Had a chance to play around with map data now thanks to x86's TSV. I personally think that there should be some adjustments to the proposal.
I just finished gathering the research and writing the script for my next video on song length (relevant polls
here and
here), and the conclusion is that most players when it comes to enjoyment prefer full length songs over shortened versions. A lot of the time full length songs do go above 3:30 in length.
Fancy graphs
Figure 1: Scatter plots of plays against song length for each difficulty. Red line is the current proposal's cut-off point for the respective difficulty.
Figure 2: Single scatter plot of plays against song length for Normal difficulties between 0 to 6 minutes and up to 6 million plays.
Figure 3: Same, but for Hard diff.
Looking at figure 1, it is true that the longer the map length, the less likely that the map becomes super popular, but keep in mind that this could be due to there being less maps in the 4 minute range compared to maps in the 1:30-2 minute range (see:
these). It's unreasonable to say that lower level difficulties in the 4 minute range don't get played at all, because they clearly do. In figure 2 you can see that there are still a good handful of normal diffs with at least 250k plays in to 3:30 to 4, with a few being above 1 million plays.
The main concern for me is locking out those 3:30-4:00 songs from the newbie players, since they still do play them, and the jump from normal to hard can be difficult for some players because of how large that gap can be compared to other difficulty gaps.
You could say that we already have a large number of ranked normal difficulties in the game already, but this is a long-term change for the game, and mapping standards and quality change over time. Most of us would recommend a newbie player to play something ranked within the last few years rather than something from say 2009, for example.
Suggestions:
-
Move the cut-off point for Normal difficulties up to 4:00. I think this is a more reasonable place to put it given the demand for full length songs.
-
Add a new guideline that relaxes what a reasonable spread is for maps above 3:00. This is my compromise for raising the normal diff cut-off. One of the problems mappers face is having a low level normal diff and a high level hard diff, and requiring either remaps of the current diffs or the addition of an advanced diff to fill the gap. This problem is amplified for longer maps because more effort etc etc. This new guideline would allow spreads with wider gaps between each difficulty, lowering the workload on the mapper by not having to worry about spread too much and having less drain time to map whilst keeping maps accessible for lower level players.
-
An (unwritten) guideline should be added/agreed for bundled maps or maps of featured artists to require normal spreads. It's probably no surprise that the most played maps in the game are the bundled default maps, and more specifically the lower level difficulties of those maps, since those are usually the first maps one plays when they first download the game. To me it wouldn't make sense to add official/bundled content into the game that isn't accessible to newbies.
I should say that I'm all for the general direction of this proposal. I just want to be weary about this sort of change since it's going to have a long term effect on the content we get in this game.