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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Still. confused as to why "Marathons can get ranked with only one difficulty" is not explicitly written in the rules

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.

not even hello there

why does this restrict people that are trying to make mapsets in order to please people? you have things like hybrid mapsets being restrictive in the way of forcing them to create an appropriate spread for all modes that they are making a map for. why is it inherently bad that people throw in an oni diff somewhere? does it cause some sort of confusion, sure, maybe but quite frankly who cares?

does the organization of certain maps really trigger peoples ocd to the point where they need to create strict rules in order to please themselves? this change, just like the one that we saw last year is nothing but restrictive when it comes to the mapping criteria. why is that the case?

why are people trying to make strict rules when all they need is to instead encourage people with mapping things that they would feel like they would want to mod? this is already the case, since people will not mod, nominate nor icon maps that they do not seem fit for any sort of support.

why is it bad that people are allowed to do things in the current guideline system? noone is gonna support a map that they do not want to support, i do not think that a change like this will cut down on the amount of submissions with "appropriate spreads".

why do we need strict rules that restrict people when it comes to mapsets? its not like BN already are just not caring about the maps that they doubt that they don't want to see getting ranked, i.e the bigger mapsets with a bunch of difficulties are never prone to getting ranked.

why are mappers getting restricted when it comes to their creativity of song choices when it comes to their mapping? changes according to no longer being able to reach minimum drain time to fit under the marathon descriptions. maps that are ~4:50 long are never going to get mapped anymore, since they are no longer allowed to be under the marathon category, this is nothing but throwing a lot of potentional songs out of the window.

this entire rule change is just to be able to fit in the last years submission of forcing people to have 8 or less maps of the same difficulties. granted, while we do not see many maps like these, there is no reason to restrict the submission of maps like that, since they are not inherently a problem. why would maps like "no title" be restricted by this rule when it is one of the most well known maps on this game?

idk dude, this entire draft seems like it doesnt cater to the community nor its needs but only to some qat with ocd who was pissed over the fact that mapsets were annoying to check.

I disagree with banning mapsets with 8 or more difficulties - it makes creative projects such as Monstrata's Can Do mapset less viable. You've got to have a normal, a hard and an insane, so by the time you get to the Extra difficulties you can have a maximum of 5. That sounds like a lot but I'd you are trying to create maps to represent an entire cast of characters it can become difficult. If you want to make intermediate difficulties between standard spread difficulties that also interferes somewhat.

Rather than limiting the total number of difficulties, I think it makes more sense to say there should be a justifiable reason for having multiple of the same spread difficulty on a map set. Justifiable reasons would be "There should be a map to represent each of the half dozen characters in the Anime this song is from" or "I felt it was apropriate to have a light hard difficulty because the normal was simplistic and the regular hard was pretty tough" or "the difficulties are mapped by different people and have very different technical styles"

The spread rule have been already discussed in the past and heavily denied by the community why bring it up again ?

What is so wrong with mapset like these : https://osu.ppy.sh/s/333139 , https://osu.ppy.sh/b/880761 , https://osu.ppy.sh/b/833605 , https://osu.ppy.sh/b/658127 , https://osu.ppy.sh/b/467726 , https://osu.ppy.sh/b/832152 , https://osu.ppy.sh/b/297812 ?

It seems like staff tries to force the rule no matter what by bringing it up again and again until pushing it thought later . There are already good propositions that are can be taken look at like Shad0w1and's - They can be discussed and even upgraded and forwarded to community .

Also the name difficulties names idk why limit such option in the mapsets even "Tragic Love Extra" while being quite silly it indicates the difficulty of the map and have a nice "ring" to it another shackles on mapper creativity - Why cannot for example diff names from Touhou arrangment song named after character spell cards ? It would be nice touch to good beatmap and can be nice thing for people knowing the source.

