Ephemeral wrote:
Establishing a minimum 'effort' cutoff via total beatmapset playtime addresses this issue, and ensures that every beatmapset that hits Ranked is at least offering players a reasonable variety of challenges to overcome.
In my honest opinion, this doesn't provide a good argumentation for given "issue". If the goal is to ensure, that a player has the option of overcoming a variety of challenges regarding the whole set, single diff marathons shouldn't be a thing as well. They're not offering content for the whole playerbase as well. Having a 5* 5minute marathon is most likely not enjoyed for 50% of the playerbase, since they do not provide challenges for all skill levels either, yet they are a valid thing.
I'd be more concerned about using super short songs in order to "farm" a number of ranked maps. Therefore it'd make more sense, to introduce some sort of "short songs ranked per (add reasonable time value here)" for every mapper.
Example:
I map a 30 second "set" with 2 or 3 diffs, which gets ranked on the 1st of July. With my previously mentioned idea in mind,
my next small set with super low drain time would have to
wait at least
3 months, in order to get ranked, which would be the 1st of October.
This would not force a mapper to make a bigger set, while decreasing the farmability for the ranked map counter. Many songs that feature a low drain time, just do not offer the kind of "flow" in order to really make a clean spread throughout the difficulties. This would much rather lead to 6 diffs being nearly the same, which would not form a good spread and drastically decrease the quality of the set in its whole. Other than that, some songs are just super good, yet extremely short. Why force the mapper to make 6 diffs of that same song, without the opportunity to even create a good spread in order to get the map ranked?
Furthermore, there are people that just enjoy very short maps. For whatever reason. Bringing the previously mentioned marathon argument up again, some people do not like long maps, yet they're totally fine to be ranked. (and once again, they're not even playable for a big amount of players, when the map reaches a certain difficulty level.)
Short maps are playable for everyone. No one is forced to play these maps, yet it is additional content. If the quality of given sets is good enough, they should be able to get ranked, aside from the low drain time.