NOT RC but I'm putting it here for easy access thanks

So guys. You and I have issues with the veto system in its current state. Let's discuss!


Please review relevant information pages before posting, so that decisions can be informed based off of both the current existing rules and current existing problems

help/wiki/People/The_Team/Beatmap_Nominators/Beatmap_Veto
help/wiki/People/The_Team/Beatmap_Nominators/Rules#veto


This has also been discussed on twitter, on vetoed beatmaps, on discords, in the osu!dev server on occasssion but mostly ends up as noise that has gotten lost and lead to no changes and only the mood of discontent with the current state of affairs is left. I do have some ideas of my own, but would like to hear other's opinions as well. This thread is to discuss issues with vetoes as a system presently, and ideas on fixing that. Anything targeting specific users may be subject to removal, as this can lead the thread to go off the broader topic.

This thread will periodically be edited to summarize current issues and solutions pointed out. Other NAT and GMT may edit this post for that purpose.

Ideas for improvement may be implemented individually or in tandem with other ideas and proposals. If entire system rewriting proposals are written those will be linked and briefly summarized as a point for the improvement ideas.

Present Issues
this list is not final
this list is a mishmash of varying opinions of issues, some may disagree these are issues. that's fine, let's figure this out

1. Veto mediation outcome may not represent general community opinion.
2. Vetoes can take up a lot of unnecessary time when outcome is already clear.
3. Vetoes can be initiated for basically any reason big or small.
4. Mediation only includes the voices of mediators, and not others who are invested in beatmap discussion.
5. Mediation results can be confusing and long to read.
6. Vetoes may include multiple issues, which can be unclear how to vote on during mediation.
7. Vetoes should be to prevent low quality maps from ranked, not shoehorn disagreements.
8. A veto immediately halts the ranking process before seeing if it's valid or before the mapper responds
9. Some mediators may not care about the veto or may not be knowledgable for that speicifc issue.

Ideas for improvement
this list is not final
this is not what will happen or is planned to happen, but a collection of floated ideas for discussion for potential implementation.

1. NAT summarize mediation outcome and link to the list of individual mediations on the BN website, making what needs to be fixed easier to parse.
2. Make vetoes require 2 agreeing BNs to go to mediation. This would be equal to how many BNs are required to push a map to qualified. If a disqualified map can not find a 2nd BN to support the veto, it would be immediately dismissed.
3. Reduce the time on mediation for issues which are quickly checked. Problems such as background images or difficulty names could have their time reduced to 3 days for instance, while spread and entire difficulty quality issues would remain at the standard 7 days mediation.
4. Give NAT or someone else the express power to dismiss vetoes if general community opinion is clearly against the veto. This could happen both before and after mediation.
5. Instead of the above, allow vetoes to be appealed in cases where community opinion is against the veto, this time mediated by NATs. This would allow the veto to be re-evaluated with the community thoughts better in mind.
6. Move mediation to the NATs hands
7. Weigh "bad" vetoes more heavily in current BN evaluations
8. In response to this, make each single definable issue in a veto be voted on separately?
9. Clarify the purpose of mediation - for opinion or for should never be ranked?
10. Make mediation yes/no only and get rid of neutral entirely. If nominators don't feel strongly on an issue they would be directed to vote to dismiss. This way only substantial issues multiple people agree on would be upheld.
11. Represent both mapper and vetoer opinions and base arguments clearly on the veto site itself.
12. Allowing other community members as part of mediation, handpicked, or apply to a selection specifically for that purpose. Such as non BN experienced mappers, modders.
13. "Suspend" the qualification timer for the veto discussion, keeping the map in qualified but unable to be ranked. *note: this was brought up in several posts, so i linked just one
14. For each veto, call specific people who are experts in the field when applicable.
15. Require at least 1 NAT to agree to place a veto
16. require 5 bns to start a veto, then 5 mediate. Other numbers to balance could be like 3/7 or so.
17. In tandem with removing neutral, allow people to opt-out if they don't care to mediate a particular issue.
18. Kite's proposal on how to handle mediation, requiring a step for vetoes to reach that point by a vote of the mapper, 2 bns, 2 vetoing bns, 2 NAT. If the discussion leads to no results, hand to the NAT. *note: this propsal has many other details as well, some overlap with the rest of this list. some don't. click for full post.
19. suggestions should be made and responded to in order to be considered grounds for a veto
20. Make staying a BN harder to raise the competence floor and the rest of Mun's post! very thought out proposal. please read
21. If issues arise after mediation, allow mapper to go through mediation again, but with exclusively NATs.

Please keep in mind that proposals that are basically get rid of vetoes entirely will not be accepted. While the system is not perfect, it is necessary for the push and pull quality maintenance of the ranked section. Improving the system is what is being looked for here, and basically anything goes so long as stopping maps for quality issues would exist in some form or another.

The ideas listed so far are quite good imo, i don't think the first one is ''that'' useful, since the bn explanations individually would make it more reliable and open to discussion. Also, i personally like the 2 BNs needed for vetoes and also the power to someone dismiss vetoes depending on general community opinion + analysis, ideally someone from within NAT or a group of people within the NAT that are more motivated for that extra task, this could potentially work well and give mappers/community more chance to overcome questionable vetoes.

I think the potential solutions presented by the post are already good enough and idk why it wasn't implemented from the start as it's seems like the most logical way to make vetos work. I also think that vetos should only focus in gameplay issue, veto on a diffc name, a bg, etc don't hinder the maps quality, gameplay or how a player will see a map as the most Importen thing about mapping is gameplay. I also think that vetos should be more closely followed and punished when abused. The veto button comes with responsibility abusing that for small nitpicks is toxic and is also stopping the flow of mapping in general. I also think cross mode vetos are terrible a taiko bn should not be able to veto std, Mania, ctb and other way around.

most of the ideas for improvement seem pretty good but im heavily against

"Give NAT or someone else the express power to dismiss vetoes if general community opinion is clearly against the veto. This could happen both before and after mediation."

This just creates a contest to see who can shout the loudest to overturn the mediation, would prefer that in cases of clear community opinion going the other way that cases could be appealed and then NAT could vote and come to an agreement among them. If the NAT agrees with how the BNs handled it then i see no real use in overturning it.

Vetoes shouldnt just be dismissed because they people are angry, they should be dismissed if clear counterarguements have been made.

PS: can also give veto mediation back to NAT cause the current BN rng for each mediation is pretty bad. Furthermore the fact that some BNs really shouldnt be mediating as seen in some of the mediation posts from recently. I trust the expertise of the nat more way more than that of your average bn.

1) perhaps? personally don't have the biggest issue with reading mediation posts as within the first few lines it says whether it was upheld or not upheld. (though at times responses are omitted based on what they voted and it never really seemed too clear. ie votes that disagreed were not present. note: does not include thrown out votes.)

2) definitely support the idea of having 2 BNs necessary to veto something, it would allow for a more visual representation of, "hey there are other bns with similar issues to me!" instead of it just being said in the original post. (sometimes people just note they asked others but aren't too transparent about it, making it more on the ambiguous side.) i like the reasoning of 2 BNs to push a map = 2 BNs to veto a map, it makes things seem more fair. i say this as it has been argued sometimes about how 2 BNs looked over the map and thought everything was fine but 1 BN comes and takes it down.

3) for general, not specific to the map issues, i agree that cutting the time in half to like 3-4 days would be much better. (a la mamma mia veto as of late.) because realistically, it is not hard to open a background or look at a difficulty name. given the example i noted, multiple people on the thread, on twitter, and on discord were complaining about how the host would have to wait a week over something like this. that creates unnecessary community uproar, putting aside the legitimacy of the veto at hand, just the content of what it contains.

4) neutral, possibly against this last one, but it depends. it is very similar to how the QAT used to be, (i mean even having a bn jury is similar except a bigger pool.) but "someone else" is what worries me because it is not clear. (i don't really expect it to be right now, but that is my general concern.) citing the veto on vell's map again, the position of the community was quite clear, and emphasized multiple times but a) the vetoer stood their ground and sent it to mediation. (the idea of having a second bn necessary to veto with would help to remedy this and provide better transparency when necessary.) b) the community, bns, etc felt that the veto itself was wrong and who knows, sometimes against the odds things get upheld. it just depends on who gets picked. but i digress, in theory i feel that being able to dismiss some vetoes would be good and more reliant on the community which is important in this kind of game, it's community based.

tl;dr i feel the current list of improvements are worth thinking about as well.. improvements to the current system, but they won't necessarily make everyone happy.

i think i like your ideas, and i have one to propose

how about making maps still QFed until community decides to DQ the map after veto process? (but can't be moved to ranked until veto ends)

since veto's real problem for mapper is 'wasting time unnecessarily with controversal/silly issues'. let's keep instant DQ for significant RC related things

Give NAT or someone else the express power to dismiss vetoes if general community opinion is clearly against the veto. This could happen both before and after mediation.

I like most of the other ideas, though unsure about requiring more than one BN.

