Hi everyone!

It's been a minute since the "Captain's Pick" vote collaboration between Ephemeral and I was rolled out and I've taken into consideration feedback from both Reddit and the osu!forums.

Two concerns that stood out were a lack of lower level beatmaps and that maps selected could be biased by the representatives of each mode. I am here to address these issues and propose a solution that will hopefully work better in the long-run than previous Loved implementations.

As you may or may not know, Captain's Pick is a community-driven effort to revamp the Loved category and spark new interest through the addition of more community chosen mapsets. Through the collective efforts of myself, tasuke912, Zak, and Halogen-, we created a grouping of worthy (in our opinions) maps to be put forward for voting in our respective gamemodes of proficiency. I am looking to also find a representative to divide osu!mania into 4k and 7k denominations as there appear to be separate communities for both.

The plan for now is to open up a Google Submission for for anyone in the community to nominate mapsets which they believe are worthy of being Loved. I am providing an optional space for you to "pitch" your maps as you why they deserve to be selected, as well as limiting the maps submitted per submission form to one at a time to avoid large map dumps. I wish to give more power to you as a submitter to explain what makes a mapset unique and give the community a larger voice versus giving us a list of links and creating our own, unavoidably biased lists for each week.

This submission form will remain perpetually open to responses (barring abuse of the form) and voting is planned to occur weekly for standard, and possibly staggered further for other modes that don't have the large pool of graveyarded maps as standard has.

I am very receptive to any comments, concerns, feedback, or questions that people have about this plan and would love to hear what you think can be improved each week.

Let's bring the love back into the Loved category.

Here is the submission link

Note: Chinese players without access to Google may submit maps to me directly by Forum PM. Thanks 09kami for pointing this out.

Reddit Post

EDIT: I have begun manually adding submitted maps into this public spreadsheet. Here you can view what maps have been submitted and which are more popular compared to others. If you already see a map listed here, don't be afraid to submit it again under your own name. More votes only reinforces that map's status!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing (Sorry to all Chinese players who don't have access to Google :c)

Ayyo this is awesome, the previous Captain's voting was already stellar and much better than the other loved votings. Adding user suggestions makes it less of a "a few guys act alone on behalf of the community" and more of a community based effort with the final judgement made by the same people who brought us the great previous one. Hope this goes through and continues!!

Also I assume it's okay to vote for maps that didn't make the previous picks right? Asking mostly because I'm a massive yakubyougami fan.

Big thanks for your continued spearheading of this process, Toy. I commend you for doing this while having the responsibilities of OWC around the corner, and you've been pretty awesome to work with in the limited contact we've had. Of course, thanks to Ephemeral for allowing this to happen, as well.

Hi! I think its a pretty good thought. Although I'm not 100% sure what does "Loved Category" nowadays state for...so I'm a bit confused

I'd like to hear about the maps which people raised to the previous 100kds requirement months ago before the system was "officially" put on hiatus that still haven't been added to Loved.

Otherwise this sounds great.

Thats some sweet news to hear, i'm always up to look at the loved section as I believe it's a breath of fresh air compared to the more common stuff ranked is used to show.

However regarding osu!minigames i'm still not enthusiast in the 30 favs rule. Standard benefit of the advantage of having a huge active community (i'm pretty sure it's at least twice bigger than every osu!minigames combined) and I believe it's a fair cap of quality you can ask for.
But we kinda run in a wall when it comes to CTB, Taiko or Mania : favourite is not a good way to valuate because it's not revelant in any ways.

First of all it's super difficult to get 30 favs in any of these mods (well, let's say just difficult for mania) and so this cap is too big.

"Then we just lower this cap and it's all good !!"

Actually it's not that simple because if we lower it, it might just be even more terrible as it's not that hard to get let's say 10-15 friend/randoms to fav it. I believe everyone start to understand how bad this is.

Another point is fav is a really largely community driven system and it does not reflect the spirit of loved. Most favourited maps are often driven by trends over either mappers or artists/songs and not the map ITSELF in particular.
Let's take one of my favourite maps and one of I believe is the finest goods of mania pending :

b4kn - Act V - The Battle At Mammoth Mountain

It's structurally super interresting, it's freaking blast to play and it's mostly feels really unusual from most ranked (and pendings) we use to play.
Yet as i'm writing this, it only have 4 favs (yeah I didn't faved it because I start to be really limited with 3 favs remaining lmao) because it's super niche.

I believe we all agree loved should be this section that doesn't feel like a ranked v2, yet I believe theses ruleset goes completely againsn't it.

If you want your loved section to be a succes, just be confident in your Captains knowledge as i'm sure these persons don't need to deal with dumb restrective rulesets to pull out some of the best experiences of osu!minigames.

With that bein said, I wish you the best of luck for the loved section !

Cool, I just now pray that people still maps for ranked if we will have a weekly loved category .

Weber wrote:

I'd like to hear about the maps which people raised to the previous 100kds requirement months ago before the system was "officially" put on hiatus that still haven't been added to Loved.

Otherwise this sounds great.

