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[Proposal] Spread requirements based on song length

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LwL

Krfawy wrote:

I hope everyone agreeing on this issue starts thinking a little bit more soberly because that seems as if you all want to create only 5-10* content.


No, I want to create content I enjoy creating, and mapping the same song multiple times very rarely falls under that for me. And I'm most certainly not alone on this or we wouldn't see so many sets with 1 diff per mapper. And for many, mapping a long song probably invokes a similar feeling as most songs repeat themselves, which also makes it harder to fill a 4 minute set up with GDs in that manner.

Krfawy wrote:

I'm crying for this proposal to die as soon as right now, I am not even going to hide how triggering that is.


You can still force normals while helping with the problem if you just modify the precise rules a bit. It would still help as in terms of workload it's much less to map, say, N-I-X with the X being 6.5* or sth than a full spread that would almost certainly need an additional extra, or high star insane, as well as a hard.

Krfawy wrote:

I will make it very clear that if my National Hangover Anthem aka Kac was looped to 4 minutes and people skipped mapping at least Normal difficulty for the song, I would be, putting it unbelievably lightly, pissed off to my very fucking death.


And as it stands you could just loop the song to 5 minutes instead and map only one diff, yay so much better! The point of this proposal is precisely to reduce the excessive amount of looping that came up recently, because not having a gradual cutoff is just screaming for loops. The workload difference between N-H-I-X-X and N-I-X is decent, but if the first is 3:40 and the second is 4:10, it's not that bad. However having a 4:40 N-H-I-X-X spread vs. a 5:10 single diff is huge.
peppy
Hi I'm new to this thread.

I tend to agree with this direction. It is hard to map easier difficulties over longer periods of time because it is harder to keep things interesting.

The argument of not having enough beginner content doesn't really hold because we already have a huge library of easy difficulties.

We should probably also disallow extending songs for the only goal of hitting a length. Cutting shorter is fine; extending should not be.
Pachiru
thanks ppy
but if cutting a song is fine, why entending shouldn't be then?
Kyuunex
I agree with peppy.
including the part "Cutting shorter is fine"
peppy
Cutting shorter is done to make it more playable/suited to a rhythm game. Making longer is done to avoid mapping certain difficulties with basically no exception.
lewski

peppy wrote:

Cutting shorter is done to make it more playable/suited to a rhythm game. Making longer is done to avoid mapping certain difficulties with basically no exception.


Yeah, extending is almost always done just to hit five minutes, but I seriously doubt most people cut songs for any reason other than not wanting to map the whole thing lol
Mordred
People cut songs because they're lazy. Extension are done for the exact same reason, barely anyone likes to make a 4:59 spread
pimp

peppy wrote:

Making longer is done to avoid mapping certain difficulties with basically no exception.
are you just refering to mp3 loops?
including a song to the end of the mp3 counts as making longer or will it just be considered a "compilation"?
Kyuunex
before moving forward, we should decide what kind of extensions are a no-no.

are r3 ok? because it can be considered a compilation, one song after another.

another example are short ~29 second anime opening/ending songs, like Harumachi clover, where the song is under 30 seconds but mappers have been extending them to hit the 30 second mark.


as for cuts, i personally cut the song for playability and "not making the player bored" sake. Most songs have pretty much copy pasted rhythm.
The most common song structure is intro, verse, pre-chorus, chorus (or refrain), verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge ("middle eight"), verse, chorus and outro, and then the song is pretty much over. pretty much copy paste with different vocals.

making a song shorter serves more purpose than just putting less work. in fact, it does not require that much work if i don't cut a song, i just copy paste items, change them up a little and etc.
Vacuous

Kyuunex wrote:

before moving forward, we should decide what kind of extensions are a no-no.

are r3 ok? because it can be considered a compilation, one song after another.

