uh ok i have a lot to say and not a very good way to structure everything so im gonna just wall for a bit.
i've been pretty close to qat operations for the past year now so i have a pretty good understanding of how they've been approaching quality assurance. the biggest thing that a lot of people here need to realize is that everyone on the team rn does in fact care about quality assurance, and have all at some point taken a stance against something they've considered to be low quality. they just all have a different criteria for what is low quality. every once in a while they all agree, but it's for maps like asymmetry, or calling, aka sets that the playerbase and newer mappers won't know are/consider to be low quality because they look nice and play nice.
before i go further with this, it needs to be very clearly stated what the intentions of this thread and all the proposals are. some people earlier have been slipping it in, but it needs to be very explicitly stated for the people under the impression the conversation is about something else:
this thread is about making a system where my maps can't get ranked.
well, my and my friends', but just simplifying for ease of reading. this isn't me being full of myself or w/ev, it's very definitely the case. one of the earliest posters literally put my name in their avatar and userpage banner to attack me (gmt where?), and many other people have brought me up both directly and indirectly. now i don't mind that this entire thread is an effort to get rid of me, but this discussion can't move forward until it's been directly stated.
it's very important that people in this thread realize that the majority of the qat do not find my maps to be low quality, but instead consider them to be above average, or even great. multiple have even told me that a map i've ranked this year is one of their favourite maps of the year. and it was a different map for each of those qats. and even for the qat's that don't think this, in every instance of my maps getting vetod, the qat have vouched for the design being of well beyond rankable quality. feel free to ask them, they will confirm this. my maps are not an issue to the qat.
instead of nuking my maps the qat would be far more likely to nuke sets made by mappers like professionalbox (which they've actually somewhat done already w/ calling), delis, andrea, etc. which the majority of the team don't like. if a system were implemented that made it so my maps couldn't get ranked, these would also all be obstructed. that is the consequence for wishing for subjective quality control, it'll apply to everyone.
this isn't exclusive to the qat either, the bng is also filled with people that, at the very least, support my mapping. i know people love to say i only get the same couple of people for my sets, but this is the list of bns that have ranked my sets:
- nao tomori
- zero__wind
- bonsai
- natsu
- lasse
- doormat
- hobbes2
- mir
- hailie
- halfslashed
- princess kisses
- ryuusei aika
- ayanokorin
- kuron-kun
- realazy
- frogyfro
- nevo
that is more than 2 unique bn's per ranked map, and that list gets even longer if you include my gd's, and even longer if you include bn's that have gd'd in my sets. now i'm not saying everyone in this list would bubble every map of mine (i know the opposite, in fact), but if i want to rank a set, i will be able to find people in power that support it. (also before people say anything, i haven't done a single m4m with any bn here, and many here i've never bubbled a set for).
some people seem to think this disconnect between mappers in power and "the community" is a problem, and as such have proposed to give "the community" power to keep maps from rank. this is a terrible, terrible idea. time and time again we've seen maps be called "the worst thing ever" by the community when they first got ranked, only to be seen as masterpieces a year or 2 after the fact (miss you, hw stuff, etc etc). these maps would never have been ranked under such a system.
community backlash is super witch-hunty and circlejerky in nature. a map being "controversial" usually requires a call to action of some sort, like what recently happened on hailie's shiten. but this call to action means that backlash happening is wildly, wildy inconsistent. shiten is a perfect example of this. that map doesn't really have much different from many of hailie's previously ranked maps, but it's the only one that saw drama on it because someone happened to post it to reddit. but all those previous maps got ranked with no issue, and most didn't see much backlash post-rank either, they all have many praise comments from the actual target audience instead of being flooded by the hatemob.
the call to action is totally random in both when it happens and on what maps it happens to. any pro streamer with lots of viewers can just casually say a map is shit and then lots of their viewers will parrot this idea. it could be on literally any map. mixing any quantitative metric like user rating into this makes it even worse. it's really easy to get a bunch of people together, either intentionally or otherwise, and mass-downvote a map. i know because i just did this with this qualified set:
https://osu.ppy.sh/s/703956. this is a harmless set by a popular mapper, but i poked a bunch of people to rate it 1*, and now it'd be dq'd and potentially nuked.