This one though is kind of difficult to define, beyond using "common sense" which fails more often than it should. My main questions are:

1. What constitutes "clearly against"?
   Even the most controversial vetoes have some amount of support usually, and vice versa (e.g. My Movie). It's very difficult to get an accurate reading on community opinion because that usually differs between groups and between sites (osu, discord, credit, twitter...). Thus it is also not really possible to justify such a decision on evidence, which could lead to people being unsatisfied with the decision and perhaps questioning the integrity of those making the ruling, in all but the most clear-cut cases (e.g. beatmapsets/934576/discussion#/1577482). Especially because staff/NAT may have connections to the mapper/vetoer and though I generally trust the NAT to remain impartial, its still a valid concern I believe.
2. What is the "general community"?
   As mentioned above, discussion in the osu community is split across multiple groups and platforms. I don't think it makes sense to weight all these people's opinions the same when it comes to more in-depth mapping questions - then again players being the ones the maps are made for, their opinions should matter. beatmapsets/1052935/discussion/-/generalAll#/1441566 is an example of where player/community opinion is very relevant to a veto.

I dont think that option should be implemented anyway, but if people argue for it the points above need to be clarified/discussed imo.

Also adding another idea that I saw quite a few times:
Make "bad" vetoes (more?) relevant in BN evaluations.

Unsure if this is already the case since eval criteria are untransparent, and this could lead to BNs being afraid to voice valid concerns and do QAH out of fear of probation/being kicked, but I wanted to mention it nonetheless.

Reading this and seeing all the recent discussions on vetoes, mediations etc, I do think that having vetoes need 2 BNs to go into mediation would make it not look like one person has all this power and all to stop a map from getting ranked which will stop these almost random vetoes over stuff that really doesn't matter. Also having a group who can completely dismiss vetoes that the majority of disagree with will definitely get rid of long drawn out and pointless discussions over something people don't agree with anyways. Maybe have a vote on if it should be dismissed or not. But yea that's my opinion :3c

I feel like the whole veto thing became more complicated than it has to be

"Having to get a second agreeing BN to veto as well or else it'll get dismissed"

This doesn't discourage BNs who are actively circlejerking.

Even when I was a BN as Bubblun, there was still an issue of vetoes / DQs over minor issues, the nomination team has become such to where there's more reward for bringing maps down than it is to bring them up. (Example: starting the QAH thing) I say that because there seems to be little remorse in how maps are handled now when it comes to DQs / vetoes.

They need to remain for issues bigger than "Adjust timing by 10ms" and "Add hitwhistles on these notes"

Big issues that used to be just enough of a reason for a valid veto:

Inconsistent difficulty fluctuations / bad spreads

Lack of hitsounds

Metadata, timing, Storyboard issues, video / lyric content

Rankables (Unsnapped notes, silent hitcircles / heads, etc)

Questionable mapping choices overall (This wasn't always a bad thing, as vetoes were at one point just a simple way of coming to an understanding with the mapper)


There's really no reason for a veto outside of technical things, plus general issues with the map. A missing hitsound is not worth another 7 day wait, I thought we as the nomination team cared for the mapping community enough to give some leniency with that stuff.

We team as a whole shouldn't be actively venting out maps, because there's still a demand of pushing maps out there for the community. Before BNs were allowed to DQ, only the QAT / NAT could do it, and that created a balance of quality and also quantity. With even fewer BNs now than before, I don't know why they all have permission to halt the ranking process like an NAT can.

The issue with community vote is the community doesn't always want what everybody wants. What that means is, if enough people say "yes" then surely everybody wants this, right? No.

There's little understanding for mapping / nominating how you want to nominate and allowing others to do so the way they want to.

I bring this up because I think the issue is less-technical / political and more-so moral. We as a community should have the decency to work with the system we have now. Changing it up for the sake of changing it won't fix the problem

i feel like sometimes it's not necessary to veto if the bn can communicate with the mapper privately and see if there will be any agreement before dropping a veto to the mapset
also would it might benefit the veto outcome to be more justified if you can pick some mappers who has specified expertise in what the veto is about, for example hitsounding, or metadata etc. its better to get a "general community opinion" if its also given more power to the community itself rather than limiting the bng to represent a "general community"

Moecho wrote:

i feel like sometimes it's not necessary to veto if the bn can communicate with the mapper privately and see if there will be any agreement before dropping a veto to the mapset
also would it might benefit the veto outcome to be more justified if you can pick some mappers who has specified expertise in what the veto is about, for example hitsounding, or metadata etc. its better to get a "general community opinion" if its also given more power to the community itself rather than limiting the bng to represent a "general community"

↖↖↖↖
damn i mean cho

Moecho wrote:

i feel like sometimes it's not necessary to veto if the bn can communicate with the mapper privately and see if there will be any agreement before dropping a veto to the mapset

usually they dont, thats why veto happens

the manner would be:
-ask the mapper if he could change it privately or in forum both works, like a normal mod
-and if both sides doesnt reach an agreement than proceed veto

but most just veto because a side think the issue is very troublesome

Since I personally think most of the issues listed aren't issues I won't comment on that, just on the proposed solutions.

Noffy wrote:

NAT summarize mediation outcome and link to the list of individual mediations on the BN website, making what needs to be fixed easier to parse.

This is good. The post could be split into two parts which are "what needs to be fixed" and then a list of all ideas for possible solutions provided by the mediators / vetoing bn.

Noffy wrote:

Make vetoes require 2 agreeing BNs to go to mediation. This would be equal to how many BNs are required to push a map to qualified. If a disqualified map can not find a 2nd BN to support the veto, it would be immediately dismissed.

I think this achieves nothing except making the process more complicated. There is almost always atleast one BN that will agree with a veto considering how many BNs there are. Even if that's not the case, almost every one of us has good friends in the BNG that we could probably convince to support our vetoes, which is what is realistically going to happen.

Noffy wrote:

Reduce the time on mediation for issues which are quickly checked. Problems such as background images or difficulty names could have their time reduced to 3 days for instance, while spread and entire difficulty quality issues would remain at the standard 7 days mediation.

Sure, this makes sense.

Noffy wrote:

Give NAT or someone else the express power to dismiss vetoes if general community opinion is clearly against the veto. This could happen both before and after mediation.

This point sounds like a bad idea to me. "General community opinion" is never clear - in most cases, on the map threads, it's the mapper and their friendcircle arguing with the vetoing BN and their friendcircle plus a few engaged mappers on both sides. If you want to consider more than that, how exactly are you gonna get an opinion from the "general community" and even then, there are certain aspects of mapping the vocal part of the general community doesn't care much about (low difficulties, hitsounding, ...) while other aspects they care a lot about (maps that are "controversial" in some way or another) so it would be just dismissing any veto based on certain aspects of mapping, which seems nonsensical.

Sylvarus wrote:

Also adding another idea that I saw quite a few times:
Make "bad" vetoes (more?) relevant in BN evaluations.

Unsure if this is already the case since eval criteria are untransparent, and this could lead to BNs being afraid to voice valid concerns and do QAH out of fear of probation/being kicked, but I wanted to mention it nonetheless.

this has been talked about sometimes, but from what i've noticed from some other BNs is that this creates a mindset that they should not be vetoing because it can hurt you. i can understand if it's multiple times, ie 5-7. (just a rough number because it really depends on your mode.) but i don't think BNs should be made to be scared of voicing their concerns as that goes against the nature of what vetoes are supposed to be. as subjective as someone can think a veto is, the poster thought it was a serious enough issue to go as far to veto that, and making this be feared is almost as bad as taking it away entirely.

basically, please don't make vetoes be feared because it can be detrimental in a different way.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
unrelated to the above portion, something that i feel is a big issue is when multiple things are being submitted for veto mediation. say for example the vetoer has multiple problems that cannot be summarized as one idea. but not every mediator will react the same or even address all of the issues at hand. this feels quite faulty as it gives either a wrong or incomplete idea as to what the mediators feel with the issues.

NAT summarize mediation outcome and link to the list of individual mediations on the BN website, making what needs to be fixed easier to parse.

good, no objections here

Make vetoes require 2 agreeing BNs to go to mediation. This would be equal to how many BNs are required to push a map to qualified. If a disqualified map can not find a 2nd BN to support the veto, it would be immediately dismissed.

While I don't think this is a bad idea, I'm not too sure if implementing it is. As you can see from lots of recent events, vetoing a map often results in the vetoing nominator recieving lots of hate (justified or not doesn't really matter here). A great example would be Cheri's veto on worldenddominator, she disqualified the map for something she considered an issue (and I think 9 other mediating bns agreed with her), yet she, and only she (except for maybe #8, but that's a different story), was met with an incredible amount of hate, simply because she veto'd a map by a well known mapper and people disagreed with her reasoning. Now, if we implement this rule, you would obviously require 2 nominators to veto a map, but I seriously doubt most people would want to be the 2nd bn for this, because of reasons I mentioned above. Being the 2nd vetoing bn puts you in the position of the responsible person, while no one cares if you simply state you agree with the veto in the replies. I'm very certain most people wouldn't want to be "the big bad veto guy", even if they actually agree with whatever the veto reason might be. Adding this rule might make it too hard to actually veto stuff imo.

You could also look at it from the perspective myxo pointed out.

Reduce the time on mediation for issues which are quickly checked. Problems such as background images or difficulty names could have their time reduced to 3 days for instance, while spread and entire difficulty quality issues would remain at the standard 7 days mediation.

good, no objections here

Give NAT or someone else the express power to dismiss vetoes if general community opinion is clearly against the veto. This could happen both before and after mediation.