I think I am already wasting my time here because there were multiple people that had already discussed those things and propossed changes but were ignored. It feels like talking to a wall again and again

no

Every time someone tries to force a mapset difficulty restriction upon us, tons of mappers that might not even be as active in the forums come out and try to get you guys off that idea. That happened last time when ztrot posted it, now it's happening again. Cant you just throw that idea out of the window for once and leave that the way it is? We simply do not want it.

If you guys really have too much to work, feel like quality falls down the drain or whatever, then please give us incentives to improve, not restrictions. Find more capable QATs, showcase high-quality E/N/H maps that have been ranked in the past few days, reward better modding more or anything else, really. Ive posted that in the last thread as well; Restrictions like that kill high-effort sets like Ascendance's Sweet Dreams for 11t, greater mapping contests where the winners get featured in a premade set (GMC, you should know) or funny sets, maybe memes, idk.

pls just dont, not again

i decline mapsets with a lot of diffs are usually very good and take a lot of work to make so why split it when you can have all in 1

the community has spoken out against this "8 diff rule" or stuff like it before, how is rewording it going to change that fact no one approves of it.

jesus i dont understand why it's hard to accept that lots of diffs on a map, whilst rare, are actually kinda beneficial to the game as a whole (and prevent people all mapping the same song in different sets, yay for neatness).

Read through wall of texts.

Quality issues of huge sets? How are you sure that limiting the number of diffs in one set could increase the overall quality of the map? The two stuffs are pretty irrelevant. Maybe you have to give rational and persuasive deductions.

What could improve the quality of maps should be the modding process in fact. Unrealistic fancy on such number restriction criteria on improving quality is not tenable at all.

Repeatedly, if the map lacks of quality (even not because of it's huge), else if the mapper meets difficulties on ranking such huge mapsets, they will spontaneously reduce the size of their maps, by themselves. And if they stick to their huge sets, they will just undergo a hard time for ranking them. I do not see any meaning of a new rule or guideline.

Dislike PP maps? At first I have to say, not all the huge sets are pp maps. So talking about PP maps under this criteria is already partial. If you are not satisfied with pp maps, you could just stop playing them. No one forces you to play that maps. And if you want to see more non-pp maps, why not just map them by yourself? Again, not all the people are against the pp maps, by advocating this rule or guideline under a reason related to PP stuffs, you are also jeopardizing the recreation of other players.

Worried about too similar difficulties in one set? Firstly I have to say "similar" is pretty subjective. How you define similar? Styles? How you define "style" then? Let's compromise, assuming there are several "similar" difficulties in one map. By limiting the number of diffs, people will stop making similar difficulties? No, they will just make a new set with difficulties removed from former sets because of that limitation. And that will make the case even worse. If you really want to see a more various style of maps, the best way is to join in the mapping and create your own maps, or, giving appropriate and pertinent suggestions during modding period of the map.

Isn't that diff-number cap thing been highly rejected by the community last year? Why are you guys putting it back to here, only with small modification towards the rule? Osu! is a community-based game, and I believe community's opinion should be taken into serious consideration, but now I just feel like you guys are trying to ignore them.

Possible upcoming response:"no, we did. Look! We tried to be lenient by allowing the highest diff not to follow the spread."
But you just can't deny the fact that the diff-number cap still exists, and the community hates it.

Other posts above should have listed tons of reasons of why people don't want that rule to exist. Please, just no.

xdominik wrote:

It feels like talking to a wall again and again

I can't be bothered to make more than one difficulty, much less eight.

I think the main reason for this is modding a map with 10 difficulties is a real pain in the badonk

pishifat wrote:

1. Converted difficulties must form a reasonable spread. For example, a mapset with Easy and Normal osu!standard difficulties and an Insane osu!catch difficulty is not permitted. One or more additional difficulties may need to be added to fill the gap.
2. Any two osu!taiko or osu!mania difficulties must be arranged in a reasonable spread. The lowest difficulty must be at least a Hard.
3. One osu!catch difficulty may be included. It must be at least an Insane difficulty.

