okay so uhhhh
speaking as a mapper of quite a long time (i like to think of myself as "experienced" as a mapper and modder, while i never really dedicated myself physically enough to be able to play, I understand quite a bit about how maps play in general)
i'd like to point out that during the era before ppv1 and ppv2, mapping was 100% about how players experienced the map - not how well it played, not how much fun it was, but how it expressed the music and what kind of cool ideas or interesting functions it can do to represent the music
in other words, mappers mapped their maps to be played and to provide an experience to the player - yes, most often that vague "fun" everyone tries to race after - and practically ignored all concepts regarding score or difficulty - except when the purpose of the map was expressly to be a challenge in one way or another (the famous BIG BLACK challenging jumping, my infamous chipscape challenging stamina and reading). because there was no "official" metric to judge anything by, and the star rating system capped out an extremely easy-to-hit 5*, people judged every map based off its own merit and comparing it to other maps. literally the only number people cared anything about in mapping was the number of plays they got, and even then it was only a "wow this did way better/worse than i thought" kind of thing
with an official metric being introduced in ppv2, mapping naturally was influenced by this, no matter what anyone might say otherwise - how often do you ever see anti-jumps, or stacked streams, or other such techniques that are completely invisible to the difficulty metric? techniques that evoked emotional or visceral responses in players, knowledge that was only useful for mapping for the player, these fell to the wayside - what became important was numbers - star rating, difficulty settings, pp results, accuracy and its effect on pp, and things like that
mapping became about mapping for the rating system and its perception of player experience, rather than experimenting and figuring out how players really felt via peer review and experience.
Numbers became more important to mapping than people.
and if you can't see how this might be kind of a bad idea then you clearly can't be convinced by anything
speaking as a mapper of quite a long time (i like to think of myself as "experienced" as a mapper and modder, while i never really dedicated myself physically enough to be able to play, I understand quite a bit about how maps play in general)
i'd like to point out that during the era before ppv1 and ppv2, mapping was 100% about how players experienced the map - not how well it played, not how much fun it was, but how it expressed the music and what kind of cool ideas or interesting functions it can do to represent the music
in other words, mappers mapped their maps to be played and to provide an experience to the player - yes, most often that vague "fun" everyone tries to race after - and practically ignored all concepts regarding score or difficulty - except when the purpose of the map was expressly to be a challenge in one way or another (the famous BIG BLACK challenging jumping, my infamous chipscape challenging stamina and reading). because there was no "official" metric to judge anything by, and the star rating system capped out an extremely easy-to-hit 5*, people judged every map based off its own merit and comparing it to other maps. literally the only number people cared anything about in mapping was the number of plays they got, and even then it was only a "wow this did way better/worse than i thought" kind of thing
with an official metric being introduced in ppv2, mapping naturally was influenced by this, no matter what anyone might say otherwise - how often do you ever see anti-jumps, or stacked streams, or other such techniques that are completely invisible to the difficulty metric? techniques that evoked emotional or visceral responses in players, knowledge that was only useful for mapping for the player, these fell to the wayside - what became important was numbers - star rating, difficulty settings, pp results, accuracy and its effect on pp, and things like that
mapping became about mapping for the rating system and its perception of player experience, rather than experimenting and figuring out how players really felt via peer review and experience.
Numbers became more important to mapping than people.
and if you can't see how this might be kind of a bad idea then you clearly can't be convinced by anything