I'd like to think most of them should be up for consideration - however, given that the concept of KD was somewhat exploitable, I feel like maps whose KD totals were contributed largely by small amounts of individuals shouldn't be given the opportunity to get to loved status (primary example: Another Lie's Beethoven Influenza, which only got loved because Another Lie KD farmed and literally dumped 100 of their stars into it). It's not "loved" if it doesn't really have support.

Xeo: I appreciate the compliment about my map, hahaha. That being said, 30 favorites might be a little high; however, but I don't think it's an unreasonable total simply on the concept of loved maps now: if the community really enjoys a particular map and it's well done/understandable, it'll likely get noticed. It's pretty easy to tell the difference between a map that is forcefully nominated as a result of recommendation and nothing, versus telling the difference from something that is nominated because it is truly different, and stands out for some reason.

I definitely understand the concerns about loved being a "ranked v2", and I'll certainly be keeping that in mind as well.

Why would you do this to the other modes again. We already told you, 30 favorites is unacceptable for anything that isn't osu!standard. How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?

XeoStyle wrote:

Thats some sweet news to hear, i'm always up to look at the loved section as I believe it's a breath of fresh air compared to the more common stuff ranked is used to show.

However regarding osu!minigames i'm still not enthusiast in the 30 favs rule. Standard benefit of the advantage of having a huge active community (i'm pretty sure it's at least twice bigger than every osu!minigames combined) and I believe it's a fair cap of quality you can ask for.
But we kinda run in a wall when it comes to CTB, Taiko or Mania : favourite is not a good way to valuate because it's not revelant in any ways.

First of all it's super difficult to get 30 favs in any of these mods (well, let's say just difficult for mania) and so this cap is too big.

This hard cap was set with mainly osu!standard in mind, my fellow map selectors are telling me to be lax about the Fave reqs in the other modes. While it may not seem intuitive for mania, it has its purpose in standard.

Backfire wrote:

Why would you do this to the other modes again. We already told you, 30 favorites is unacceptable for anything that isn't osu!standard. How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?

That cap is for standard only.

Necros96 wrote:

Hi! I think its a pretty good thought. Although I'm not 100% sure what does "Loved Category" nowadays state for...so I'm a bit confused

The Loved category was initially implemented to give maps that don't particularly meet the ranking criteria their own separate leaderboards that don't grant performance points. The goal in the continuation of this category is to give credit to maps and mappers who exceed the standards of quality in mapping, yet are unable to be recognized through ranked status due to failing to meet the set criteria.

How would maps that were designed for loved be treated?

Eg. if an osu favourites collab was revived and made some changes so that it can be submitted to loved, would it have to wait until it's re-graved? Or can it be submitted when fixes are done?

Toy wrote:

Backfire wrote:

Why would you do this to the other modes again. We already told you, 30 favorites is unacceptable for anything that isn't osu!standard. How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?

That cap is for standard only.

So what is the situation for other modes? Can you specify?

Sorry for playing around btw I wasn't trying to be rude.

If Katayoku no Tori doesn't get loved i'm gonna cry.
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/646861

This new system - I am a very very VERY big fan of. This new system actually feels like what Loved is genuinely supposed to be. The community hand picking maps & submitting them, instead of getting a random list of random maps & voting on them.

It actually makes us feel like we have control over which maps do & don't get Loved, and I absolutely love this.

Thank you.

Because Loved maps are receiving a leaderboard and being passed off as official content, should official metadata be applied to future maps in the Loved section?

30 favourites are gonna be hard to get even for standard maps that aren't super difficult or really outstanding gameplay-wise. The lack of lower difficulty maps in the loved section can be explained by that.

There are so many great maps worthy of being loved, but they are outside the radar for most people.

Sinnoh wrote:

How would maps that were designed for loved be treated?

Eg. if an osu favourites collab was revived and made some changes so that it can be submitted to loved, would it have to wait until it's re-graved? Or can it be submitted when fixes are done?

The graveyard rule is in place to prevent submissions for mappers who are still updating their maps. If the mapper specifies that the map is "ready" after making recent changes then it will be looked at case by case.

Backfire wrote:

So what is the situation for other modes? Can you specify?

Sorry for playing around btw I wasn't trying to be rude.

Other mode restrictions and criteria will be developed by the respective "captain" of each mode. This being tasuke912, Zak, and Halogen- for osu!taiko, osu!catch, and osu!mania respectively.

_verto_ wrote:

30 favourites are gonna be hard to get even for standard maps that aren't super difficult or really outstanding gameplay-wise. The lack of lower difficulty maps in the loved section can be explained by that.

There are so many great maps worthy of being loved, but they are outside the radar for most people.

At that point, it's unclear whether these maps fit under the criteria of "Loved", meaning well-recognized by a large portion of the community aside from the general quality requirement. If these maps are of quality, but don't meet 30 favorites, it shouldn't be terribly hard to get a small group of backers to vouch for the map I'd imagine

Monstrata wrote:

Because Loved maps are receiving a leaderboard and being passed off as official content, should official metadata be applied to future maps in the Loved section?

Very interesting point. I'd like to open that up to the decision of Beatmap Nominators, though I feel as it's not terribly necessary to regulate it very strictly.