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osu!, touchscreens and you

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Topic Starter
peppy
Hi guys!

You may know me as the guy who made this weird game. In the last 48 hours I've been been told osu! has been broken since its inception and to "fix pp" many times, so I figure it probably best to centralise my thoughts and replies in one place (even though in most cases I did respond locally on twitter, forums, reddit or other).

Recently, a score was set using a touchscreen device which achieved a new high 900+ pp score. The performance point algorithm designed by Tom94 was made with many factors considered, one of which is "aim". Touchscreens greatly reduce the difficulty of aim as players using them now have up to 10 localised input points (their fingers) which both need to travel less distance and can preempt where they need to be for future hit objects.

Many people have proposed fixes so I'll quickly explain why each one has flaws or inherent issues that are not easy to solve:

"The new play had low 80-90% accuracy! Just de-weight the accuracy in pp!"

There's no reason touchscreen players can't improve their accuracy to a higher level. This would only delay the inevitable -Tom94

"Make touchscreen only leaderboards!"

This is a HUGE infrastructure change. It needs database, osu-web (new and old), bancho, client, team and community structural changes. It would take me (and other team members) off any other task for a few weeks. All of this new infrastructure would be made for a currently very small group of touchscreen players.

I do not see this as a good solution when at the end of the day the majority mostly care about making sure scores like this do not appear higher than tablet scores. There's definitely a time and place for splitting out ranking systems, but now is not that time.

"Lower the amount of pp weighting for aim!"

This would effectively place a skill cap on non-touchscreen plays and is not a true solution.

"Ban touchscreen players!"

No user should be banned for how they choose to play a game (within limits of course).

_______________________________


verto does a good job summing up quite well why this isn't a simple algorithm-change issue and has some strong opinions on mapping which i can generally agree with to boot.



We are actively looking into a temporary or semi-permanent solution until we have more flexibility in changing infrastrcuture (this will need to come after lazer/new web goes live) and will keep you guys posted as we figure things out. A proposed solution of a touchscreen mod which devalues touchscreen pp values across the board may be something we apply as a stop-gap measure, for instance.

The pp calculation engine and infrastructure has always been designed to allow for online changes, which propagate out to all existing scores, so making changes retroactively is very possible, which means there is not an imminent danger from delaying any changes we push out.

In the mean time, if you are a programming/maths/statistics guru and want to help improve the very-stale pp algorithm – not necessarily to fix touchscreen because that is very much not possible with a single algorithm, but to make ongoing balancing changes – we have opened a new channel specifically for technical discussion of the performance points algorithm on the osu!dev discord network. Please note that a certain level of competence will be expected; this is not a place to meme, rage or bitch.

Keep playing and please enjoy osu! as a game, in a fun way, not a grim WORLD-IS-GOING-TO-END-DUE-TO-ONE-HIGH-TOUCHSCREEN-SCORE way <3

Keep in mind everything that most everything I've said here is my opinion. Other people on the team may have differing opinions as many community members. We won't be making any decisions without taking all feedback on board, so do feel free to add your own below!
Girl
Nice
-sandAI
No reason to change the way pp values are calculated or even change the types of people we allow to play this game..

Why not just rerank tag4 maps since touchscreen was the reason why it was removed in the first place?
Nifty
One step closer to a PP-less future <3

edit for a constructive thought: I haven't seen any high level touch screen players (other than "sorry did it for the memes" from freedomdiver) comment on this situation. I would like to see what someone like CatBagasm thinks about the touchscreen situation so we could have a less one-sided conversation.
salsa
Great to see some communication on the problem, thanks pepper.
goink
Glad to hear that change is being looked into, regardless of whether or not the decision is what I would prefer
Jace

-Vanilla wrote:

No reason to change the way pp values are calculated or even change the types of people we allow to play this game..

Why not just rerank tag4 maps since touchscreen was the reason why it was removed in the first place?


because it's just going to add to the current problem. reranking tag4s would only make the top ranks even more dominated by touchscreen (for example, the new top score would be around 1050pp on exgon's megamix score).

i think once the touchscreen problem is fixed(?) then tag4s should be re-ranked. people who can get pp from those maps with tablet/mouse deserve it imo
lolarisan
Maybe there could be an option on your profile where u select touchscreen and it will automatically be sent to another leaderboard?
Halogen
poggers
if touchscreen leaderboards happened, will that include touch kb players?
My Angel Akito
k
Dea ex machina
Nice
mits
Thanks for getting to addressing this so fast, peppy!

I'm curious to hear about your stance on disabling mouse buttons, aiming with a touchscreen using a single finger and hitting notes with two keys, as one would with a tablet or mouse. Do you believe this would potentially fall into the touchscreen mod category?
Topic Starter
peppy

Mits wrote:

Thanks for getting to addressing this so fast, peppy!