I've got two questions here. First question, why would you actually limit the difficulty of maps in a hybrid set? That would mean that if you want to have a Hard difficulty of osu!catch in an ENH or EN mapset, you can't. Why not? How are Insane difficulties superior in this case? I don't see any sensible reason behind this, so I'd welcome a good explanation.

Second question, why is osu!catch the only mode that can be alone in a hybrid mapset? I understand that converting osu!standard map into osu!catch is very smooth, but if you manage to have an osu!standard map that converts properly to any other mod, why wouldn't that be allowed? The probability is lower, but it's clearly not impossible. For example, I don't understand why it wouldn't be allowed to have one taiko difficulty and 2 or 3 standard difficulties which would make a nice spread to it and would work as an actual taiko map. That wouldn't be allowed, but literally copying the map and setting its mode to taiko would. I know that the probability of creating such a compatible map at random is not possible, but with enough knowledge of both modes, you certainly can be able to achieve that, so why limiting it to osu!catch only?

@Wafu - You can have more than one osu!catch difficulty as far as I'm concerned. The wording was just bad. Probably something like "If you want to add osu!catch difficulties to your mapset, at least one osu!catch difficulty must be included, and this difficulty must be at most an Insane."

Your second point makes a lot of sense in theory though. I think we should also consider if maps somehow convert well into taiko/mania and allow taiko/mania BN's to give their approval for such maps. Idk how often converts will actually be reasonably high quality though.

Monstrata wrote:

@Wafu - You can have more than one osu!catch difficulty as far as I'm concerned. The wording was just bad. Probably something like "If you want to add osu!catch difficulties to your mapset, at least one osu!catch difficulty must be included, and this difficulty must be at most an Insane."

Oh, "at least" sounded as if it was the minimum. Other way around makes sense, thanks.

- Yoshimaro - wrote:

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?

I only thought tokyo was questionable with all of the extras in the set. But yeah, thinking about it a bit more, I do agree with you how this rule is limiting creativity. Multiple of mappers interpreting one song differently was an interesting dynamic tokyo brought in for sure.

[*]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.

Regou=

Isn't that diff-number cap thing been highly rejected by the community last year? Why are you guys putting it back to here, only with small modification towards the rule? Osu! is a community-based game, and I believe community's opinion should be taken into serious consideration, but now I just feel like you guys are trying to ignore them.

I felt like the topic was out of the minds after the high disagreement in the comunity - guess i was wrong.
I don't like the idea of limiting the difficulties because restrictions arent a good thing when they are not needed - I guess it should be common sense that you can't rank a set with 50< diffs but as i can remember there was not very much drama over the sets with over for example 15 diffs in a set, so why change the concept when they arent problems.

When BNs complain about huge sets - they just should not mod them - but when there is no single BN who want to mod the set - then there is a problem with the set, not with the system because its not like there are multiple set which over 10 diffs.

I do not think so that a drop of quality is a thing in theese mapset - manly because its the case that many mappers are inclueded in theese sets what leads to vareity, what is always a good thing and more ppl are making smaller mistakes than one single person i guess
(the only pro agruement i can think off is that many diffs cant get as much mods as in a set of for example 5 diffs)

I think its hard to regulate something as spread - expecially in a time as this where the mapping style is getting more wiedly as ever - so i hope you will find another soulution than this (expecially when the crowd is shouting NOO!) - But i could not find the solution myself~

Based on community response, it's not likely the 8-diff cap rule will go through. So my question is: should the community and the Ranking Criteria compromise and make this cap maybe a guideline? Or should a compromise even be necessary. I'm wondering if there is a need to compromise between "having a cap" and "not having a cap" or if the disagreement between the two is just too great.

Basically, if the cap rule became a guideline, would people be happy? Or would they still disagree with it. Remember that guidelines are now enforceable and can only be broken with clear reasons. I'm worried that these "extenuating circumstances" will still force mappers to be unable to rank mapsets with over 8 difficulties because "breaking the guideline" is no longer something you can simply do without concequences.