I'd say that r3 is not ok because in almost every circumstance where it has been put in a "compilation" it's been to extend a song past 5 min. If the compilation itself is all r3 music box songs that'd be fine but just pasting it onto a 4:40 song should not be acceptable imo
Nao Tomori
i think extending to meet 30s mark is different from meeting 5min mark. cuz otherwise its literally unrankable for 30s but for 5min its just to have less effort. extending to approval length with r3 or whatnot is what is being targeted here after all
Topic Starter
UndeadCapulet
eek thread derailing fast

@peppy thank you for your approval! will get the extension stuff drafted in soon

@everyone freaking out about extension ban, please do me a huge and favour and 1) reread the op, most reasons people have for extensions are irrelevant with this proposal, and 2) wait until the ban is drafted until you start heavily discussing, i already know all the things needed to consider like compilations, 30sec, 1sec extensions, etc. that will be accommodated for, it's just going to take some time for me to draft it up/oko to get back home from vacation to actually push it

things are happening now, i won't let those things hurt the game, just hold on
moonpoint
some of us discussed this on a discord, if you're interested in reading what some other people think about it then you can click right over here.
Teky
I agree with the idea of more length = less diffs mapped. I am interested to see what people against this idea say and their reasons.
LwL
In general regarding extension ban, if it's done (which is hard to do objectively because you can just call it a remix), the rule should be worded as such that you can still extend songs if you want, you just have to still map the spread required for the original length. That would also eliminate the problem with <30 seconds songs. This is simply to allow people to extend songs or maybe use minor remixes that happen to put it past 5 minutes and might be seen as "lazy edits for extension" by the relevant people (and such a subjective judgement will be necessary at times since it's simply not possible to 100% objectively determine what is an extension and what is a legitimate remix or compilation).
Fu Xuan
peppy our saviour
Topic Starter
UndeadCapulet
ooooooooookay here's the draft: https://gist.github.com/Okorin/190bc363 ... 919eb8e1cf

tl;dr of the draft:
  1. incorporated the op
  2. incorporated a draft of the upcoming compilation rules staff want that you can read about here: https://osu.ppy.sh/beatmapsets/786643/d ... ll#/289974
  3. incorporated the extension ban peppy requested
  4. incorporated this proposal: t/726926 to enable marathon rules to function for sets where the topdiff is lower than the required lowest difficulty
hope this makes everyone happy
Pennek
I love you all, what a time to be alive. I really hope these changes go through.
Noffy
1

Proposal wrote:

Song compilations must incorporate 3 or more songs. Using only 2 songs in a compilation is not a sufficient number of tracks to offer a compelling experience for players when compiled together, and should be broken up into separate mapsets.
Ooook so... would 2 songs be considered a compilation, or would it go under the other rule about "The audio file of a song must not be artificially extended in order to meet a time limitation in the mapset section of this criteria. ... If the audio file is extended in such a way, the mapset must still comply with the time limitations of its unaltered audio. Song compilations are not considered extensions, and are exempt from this rule."
What if one or both of the two songs is already over 5 minutes, but the mapper chose to combine them because they're directly related to eachother? The way this is currently put together would disallow that as well, because that'd still be considered a compilation atm.

I think a better approach would be defining "Compilation" in the Glossary as an edit which puts together 3 or more songs, and having rules related to the quality of compilations and other edits similarly to how they currently are to avoid confusion about this. Then it'd be obvious if a combination of 2 songs would be considered a compilation or an "artificial extension" and whether or not it's completely disallowed like the current draft implies

2

Proposal wrote:

Song compilations must be mixed properly and cannot include abrupt breaks or long fades between different songs. This is to ensure compilations achieve the same cohesive gameplay experience as other beatmaps.
ok what is a "long fade" here? There's no idea how long "long" could possibly be.

3

Proposal wrote:

The audio file of a song must not be artificially extended in order to meet a time limitation in the mapset section of this criteria. Illegal extensions include (but are not limited to) looping sections of the audio file, lowering the bpm of the song or section of the song, and adding small amounts of music to the song without incorporating it throughout the entire song. If the audio file is extended in such a way, the mapset must still comply with the time limitations of its unaltered audio. Song compilations are not considered extensions, and are exempt from this rule.
this rule is disallowing extending songs to be over 30 seconds, this isn't accommodating for 30 second songs at all with this wording.