I'm curious to hear about your stance on disabling mouse buttons, aiming with a touchscreen using a single finger and hitting notes with two keys, as one would with a tablet or mouse. Do you believe this would potentially fall into the touchscreen mod category?


it'd be based on cursor "warping", and automatically applied. so it depends on how the user decides to play.
Axer
peppy doing good job
hi-mei
I think its a long awaited time for a meticulous review of how PP score is calculated.

There is a very tangible difference between 4 min 7* HDHR map fc and 20 seconds HDHRDT haitai FC.

This thing HAS to be addressed at some point, I truly hope that the solution will be finded and we gonna shift from TV-size farming meta to something a bit different.

I am not a math-guru, but I can say that the formula of PP calculation is struggling when it comes to sliders.

Maps with lots of sliders gives less score, doesnt matter if the actual difficulty is higher than the common TV-size anime maps.

So the main thing that comes to my mind is that PP system doesnt care how you hit sliders, how much input sliders are having on the player during the gameplay, how it affects reading and such.

But for temporary solution I can suggest to nerf how much PP is coming from short maps, it is just not ok that 20 second map gives 900 pp. Its just wrong.
lolarisan
It's good that u brought this up so quick peppy.

As technology is getting more advanced by time maybe there are other "tools" we should consider an fix on as early as possible.

There are certain companies out there that are currently developing eye-tracking software. What are you thought on this seeing as this may be an issue?
fieryrage
Wow the world is gonna end because oa f 900 pp play omg!!! Please panic erase all the pp

for real though I'm sure many people (myself included) would be willing to make a more balanced pp system, I doubt separating the leaderboards will make any difference in terms of people's satisfaction with both the pp system and the touchscreen issue
-GN

peppy wrote:

I do not see this as a good solution when at the end of the day the majority mostly care about making sure scores like this do not appear higher than tablet scores.

I really doubt there exists a solution that would ensure this never happens without completely separating the two, due to the way the current pp system deals with jumps. Having to consider touchscreen when balancing for mouse/tablet spacing and vice versa would just throw everything off. (we've seen this already, back when TAG4 maps were unranked btw please rerank)

Also, just a suggestion, but if touchscreen had their own leaderboards, they could have different mechanics as well. Maybe taking the streaming mechanic of osu!droid(aiming with one finger and tapping elsewhere with the other hand) and putting it into osu!std could make touchscreen more approachable. What's your opinion on that?
0x84f

lolarisan wrote:

Maybe there could be an option on your profile where u select touchscreen and it will automatically be sent to another leaderboard?
Yeah but people could just not select that option and have it submitted regularly, and to prevent that there would always have to be people looking at the leaderboards and all plays for that, which is kinda impossible imo
Topic Starter
peppy

lolarisan wrote:

There are certain companies out there that are currently developing eye-tracking software. What are you thought on this seeing as this may be an issue?


I felt sick for three days after trying to play osu! with eye-tracking. Two other people who tried almost vomited on my desk. Keep in mind that when playing osu! your eyes tend to read ahead. Trying to target hitcircles directly is hard. Sliders is puke (eyes are not made to smoothly track).
jesse1412
I completely agree with basically everything mentioned in the OP. The best time to solve this issue isn't now, but after the release of lazer. Knowing that it WILL be addressed is more than enough for now, while the issue isn't hugely damaging. It's better to inform touchscreen players of proposals sooner rather than later to help them decide whether the peripheral is something they'd still enjoy using.

Your temporary fix of applying a mod will work in the short term, but I think the only true solution to the issue is creating a separate gamemode for touchscreen when lazer drops. Touchscreen is a completely different game that needs different maps and different gameplay features and by extent, it's own leaderboard (like taiko/ctb/mania).


hi-mei wrote:

But for temporary solution I can suggest to nerf how much PP is coming from short maps, it is just not ok that 20 second map gives 900 pp. Its just wrong.


Completely incorrect. IF that map was a 20 second 300bpm full screen spaced deathstream, it definitely should give 1000s of pp. This shouldn't even have to be said.


fieryrage wrote:

I doubt separating the leaderboards will make any difference in terms of people's satisfaction with both the pp system and the touchscreen issue


Well I mean, it would completely solve the issue people have with touchscreen. PP issues are an unrelated topic.
Tune
What I don't really get is that changing the pp system doesn't work.
By nerfing difficultyspikes(Example: 5* map with one or two short 7* jumpspikes)
and improving pp gained from streammaps or technical maps,
the pp mappers, that would have mapped short longjump difficultyspiking maps would start to map different styles, effectively nerfing touchscreen indirectly.

Letting length, average difficulty, and accuracy play a greater role in the current system would probably shift the meta to a more balanced set of skills required for pp.

A few friends of mine who reached the top 1000 fairly fast, all have only one skillset in common, and that's long fast jumps.

No streams, barely any technical ability, no low AR reading, no complicated tap variations, barely any consistency on non-jumpmaps.

It's sad to see those playstyle slowly go away, they add so much depth to the game, but in the new mapping meta it's very rare to see stuff that isn't 1:28 jumps with the odd triple in there.
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