If you ask me, I don't think the community needs to compromise at all with the RC. I would vote to abandon the rule, and I wouldn't consider making it a guideline a compromise since it largely favors the RC's agenda still, by making large sets still enforceable.

Agreed

(When this would be a guidline tho it should have the cap of 15~ diffs i guess because then the set should have a reason to have THAT much diffs, but it should be possible then tho)

I don't see why it should be a guideline at all. If a mapper wants to incorporate a large set, he or she would naturally have to put in more work (mapping process, getting gds, getting mods - all of which can be very difficult and time consuming)

as long as they've made sure everything ensues quality, they should be rewarded for their efforts.

I just mean "if it would be a guideline"

Imo it shouldnt be considered being a rule or anything, let the mapper decide!

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.

Wouldn't it make more sense if the mapset host has to have more mapped objects than the guest difficulty mapper?

e.g.: If the mapset host mapped the Easy and Normal difficulty and the guest difficulty mapper mapped the Extra difficulty of a song that has 1:30min drain time the mapset host would have certainly more mapped drain time but way less mapped objects, so the guest difficulty mapper has actually mapped more.

__Phantomhive__ wrote:

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.

Wouldn't it make more sense if the mapset host has to have more mapped objects than the guest difficulty mapper?

e.g.: If the mapset host mapped the Easy and Normal difficulty and the guest difficulty mapper mapped the Extra difficulty of a song that has 1:30min drain time the mapset host would have certainly more mapped drain time but way less mapped objects, so the guest difficulty mapper has actually mapped more.

No it wouldn't. Think again, what is the difference between a repeatslider and a stream?

I think that it shouldn't be even kept as guideline . Even as a guideline it will prove difficulties on the mapset host like for example when someone wouldn't want to mapset to pass through to the ranking section , they could just report it to QAT as "unreasonable" spread with too many difficulties creating discussion that would provide no feedback to the map and could cause disqualification it would be hard to pass mapsets with questionable diffs like Skystar's AXION diff (just remember whole drama with this wierd jump stream alternating pattern) . Sorry for extreme example but I think it best represent possible issues .

As many said before this rule/guideline isn't in interest of community to keep improving quality of the ranked maps - I think that all of ranked criteria should be doing that not just make mapper's life more misserable than it already is , killing creativity .

I feel like whole of these proposal feels unnesserar MAYBE other than not extanding/shortering mp3 (I think this need disscusion) are all missing the point and shouldn't be even posted . Same for recent 2 tier BN system but that is already done and set in place I hope it won't be same with this one .

Endaris wrote:

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.

If spread design is the concern, why not put a condition on mapsets that have more than 7 diffs, the mapper must map the minimal amount to make a spread , basically the host must map a normal a hard themselves, plus what ever insane and extra he decide to map that fits the description of a good spread, and then GDs are treated separately.

Though unlikely people will like this idea

N0thingSpecial wrote:

If spread design is the concern, why not put a condition on mapsets that have more than 7 diffs, the mapper must map the minimal amount to make a spread , basically the host must map a normal a hard themselves, plus what ever insane and extra he decide to map that fits the description of a good spread, and then GDs are treated separately.

Though unlikely people will like this idea

uhmm, seems reasonable. but if there is no limit on the set itself, it really does not matter how many diffs are created by the creator... it won't help the set.

Monstrata wrote:

Insanes/Extra's because they allow you a lot more creative freedom

Glad there is at least one person with sway in the community able to look beyond the meaningless numbers and statistics to bring up the actual issue at hand.

One of the reasons I don't agree with what the ranking category stands for is that it gets too hung up on game design fundamentals. The true source of quality in mapping isn't adherence to good game design. True quality comes from artistic interpretation of the music. As music is highly structured, an interpretation consistent with the music will naturally exhibit good design.