Bad idea, giving in to peer pressure is not how you should handle issues. The thing with "general community opinion" is that no one will care if you veto a map by some random unknown noname mapper, it heavily depends on whose map you veto (I doubt there would've been much drama if Cheri's veto would've been on some noname mapper's set).

Map should be push back to Pending（disqualify） by the nominators or mapper
instead of who vetos.

I don't agree with veto can directly pushing Qualified map back to Pending.
Map should be push back to Pending by the nominators or mapper instead of who vetos to avoid Re-nominate with mis-veto.
When a map having veto it should delay move to Ranked until the veto resolved.
And it should have a time limit (about 1 week) to deal with vetoed map,to avoid it stay in Qualified too long.

About Ideas
1.Make vetoes require 2 agreeing BNs to go to mediation. This would be equal to how many BNs are required to push a map to qualified. If a disqualified map can not find a 2nd BN to support the veto, it would be immediately dismissed.
I think this will makes bn pairing and helps nothing. unless one of the veto is by one of the map's nominators.

ts8zs wrote:

About veto rules:
if they feel there are significant issues regarding beatmap quality
There should be a standard instad of feeling.
like
1.hitsound missing.
2.alone partten over maps avarage difficulty too much.
...etc
This is also telling what should do to mappers
instead of what nominator want mappers do.

well, most of issues can't be defined with certain categories, will mean nothing eventually since evgerything is correlated each other in mapping.
like worlddominator, cheri vetoed with HS aspect, but deetz' expanded this to larger view

One thing I think is unclear to mediators (from what I know) is that it seems to be unclear what the mediation is for. Is the question whether or not they think something is a good idea, or whether or not something in the map should be rankable at all? One of these two is much stronger than the other, and I don't see the point of mediation if it's the former. Either way, it should be abundantly clear.

Second, and more importantly, I feel like the weight of the mapper themself should carry a little more weight in the discussion. The reality is that the whole process from submitting a veto to mediation to having it mediated can happen without the mapper saying a word. An idea that I think might be good would be to have both sides (vetoer and mapper) clearly present their sides on the mediation site, and then present them to whoever will be doing the mediation in an unbiased manner.

Noffy wrote:

Make vetoes require 2 agreeing BNs to go to mediation. This would be equal to how many BNs are required to push a map to qualified. If a disqualified map can not find a 2nd BN to support the veto, it would be immediately dismissed.

Give NAT or someone else the express power to dismiss vetoes if general community opinion is clearly against the veto. This could happen both before and after mediation.

Except these, the proposed suggestions make sense, and have the potential to make the whole process both faster and more stable in the future.

Why I don't agree with these? Let me explain.

Noffy wrote:

Give NAT or someone else the express power to dismiss vetoes if general community opinion is clearly against the veto. This could happen both before and after mediation.

The power to be able to dismiss a veto over a community opinion would make sense if the community was the one that has been nominating the beatmaps. There can be flaws as the people might not see clearly and yet, due to this issue the team would be required to remove the veto because community didn't support it / liked the map. This is a bad idea. Including community in such deep matters shouldn't be the solution. It might help, but it should not finalize the matter.

I don't support this idea at all.

Noffy wrote:

Make vetoes require 2 agreeing BNs to go to mediation. This would be equal to how many BNs are required to push a map to qualified. If a disqualified map can not find a 2nd BN to support the veto, it would be immediately dismissed.

Even if this would require 3 BNs or more, it wouldn't be an ideal solution. What if the BNs don't want to check the map? They're not obligated to (unless they are assigned in an official mediation). Apart from that, the BNG has already enough people to get somebody that could easily support the vetoer's opinion, which wouldn't achieve anything, apart from getting another BN to support your opinion.

This one requires some tweaking I suppose.

what deetz said

veto wiki says: Beatmapping is extremely diverse and creative differences are to be expected. This is to be encouraged for the sake of creating a variety of content all players can enjoy!

judges should do their work from a more objective view rather than their own opinion

Left wrote:

i think i like your ideas, and i have one to propose

how about making maps still QFed until community decides to DQ the map after veto process? (but can't be moved to ranked until veto ends)

since veto's real problem for mapper is 'wasting time unnecessarily with controversal/silly issues'. let's keep instant DQ for significant RC related things

Not sure I really understand what the idea here is :<

Sylvarus wrote:

Also adding another idea that I saw quite a few times:
Make "bad" vetoes (more?) relevant in BN evaluations.

Unsure if this is already the case since eval criteria are untransparent, and this could lead to BNs being afraid to voice valid concerns and do QAH out of fear of probation/being kicked, but I wanted to mention it nonetheless.

we currently do this but to an extremely minor extent. e.g. if it's clear abuse over multiple occasions (hasn't happened to my memory thankfully), or we write the nominators gentle reminders due to the issue you and some others have mentioned that being too harsh in this aspect can make vetoing scarier

_______

I and other NATs are checking this thread regularly and updating OP post as needed. Just DM me or someone if I missed something to add.

As for the issues re:
NAT dismissing vetoes
and
2 BNs for vetoes

I read and understand all these counterpoints and don't really have anything to refute them. I'll leave the ideas there for consideration but nothing in the OP is 100% guaranteed since right now it's floating ideas, so pointing out those flaws is greatly appreciated. Thank you guys so far

Once most ideas are hashed out with base arguments given, in a week or two I think we can move to a more specific proposal to work out details on as well.

Left wrote:

well, most of issues can't be defined with certain categories, will mean nothing eventually since evgerything is correlated each other in mapping.
like worlddominator, cheri vetoed with HS aspect, but deetz' expanded this to larger view

its not i want really talking about so removed them


i think we have same opinion about that vetoed map should keep in qualified.unless more change maded.because we couldnt see through the mapper's thought.

after made this change we can give the veto rights to every mapper/modder.

deetz wrote:

Second, and more importantly, I feel like the weight of the mapper themself should carry a little more weight in the discussion. The reality is that the whole process from submitting a veto to mediation to having it mediated can happen without the mapper saying a word. An idea that I think might be good would be to have both sides (vetoer and mapper) clearly present their sides on the mediation site, and then present them to whoever will be doing the mediation in an unbiased manner.

entirely agree with this, especially because actually finding the mapper's / vetoer's replies (or a clear statement of their opinions) can be... quite hard sometimes

@Noffy

i mean
=> no instant DQ with veto / but can't be ranked until veto process ends


that will solve mappers' time waste with silly/controversal issues (which is the actual reason mappers hate veto), while earning enough time to be discussed

Noffy wrote:

allow vetoes to be appealed in cases where community opinion is against the veto, this time mediated by NATs. This would allow the veto to be re-evaluated with the community thoughts better in mind.

The issue is the same as mentioned before.. How we define "community opinion"? Cause this will probably lead into have popular mappers able to have a re-evaluation while new mappers can't and it's gonna be very unfair..

Noffy wrote:

Weigh "bad" vetoes more heavily in current BN evaluations

It's already hard enough to perform a veto (for what mordred said) so i think that if this is gonna afflict in a negative way the BN status no one would bother to veto something cause how we exactly define a "bad" veto? Is it a "bad" veto if the "community opinion" is against the vetoer?

deetz wrote:

An idea that I think might be good would be to have both sides (vetoer and mapper) clearly present their sides on the mediation site, and then present them to whoever will be doing the mediation in an unbiased manner.

I agree this could be a thing to have both the vetoer and the mapper to add a reasoning on the BN site when submitting a veto

Stop with secrecy and be more transparent with the mediation process in general, invite the mapper to be part of the discord channel the mediation is happening in so during its time it doesn't just end up becoming a process of collecting individual thoughts about the veto in question while discarding essential information that should influence the outcome.

Could you elaborate what you mean with "Make vetoes require 2 agreeing BNs to go to mediation."
Did you mean to lead into disqualification of the mapset instead of mediation? Because mediation is initiated by the maphost afaik(?). Not quite sure how to read or understand this since a single BN can just re-open their veto issue if the mapper disagrees with it, keeping it from proceeding. So I am not sure what kind of a purpose 2 agreeing BNs to initiate a mediation would serve.

I agree with many of the suggested ideas though, especially:
Reduce the time on mediation for issues which are quickly checked.
Give NAT or someone else the express power to dismiss vetoes if general community opinion is clearly against the veto. (Could be handled via polls for example and enables the community to have a voice in the entire process.)

In general I'd wish that initiating a Veto requires more than just a single individual and that a minor discussion about starting a Veto happens within the BNG which helps in enforcing the Veto with more insight from various people and also helps the mapper to see that the issues listed are not coming from a single individual.

Kite wrote:

Stop with secrecy and be more transparent with the mediation process in general, invite the mapper to be part of the discord channel the mediation is happening in so during its time it doesn't just end up becoming a process of collecting individual thoughts about the veto in question while discarding essential information that should influence the outcome.

Veto mediation is as transparent as it can be already. Not sure what discord channel you are talking about - the way mediation is handled is that the map in question gets sent to the 10 BNs involved and they submit their thoughts (what gets posted on the map thread in the end) on the BN website. There is no discussion with other BNs

Myxo wrote:

Kite wrote:

Stop with secrecy and be more transparent with the mediation process in general, invite the mapper to be part of the discord channel the mediation is happening in so during its time it doesn't just end up becoming a process of collecting individual thoughts about the veto in question while discarding essential information that should influence the outcome.

