Dropping my two cents: I think the option to have a display on which maps are currently most played is a fun idea, but is definitely skewed towards certain types of maps, especially since some of these maps have been on there for a long time (1+ years).
Likewise, I’m not a fan of the “replace it with Spotlights” idea either because that’s going to be biased towards certain picks as well (i.e. which maps are decided as spotlights? how do we ensure impartiality/unbias towards spotlight picks? how long will they remain in the spotlight? etc.) We already have a “beatmaps spotlights” advertised on the home page every month but I certainly don’t see it being an effective replacer due to how infrequent these are posted. I especially don’t think that a monthly tracker would be ideal due to how quickly people want to move on to new maps; a weekly tracker would be better, but then it’s impractical to get people to curate 30+ new maps and determine which one deserve to “be put on a spotlight” on a weekly basis.
The “newly ranked beatmaps” feature on the newer site is a neat idea too, but because of how fast things get ranked these maps don’t gain a lot of exposure either.
To sum it all up: older maps shouldn’t receive as much exposure; beatmap spotlights are proven to be ineffective; newer maps could use longer exposure. Maybe something where we display most popular maps within a specific time frame would be a better system (for example, the most popular maps from maps that were released within the last week/month using play count as the variable for which we determine popularity), but I don’t know how effective that would be either.
Likewise, I’m not a fan of the “replace it with Spotlights” idea either because that’s going to be biased towards certain picks as well (i.e. which maps are decided as spotlights? how do we ensure impartiality/unbias towards spotlight picks? how long will they remain in the spotlight? etc.) We already have a “beatmaps spotlights” advertised on the home page every month but I certainly don’t see it being an effective replacer due to how infrequent these are posted. I especially don’t think that a monthly tracker would be ideal due to how quickly people want to move on to new maps; a weekly tracker would be better, but then it’s impractical to get people to curate 30+ new maps and determine which one deserve to “be put on a spotlight” on a weekly basis.
The “newly ranked beatmaps” feature on the newer site is a neat idea too, but because of how fast things get ranked these maps don’t gain a lot of exposure either.
To sum it all up: older maps shouldn’t receive as much exposure; beatmap spotlights are proven to be ineffective; newer maps could use longer exposure. Maybe something where we display most popular maps within a specific time frame would be a better system (for example, the most popular maps from maps that were released within the last week/month using play count as the variable for which we determine popularity), but I don’t know how effective that would be either.