Exclusivity is not necessarily the issue people take with it - it's the questionable nature of whether something belongs in the Loved category. Adding some curation requirements does not make it "exclusive", it simply makes the entire category more respectable. Be it either through voting, a few people "checking" maps, or some other step that involves actually looking at the map, something should be done to make sure that every Loved map is "Special" in some way. Otherwise, it's just a dumping ground for mappers that can't get the map ranked normally, popular songs with bad maps, or a mapper begging for favorites and dumping SP. Even with the new proposal.

The change you propose is nice and all, and backed by statistics, but the outliers that are just "normal maps" really taint the barrel. I'm sure everyone's aware of the good old rotten apple analogy.

When people look through the Loved category, they want to see uniqueness. Specialness. That hard-to-summarize quality that separates these maps from the peer-reviewed, highly specialized content control system the Ranked category has. Many maps in the section have this. But nowhere near "Most" of them.

They don't want to see otherwise normal maps like entire normal sets ("giving up on ranking") or four-minute regular maps that would just be a minor pain to make lower difficulties for ("lazy") or the like. They also don't really want to see actually crappy maps. (That crystallized set really stands out as being kind of full of shit, no hitsounding, no effort bullshit)

I understand that this is a much more major change than tweaking the thresholds of SP and Favorites, so I'm not surprised it was kind of politely pushed to the side, but it'd be nice to hear this kind of issue was being considered.

It is being considered, and I've said repeatedly that the demand for curated content (ie: exactly what you're asking for in regards to content that "belongs" in the communal expectations that the Loved category currently carries) is better undertaken elsewhere or in different domains rather than forcing the issue in the Loved category.

For example, Loved being open allows for maps that aren't that great to get in it. Curated content based on Loved maps (ie: the proposed "Vintage" spotlights) fulfills the need to have a way of marking or denoting truly excellent content within the category without closing it out to everyone else.

Adding another category-within-a-category seems kind of silly.

It'd just be another layer for the actually-aiming-to-have-interesting-maps-get-a-scoreboard-and-played maps to pass, except it'd have an even more esoteric set of entry requirements. People wouldn't want to go for Loved just to get Vintage or whatever due to the added level of risk. Loved would still be a dumping ground.

Right now there are four separate types of maps in the Loved category:

1. 1. Maps that break some form of modern rule of rankability. Be it aesthetics, esoteric concept/theme, or outright breaking the rules for the sake of the song. This is what people look for.
2. 2. Ridiculously high-difficulty maps under 5 minutes that are otherwise perfectly rankable. Can include songs that genuinely struggle to have lower difficulties, such as What The Cat.
3. 3. Maps that are "dump sets", maps that are incomplete, low-effort, or otherwise just don't have the polish or focus necessary to get ranked. But totally could.
4. 4. Maps that are completely normal but are either Loved because the mapper has given up on Ranking, or because it's a normal map that didn't reach the 5 minute drain time and the mapper can't be assed to fill the rest. The "effort to get loved" is less than the "effort to extend >5min or fill with other difficulties"

What do we want to see in Loved?

It's not a real "category" perse (referring to Vintage), but rather a way of selecting the better maps in the category. Spotlights as a whole will be much more prevalent in osu! once lazer is complete, and it seems as if a good way to give them that initial traction would be to move the expectations for curated content away from Loved as a whole category, and into them instead.

Alright, let's add this to the list of "Stuff that'll be more relevant once lazer is complete" and call it a day, then.

I hope I'm not too late, but I'll dump everything on my mind.

I don't see why a map being ranked and a map being Loved have to be mutually exclusive. Aren't there plenty of maps out there already that are not only loved, but also are ranked? I'm probably projecting, but I think something like Freedom Dive should be Loved, even though its already ranked. It has 1000+ favorites, too. But for those Loved maps that can't be ranked, the warning with the "This Loved map will not give pp" can just flash before you play the map.

I agree with what several others have already said, including that the Loved category should be full of things that are genuinely loved, like a priceless treasure. That said, there could be two ways that a map can be Loved:

1. A point-based system, where a favorite counts as two points and a kudosu counts as one point. Additionally, any amount of kudosu from each user only counts once, only allowing anyone to contribute a maximum of three points to the map. I understand the important of kudosu, but allowing kudosu to have too much influence over whether a map enters Loved or not could be easily abused. Then, a map has to reach at least 250 points or so to be Loved.