Veto mediation is as transparent as it can be already. Not sure what discord channel you are talking about - the way mediation is handled is that the map in question gets sent to the 10 BNs involved and they submit their thoughts (what gets posted on the map thread in the end) on the BN website. There is no discussion with other BNs

Alright that's my bad then, wasn't quite sure how it was handled in the end. So you basically roll the dice and get 10 random BNs appointed to your mapset which each just individually submit their thoughts without any sort of dicussion happening between them? Not quite sure if that's really a good approach, and could be essentially the underlying issue with the entire thing. If there is not even a discussion happening between the people involved then do they even bother to read previous discussions before they submit their vote?

I still believe keeping the entire thing being anonymous and not involving the mapper directly into the mediation process could be handled better.

Kite wrote:

Could you elaborate what you mean with "Make vetoes require 2 agreeing BNs to go to mediation."
Did you mean to lead into disqualification of the mapset instead of mediation? Because mediation is initiated by the maphost afaik(?). Not quite sure how to read or understand this since a single BN can just re-open their veto issue if the mapper disagrees with it, keeping it from proceeding. So I am not sure what kind of a purpose 2 agreeing BNs to initiate a mediation would serve.

Veto mediation can be submitted by either vetoer or mapper if the discussion has reached a dead end.
If the disqualifying BN couldn't find a 2nd BN in support of this idea, it would not go to mediation, and instead be immediately dismissed, allowing the map to proceed through the ranking process after resolving the veto like any other mod. Constantly reopening issues just to press the issue without new arguments shouldn't be allowed in that case.

Noffy wrote:

Kite wrote:

Could you elaborate what you mean with "Make vetoes require 2 agreeing BNs to go to mediation."
Did you mean to lead into disqualification of the mapset instead of mediation? Because mediation is initiated by the maphost afaik(?). Not quite sure how to read or understand this since a single BN can just re-open their veto issue if the mapper disagrees with it, keeping it from proceeding. So I am not sure what kind of a purpose 2 agreeing BNs to initiate a mediation would serve.

Veto mediation can be submitted by either vetoer or mapper if the discussion has reached a dead end.
If the disqualifying BN couldn't find a 2nd BN in support of this idea, it would not go to mediation, and instead be immediately dismissed, allowing the map to proceed through the ranking process after resolving the veto like any other mod. Constantly reopening issues just to press the issue without new arguments shouldn't be allowed in that case.

So essentially with this approach the mapper himself would want to avoid initiating a mediation at all costs for higher chances to get his way? Hmm, I'm not sure if that's a good workaround in the end. Perhaps the mapper could instead call the nominating BNs into the veto discussion and if one of them agree after a dead end it would go into mediation.

"Make vetoes require 2 agreeing BNs to go to mediation. This would be equal to how many BNs are required to push a map to qualified. If a disqualified map can not find a 2nd BN to support the veto, it would be immediately dismissed."

Mostly on the agree me with others (Mordred,etc) but I also found this kind of redundant being that majority of bns already ask opinion beforehand placing a veto and as we see through threads, there is always going to be someone who agrees unless it very clear the veto shouldn't even be there.

Feels like an over complicated process to vetoing that with Mordred concerns around this, I can't help but feel this will only hinder to get people to veto more than it already has.


"Give NAT or someone else the express power to dismiss vetoes if general community opinion is clearly against the veto. This could happen both before and after mediation."

I'm kind of on mordred with this one. The thing about vetoes is that often times, most vetoes will have no drama, end with some form of compromise, and we move on.

Whether that be with HS, spread, etc

The problem that I have with this is that the community's opinion is often bias especially when the involved maps that of their friends/or favorite map of the mapper in question.

What you will have is a system that is simply giving in to peer pressure when it comes to cases such as when the mapper's is popular, while most cases other cases such as say for a new mapper, will have less power in this regard.

Whilst a solution to the issue I have can be form, it still doesn't change the inconsistencies for this and overly complicates a situation more than what it already has

How would the community's opinion outweigh if majority of the bns agree with said veto? Are we going to let the community decide that even if a majority bns agrees, waives the veto at had just cause of a popular mapper? As that is what you will have here.

Even if we decide to have a community voting to negate some of the bias and to gather more people in the community, it still will lead to more popular mappers having more control, as well as lead to potential problems with people even be willing to veto in the first place, negating it's function as it will make feel that bns in question shouldn't even voice out their concerns at all.

Whilst the idea itself is not bad and even some of this is just speculation of what will happen, but even then in practice could leave to too many questionable problems, that I truly do not see it more than an hinderence to bn's at hand and possibly even to some mapper's.

I do think at the very least having this done case by case for the more extreme situation when the disagreement is more blantantly obvious (extremely one-sided) for example

Another small improvement in-case such as when drama arises when bns do vetoes a map, is simply having the ability to let the mapper go through mediation again, but not through bns, but NATs this time when they still have an valid argument at hand and completely disagrees with the mediation results.

^ This way there is more assurance since mediation is at the end rng, which can lead to some unfortunate circumstance such as the mapper simply being unlucky.

Whilst the NATs themselves is bias in their own form, they could at the very least laxed the restrictions depending on the veto in question and possibly give more alternatives than the vetoer or mediators have gave.



For me personally whilst the idea of shorten time for mediation for certain cases and having some of the other adjustments will be nice especially, but I do not think these ideas in question really helps the situation and simply, creates more issues that arises in the bng

The list of potential improvements seems partially good, but I don't fully agree with some points:

Ideas for improvement wrote:

NAT summarize mediation outcome and link to the list of individual mediations on the BN website, making what needs to be fixed easier to parse.

This would be helpful to make the feedback clearer, but I'd like to mention that all the individual comments should be included, not only those in favor of the overall outcome. The reason for this is that counterarguments can be absolutely valid and provide a different view on the matter, even if it's the minority opinion. I guess the summary could still only include the arguments from the majority (like it has been until now) in order to avoid confusion.

Ideas for improvement wrote:

Give NAT or someone else the express power to dismiss vetoes if general community opinion is clearly against the veto. This could happen both before and after mediation.

I'm not too sure about this, how would you decide what the general community opinion is? Most people who talk about vetoes are those who disagree or complain about them which could lead to a biased result. The community is often split regarding some topics so it would be quite arbitrary. Also, this statement only mentions cases where they community is clearly against the veto, but not where it is clearly in favor of it. In any case, I think a better solution for this would be the possibility to appeal a veto result if it doesn't represent what the community thinks.



I also want to address some of the issues that were already mentioned:

Present issues wrote:

Veto mediation outcome may not represent general community opinion.

Mediation only includes the voices of mediators, and not others who are invested in beatmap discussion.

Both of these issues could be solved by including other users who are not BNs or NAT into the mediation jury. These users could either be handpicked by the NAT/BNG if they are known to be good at modding and analyzing maps, or they would be able to apply as a veto mediator and be accepted if they have proven to have enough knowledge/expertise. The size of the jury could also be increased in order to make the result based less on RNG but rather more representative of the majority, especially for the smaller game modes.

Present issues wrote:

Vetoes can be initiated for basically any reason big or small.

This is definitely a problem in the current system because vetoes can be done for trivial things that don't really affect the map's quality. Vetoes should be used in order to prevent low quality maps from getting ranked, not to forcibly stop the ranking process because of a disagreement. Many vetoes are being justified by saying "they are supposed to be subjective", which is true, but this does not mean that any veto is valid and makes sense. I think there should be a distinction between a subjective concern and a personal preference because the latter is something that should not matter regarding quality assurance. There will always be some maps someone dislikes/disagrees with and that is okay.
Anyway, this issue could be solved by defining rules as to what kind of things vetoes can be used for. For example, someone could veto a map because they think the sliders look ugly, but that is just a matter of preference and should not be part of a veto.
Moreover, making clearly invalid/unreasonable vetoes should be punishable because it means that the BN is not able to differentiate between actual quality concerns and negligible issues. This is similar to how BN applicants are usually denied if they point out things in a map that are totally acceptable.



I think the list of issues and improvements can also be expanded though, here are some ideas:

Issue: A veto causes an immediate halt to the ranking process before even determining whether it's valid or not and before the mapper even has a chance to explain their thoughts.

Possible solution: This one would require some coding from developers but it would be cool if the qualification timer could be suspended for as long as the veto discussion lasts. This would mean that vetoed maps remain in the qualified state until there is a result. If the veto is upheld or the mapper agrees to make changes, the map will be disqualified, otherwise the timer will simply continue from where it left off. The advantage would be having access to replays during qualified, but it would also change one major factor: Right now when mediation occurs, the map has already been taken down so many BNs might (unconsciously) think that it doesn't hurt to make changes at that point, but the question should be whether those changes are absolutely required and warrant a disqualification or not.

Issue: Some mediators might not care about the veto and/or don't have much knowledge in that particular aspect. In those cases their input is probably not very meaningful compared to someone who is more invested and proficient in it.

