Hello, this is quite a controversial topic, but I believe it is necessary to clear up this grey zone of the rankability of a map.

Some people seem to argue that visuals do not matter as long as the intent or concept is well executed, but I would make the point that a good concept is way better conveyed with an effective design, and clean visuals make a map easier to read.
Moreover, they show that the mapper cares about their creation (not that they don't, note the use of the verb "show"), and when your map becomes an official part of the game (=ranked), it should look the part.

Of course everybody can't be literal Michael Angelos but aesthetics are still something that can be learned to some extent, just like flow, rhythm, consistency, and anything else that makes up a good map. There is no excusing obvious defects like unintentional overlaps, bad blankets, or clash in styles.

I'm also aware that this is quite subjective as well, so I don't want to get into total aesthetics nazism (although I wouldn't mind it tbh), but since there are literally zero (0) rules or guidelines about this subject, I think we should at least clear this up in the guidelines for Standard:

Appropriate, consistent and clean visuals should be used throughout the map.
Unless the song suggests it, avoid clashing slider shapes and patterns (e.g. "industrial", straight shapes when the others are "natural" and curved). Be also mindful of close objects unintentionally overlapping each other, non-centered blankets, and inconsistencies in angles or spacing in similar parts of the song.

Hopefully, having this kind of guideline should make any poor design choice unrankable unless the mapper can justify it.

I really believe this is an important aspect of mapping, so I hope we can have a productive discussion about it, thanks!

tl;dr: visuals are as important as any other aspect of a map for a lot of reasons explained above and should be heavily considered for rank

i can understand consistent, but "appropriate" is unenforcable and "clean" is damaging to mapping diversity.

A lot of maps that have been spited by the community for their lack of aesthetics I thought they were really visually nice/pretty, they were clean in their own regard in such a way that the map looked like that map and not a jumble of notes or anything. Its pretty clear that between numbers of people that a majority isn't inherently correct in any regard. That being said should be noted this kind of thing is really ambiguous and subjective. It reminds me of middle school and highschool when kids would get bullied for being ugly to the popular kids. How is this any different?

Also there is no grey zone in this area, it should be really clear when a full QAT team comes and backs a map and says "aesthetics don't matter" on that map then you really shouldn't think it undermines the rankability of a map lol wtf

"Clean" refers to unintentional defects like overlaps and bad blankets in this case.

But yeah, my intent for "appropriate" was to have some kind of justification from the mapper, which is the purpose of a guideline anyway, but I guess it could be formulated in a better way.

Then this doesn't really seem helpful to me. Maps that are visually inconsistent are usually otherwise inconsistent as well (which is frowned upon and can lead to a veto or DQ to fix), and "the removal of unintended defects" is one of the major intentions of the whole modding process.

I do agree that mappers should be able to justify their positions instead of bullshitting their way out of it. However, we have very little way to enforce that without limiting the headroom we have as mappers.

The ranking criteria and QAT are very non-interventionist as they are now, because this structure of community trusts its constituents to be smart, thoughtful, and tactful about their decisions on what to map and what to rank. Some people will violate this, certainly, but encroaching upon that freedom in response to a few bad apples can only impede the ability of the community at large to dictate its own direction. If you see a map you consider bad getting ranked, respond to it by mapping and ranking one of your own. You can have the effect you want on the future of mapping by influencing others with your work, rather than telling them how to do theirs.

Mun wrote:

Then this doesn't really seem helpful to me. Maps that are visually inconsistent are usually otherwise inconsistent as well (which is frowned upon and can lead to a veto or DQ to fix), and "the removal of unintended defects" is one of the major intentions of the whole modding process.

I do agree that mappers should be able to justify their positions instead of bullshitting their way out of it. However, we have very little way to enforce that without limiting the headroom we have as mappers.

This would be quite the ideal but recent events *cough squartatrice* show that even with common sense this is not possible, going full "i prefer my way" every reply and still getting away with it.

We live in a world where everything is subjective and if you can big talk you can bullshit your way out of it without any problem.

Not talking only about aesthetics here but it's still part of it

Linada wrote:

This would be quite the ideal but recent events *cough squartatrice* show that even with common sense this is not possible, going full "i prefer my way" every reply and still getting away with it.

We live in a world where everything is subjective and if you can big talk you can bullshit your way out of it without any problem.

Not talking only about aesthetics here but it's still part of it

can you keep on topic of the thread instead of flaming other maps please

not flaming but just giving a mere example

pls stop

I think the biggest point of this guideline would be to enforce the minimum aesthetic requirements that mappers can currently flat out ignore because there's literally nothing about it in the RC, and the backlash and stepping in of the QAT in some extreme cases show that there needs to be a clarification there.