Ranking Criteria wrote:

Mapsets must have a minimum drain time of 30 seconds. This ensures each ranked map has a practical play-time.
This is a time limitation in the mapset section of the ranking criteria. Which is exactly what your proposed rule specifies about when extending songs is bad and not allowed.

4

UndeadCapulet wrote:

incorporated this proposal: t/726926 to enable marathon rules to function for sets where the topdiff is lower than the required lowest difficulty
where? all I see is "Single-mode mapsets must include a reasonable spread of at least two difficulties. " which is not that at all. I don't see any exceptions listed, am I blind?
Okoratu
1 - they wouldnt they'd count as extension but i can see where you're coming fromwith this
your second idea about the glossary makes no sense to me because that's in the top of the proposal and there?
2 - dunno suggest some value
3 - ok we need to exclude 30 seconds from this? i mean i find 30 seconds mapsets pointless but whatever yeah
4 - probably not direct enough inclusion of that - yeah i dont see it either rn
Topic Starter
UndeadCapulet
fuck i knew i forgot something, will get the 30 sec extensions added in

and uh yeah noffy you should re-read, bc we took out the 2 diff minimum
Noffy

UndeadCapulet wrote:

and uh yeah noffy you should re-read, bc we took out the 2 diff minimum
I'm blind :psy:

2.) like over 10 seconds would count as long, I'd think? under that should be fine as it'd work well to add in a short break too (like a lot of old song compilations do)
Okoratu
Wait fuck i didnt see that either and i helped write it
Topic Starter
UndeadCapulet
the point of the long fades thing was to make p much any fade that wasn't a seemless transition illegal, as staff don't like those anymore. perhaps instead of fussing about how long "long" is we should just reword it to make that more clear?
Noffy
Yeah, though I disagree with banning fades because even if songs fit well together such as being from the same album or series, making "seamless" transitions can be very difficult unless you are super good at audio editing edit: especially what's considered seamless can be quite ambiguous.
"Song compilations must be mixed properly and cannot include abrupt breaks or long fades between different songs. This is to ensure compilations achieve the same cohesive gameplay experience as other beatmaps."
could be better as a guideline so that there is some discretion about what works and what doesn't?
Doormat

Mapset Proposal wrote:

If the drain time of a song is...
… lower than 3:30, the lowest difficulty cannot be harder than a Normal. Because osu!mania does not have a difficulty-specific Ranking Criteria yet, an osu!mania mapset's Normal difficulty is defined as a difficulty below 2.00 stars. For non-osu! game modes in hybrid mapsets that feature osu! difficulties, the lowest difficulty cannot be harder than a Hard.
… lower than 4:30, the lowest difficulty cannot be harder than a Hard.
… lower than 5:00, the lowest difficulty cannot be harder than an Insane.
… anything else, the mapset does not require a reasonable spread.
Just my opinion, but the cutoffs are a bit odd; why does it shift from 3:30 to 4:30 to 5:00? imo it might be a bit more cohesive if it was 3:00 to 4:00 to 5:00, but I'd like to hear what you guys think. Also this is a bit nitpicky but instead of "anything else" maybe we should be more specific and use "anything over 5:00". Other than that, I don't really have any objections.


edit: apparently this was answered earlier in the thread lol.

Audio Proposal wrote:

The audio file of a song must not be artificially extended in order to meet a time limitation in the mapset section of this criteria. Illegal extensions include (but are not limited to) looping sections of the audio file, lowering the bpm of the song or section of the song, and adding small amounts of music to the song without incorporating it throughout the entire song. If the audio file is extended in such a way, the mapset must still comply with the time limitations of its unaltered audio. Song compilations are not considered extensions, and are exempt from this rule.
From what I understand, this rule stems from the prevention of extending mp3s via looping (i.e. True Force) or jamming two songs to meet marathon length (looking at you, R3 Music Box Extension mappers...). But what about cases in which mp3s don't meet the rankable drain time of 30 seconds? There are quite a TV songs usually end up being 29 seconds in drain and thus require extension (Bill Nye, for example).. Will the new rule of prohibiting mp3 extension also apply to these songs?
Arf
>Song compilations must be mixed properly and cannot include abrupt breaks or long fades between different songs. This is to ensure compilations achieve the same cohesive gameplay experience as other beatmaps.