Possible solution: This idea was brought up by someone in the dev server, basically for every veto you would only call people for mediation who are experts in that specific field, for example timing, metadata, hitsounding etc. unless it's a general issue such as song representation, overall quality concerns or spread.

honestly i think what would be a great thing is to make vetos harder to place (while still keeping the idea of vetos valid and applicable when needed), and also reduce the disruption a veto can cause over small issues

the suggestions you laid out are pretty good, although i think a good idea could be to instead of getting a 2nd BN to agree with the veto, to get an NAT member to agree with the veto before applying it, considering that it would make sense to have some NAT input on the removal of nominations (as getting one other BN to agree to an invalid veto probably isnt that difficult), so instead of 2 BNs being needed, 1 BN and 1 NAT are needed,

for smaller issues (such as the most recent one regarding diffnames, BGs, etc) then giving the NAT power to dismiss vetos that are contentious is a good idea, but imo this would have to be thought out more as the community reaction can sometimes be wrong or blown out of proportion for a veto that is actually valid (maybe have 2-3 NATs agree on if the veto should be dismissed) but then the process might become too convoluted,

i also think its a bad idea to increase punishment for "bad" vetos (as it might discourage some QAH work) but incorporating vetos on the BN evals more is a good way to do this (just dont like directly kick bns for "bad" vetos),

it might be a good idea to have a special probation mode for consistently "bad" vetos?

i know my post is quite big but i hope this gave you some ideas to think about, its good to see an actual discussion on the topic instead of just bashing one side or the other.

Left wrote:

@Noffy

i mean
=> no instant DQ with veto / but can't be ranked until veto process ends


that will solve mappers' time waste with silly/controversal issues (which is the actual reason mappers hate veto), while earning enough time to be discussed

ts8zs wrote:

Map should be push back to Pending（disqualify） by the nominators or mapper
instead of who vetos.

I don't agree with veto can directly pushing Qualified map back to Pending.
Map should be push back to Pending by the nominators or mapper instead of who vetos to avoid Re-nominate with mis-veto.
When a map having veto it should delay move to Ranked until the veto resolved.
And it should have a time limit (about 1 week) to deal with vetoed map,to avoid it stay in Qualified too long.

Serizawa Haruki wrote:

Issue: A veto causes an immediate halt to the ranking process before even determining whether it's valid or not and before the mapper even has a chance to explain their thoughts.

Possible solution: This one would require some coding from developers but it would be cool if the qualification timer could be suspended for as long as the veto discussion lasts. This would mean that vetoed maps remain in the qualified state until there is a result. If the veto is upheld or the mapper agrees to make changes, the map will be disqualified, otherwise the timer will simply continue from where it left off. The advantage would be having access to replays during qualified, but it would also change one major factor: Right now when mediation occurs, the map has already been taken down so many BNs might (unconsciously) think that it doesn't hurt to make changes at that point, but the question should be whether those changes are absolutely required and warrant a disqualification or not.

maybe can add this to main post? same opinions

if u care about a map, follow it and voice ur opinion before it hits qualifed. if u dont care why even veto?

Will just talk about the ideas for improvement here since i think they're the most important and i don't see real issues on the presented ones.

Make vetoes require 2 agreeing BNs to go to mediation. This would be equal to how many BNs are required to push a map to qualified. If a disqualified map can not find a 2nd BN to support the veto, it would be immediately dismissed.

No reason for this imo, 1st BN can easily find someone else that agrees with their concern, more if that 2nd BN is on their friends circle, the only case i think it'd create a difference is when very dumb vetoes happen, which i don't think i've seen yet. Plus, if you end up applying this please make it so 2 BNs are needed to START a veto, otherwise the toxicity against the BN that DQd will remain and may be even worse.

Reduce the time on mediation for issues which are quickly checked. Problems such as background images or difficulty names could have their time reduced to 3 days for instance, while spread and entire difficulty quality issues would remain at the standard 7 days mediation.

Agree, but maybe some BNs wont have enough time to properly present their opinions, 3 days is not much time tbh

Instead of the above, allow vetoes to be appealed in cases where community opinion is against the veto, this time mediated by NATs. This would allow the veto to be re-evaluated with the community thoughts better in mind.

You mean "with the opposing part thoughts better in mind", BNs are also a part of the community and we also have our opinions, the fact that vetoes seem to be harsh is something we can not fix because it's still a DQ and right now there is no way to create a discussion without it. A suggestion post will end up in a DQ eventually if they keep disagreeing, talking to the mapper will do the same. It would be really nice to have a hiatus state to extend QF time while the discussion takes place, but i highly doubt that would be implemented.

Move mediation to the NATs hands

I don't see the difference with how it is right now, except it'd probably have less opinions compared to current mediation

Weigh "bad" vetoes more heavily in current BN evaluations

Nope, as said before by other people, please don't make BNs fear vetoes

Edit:

Drum-Hitnormal wrote:

if u care about a map, follow it and voice ur opinion before it hits qualifed. if u dont care why even veto?

No real way to know about the map existence before it hits qualified tho, unless you're looking for things to veto in pending/bubbled.
The bubbled state doesn't tend to last very long since it goes to qualified quite quick most of the times.

imo u could make the veto requirement by having 5 bns agreeing with it, taking the map down and then let other 5 bns on mediation decide the final outcome. i think this way is more balanced so dqs can be placed more wisely and not that easily like now by 1 person only

Nikakis wrote:

imo u could make the veto requirement by having 5 bns agreeing with it, taking the map down and then let other 5 bns on mediation decide the final outcome. i think this way is more balanced so dqs can be placed more wisely and not that easily like now by 1 person only

if this happens i think 5 might be a bit too high of a requirement to get vetos done, and also its a bit too small of a number to mediate imo, maybe a 3/7 split instead (3 BNs needed to veto and 7 BNs to mediate)

Nikakis wrote:

imo u could make the veto requirement by having 5 bns agreeing with it, taking the map down and then let other 5 bns on mediation decide the final outcome. i think this way is more balanced so dqs can be placed more wisely and not that easily like now by 1 person only

The reason to have an anonymous jury is to avoid bias, if you split it like this, half of the jury will be already on the agreeing side, it'd maybe work if you kept the 10 bns jury but then it's a quite large amount of bns involved into a single veto

DeviousPanda wrote:

Nikakis wrote:

imo u could make the veto requirement by having 5 bns agreeing with it, taking the map down and then let other 5 bns on mediation decide the final outcome. i think this way is more balanced so dqs can be placed more wisely and not that easily like now by 1 person only

if this happens i think 5 might be a bit too high of a requirement to get vetos done, and also its a bit too small of a number to mediate imo, maybe a 3/7 split instead (3 BNs needed to veto and 7 BNs to mediate)

Crissa wrote:

Nikakis wrote:

imo u could make the veto requirement by having 5 bns agreeing with it, taking the map down and then let other 5 bns on mediation decide the final outcome. i think this way is more balanced so dqs can be placed more wisely and not that easily like now by 1 person only

The reason to have an anonymous jury is to avoid bias, if you split it like this, half of the jury will be already on the agreeing side, it'd maybe work if you kept the 10 bns jury but then it's a quite large amount of bns involved into a single veto

then i guess we could make it 5+10 but idk it might be a lot

NAT summarize mediation outcome and link to the list of individual mediations on the BN website, making what needs to be fixed easier to parse.

Doing a TL;DR seems beneficial, but I wouldn't make it more than two or three sentences. Making it longer would take additional time for little gain. The more we can make BNs' reasoning speak for itself, the better, I think. Both faster and less chance we misinterpret stuff that way.

Make vetoes require 2 agreeing BNs to go to mediation. This would be equal to how many BNs are required to push a map to qualified. If a disqualified map can not find a 2nd BN to support the veto, it would be immediately dismissed.

As a mapper disagreeing with a veto, the optimal (but maybe not very moral) strat would be to alinate the 1st vetoer so that any potential 2nd vetoer gets dissuaded by this, regardless of how reasonable the issue vetoed for actually is. You'd basically want to exploit the fact that few BNs want to waste their time and ruin their reputations for nothing in return. This seems like a bad meta to have, and we kinda already have it to a lesser degree.

Then there's also what mordred and myxo said.

Reduce the time on mediation for issues which are quickly checked. Problems such as background images or difficulty names could have their time reduced to 3 days for instance, while spread and entire difficulty quality issues would remain at the standard 7 days mediation.

Think time being case-by-case is ultimately good. Could come with some rng drawbacks if we don't manage to replace enough people in time, but benefit probably outweighs it.

Give NAT or someone else the express power to dismiss vetoes if general community opinion is clearly against the veto. This could happen both before and after mediation.

This is unrealistic to properly gauge. Best we can do is hold a vote, and that's exactly what we're doing.

Instead of the above, allow vetoes to be appealed in cases where community opinion is against the veto, this time mediated by NATs. This would allow the veto to be re-evaluated with the community thoughts better in mind.

The entire reason we're doing mediations is for them to be conclusive, the decision shouldn't need to be questioned often enough for something like this to be a procedure. NATs' word also does not weigh more than BNs', so NATs specifically doesn't make much sense.

Move mediation to the NATs hands

We've already tried this. All it did, from what I can tell, was shift the responsibility on a smaller pool of people. It got to the point where you'd mediate pretty much all vetoes, and it kinda gets to you. BNs can handle this equally well in most cases, sometimes even better.