A guideline is a good idea because it prevents most of those issues to get to qualification, preventing DQ and drama, while still leaving room for creativity if the mapper can justify it and if the community agrees with it, just like any other guideline has done so far.

If things are "frowned upon", why not make a guideline? I believe it's a necessity to write some points down so that everyone is on the same page and to prevent debating again over the same things.

Hey I have some reservations with how you posted this that are explained in red, please fix these before we move forward

Alheak wrote:

Hello, this is quite a controversial topic, but I believe it is necessary to clear up this grey zone of the rankability of a map.

Some people seem to argue that visuals do not matter as long as the intent or concept is well executed, but I would make the point that a good concept is way better conveyed with an effective design, and clean visuals make a map easier to read.
Moreover, they show that the mapper cares about their creation (not that they don't, note the use of the verb "show"), and when your map becomes an official part of the game (=ranked), it should look the part.
the equal sign looks ugly next to the parenthesis here
Of course everybody can't be literal Michael Angelos but aesthetics are still something that can be learned to some extent, just like flow, rhythm, consistency, and anything else that makes up a good map. There is no excusing obvious defects like unintentional overlaps, bad blankets, or clash in styles.
the way you wrote this list hides it in this paragraph and makes it harder to read
I'm also aware that this is quite subjective as well, so I don't want to get into total aesthetics nazism (although I wouldn't mind it tbh), but since there are literally zero (0) rules or guidelines about this subject, I think we should at least clear this up in the guidelines for Standard:
putting the number 0 in the parenthesis has bad blanket because you need to move it down a few pixels

Appropriate, consistent and clean visuals should be used throughout the map.
Unless the song suggests it, avoid clashing slider shapes and patterns (e.g. "industrial", straight shapes when the others are "natural" and curved). Be also mindful of close objects unintentionally overlapping each other, non-centered blankets, and inconsistencies in angles or spacing in similar parts of the song.

having a quote above adds an extra line below this paragraph so to make it even you should make an extra line of space before it
Hopefully, having this kind of guideline should make any poor design choice unrankable unless the mapper can justify it.
the italics in "should" put the letter d much closer to the word "make" which is inconsistent to how much space is between the letter s in "should" and the letter n in "in" before it
I really believe this is an important aspect of mapping, so I hope we can have a productive discussion about it, thanks!

tl;dr: visuals are as important as any other aspect of a map for a lot of reasons explained above and should be heavily considered for rank

having a bold at the bottom of your post makes it feel really cluttered because of how the forums work

You could've not named squartatrice and people would've still understood your point lol. Well either way, I don't think that restriction the ability of a lot of mappers just because of 1 or 2 people isnt exactly fair either. And the terms that this post brings on are already present in how mods function on a basic level. While it might be frustrating for modders for the mapper to say "No i like it better like this". It can be just as frustrating to give the modder more power over the mapper just so they can just say "No your idea is wrong".

I would rather get redwalled in a mod rather than making no progress in a map just because my slider didnt align with how a modder thinks a sound should look.

bor wrote:

things

Please stop, you're embarrassing and discrediting everyone who disagrees with this guideline proposal.

Anyway, I think that there is some rift in the understanding of what each side is saying.
On one side, we have people saying "mappers have to be able to justify their aesthetic choices!" while the other side is saying "any suggestion based around aesthetics misses the point of whatever map."

What is needed here is better communication, not for people to jump to conclusions. Personally, Alheak, I think you should hold off and maybe think about what you really intend for a visuals guideline to be about, or whether that can and should be generalized to something more commonly considered and regarded than visuals and aesthetics, i.e. consistency.

And on the opposing side, I think people should take more time to understand what is being said, rather than jump to conclusions, ironically miss the point, and act frustratingly toxic in some strange attempt to shut down conversation about the topic.

I hope I don't sound too mean in saying this, but the longer this goes on, the less each side seems to understand the other. It's only been a bit over half an hour and there's already shit being spewed everywhere over it.

Mun wrote:

bor wrote:

things

Please stop, you're embarrassing and discrediting everyone who disagrees with this guideline proposal.

Anyway, I think that there is some rift in the understanding of what each side is saying.