2. A voting system, probably 2-4 times every year, allowing the community to put in any beatmap for entry and to vote on them. The primary purpose of this is to get loved older beatmaps that have little/no favorites and beatmaps with inactive creators to become Loved, if the community wants it.

There may be other ways that I'm not really thinking of, but any method of getting a beatmap into the Loved category should have a significant part of the community play a large role in determining the result and not by any small group of users.

That said, maybe there can also be a new category of beatmap, "Notable", to allow mappers who want exposure to get what they want. I'm not too confident about how this would work, but you could probably just rename the current Loved category to this and it'd be okay for a while. I think this would work because I am of the belief that the only reason Loved is a goal for mappers who want exposure is because its an entirely different category which much fewer maps than the Ranked & Approved category, allowing their work to stand out more against the incredible amount of ranked maps present. My belief could be entirely wrong, though.

Hi

Well.. even if I dont have "morality" to talk about (because I have a map in loved just because it was unranked many time ago and I was really tired of remapping), I wanna say my opinion:
The issue of perfectly rankable sets in loved section is responsibility of BNG, in the sense that they can push it to the ranking section yet!
As Eph said, loved is a good place to get some visibility right now.


I'm agree with that 30 favs is very low, and 75 favs feels more "relevant" for a loved map.
But I'm not agree with ignore SP, I think that limiting the amount of stars for person will avoid the abuse.

Just lower the criteria if people think they are too high and bring voting back for old favorite maps that the creator has not intentions to update.This worked in the past and I don't see any problem using this method again. The problem is happening due to how ineffective the ranking system is right now but this will supposedly change when the new modding system goes live.

Also I don't see how 50SP + 100fav or 25SP +500fav is better than the current system.

So is this 100fav / 50sp in effect now? What about maps that already had reached old loved map criteria like https://osu.ppy.sh/s/376203 for months ?

Also if this is in fact in effect, would be nice if this was announced since I only knew this by word of mouth.

Sorry in advance if this was cleared / ask before, I just could not find the answer.

It isn't in effect. We'll announce any changes we make to the system when/if we make them.

In my opinion, the first system, where people could vote for the next Loved maps was the best, I mean it had more sense than nowadays Loved maps.
I already received some message from my friends that was asking me if I could shoot some kudos and a fav on their maps. But to me this system doesn't create a Loved map, the true Loved maps was the first ones that got Loved.

That's just my point of view, maybe it got stopped because the people that manage this was probably busy, and I can understand it. (I'm sorry if the reason why the system changed is different from what I'm saying, to be honest, I didn't read the text explaining why the Loved system changed.)

Have a good day everyone

The old voting system was bad because maps were chosen by the staff imo.

Maybe be a vote were people are free to submit their maps could be a good alternative idk.

The maps weren't chosen by the staff, actually. They were an aggregate of high favorite maps and random suggestions from a variety of "which map should be Loved" threads that were extremely popular at the time.

I didn't know, my bad.

My suggestion would be making a section for pending maps that aim to be loved so lets say BN's or high level mappers can nominate them every set amount of time. Then people vote. Its a good way to ensure quality without using sp

well this is wat i think
i kinda agreed with Natsu's post
however, i think community votes is still necessary (preclude the maps dat doesnt rly good), and the maps required only 100 favs, and it can be nominated by anyone (consider the mappers already quit or w/e)
imo sp isnt rly necessary in loved, cuz loved maps supposed to be popular gravedyarded maps (but u can still replace favs with kds)

The thread is too long and I can't be bothered to read the whole thing, but in general, at least in my opinion the mapper should have no direct influence to if a map is loved or not. The point as I see it is that the loved section is supposed to be maps that the community loves, and then limiting one of those factors to not only be just a subset of the community (star rating), but also something the mapper themselves can directly manipulate kind of backwards. Letting the mapper have this control also makes it much easier to cop-out and "aim for loved" rather than actually going through with the ranking process. Loved shouldn't be an alternative to ranked, it should be specifically maps loved by the community. It shouldn't be a place to throw unrankable maps, or anything. Even if there is a good map using unrankable elements "aiming to get loved", the criteria for it to get there shouldn't just be "good, but unrankable", but also actually liked by a good portion of the community.