Weigh "bad" vetoes more heavily in current BN evaluations

There are few enough BNs that want to veto already. If we're going to do this it should only be in extraordinary circumstances, at least for now. Worst case scenario the mapper has to wait for 7 days (or ~3 days if we implement the other thing), before proceeding with ranking.

In response to this, make each single definable issue in a veto be voted on separately?

Probably needs a proposal. E.g. how to handle vetoes due to a combination of smaller non-veto-worthy issues, how to submit the vetoes, how many mediators for each one, how there'd be displayed on the site, etc.

Clarify the purpose of mediation

Agree, should be clear from the wiki page, if it isn't already.

Make mediation yes/no only and get rid of neutral entirely. If nominators don't feel strongly on an issue they would be directed to vote to dismiss. This way only substantial issues multiple people agree on would be upheld.

Agree, although believe this ties closely into being able to partially agree with a veto, as this seems to be the most valid use of neutral rn. Shouldn't be a blocking change tho, I think. Can always vote uphold and specify only wishing to uphold certain parts of the veto.

Naxess wrote:

Agree, should be clear from the wiki page, if it isn't already.

I'd add that it should even be clear from wherever people go to do the mediation itself.

My thoughts about changing how vetoes are done:


I agree with deetz' solution on this subject entirely on making the mediation process more clearer, would help get rid of a lot of the bias on if you're meant to judge if you think it should be allowed to be ranked or not and what the mapper's intention was.

My next point I want to talk about is mediation time. I do think time should be reduced for smaller vetoes that are quick to reach a conclusion. Don't really see any drawback to implementing this.

Next, I do think there should be a second opinion before a veto is placed since you do need 2 BNs to icon a map so it makes sense for 2 to veto/disqualify one. As I don't really see an issue with a second person having to voice an issue, as to me vetoes should be focused on larger issues that multiple BNs disagree with. (I mean if people are gonna shit on a veto they would shit on it after mediation too so it doesn't really change anything besides the mapper feeling less targeted that a sole person has that much power to stop their maps ranking process.)

Lastly, I don't really think NATs should solely handle vetoes as for the most part you'll get less opinions which will just make the outcome more unclear as it's a smaller sample size.

EDIT: Forgot to include one last point:

About neutral votes in vetoes, I think that button should be removed and instead replaced with an option to opt out of a veto if you ain't feeling strongly about upholding or dismissing. Since to my knowledge, vetoes are mandatory to participate in unless there's some circumstance where you arn't able to look at the map and there isn't a way to opt out of vetoes you don't care about willingly. A simple solution to this problem would be to just re-roll new people to fill the vacant spots if some people opt out of that specific veto. (Assuming that isn't already in the system as to me it isn't clear if there is something like that in place already.)

The least that should be done is holding people accountable.

There is nothing but common sense and fair play holding us back from just vetoing every set in qualified right now. If those break there should be some formalized process to not only appeal but mediate the veto itself either through just the NAT or again the BNG.
Else the optimal strategy for someone want I to maximize that QH output would be to just veto everything they can as there is no downside to messing up a veto, in contrast to how nominating a map blindly can cause serious problems ergo why it is disincentivized.

It shouldn't deter people from vetoing maps in fear of getting punished for a veto which did not pass. In that sense it's less harsh than a failed qualifization and should mostly count to the qah performance with a too low performance implying a stripping of the afgected BN's ability to veto for a certain amount of time or similar.

Alternatively an a priori discussion before a veto takes root could be implemented to judge if it should be followed through mediation.


A veto should be the last step during a dispute and that should be made clear through these mechanics.

(Sorry if I am restating things mentioned above, I wrote this hours ago but I didn't press send...)

OP wrote:

Please keep in mind that proposals that are basically get rid of vetoes entirely will not be accepted

why I even bothered to read all the prose at the beginning when it ends with this lol

otherwise I agree with Moecho and deetz

There has to be a solution that includes the nominating BNs and allow them to voice their side and thoughts, because a veto also affects them and not just the mapper. In the current approach the mapper also often falls flat with their arguments being buried in walls of discussion text. These things need to be adressed somehow.

I've compiled some ideas that could be worth considering down below:

Procedure on Veto
*Min. 2 BNs required to initiate a veto, allowing solo rogue actions should be prevented with such a powerful tool
*Not immediately push back the mapset into Pending but place it on hold, during this period discussion should happen where all sides, including nominating BNs can voice their thoughts and try to reach a conclusion or compromise.
*In case of a dead-end, all involved people (2 Veto BNs, 2 Nomination BNs, and Mapper) submit a vote to the NAT wether or not a mediation should happen with reasons given why or why not. Possibly 2 NAT members are chosen to review the votes submitted and approve or disapprove the mediation for a total of 7 Votes. Should the mapper decide to not submit their vote the mediation will be automatically carried through, should one of the Veto BNs decide to not submit their vote, then the mediation and veto are automatically canceled.

Procedure on Mediation
*Same as before, random BNs are picked and have to submit their thoughts and judge the viability of the veto.
*All involved BNs receive a small summary that highlights the most important arguments of both conflicting sides.
*All involved BNs need to confirm that they have read and understand what the discussion is or was about.
*All involved BNs proceed to submit their final thoughts and verdict.

Procedure Post-Mediation
*If the verdict is in favour of the mapper then the veto is canceled.
*If the verdict is in favour of the veto then the mapper should attempt to compromise with suggestions given or offer their own compromise to the problem.
*Should the further discussion lead to no results, the case will be directly handed to the NAT for inspection. At this point any further action will have consequences for either the mapper or the BNs that issued the Veto. Nuke if the Mapper isn't willing to compromise after the involvement of NAT and a frowny face for the BNs if the NAT finds the veto to not be substantial in the end.

___________________

A few things change and a few things stay the same with this approach. Overall this approach will still offer fast results for obvious flaws in a map but provide a bigger obstacle to vetos of a more subjective and questionable matter. With the risk of a potential punishment involved both parties will think a second time before proceeding further and overall it should prevent things from escalating as they have recently. The biggest role during the mediation is still on the BNs involved, with the only difference that now instead of given an unbiased opinion about the nature of the veto they know the circumstances and arguments of both sides to make a better judgment that doesn't disregard any important information from both parties.

To add a bit more to the voting submission part towards NAT. The most common result would be 3x No - Yes x2, in a sense one might think it's useless to allow the vote in the first place but there is a reason behind this idea. The NAT get's some insight on where people stand regarding the veto the more so if the votes deviate from the most expected result (which is bound to happen). The other reason is that a veto should be in a slight disadvantage against the mapper, since he has proven his work was good enough to be qualified in the first place.
I believe harsh issues will have no problem finding some way of resolution anyways.

To end it on a more personal note, I don't think that the priviledge of veto is something every Beatmap Nominator should have from the get-go. It should be a right that's earned through a record of good work that proves the credibility and expertise that this person can be entrusted with.

Noffy wrote:

Left wrote:

i think i like your ideas, and i have one to propose

how about making maps still QFed until community decides to DQ the map after veto process? (but can't be moved to ranked until veto ends)

since veto's real problem for mapper is 'wasting time unnecessarily with controversal/silly issues'. let's keep instant DQ for significant RC related things

Not sure I really understand what the idea here is :<

this means a veto will no cause dq immediately until more community voice (the two nominators,owner mappers,other modders,bng,nat) comes in.
to realize this. we need:

1.veto will not cause dq immediately until the two nominators or mapper admits it.
means we should respect mapper's opinion or it have real problems.

2.vetoed map will not move to ranked until veto issues dismissed.
this creates time for vetoer and mapper and the two nominators and community to talk about it.

3.vetoed map will be dq when it reach a time limit.
means the problem veto said must be resolved by dismiss or fix.

these measures can help veto resolve real problems instead of subjective opinions.
dq by subjective opinion should be agree with mapper or commnuity.
subjective veto should respect mapper&community's opinion.

Present Issues wrote:

Mediation only includes the voices of mediators, and not others who are invested in beatmap discussion.

A mapper earlier pointed out a very interesting suggestion regarding the inclusion of a separate jury. I'd like to give my two cents on the matter.

Serizawa Haruki wrote:

Both of these issues could be solved by including other users who are not BNs or NAT into the mediation jury.
These users could either be handpicked by the NAT/BNG if they are known to be good at modding and analyzing maps, or they would be
able to apply as a veto mediator and be accepted if they have proven to have enough knowledge/expertise. The size of the jury
could also be increased in order to make the result based less on RNG but rather more representative of the majority, especially for the smaller game modes.

This idea of a separate jury is something we've seen used in real life (jury duty), and it works well in especially nuanced scenarios.

We could include a team of experienced volunteers from the osu! mapping community who have passed extensive evaluations to act as voices for the mapping community. Allowing experienced mappers that are outside of the BNG to weigh in provides them with an official format on which they may influence vetoes and avert needless twitter clutter. It also brings in voices that are more representative of the community, which may subsequently alleviate issues related to under-representation.


I would also like to address a mentioned idea for improvement:

Ideas for Improvement wrote:

Make vetoes require 2 agreeing BNs to go to mediation.
This would be equal to how many BNs are required to push a map to qualified. If a disqualified map can not find a 2nd BN to support the veto, it would be immediately dismissed.