In turn, if you completely ignore *rating and focus on making an artistic rendition, your map will nearly always exceed 4*. Speaking purely from an artistic POV, the need for fresh lower diffs is far more bloating than the trend to focus on higher diffs.

tl;dr:

most plays are on hards/insanes because that's where most players tend to practice / find a "comfort zone".

There are fewer plays on extras due to their higher skill requirements and the fact that most players will rather quickly plateau and they will either start playing less or quit altogether over time. The only reason to actively get better at this game is only to raise your pp score, as the maps that give the most pp also naturally are the most robotic in design. There is very little enjoyment to playing maps anymore, because the most popular maps are the ones that give the most points for minimal effort (It's not coincidence that these tend to be anime songs, either: The extremely basic, catchy melody structure of theme music just happens to really fit this style). This self-feeding spiral quickly saps most of the fun out of the game, as it is no longer a musical game, but one based around reaction time and physical conditioning.

Implementing a cap to the map size is so random and out there. Omnibus sets are rare as hell and feature their own host of problems, especially in the current meta. Most of this list is just already in existence, or slightly re-worded to allow for less bullshittery. Which I approve of, but the pepper sprinkles in the vanilla icecream are what pisses everyone off.

Player retention is at an all-time low. Mapper retention is at an all-time low. Modder retention is at an all-time low. Fresh meat comes in, but quickly spoils. Because the staff is so obsessed with making numbers look good and making public statements that look good while desperately ignoring the gushing wound that will exist until an actual overhaul that includes coding changes to the client and to the site.

Which have been in progress for over three years. At minimum.

But personally, I am still holding my breath.

at this point it's very clear which points of the draft will need revision lol


Here's my personal opinion on the matter of approval maps, backed up with a bit of data grabbing by Ephemeral:

My one and only issue with approval is that compared to the average map the average 5 minute approval map actually adds way less content targeted towards way fewer people to the game itself.
The average (osu!) mapset across Approved, Loved, Qualified, Ranked mapsets adds 460.4542 seconds of draintime on average to the Ranked section, this translates to 7.6 minutes of content per map across all skill levels whereas Marathons are targeted towards one certain audience only and provide less content than your average map.

I'm not going to suggest raising the limit because I can predict the deaththreats coming in already, but with this the suggestion to have marathons include more than one diff as mentioned in parts of shad0w1and's suggestions suddenly seems more reasonable than it already was.

i.e. if your set includes one diff above 300 seconds in length it must at least include another diff if its total draintime is <500 seconds or something among the lines to balance out that the minimum requirement for the entire category is at 300 seconds, the average length across approval maps is at 399 (data distribution is hugely uneven towards being at 300 seconds or close with only 80 mapsets being above 400s draintime out of 523 (less than 20%)) seconds and the average length of all sets is 460 seconds for the upside of omitting spread

the upside to this would be that the entire basis for don't abuse approval limit rule probably could be entirely transformed into a guideline that aims to prevent poorly done extensions as well as mp3 cuts

all the data above is on osu mapsets only btw can rerun numbers for all modes but i think this should be representative anyways

What do you think? So far this is only a rough idea where i asked for data to back up my assumptions

@Oko The whole discussion of approval necessitating a spread isn't even in the current draft yet. This is opening up a new can of worms. Didn't we already agree not to discuss all that "removal of approval" idea since people would be coming here with pitchforks again?

Anyways, since shadowland's idea was mentioned, i'll just say some quick things. I like the idea up until Approval. I tried to push forward some ideas about allowing larger spreads for songs that are longer than 3 minutes, as well as having the minimum difficulty be a Hard rather than a Normal for songs past say 4 minutes etc... (Insert arguments about stamina and Normal players etc... reasons here).

However, the point of approval isn't to cater to a larger audience. That was never the objective to begin with... So I don't think adding extraneous diffculties to approval mapsets is necessary at all. Basically, if a rule forces mappers to map "filler difficulties" for the sake of catering to more players, we need to consider where to draw the line. And we have. We drew the line at 5 minutes. Once a song is over 5 minutes, mappers no longer need to cater to the whole community by adding filler difficulties to satisfy a spread.