I think in general having some kind of preliminary voting for nomination, such as giving every player (or a subset if we want to go that route) a finite amount of votes on any map they love, then round up the maps with the most votes, and have a final voting round similar to what we had in the beginning could work. This would require implementing new functionality to the website or client though, as it needs to be something that's easy to do and also different from favorites, since people have been using favorites for a lot of things, and won't necessarily reflect what they love the most etc.

That's my pov anyway. I feel like the loved section right now feels more like an alternative to the ranked section where rules are much laxer, resulting in poor quality maps being loved, rather than what it truly should be; a reflection of maps the community deems good. In that sense, having maps that are already ranked in the loved section as well does make sense, if we think of it purely as a label for what the community enjoys, and not necessarily a completely different category.

+1 What Cxu said, I'm all for the voting rounds.
And for voting, perhaps splitting into categories of mapping settings / (which is usually related to submit era) come to mind.
For example "2009" "2010" etc?
I'm right now wondering how an old loved map such as https://osu.ppy.sh/s/16987 could achieve the Loved status, because as far as I understand and I could be wrong, it currently won't?
Every now and then I am looking into the Loved section, and I notice certain maps made recently with far less favourites are in there while some golden oldies are still missing in my humble opinion.
Especially when you take the relativity into account, for example the map I mentioned was from a time when the community was much smaller in size and reaching 100 favourites in those days was a much bigger thing than nowadays.

Anyway, I love the initiative and I am looking very much forward on all developments of osu! in the future.

Time to tidy this up, I think.

The general consensus seems to be that the expectation for the category is to unequivocally support maps that are highly appreciated by the community. By large, it appears that most people do not endorse the ability for mappers to contribute a majority share of the SP requirement via their own kudosu (though people from the modding community do support this as it obviously empowers them).

It also appears that there is large support for a return to the community-based voting to determine at least a nominal number of Loved maps to enter the pool.

I think we can address this by implementing the mode-specific scaling SP/favourites requirement as listed in this post while also imposing a hard limit on the amount of SP that can be contributed by any one user - perhaps something to the order of no greater than a third of total contribution towards the base SP cap. We'll also start holding votes for older maps with inactive or uninvolved mappers that have widespread community support, though the number of maps this will introduce per month will be very limited (2-3) to start with.

my opinion is relevant i swear i totally didn't come here cause i saw eph bitch on twitter


it would seem like a very easy idea to let the community decide which maps are loved or not through going to a qualification state (see what i did there) during where a map is open for play and after playing, people have to vote if they liked it or not (and not some arbitrary 1-10 scale that nobody will know how to use right) and if the map has a good enough positive/negative ratio, it gets loved.

seems like the most painless way to do things that gathers the biggest amount of data from players

someone fucking prevent me from entering these forums i keep giving my opinion on a game i have not touched in 2 years

i'd only support a voting thing if there's something like a suggest cool maps to be put up for a voting instead of ephemeral randomly hitting up all the places in order to get a list of maps that have a lot of favourites

wasn't there someone volunteering to oversee a voting list like this anyways

if you have like a criteria that goes among the lines of
mapper or map should be graved for X or visibly abandoned
vastly higher favourite count for this thing
and someone to do like the shitty work involved with that sort of thing

i think that could work

given that i know how the numberrunning on kd requirements went down halving the thing seems pretty agreeable, though i doubt that the favourite thing lowering the kd requirement is going to be all that clear for everyone unless you include a fucking calculator in some very obvious place and adjust secretary-chon's worst nightmares accordingly if you do that

Toy's mentioned on twitter that he'd like to help out, so I figure he'd be a good starting block.

I don't mean to be irrelevent but does it take really that long to get a map loved? I filled the form and sent a confirmation pm to Ephemeral on 18th March and nothing happened since :/

The system we had in the past was very rudimentary and prone to missing people. I sorted out a case earlier today where someone had been missed for nearly three months. Toss me a PM if you're concerned and I'll look into it.

Actually, scratch that. New idea.