I would argue that a 3rd BN, or even a 4th/5th/6th/7th BN be necessary for a map to go into mediation. As we've seen already, there have been a number of questionable vetoes.

Allowing every single BN the power to directly interfere with nomination is potentially disruptive, and requiring two BNs to agree to undergo veto is a silly intervention that can easily be abused. As Cheri mentioned earlier, much of the discussions revolving around the veto is being unofficially discussed on separate platforms. There should be more transparency regarding this discussion as it involves more than just a single group of individuals.

QATs previously have held sole authority in this matter, but a difference was that the team had barely 10 people. In comparison, the BNG has around 40 members (the exact number, I am not too sure).

Crissa wrote:

Nope, as said before by other people, please don't make BNs fear vetoes

I've been here long enough to see the good and the bad, and beatmap nukes were very VERY rarely used. Proper communication with the mapper should be prioritized over vetoes.

If too many questionable vetoes arise out of the BNG, it could potentially be even more taxing on the NAT than if they were to handle vetoes from the start.

I like the idea of a map going into a qualified limbo, where it's not dq'd and doesn't require bns to renominate, but also doesn't let the map get ranked until the issue comes to a conclusion. understandable if this can't happen, it'd need a bit of work by the web devs to make a system where an issue isn't solved until the initial bn and mapper mark as resolved.

also a fan of the idea of making mediations a strictly yes/no answer

Hi i have onions

Noffy wrote:

Veto mediation outcome may not represent general community opinion.

This is a bit vague, but for the sake of argument, I'll assume this just means "the mapping community as a whole." Unfortunately, neither popularity nor prominence are effective tools of argument. The point of vetoes and mediation has never been to represent community opinion. The point is to receive the educated opinions of a broad pool of qualified individuals. If the community, including more experienced mappers and modders within it, finds the outcome of a veto incompetent or unpalatable, that is not a problem with the structure of vetoes and mediation - that is entirely a problem with the capability of current members of the BNG. No amount of community structuring will fix this.

Noffy wrote:

Vetoes can take up a lot of unnecessary time when outcome is already clear.

Certainly a big one, often mediation can just look like a big waste of time. There are two potential cases for this:

1. Mediation is overwhelmingly likely to uphold the veto, and the mapper refuses to comply.
2. Mediation is overwhelmingly likely to dismiss the veto, and the vetoer refuses to drop the issue.

Before a veto actually takes place, the two processes can look very similar. A nominator offers suggestions/points out issues with a map, the mapper refuses to make changes to adequately accommodate these suggestions. The only way that we see which case it is (or if it's one of these cases at all), however, is by letting the veto take place. The way to fix this issue is simple: if there is no significant time constraint, suggestions should be made and responded to in order to be considered grounds for a veto, unless the veto is for general quality issues and specific suggestions to improve the map enough to be adequate cannot be made. This will catch most of the silly vetoes like diffnames and having a couple seconds of sliders in a normal, and also allow for less polarized discussion to take place on more high-profile, controversial issues that the mapper may refuse to assess. It will also make it evident to involved parties as well as potential mediating BNs whether this falls into case 1 or case 2.

To put some additional work on naxess - if this is an acceptable change to the veto system, an Aiess feed for suggestions placed on qualified maps would be quite useful and conducive to discussion.

Once we've figured out what case it is, however, there's the issue of how to deal with it:
In case 1, I see no issue at all. Mediation brings in more allegedly educated opinions, and the time it takes allows for cooler heads and for more relevant discussion to take place on thread.
In case 2, everyone is wasting their time for a single nominator committing too hard. With the changes suggested above, this should rarely, if ever, happen - and if they do, it will be the result of that nominator's incompetence, not the fault of some sort of systematic inadequacy stopping the vetoer from causing problems. Focus should be on minimizing the impact of this in cases where it's possible to:

Noffy wrote:

Reduce the time on mediation for issues which are quickly checked. Problems such as background images or difficulty names could have their time reduced to 3 days for instance, while spread and entire difficulty quality issues would remain at the standard 7 days mediation.

Sounds like a solution to me.

Noffy wrote:

Vetoes can be initiated for basically any reason big or small.

I do not view this as a problem. If an issue is small, but significant enough to have a noticeable impact on the map, and the mapper refuses to apply as in case 1 above, it's worth vetoing for. If not, it should be caught by the process detailed above.

Noffy wrote:

Mediation only includes the voices of mediators, and not others who are invested in beatmap discussion.

I was under the impression that this was a positive, not a negative. Any neutral and otherwise uninvolved mediator that doesn't do their due diligence in looking at the discussion on the thread and making a decision based off of the arguments represented there is not doing their job properly. This is not a problem with the structure of vetoes and mediation, this is a problem of the competence of current BNs.

I think I've presented my case enough on these issues, so I won't go further with the rest of the present issues.
tl;dr: Most of these are not issues that we can solve by changing how vetoes are handled, we can only solve them by changing who vetoes are handled by.

Part 2: Solution Boogaloo

I hope you didn't think that those proposed solutions could escape my complaining spree!

Noffy wrote:

Make vetoes require 2 agreeing BNs to go to mediation. This would be equal to how many BNs are required to push a map to qualified. If a disqualified map can not find a 2nd BN to support the veto, it would be immediately dismissed.

This is, in the best of circumstances, useless. Many nominators are friends, or at least in active communication, with each other. This is not a question of the competence or validity of a veto. This is a popularity contest.
Whether a veto is valid, helpful, or effective is not a function of how many people agree or disagree with it, no matter their position. All this does is cause a vetoer to seek validation instead of real feedback.

Noffy wrote:

Give NAT or someone else the express power to dismiss vetoes if general community opinion is clearly against the veto. This could happen both before and after mediation.

I must agree with Stack in being vehemently against this motion. General community opinion should never factor into a veto, more people believing something doesn't make it any more correct. More people believing something doesn't even mean it's a better argument. This amendment would give credence and direct support to a community ready to turn every veto into a dramatic, controversial shouting match - not support a community that wants to see more thoughtful, meaningful discussion.

Noffy wrote:

Instead of the above, allow vetoes to be appealed in cases where community opinion is against the veto, this time mediated by NATs. This would allow the veto to be re-evaluated with the community thoughts better in mind.

Noffy wrote:

Move mediation to the NATs hands

I have only one thing to say to these. This would not be anywhere near necessary if the BNG was competent enough to handle these cases effectively.

Conclusions

So having complained for several pages, what actionable conclusions are there to this rant?

1. Require* suggestions on thread before vetoes occur

A nominator that intends to veto a map for a specific issue that can be pointed out and fixed by the mapper - i.e. there are specific points on the timeline at which a perceived problem occurs - should first pose it as a suggestion. This gives time for several aspects of these suggestions to be discussed - whether solvable, valid, or even worth DQing for at all.
If there aren't specific points to be made and/or the perceived issues are not solvable through specific suggestions, vetoes should be allowed to skip this, as there's not much room for non-veto discussion there.

The goal of this amendment is to make the act of vetoing more thorough and transparent. Requiring vetoes for specific problems to undergo discussion before a veto is placed means the vetoing BN has to actually make their case to the mapper before ever coming to the conclusion of "I'm blocking this map from being ranked for the time being."

2. Make staying a BN harder.

It's absolutely no surprise to see that some members of the BNG appear to be incapable of living up to the expectations that accompany their station. People aren't perfect, and NATs are not perfect judges of capability. However, it's simply too hard to lose the title. Get someone to help you with your mods and the test, keep your head down, nominate a couple of safe maps every once in a while, and boom - you now have and can maintain a title that essentially just says "My opinion is more important than yours." The floor for competence is too low and very ill-maintained.

Review of BNs' performance should be more strict, and underperformance should be met with a more solid response than just tossing them onto probation, giving the message of "be careful and active for a month, then you can stop caring again."

From where I stand, these two measures implemented together are capable of both minimizing frivolous vetoes and, importantly, making vetoes as a whole less necessary. Requiring discussion of specific points means the potential for the nominator challenging a map and the mapper to come to an agreement - veto doesn't take place. Raising the bar for BNs means higher standards in general when ranking maps, resulting in less maps that any nominator would consider an affront in terms of quality - fewer general quality-based vetoes take place.

Bravo Mun, I pretty much agree with everything you said.
Edit: On second thought your last paragraph might cause trouble for the future whereas we experience another bottleneck of BN Activity and the requirements will have made to be lax again. But in general I agree that unsuccessful vetos post-mediation should find some sort of punishment.

a complaint I've made elsewhere is that the decisions of vetoes sometimes don't align with other popular opinion in a way that's not constructive, but Mun's right, this shouldn't be an issue as long as the involved BNs are competent and capable enough to make a good decision. I don't think the current lineup of BN is a great representation of the most "competent and capable" mappers/modders, especially recently with the increasingly lax requirements for joining and staying on the team. then also those BNs are not properly encouraged to make their best effort to assist the mapper, because the veto allows them to post a sort of ultimatum with no risk of consequence if it turns out to be overturned by other BNs via mediation.

pretty much agree with the solutions he proposed too. thanks for writing this Mun

@Kite, I'm not sure that overall BN activity being lower is a bad trade-off here, we really don't need this active of a content stream for Ranked anyway, there are already so many maps that it's both tedious to keep up with Ranked and almost impossible to play all of what Ranked has to offer. as long as BNs are able to keep up with the push&pull nature of the ranking cycle I think it'll be alright.