I really believe visuals matter if we are going to push this to an official state, and I don't get why you are personally attacking me on an official thread

Alheak wrote:

I think the biggest point of this guideline would be to enforce the minimum aesthetic requirements that mappers can currently flat out ignore because there's literally nothing about it in the RC, and the backlash and stepping in of the QAT in some extreme cases show that there needs to be a clarification there.
- there is already, in 99.99999% of cases, a fairly intersubjective level of aesthetics in a map. so much so that people complain, and have been complaining for a while now, that a lot of maps look the exact same. defining a minimum level of "aesthetic", aside from being hilariously impractical, is not something that can be codified since it's so subjective. for example: i am a bn. i think that so-called russian style mapping looks terrible. should i veto a map for using that type of aesthetic? very few people would agree with that, but this guideline would provide support for it.
A guideline is a good idea because it prevents most of those issues to get to qualification, preventing DQ and drama, while still leaving room for creativity if the mapper can justify it and if the community agrees with it, just like any other guideline has done so far.
- the community agreeing with a guideline being broken has nothing to do with whether or not it's justified. aside from that, the community at large is laughably inconsistent with what is accepted and what isn't so it shouldn't be used as a judge for what is rankable or not. note that this applies to both the BNG and mappers in general. guidelines, as a whole, are either entirely ignored (slider tick + slide being muted) or treated like rules (break times in muzu diffs, density guidelines, etc.) this, i am 100% certain, would be under the first category, making it useless.
If things are "frowned upon", why not make a guideline? I believe it's a necessity to write some points down so that everyone is on the same page and to prevent debating again over the same things.
- a lot of things are frowned upon that are not guidelines. for example, extreme overmapping is not unrankable, yet you will not see a lot of support for it. ranking the same song 15 times remains rankable despite lots of complaints. none of these have been made guidelines, because the point of the ranking system is to self control and not rank these types of things organically. yes, it happens once in a blue moon, that doesn't mean the solution is to overreact and make a huge change to the system to make sure it never happens again.

that aside, this proposal wouldn't even do anything about the maps you're knee jerk reacting to because the justification for the awful aesthetics in them is very simple - the gameplay value of the placement is worth more than making the map look nice to other people. this is just unnecessary.

Again, and thanks to Mun for precising it, this is not about forcing a certain style or the modder's views or whatever, but to make sure a minimum amount of care and thought for visuals is respected when mapping a song.

Of course some points that have been brought up will make me rethink about some elements of my proposal, but im gonna sleep for now, and hopefully the thread will not have burned down when I wake up.

Appropriate, consistent and clean visuals should be used throughout the map.
Unless the song suggests it, avoid clashing slider shapes and patterns (e.g. "industrial", straight shapes when the others are "natural" and curved). Be also mindful of close objects unintentionally overlapping each other, non-centered blankets, and inconsistencies in angles or spacing in similar parts of the song.

I agree with most of it except the part about being clean. I personally think a map can look really good and have fitting aesthetics even if its visiuals are unclean as hell.

Concerning the rest of the discussion, I think enforcing this as a guideline is important, because while yes, the nomination groups have been enforcing that rule unofficially, this just adds a lever on which to act for these cases. Just because most mappers don’t break this guideline as it is right now doesn’t mean this guideline has no need to be. And I also do not see how this would be damaging to anyone in the mapping scene who does put care in their aesthetics. I for one am a mapper who sometimes likes to make my stuff ugly, but this guideline definitely doesn’t hurt my mapping ideas.

This is far too subjective to be considered even a guideline. You can't define appropriateness without specific context, and specific context differs not even in different maps but even in different sections of the same map.

Also, "Industrial" vs "natural" slider shapes already shows subjectiveness. Not everyone considers these adjectives descriptors of sliders. I always imagined linears as natural lol.

Really seems like this was just made because of fear that maps like squaratrice will become ranked in the future. They won't. This is the same mentality as people who were against ALIEN. Just go and dq mod squartatrice again, it's not hard. If you're not bringing up concerns because you don't want to hurt the mapper's feelings then you shouldn't care about maping quality as much as you do anyways.

I agree with Monstrata

I somewhat agree with your mindset, but making this a guideline really doesnt help since some mappers get off on breaking guidelines. I can't see this being helpful unless it's enforced as a rule, and making something subjective as a rule doesn't work.

Can we just allow some basic freedom for mappers? What a map requires fundamentally is the mapper's own logic, instead of aesthetics or other's view on the map. Such ambigious and subjective lines shall never become even guidelines, as such tendentiousness guides nothing but a certain or fixed mindset, which would be a terrible thing in the field of composing.

i'd rather have diversity in the ranked section, as much as I like good visuals some maps with good visuals have horrible gameplay. hobbes once told me that we accept maps with good visuals and awful gameplay but a lot of people go apeshit if its the other way around.

like we get it, you don't like squartatrice. as much as I don't like it either and 95% of content in the ranked section, i'd rather have it ranked than have a bunch of maps be subject to this guideline lol

Improving aesthetics and how your map looks like is supposed to be part of mapping and modding process.
If a BN / QAT can’t decide when a map is good enough, or they ask more opinions or they don’t qualify the map. That’s also the purpose of 24h rule or why a map can be dq to get some improvement.
Some common sense is required that’s all. All maps don’t have to get a pure clean concept, just having a minimum of explanation about it is enough.