Loved as it is currently known, is renamed to Approved. Approved maps follow the SP/favourites criteria outlined earlier - you meet them, you get in. No questions asked.

Every month, a poll is held based on a selection of highly favourited old maps. At the end of the month, those maps are collated and the winning maps (number yet to be decided, perhaps 6-12) are made into a Spotlight complete with ranking chart and are automatically given the Approved status if they do not already have it.

Mappers/modders get their open scoreboard category, community gets their vote-based, curated content section with scoreboards full of maps proven to be liked by at least a reasonable majority of active and engaged people.

Everybody wins.

so marathons will be called marathons or what and just ranked

and approved maps are just that approved via a process

hi am really late
im in the minority but i honestly don't like the concept of a higher favorite barrier because it limits many of the most creative maps there are. You could make an entirely new section if you really had to, similar to loved except the maps would be hand-selected with the goal being to expose/give leaderboards to maps that lack the popularity to make it to loved as you proposed it.

if you do bring back voting, please try to keep each batch of maps fairly similar in qualities and favorites. Then you can tell for sure if the selected maps truly are what people'd prefer in loved; as it was, a good map being put in a bad batch could ruin its chances of being voted in. Maybe have a theme for each round, like maps around a certain amount of favorites, jump/stream practice maps, meta-bending maps, etc.

also, have you considered putting all unranked maps used in world cups into loved? they've certainly proved their quality, and probably deserve a leaderboard, don't you think?

Ephemeral wrote:

Actually, scratch that. New idea.

Loved as it is currently known, is renamed to Approved. Approved maps follow the SP/favourites criteria outlined earlier - you meet them, you get in. No questions asked.

ah yes the "we used to do this back in 2009" new idea

i don't mind it coming back really

Okorin wrote:

so marathons will be called marathons or what and just ranked

and approved maps are just that approved via a process

Guess we'll need to provision for them in the RC, yeah. Another topic entirely I think. Failing that, we can just also make special exceptions for Marathon maps.

Ephemeral wrote:

What if the mapper is inactive or has left the game?

This poses a conundrum. What if a mapper does not consent to having their map deemed "complete" enough to have a scoreboard? What if they do not or never intended the map to have one in the first place?

At what point do we assume the mapper's intentions for the map in this process? Is this something we should consider at all?

I have no answers for these questions. It is a complicated topic, and we have deliberately erred away from adding very dated maps from the most part after this issue was raised VERY early on in the community voting for the first round of Loved.

There are maps that I would love to see in the category, but with their creative directors long vanished from the game (Larto is a good example of this), often times with unclear intent for their creations that are left behind, it will likely remain a very difficult issue to resolve fully.

I don't see issue here because if mapper had posted his map on the forums it already belongs to the community in some way. If community loves map and wants to see a leaderboard on specific mapset, mapper is not obliged to actively participate in this process.

Ephemeral wrote:

Time to tidy this up, I think.

The general consensus seems to be that the expectation for the category is to unequivocally support maps that are highly appreciated by the community. By large, it appears that most people do not endorse the ability for mappers to contribute a majority share of the SP requirement via their own kudosu (though people from the modding community do support this as it obviously empowers them).

It also appears that there is large support for a return to the community-based voting to determine at least a nominal number of Loved maps to enter the pool.

I think we can address this by implementing the mode-specific scaling SP/favourites requirement as listed in this post while also imposing a hard limit on the amount of SP that can be contributed by any one user - perhaps something to the order of no greater than a third of total contribution towards the base SP cap. We'll also start holding votes for older maps with inactive or uninvolved mappers that have widespread community support, though the number of maps this will introduce per month will be very limited (2-3) to start with.

When Rezoons Jump training maps then?

Alright, I read the whole thread and I'm ready to put my two cents in.

First, we need to clearly define "What is Loved supposed to accomplish" because surely we don't have this whole category to be cute, right?

Ephemeral wrote:

Over the years, a common complaint with the ranking cycle has been that it is fairly restricted for most people [...] especially if it tailors to a distinctive audience, or seeks to attempt gameplay paradigms that are not allowed by the current Ranking Criteria.