So about this, based on what Ephemeral wrote in the oimc map, we are now disallowing any compilation that has any sort of break or fade between songs at all? It's less of a compilation and more of an extended mashup at that point isn't it? We're going to discontinue the use of this mechanic entirely now? That seems somewhat excessive doesn't it
Naxess
The wording around "does not require a reasonable spread" and "must form a reasonable spread" is conflicting, probably a good idea replacing the former with something along the lines of "the lowest difficulty can be anything" or "has no limitations", to avoid having two rules say opposite things, even though it could probably be understood with some common sense. Would allow that whole first rule to define what a "reasonable spread" is without contradicting itself.
Nevo

the thingie wrote:

>Song compilations must be mixed properly and cannot include abrupt breaks or long fades between different songs. This is to ensure compilations achieve the same cohesive gameplay experience as other beatmaps.
I really dont see why we can't use the normal method of fade out fade in for songs in compilations to me it seems by far the most logical way to make them. Nuking the way most compilations have been done for years seems kinda overkill. Especially when not all of these maps were made just to be over 5 minutes. Calling it low quality is fairly subjective :nyab:
-Mo-
There was concern about how there are some two song 'compilations' that are actually good or intended by the artist that the draft would deny, so stuff like A B C (Malformed Box was even spotlight).

Suggestion would be to allow two song compilations if both songs are from the same artist, and that the full version of both songs must be used.

Also I'm personally not fully convinced whether these changes are right for the newbie players, so I want to play around with x86's TSV file before having an opinion.
Halfslashed
Song compilations must incorporate 3 or more songs. Using only 2 songs in a compilation is not a sufficient number of tracks to offer a compelling experience for players when compiled together, and should be broken up into separate mapsets.
I think an exception should be made for using two songs that were composed to transition into each other. Ranked examples would be stuff like https://osu.ppy.sh/s/496656 https://osu.ppy.sh/s/654053. Another exception would be songs performed together in a live performance like https://osu.ppy.sh/s/627671 - while this case is single artist, it would be a good idea to include cases for performances with multiple artists. Other examples are songs like Miss Murder which is actually two songs: Prelude 12/21 and Miss Murder, as well as Prayer of the Refugee and Drones, which are both connected by the fade at the end of the former song and the fade at the beginning of the latter one.

Possible wording:

Song compilations must incorporate 3 or more songs. Using only 2 songs in a compilation is not a sufficient number of tracks to offer a compelling experience for players when compiled together, and should be broken up into separate mapsets. The exception is when songs are related by a live performance and/or composed to transition into one another by the same artist.
Pretty happy with the rest of the proposal though.
Ryuusei Aika
i agree with nevo on that thingie :blobuwu:
currently the problem of a compilation is not how the way those songs got mixed bc not everyone is a pro mixer or composer
i think we may need to focus on the definition of a compilation (i think there was a thread about it)
for me the basic components (ie. rules) of a compilation would be
(1) songs from the same artist, and/or
(2) songs from the same production (like, from the same film/game/series/anime/album etc.)

and for a compilation itself is proper or not, since it’s a purely subjective issue i’d like to let concerned BN/QAT member(s) to judge

edit: fk typo
Monstrata
Two very big issues:

1. Artificially extending mp3's should be allowed.

This has already been discussed before but there are many reasons why this just won't work as a rule. You shouldn't expect every BN to be able to know that the song they are checking is actually 4:59 length and not 5:01. It's very easy to get away with extending mp3, and enforcing this rule is just not something feasible. Maps will inevitably slip through and you are going to get "well, x got theirs ranked, why can't I?" People will always be lazy, stop trying to penalize it, it won't work. Additionally, this rule applies to a very small minority of mappers anyways. I can only see this being enforced for quality-based concerns such as the mp3 editing (to achieve 5 minutes) being poor quality. If you can't tell the map has been extended artificially just from listening to the song, then it is fair game.