the general playing community should never be considered a prominent voice in the mapping scene, they don't know what's good and are easily swayed by hivemind mentality. any system that takes "backlash" into consideration opens up the ranking system to 1000x more abuse than what happens at the moment.
a lot of other proposals going around are very similar to last year's bn tiers system (or any system that involves a significant downsize in who can qualify maps). the idea that reverting to something similar to that universally-hated system should be immediately discarded from any discussion. tiers did not make it so less "bad maps" got ranked, it just made it so less maps got ranked. but since this isn't convincing enough, allow me to reframe this:
the tier system didn't stop me from ranking maps. i got call on me ranked during this system with no issue whatsoever.
i've also seen a lot of people asking for some sort of subjective quality test again for people in power. this is also a bad idea. last time we had tests, it just led to dumb shit like how rizen couldn't get bn for 12 years even though every human wanted him to be one, and led to a spam of cheating from a bunch of people. but again, i need to reframe this: mao gave out the tier 2 test on the bn server a few months ago, and after i took it, i got the second highest score out of any bn to take it. and sure, that test was biased to the views of people i agree with, but little different would be changed if someone else wrote it, because it's really easy for anyone to game the system and cater responses to the test-writers. tests won't keep me out of the ranked section.
the people requesting changes right now need to come to terms that my maps are considered quality maps by a very significant amount of people, instead of requesting changes that will make ranking a map or joining the team worse for everyone. that, or they'll have to come up with a system that will somehow rid the bng/qat of every person that thinks my maps are good, and prevent others from joining in afterwards. good luck with that.
---
now, with all this said, i don't think everyone here is wrong about the current qat structure being kinda bad. in particular, loctav's proposal, whether intentionally or not, hits on what i find to be the true issue with the qat atm.
back in the bat days quality assurance was a very active process. bats nominated good maps. qat is not structured this way. instead, qat's quality assurance is a reactive process. people in the bng nominate whatever they feel like, and the qat are expected to respond to things in the qualified section that are low quality. if they do not react to something that some people find shitty, they are flamed for it. at the same time, if they react to something that some people don't find shitty, they are flamed for it. they have no option that leads to a content community, because the community is too diverse and at least some group of people can be vocal about how their action or inaction was wrong. qat literally warn new members ahead of time that their job sucks.
for those not around at the time, gaia's asymmetry set is still the biggest shitstorm in osu history, where people complained about how overly nitpicky and unreasonable the quality assurance was. it was such a big event that peppy told the qat to pretty much stop doing that forever. every once in a while they still do this, but it tends to lead to the same result, so they go back to not giving a shit about subjective quality, because the community honestly doesn't want that.
like i said, bat didn't have the issue of literally everything they do or don't do making them look bad. so the proposals that are structured in a way that brings this action-based quality assurance, instead of primarily relying on reaction-based ones, seem better to me. now, i wasn't around at the time, so idk what the problems w/ that old system were, but from how it's been described to me it was mostly just changed to segue into peppy's stackoverflow system. any older people can correct me on this if i'm wrong, i'd love to have more info on this.
as such, i have drafted up a proposal of my own:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yvbUE4lslgG4GYOsTrM9PtiHAaHg2YH90mCX262XfTc/edit?usp=sharingthis proposal aims to mostly combine the bng and qat into a single entity whose purpose is to actively control quality, instead of relying on "catching bad maps" in qualified. it draws from some ideas in loctav's proposal but keeps moderation privileges in the mapping community, which we do desperately need, and gets rid of all the tier2-esque stuff and team downsizing that would do nothing but lower overall ranked content. it's mostly but not totally finished, and pretty easy to iterate upon, so any feedback would be awesome to make it better.
edit: discuss the proposal here i guess:
https://osu.ppy.sh/forum/t/843955