So we define "Loved" as attempting to highlight and immortalize maps that deserve attention or are cult classics, but explicitly do not and will not fit the criteria to be ranked. So, what's the best way to accomplish this task while avoiding pitfalls, explits, and controversy such as:

1. The creator of the map can easily manipulate the system to glorify themselves at the expense of the goal of the system.
2. Modders have a very controversial extra ability to impact the process.
3. Too many maps enter the Loved category too quickly.
4. osu!standard gets almost all of the slots because it's got the lions share of players.
5. The qualifier has multiple requirements that may not all be met, and are balanced together in a manner that attracts controversy in terms of unfair weighting between requirements.

Here's my suggestion for the Loved system that I think resolves all of these issues: Maps become qualified for Loved once they become a certain age (I suggest one year old) without being rankable, and have a certain amount of total plays (I suggest somewhere between 25,000 - 100,000) among a certain amount of unique players (I suggest 2,500). Lower standards can be applied to game modes other than standard.


Some commentary on what others have said in this thread:

burntcedar13 wrote:

we're involving sp because it's actually worthless otherwise [...] the loved section is supposed to be about the community (which is mostly players), not mappers.

Couldn't agree more. That seems to be the case as to why kudosu is involved - because the staff have failed to incentivize modding properly, so the reward for modding is being shoehorned into this system, to the system's explicit detriment and abuse.

melloe wrote:

[the modders] make the maps for you to play and they know more about mapping than the community

Do they know more about fun than the community, or do they know more about rules?

A severe dunking wrote:

Ephemeral wrote:

I'm not sure I can get behind the idea of removing SP qualification from the system entirely - the modding community should have some sort of investment in the system themselves given the work they both undertake to make it a thing in the first place.

chainpullz wrote:

The modding community works to make the ranked section a thing. If a map is getting heavily modded it should be getting ranked not loved.

Why are the people who focus on making something rankable whether it is fun or not getting an undue say on literally the exact opposite type of mapping category?

1. We will regularly be adding maps based on community votes.

with 100 SP being thrown by the mapper into their own map, its not relevant for now

Is it in effect yet?

Well actually.
I think have a standard on SP is quite a bad idea.Since shooting & earning stars are quite easy.
Nowdays,mappers who have 100+ kds aviliable is very common.So for some reason,it's teribbly easy to push a low-quality map to Loved state.(If they want)
The old voting system is a littke better but still bad.Because it's BN choose the maps which can be voted.There're some BNs' personal tastes.
And now fav effects SP? wtf.

I agree with Monstrata for his Loved-Score system.And I had a new idea called "Loved Switch" to solve the inactive-mappers problem.


Btw,I think the new system Ephemeral will be worse.First,it will make Rank more easily because fav effects SP.And because of the 50SP,send a map to loved state will be easier.
For high-level mappers,they have more than 100 fans.

most loved maps only have 1 diff tho

What about maps, where mapper is unable to do anything in this matter, for example because he's banned?
There are known and loved by people maps like this one:

JerryC - Canon Rock

Many people really hoped for this mapset to become loved, but then criteria changed and as the maps were being made Loved by staff at the beginning, then now mappers must fill in a form... which simply kills of maps like this one

I still hope that something can happen in this matter and maps like this one can become Loved.

Ephemeral wrote:

Actually, scratch that. New idea.

Loved as it is currently known, is renamed to Approved. Approved maps follow the SP/favourites criteria outlined earlier - you meet them, you get in. No questions asked.

Every month, a poll is held based on a selection of highly favourited old maps. At the end of the month, those maps are collated and the winning maps (number yet to be decided, perhaps 6-12) are made into a Spotlight complete with ranking chart and are automatically given the Approved status if they do not already have it.

Mappers/modders get their open scoreboard category, community gets their vote-based, curated content section with scoreboards full of maps proven to be liked by at least a reasonable majority of active and engaged people.

Everybody wins.

This sounds like a good idea except mappers can still shoot 100 stars by themselves to get their maps into the Loved (or Approved) category.

There should be a limit to how many kudosus a mapper can actually give to an individual map.

Edit: Reason being, Loved maps are a community effort. A mapper can just ask random people to favorite his map and he can shoot 100 stars to the map and go for submission currently, which is not what Loved maps are.

^ Just don't count mapper's own SP into the calculation tbh