2. Cross-fade editing is perfectly fine in almost all cases.

No one had issue with crossfading until Ephemeral brought it up. Him and peppy have clearly decided to take a backseat and not interfere too much with mapping. I don't see why this is being pushed forward on the basis that "staff doesn't like it". The staff doesn't like it? Well too bad for them, because it's something that's been done for a long time. One (apparently) poorly cross-faded map should not prevent the multitude of perfectly fine ones from being ranked. I could talk about how the genre-compilation mp3 was perfectly fine anyways (and how the current one is worse). "Low quality crossfade" is subjective to begin with, and unless you can accurately define what the difference is between "low quality crossfading" and "acceptable crossfading" and "high quality crossfading" etc... this should not be a rule because it doesn't even know what it is trying to bar from ranked, or what it is allowing into ranked.

Please stop holding the staff's words as things we need to follow. Ephemeral has made it very clear since the QAT upheaval that he won't be intervening in these matters, and peppy as well, is not heavily invested in RC rework because if he is i'm sure there are other things he would have commented about. They are fine to offer their opinions on whether these things should be acceptable or not, and you can consider them as being from informed sources, but enforcing a set of rules because "two people thought the crossfading on a certain mp3 was low quality" is kinda ridiculous.

---

Basically,

1. Take out mp3 editing as a rule. Optionally you can make it a guideline that artificially edited mp3 extensions must sound natural/unnoticeable in order to be acceptable.

2. Remove the crossfade rule, and put it in as a guideline so people have the option to call a map out for its low quality crossfading, but not the ability to completely prevent it from being ranked. It is far too subjective to be an objective rule anyways.
squirrelpascals
1) Why are we removing the marathon definition from the glossary? After the changes I feel like people will still refer to single diff spreads as marathons so it only seems practical.

2)
If the drain time of a song is...

lower than 3:30, the lowest difficulty cannot be harder than a Normal. For non-osu! game modes in hybrid mapsets that feature osu! difficulties, the lowest difficulty cannot be harder than a Hard.
lower than 4:30, the lowest difficulty cannot be harder than a Hard.


I still see a lot of people get discouraged over making spreads for songs that are around 2:30. A song bpm / rhythm complexity has a lot to do with how long someone might take to create a difficulty. This also hurts if there's no particularly "slow section" or break part of a map. So this can still be discouraging for those types of songs, i don't feel like it's entirely out of laziness at that point. I would change it like so:

If the drain time of a song is...

lower than 3:00, the lowest difficulty cannot be harder than a Normal.
lower than 4:00, the lowest difficulty cannot be harder than a Hard.


This feels like it would make a little more sense too because the drain requirements for each type of spread would be established in a more linear fashion (3:00, 4:00, 5:00) similar to the difficulty increases in spreads (normal, hard, insane). But that probably doesn't matter much xd

3)
  1. Single-mode mapsets must form a reasonable spread. This spread must comply with its respective mode's difficulty-specific Ranking Criteria.
  2. Hybrid mapsets without osu! difficulties must form a reasonable spread for each mode. This spread must comply with its respective mode's difficulty-specific Ranking Criteria.


These are pretty repetitive, they can be combined into one

  1. Single-mode and Hybrid mapsets without osu! difficulties must form a reasonable spread for each mode. This spread must comply with its respective mode's difficulty-specific Ranking Criteria.


Hybrid spreads with osu! difficulties are specified afterward so that should cover everything too

4)
Song compilations must incorporate 3 or more songs. Using only 2 songs in a compilation is not a sufficient number of tracks to offer a compelling experience for players when compiled together, and should be broken up into separate mapsets.