You guys are throwing around "community" and "audience" too vaguely. With approval, very often you are mapping for a specific audience. The mapper's objectively clearly isn't to reach a "general audience" or they would have made a set. The choice of only mapping one difficulty already suggests a narrower target scope, so we can safely rule out the mapper's intention being to cater to a larger audience. The idea shadowland is pushing forward is ideally prompting mappers to map for a larger audience, but this was never the mapper's objective. I really disagree with "mapping for a larger audience" being a goal for the Ranking Criteria. That has again, no bearing on quality standard. Have you even asked yourselves the question "is there a necessity to cater to a larger audience?" Additionally, the appeal of difficult approval mapsets has always been for the dedicated and highly-skilled players in the community anyways. The intention again, was never to make sure players who could only play 5* maps could still enjoy the song.

If you want to add a second difficulty to your approval mapset, be my guest. I don't think there's anything wrong with adding more difficulties to a mapset thats over 5 minutes. But don't force people to add these difficulties either, especially since you're forcing an objective onto the mapper who may or may not share that objective.




There is no need to compromise imo... Just get rid of the rule in the next draft. Period. Reading people's reasoning here, this is what I will be arguing for anyways.

this isnt on the current draft, i was proposing it as an idea based on comparing the amount of content getting ranked per mapset

to find that with the current approval limitation with its limit being so low seems kinda unfair towards the average map so i suggested this as an alternative and crammed together a few arguments and listed the side effects that implementing it would have in the most likely scenario. Note that I never even specified if this additionally created content has to adhere to a certain other target audience and just threw it out there.

Your beliefs of what approval is and should be don't line up with what mine are, i am pretty sure we both figured that out by now - this is a different idea entirely which is centered around something that i assumed both sides of the argument should actually be neutral on.

@Ephemeral: Is it possible to check the playcounts of easy diffs on songs with different lengths? Basically if there's a significant difference between the amount of plays a 2 minute easy diff and a 4 minute one would receive or not.

I think it would be pretty useful information in regards to Shadow1and's suggestion (I actually came here initially to post the same idea). The reason people want to get over the approval length limit and "abuse" it right now, is because the amount of work required is significantly reduced just from a few seconds of difference. A 5 minute map requires you to map less total time than a generic 5 diff spread for a 1:30 tv size, and while obviously this doesn't translate to the same amount of effort needed (mapping lower difficulties are tend to be faster because they require less notes to be placed, and are more restrictive anyway), I think it's clear why people want to get to the approval length when they're really close. Arguing about laziness and whatnot is irrelevant and should not have anything to do with a ranking criteria anyway, and even then it's not true for a lot of mappers. For instance, I'm also a player, so naturally I split my time between mapping and playing. Adding to that any real life obligations I have and whatnot, I might just not have enough time or will to map and maintain a full spread for a 4:58min map in hopes of it getting ranked. My efforts would be much better spent on either extending said song, map something else, or just play the game instead. Also, if we're speaking about laziness, then the 8 diff rule doesn't exactly promote unlazy behaviour anyway.

And I think the reason is just that the difference it makes is too big, so the rewards for "abusing" it is higher than just mapping the spread. Instead, making it gradual would make the whole thing less of a pain in the ass for mappers. For example, maps above 4 minutes need 3 difficulties, 5min need 2 and 6min need 1 (I'm just pulling random numbers right now). If we can look at the statistics of the playcounts of different difficulties and their map lengths, we could maybe find reasonable lengths to make these cut-offs, and which difficulties could be excluded. This way, the gain from extending an .mp3 is less compelling than before, and also encourages mapping for a wider audience in general.

Although I personally don't find extending .mp3's a problem in the first place. In a lot of cases you probably wouldn't even notice it was unless you've heard the song before, or someone tells you.