which does not break any difficulty-specific guidelines.
I think this wording is confusing, it should clarify that it doesn't apply to marathon maps - as it is now, it's implied elsewhere, but not clearly stated which could be confusing to new mappers and/or players.

pishifat wrote:

[*]Mapsets cannot include more than 8 total difficulties of a single game-mode. The highest difficulty of a game-mode is not required to fit within a reasonable spread, so long as no levels of difficulty are skipped.
This is much more reasonable than the last time something similar was proposed, but I still disagree with it. I can see some merit in it for one reason - lack of quality assurance due to large overall drain time.

However, I don't think it is that much of an issue. To be honest, the maps getting ranked recently I personally found to be the worst were usually not part of some huge set, so I think this positive of it is heavily outweighed by the restriction it places on getting actually great collaboration efforts ranked.

If I were to suggest an alternative solution (which might sound a bit weird considering recent changes) - sets with more than 8 difficulties could require more bubbles. If you are to rank a set like that, the amount of effort to rank it should be proportionate to the scale of what you're trying to rank. It would hopefully do something to combat pointlessly large spreads for no good reason while still allowing large sets to go through. Of course, it won't end pointless spreads either, but I'd rather have 5 stupidly large spreads ranked than 1 actually good one not ranked. And in reality, it's probably more of a 50/50 distribution anyway.



zev wrote:

If you are going to prevent people to edit their mp3 and avoid making a fullspread, you will need to provide a solution for them, just restricting more will lead to nothing.

give those the possibility to go approved with an additional difficulty that must somewhat lower than the top difficulty and always be under 5.25

-There will be people naturally will making Easy diffs cause that's the easiest and quickest to make if they are tired of making the top diff already, or they'll just go with normal or hard if the song is too complicated for that, or they will want more freedom and don't mind mapping an Insane.
-songs like UNDEAD CORPORATION - The Empress would actually be a decent choice to go for rank, and Frederic - oddloop would be cool to map!!!!
-You will naturally overall get more variety in length of songs to pick from in all kinds of difficulties.
I agree with this. You could even require it to have at least one E/N difficulty and one H/I difficulty if you really wanted to and still reduce the workload for creating sets of 4-5 minute long hard songs by a ton while always providing some spread to be worked with by players. I like disallowing mp3 edits and other shenanigans for the sake of abusing the 5 minute rule, but I feel like many good maps wouldn't be ranked without it, so some alternative solution should be put into place. Doubly so since the primary valid reason I can see for limiting the amount of difficulties in a set is that it's harder to assure its quality, but a 4:30 set with 5 difficulties has vastly more drain time than a tv size set with 10.

pishifat 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.[/list]
Also, someone probably already pointed that out, but there's a typo there.
bubbagumperson

Loctav wrote:

In my personal opinion, either way is bad, cutting and extending alike. Extending stuff by a few seconds just to adhere to personal laziness to avoid mapping a fullspread and making the set accessible to the entire playerbase (instead of just to a small minority that can even play most Approvals, which are mostly Extreme level) is contradicting some core philosophy we have been trying to defend for years (make stuff accessible and enjoyable for the majority, not just to only the top players). Like it or not, but those who play Extreme level maps are in the sheer minority. Encouraging to circumvent the necessity to produce content for the majority of our playerbase is unwanted, because with that new people will eventually not find content they like and they can play.

Why cater to and make rules for the people who only pick up and play the game a couple times a month? While they may be the majority i dont think they should be more important than the minority that actually play the game a lot

Loctav wrote:

While the argument usually pops up that there are "already loads of mid level content to play", don't forget that newcomers to this game usually look for music they already know. And as time goes on, new music gets produced and therefore new osu beatmaps on these tracks. If these tracks are all available but only for the top tier player segment, it discourages newcomers to actually stay in osu! and enjoy it with us together. (because if you are into the hottest newest Trash Metal album and beatmaps exists of that in osu!, I doubt you can be bothered to play 500 Anime opening maps first before you can even remotely play what you actually came for)

I agree with the argument that there are already loads of maps for new players, look at the all the recently ranked maps, almost every single ranked set has something new for players, when only some have maps that will be challenging and enjoyable for higher ranked players. Why are there rules that require new players to have maps available to play but not for higher ranked players. I get just as discouraged when I see a page full of maps that i'll find boring, as a new player would if he saw a bunch of high star maps. Now obviously it would be stupid to make mappers required to map high diff maps as i think the current rule is stupid.




but anyways, I think that "Mapsets cannot include more than 8 total difficulties of a single game-mode." being a rule will only reduce the amount of high quality collab sets and prevents mappers from working together to make a large set of unique maps. If "bloat" is a problem and having a bunch of low quality maps in a set is an issue, it should be a quality issue only, not a quantity, I dont see why someone shouldn't be allowed to have a large set if all of the maps are of good quality (see https://osu.ppy.sh/b/1073964).
For the argument that that's a lot for BNs to go through, they don't HAVE to, and those types of mapsets will probably be quite uncommon, but that should be something that the mapper(s) have to work through rather than making it a rule.



that's just my take on it TL;DR I think there's too much focus on new players and the 8 diff cap will only reduce the amount of great mapsets that show off a bunch of mappers unique take on a map
Endaris
I think one of the major underlying questions with this is:
What is a spread nowadays?
Back in the days spreads used to have difficulties built on each other, some sort of coherence in the usage of gameplay elements.
Nowadays I don't think that is an actual thing anymore as the majority of sets includes guest difficulties.
Instead of fucking around with a limit of difficulties it would be a lot better if there was a systematical change in how additional difficulties can get on a set.

Picking up this old feature request of Loctav along with something i vaguely recall from the ztrot-drama-thread:
As the traditional "set" is pretty much dead, wouldn't it be nice if it was possible to add difficulties to songs past ranking in a separate process?
That way one could restrict the spread for the ranking of the initial set relatively strictly to ensure a better review phase and get more variety in later through a separate review phase for each difficulty that strives to be added.
At the same time it would possibly reduce the amount of redundant difficulties because unlike in the current process people don't start their GDs at the same time, instead they see what is already there.

Apart from a change in the ranking system itself I don't see a way to properly satisfy both sides of the argument.
Kaine
Still. confused as to why "Marathons can get ranked with only one difficulty" is not explicitly written in the rules
DeletedUser_4329079

Zexous wrote:

No point in making "in-between" rules - when does it stop? If you make a special case for 4:55 to 4:59, then the losers with 4:59 songs become the losers with 4:54 songs, so on and so forth. There's a cutoff, and as with all cutoffs, inevitably some people are gonna just barely miss it. That's just how it is, no matter where you put the cutoff.
There's actually a point and it's to make the difference between each step more reasonable. A single step is the worst possible option in my opinion, because there's a massive difference in the effort required to make a mapset for a 4:54 song and a marathon. We have 50s, 100s, and 300s in the game instead of just hit or miss for the same reason.
lazysloth900
not even hello there
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