I believe that should be left for BNs to judge, guidelines are straying away with many vague things that are just useless and open to many subjective interpretations.

There is no guideline that a map should flow good.

There is no guideline that emphasis should be on point.

Yet those are being applied in everyday maps and have plenty of cases in which they are not being applied yet they still get pushed to ranked. That should go to aesthetics/visuals too.

My opinion is that a ranked map shouldn't sacrifice flow, patterning, rhythm or aesthetics unless there is a very good reason to do so to enhance some of the other points. While all of these things are subjective to various degrees, I'm sure most people where would agree that consistency is the key for those points to be of acceptable quality. I'm going to use a part of squartatrice for this, but really it doesn't matter what the map I use is:
Does the last (1) note there benefit in any of the other categories by being slightly overlapped with the previous sliderbody? Does the differences in the slope of the sliders add anything to the playability of the map? Or the interpretation of this part of the music? If the answer is no, or that it hinders other aspects, then there is no reason to make the inconsistent spacing, or the different slopes of the sliders, unless done in a consistent manner. The problem arises only when these kinds of visuals are inconsistently used through the map imo. "Inconsistency" isn't inherently any different from just having no style, or no aesthetic visuals. Even if it's playable doesn't mean it couldn't be better.


Does this need to be a guideline? I dunno. Of course what counts as aesthetically pleasing or not is subjective, and so are things like flow or what patterns play well or not, but at least I think the one thing they all have in common is that it's generally accepted for rankability as long as these aspects are handled in a way that is consistent and logical within the map. In the end I think it should be up to BN/QATs to decide whether or not being "consistently inconsistent" should be accepted as a valid mapping style and compliments the song or not.

As for my own opinion, then no it shouldn't, but yeah.

seems like the kind of thing that even if codified into a thing that people should look at etc gets broken all the time because people what looks nice and structured to you might not look nice and structured to someone else

codifying someone's general approach to aesthetics seems impractical and not even remotely enforcable so I'd just vouch for this to not be made into a guideline because it'd add one more guideline to remove in my simplification thread lol

Squartatrice is way more aesthetic than multiple maps becoming ranked nowadays (I am not mentioning any particular names only because I am attempting to be respectful and polite toward the community members) so I can't see the point in this guideline becoming a real one, especially when we can literally call everything "bad-looking" if it is anything different from straight sliders and non-overlapping patterns that are basically rotated a million times. Frankly, I lol'd when I saw the thread.

Also, as long as the guideline is not intended to enforce particular mapping styles it actually would be doing so. Believe it or not Alheak but the guideline would make everyone map similarly to Asphyxia's United set as probably around 85% of the community would agree it is aesthetically pleasing and the rest of the QAT and BNG would enforce it as the mapping meta... oh, wait... most people are mapping like it right now and there have been more than thousands of complaints made on how everything looks as if mapped by the same person due to the basic casual pp mapping yet when someone makes anything different people keep complaining on how retarded it is to create a beatmap that utilizes reversed mapping logic.

Saying simply - how about no as we can't please everyone but with this guideline set into stone we are going to please even less people with fewer options left?

Monstrata, I'd argue that natural things are rarely perfectly straight, or maybe I should have used the term "organic" instead, but this is kinda beyond the point. Also my motivation for making this proposal was because of how easily aesthetics can be overlooked, and not because squartatrice is a terrible map or I'm afraid to hurt soulfear's feelings. There wouldn't be much to mod anyway since everything has already been pointed out by others and denied.

Reading some other comments, I realize some terms should be defined here: "aesthetic" and "visuals" should not be confused with "beauty", it's about intent and care in design, and not about enforcing some kind of defined style.

My intent is to improve quality in general; Osu being a visual game, it seems pretty obvious that visuals should play an important part in the overall quality of a map, though since it's still a game first and foremost, gameplay should be the principal objective, so I can understand the leniency here.

There's also the issue of sameness and yes, more diversity is needed, but surely not at the price of reducing the quality. If the community overwhelmingly agrees that a map can be improved, even if the mapper disagrees, why should it be ranked? What's the point of a design that only the mapper himself can understand especially in the context of a ranked map? That's also where I believe the line should be drawn, between understanding and agreeing.
Taking Monstrata's A.L.I.E.N for instance, I'm pretty sure the community understood the design choices of the map, but not everyone agreed with it. As long as we can make sense of it, it should be allowed.

But yeah, in the end, it kinda comes back to what we already have, so this is probably not a guideline that we need or it'll have to be very long and specific.
I'm not really sure what would be appropriate then, but I still believe this is an important topic so I'll try to work out a solution eventually, it just won't be via the RC.

I think the thread can be closed here unless people still want to debate this further or have some better ideas.

Alheak wrote:

I think the thread can be closed here unless people still want to debate this further or have some better ideas.

archiving then