Definitely disagree here. There are many ways 2 songs together can offer a compelling experience.
  1. There are a lot of cases where 2 songs are cohesive / go alongside eachother, which are intentionally done by the composer. Example of a ranked set that does this: https://osu.ppy.sh/s/654053 According to the mapper, both songs are usually performed together, and the theme of both songs align in a somewhat chronological way.
  2. Another different example, https://osu.ppy.sh/b/315867 The songs in the actual album for this one are sold as "The Island, Part 1 (Dawn)" and "The Island, Part 2 (Dusk)." So under this rule, wouldn't this be illegal? Even though part 2 is literally intended to be a sequel to part 1, plus they are extremely similar in the first place.
  3. One last point, while its might be uncommon for only 2 songs to be contained on an album together, 2 song eps are a thing. Since they're intended to be sold together by the artist, why would it be unfitting to make them into a compilation, if they encompass their own album? exmaple


Okay so to change this I would basically move this over to a guideline and modify it to encompass combining 2 songs out of laziness:

Guidelines

Song compilations must should incorporate 3 or more songs. Using only 2 songs in a compilation is usually unfitting, unless the music within the compilation is cohesive together.


5) One thing that I think should definitely be addressed is reasoning for songs compilations. As in: you shouldn't be able to take any random songs by any random composers and throw it into a 5:00 minute compilation just because I don't feel like making a spread. I think this would be the most important thing to address if anything:

Rules
Song choice within song compilations must be justified in some manner. This is to ensure that song choice within compilations are not by random and that the songs with in the compilation fit in with eachother.


Don't know if that would be the best way to word it though.
Monstrata
Agreeing with squireel about reasoning being the more important factor with respects to defining a song compilation.

But honestly, shouldn't song compilation rules be discussed on: t/756468 or can we get a merger of the two drafts?
Topic Starter
UndeadCapulet
@squirrel
terms are only defined when they appear in the criteria. the marathon term doesn't ever appear in the new draft so there's no need to keep the definition. it was only defined because there was a rule for it, but now it's better to just standardize everything.

please read the first few pages for why we can't do 3/4/5 for time limits. it was almost exclusively seen as too lenient.

can't combine the single/hybrid sets the way you suggested bc the wording is very misleading. the current draft/current rc are how they are for a reason
(tho ive now noticed a poor wording in the current draft that'll be fixed)

--

@squirrelstrata
that draft is discussing more than just the technical requirements of compilations, so it's prob best to keep it as its own thing

---

@all
as there's been a fair amount of edge cases we forgot, and just general backlash against the 3 song rule in the thread and outside of it, that'll be reworked shortly
Rivals_7

Monstrata wrote:

1. Take out mp3 editing as a rule. Optionally you can make it a guideline that artificially edited mp3 extensions must sound natural/unnoticeable in order to be acceptable.
Agree with this. so we wont get any abrupt editing loop/extension like wonder stella or Ashita no kimi sae ireba ii ever again
sahuang
Looking forward to 4:30 IXXXXXX maps
Nevo

sahuang wrote:

Looking forward to 4:30 IXXXXXX maps
hold my beer
Ascendance
not gonna bother reading the thread since i'm not keen on reading 12 pages for something someone might not have brought up

In the "removed" section of the proposal, you have all rules of hybrid sets that previously adhered to the RC removed and some new ones brought up.

---

I'm mostly concerned about the removal of this:

"Any two or more osu!taiko, osu!mania, or osu!catch difficulties must be arranged in a reasonable spread. The lowest difficulty cannot be harder than a Hard."

which now reads (in the updated proposal) as:

"… any two or more osu!taiko, osu!mania, or osu!catch difficulties must be arranged in a reasonable spread."

---

Recently, we made a rule change proposal to ctb which made it so that hybrid sets with ctb needed the minimum of a Platter (hard diff for non-minigame users) which can be found here

I'm of the opinion that hybrid sets should still have a hard limit on how hard the lowest difficulty is allowed to be. At the very least, for ctb over the last 2-3 years we've progressively changed rules to prevent hybrid sets from only having only an overdose or only a rain and overdose to eventually get to where we are now with things like this becoming normalized with this rule change.

We came to this conclusion and have been slowly moving this scale downwards to be more in line with other non-standard modes, since we believe that converts are not enough to create a reliable spread for missing osu!catch difficulties, despite them being probably the most playable out of the 3 non-standard modes.

Again, I didn't read the thread, but is there any plan to standardize these hybrid set limits or will we have to once again combat the idea of IX or XX spreads that we fought to remove only recently?
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