Hi
I've added reviewed everything and added everything to the OP, let me know if I missed something. It has been really enlightening to read through the thread and seeing the merits of newly proposed ideas as well as the flaws of currently listed ones. The discussion so far is really appreciated!

I wanted to write something else about my own thoughts but at some point during the hour it took me to look through everything my brain melted and I forgot what it was. Will post again later if I remember. (I hope I remember).

Mun wrote:

To put some additional work on naxess - if this is an acceptable change to the veto system, an Aiess feed for suggestions placed on qualified maps would be quite useful and conducive to discussion.

pishifat already made such a bot function, but it's bn server only. could see about this somehow being expandable to an aiess feature or otherwise copied to other discord servers.
the website also has such a listing too, but yay for navigation, there's no way to get to it besides the URL. which I currently don't have saved... will get back on that.

clayton wrote:

I'm not sure that overall BN activity being lower is a bad trade-off here, we really don't need this active of a content stream for Ranked anyway, there are already so many maps that it's both tedious to keep up with Ranked and almost impossible to play all of what Ranked has to offer. as long as BNs are able to keep up with the push&pull nature of the ranking cycle I think it'll be alright.

What about BN activity in mania/taiko + rate maps get ranked in those gamemodes?

beatmapsets/events is this the 1 @Noffy

system changes fix little without a mentality change.

@Mun's post about raising the competence floor for BNs:

I agree with most of what you said, but in my opinion it's not ''imposing stricter maintenance by threatening BNs with punishments for inactivity/underperformance'' that helps.

What goes wrong is the selecting of BNs itself. Getting BN is very very easy now compared to the days of modding puzzles/BN tests. All you have to do is be active for a bit and pass a small RC test and ''not cause problems within the community''.

BNs are threatened with probation/kick over trivial RC things like nominating an unrankable object(that can easily be fixed in the qualified period). Their skill level in picking out quality maps to nominate is completely disregarded with these punishments over trivial issues. Nobody ever gets demoted for generally being abusive with their power (vast majority of nominations being circlejerk) or generally ranking low quality maps that do adhere to technical RC, but are low quality on intersubjective basis. Being a RC bot isn't motivating, being qualified to handpick good maps to be made into official content is.

Does whoever came up with this seriously think this nets you qualified nominators to maintain a quality ranked section? BNs should be picked way more carefully, their experience with mapping and the ranking process should also be taken into consideration (why do we accept bns with like 1 ranked map lol?) and a more thorough selection process should generally be in place. If you secure this and make being a BN worth something again, you wouldn't have to deal with all these issues that arise from incompetent people entering the BN because of a faulty selection process.

VINXIS wrote:

beatmapsets/events is this the 1 @Noffy

beatmapsets/beatmap-discussions?user=&beatmapset_status=qualified&message_types%5B%5D=suggestion&message_types%5B%5D=problem&only_unresolved=on this 1

(This is regarding the vetoes with multiple points raised issue)

I myself have had situations where i'd partially agree with a veto but not all issues raised. (I'd usually end up going with neutral in these cases)

For vetoes that have multiple issues raised, we could have the person who initiated the veto to list the different points when submitting the veto on the bn site (I hope it's not too hard) maybe something like this --> https://i.imgur.com/a2aqaEj.png

Then mediators can have some checkboxes to indicate which parts of the veto they agree/disagree with. Might make summarising the veto a bit more complicated but I feel it's a good start !

I SPENT LIKE 6 HOURS WRITING THIS PLEASE READ

I wanted to post THIS before, but I decided to wait until others have posted, and went to get more 1 on 1 opinions and general discussion regarding my points below in the meantime. I would like to suggest 3 changes that I believe will immediately alleviate most issues with the current system, and respond to others in this thread:

1. Changing how Qualified works
2. Increasing clarity regarding how vetoes and mediations should function
3. Increase transparency regarding QAH work as a whole

I will go into each point in detail, by first stating the problem(s), then solution(s), then (the) possible issue(s). After doing this for all 3 points I will then respond to others in this thread with my post.

Changing how Qualified works

The problem this point solves is that currently, when the mapper agrees on something is a issue, but doesn't feel like the issue is large enough to fix to the point of disqualifying the map and asking the 2 BNs to recheck the whole set again, or when they don't want to cause their nominators to face "more consequences" for nominating their map like how some BNs have recently for subjective vetoes that they themselves doesn't even agree on. In fact, we have 1 issue that has been sent to mediation solely because of this. When the map becomes immediately disqualified instead of left in qualified however, the mapper is far more inclined to change things in the map. Changing how qualified works will ultimately remove this act of mappers acting differently between qualified and pending on issues, as well as reducing consequences received towards BNs for subjective issues that are posted as problem points and vetoes that they BNs themselves may not believe to be justified either which would have been simply posted as suggestions.

The way I propose how qualified changes is as follows: We introduce version history into osu! Introducing version history here would mean that old versions of a beatmap, and changes between each version uploaded can be seen and observed by anyone. Similar to how git or mapset verifier's snapshot function work. Ideally, we can have 2 pieces of information for each version. We can see the exact line differences between the map folder and / or files like this for example, and we can have detailed paraphrasing done by the website itself like this for example. While I believe there are MANY more reasons to have version history in osu! that are completely unrelated to the ranking system itself, this is how I believe it can be best utilized WITHIN the ranking system to solve some problems.

1. A QAH BN or anyone else would post issues they may have with the map when it's qualified and the countdown to ranked freezes. If a modder that is not a BN posts issues on the map, the timer can decrease if a BN approves the mod.
2. The mapper will now apply the mods WHILE in qualified, when they upload, the new version of the map folder will be placed in an "unofficial state" (call it whatever u want I will continue calling it unofficial state).
3. Once the unofficial state is up, both the version that was initially sent to qualified, and this version will both be downloadable, and the countdown to ranked DOES NOT DECREASE.
4. We have 2 BNs confirm that this version is valid and suitable. Once it is approved by 2 BNs, this unofficial state will replace the official one.
5. Once replaced, the leaderboard will be reset, and the timer will continue once again.

Of course if the issue is large to the point where the mapper agrees but would take time to fix, then the mapper can call for DQ themselves as well. In fact, I believe that the mapper themselves should be allowed to disqualify their own map as well. With this system, I believe we will see a higher cases of suggestions that are given in qualified actually changed, and will seen less negatively when modding in qualified.

Here is a more elaborate explanation regarding how qualified would work with this community/forums/posts/7468853

Some issues that I have observed regarding this:

1. First is that this is a lot of work web-dev side. It would take some time to develop this and it solely depends on if they believe this as well as the many other reasons outside of the ranked system is worth the effort to implement.
2. Second is regarding how qualified duration would work now. I believe that the change of having the timer never reset never did its job well in making the qualified pending differences more "relaxed". One way to go about all of this is to shorten the duration a map is in qualified, and to have the time reset whenever it gets disqualified / changes are applied and approved, instead of just continuing the timer like I had originally stated above. Mappers do not care NEARLY as much regarding how long their map stays in qualified compared to having the map disqualified and re-qualified for changes.
3. Another is regarding when the mapper does not respond to mods. In the case where the mapper spends some amount of time never responding to any of the mods supplied. Then I believe the map should just be disqualified. If the direction of shortening qualified time and resetting the timer whenever its DQ'd is taken as well, I believe this is a fair enough response to the lack of response by the mapper.

Increasing clarity regarding how vetoes and mediations should function

This is a far more simpler point. I believe deetz has stated the problem regarding it already in this thread: community/forums/posts/7460075. Every time we have mediation occur, we see time and time that the BNs are simply just asked for their opinion on "Do I agree or not with the initial point / think it would be better if changed?" and has almost nothing regarding "Do I agree or not with barring this map from ranked if the initial point is not agreed upon and changed by the mapper?" So as a result you have mediation results where some may agree with the point brought by the vetoer, but almost none would agree that the map should be kept from ranked if not changed, which is essentially what is the final case when the mapper does not change anything after the mediation result has shown to agree with the vetoer.

There are 2 things that should be done to alleviate this:

1. It should be clearly stated what mediation is for (for example something like "Mediation is to decide whether a beatmap should be allowed to be ranked without changes by the mapper regarding the issue pointed by the vetoer") in the following places: The wiki, whenever a NAT announces mediation has begun, on the bn.mg.com page that lists all mediations, and on the popup where the BN writes what they are going to write.
2. The second thing is that the question presented to BNs should be a simple yes / no question such as "Is this issue large enough to bar this map from ranking without changes?". They must state their reason as to why they picked yes / no, and in the case where they picked yes, they must provide clear and concise suggestions regarding possible ways to alleviate this issue.

With this, it should be far more clearer regarding how mediations will be treated by all members. Creating clarity in these 2 cases and in similar cases as needed will greatly alleviate issues that are present with vetoes and mediation currently.

The following issue I have seen regarding this is:

1. Wording choice is VERY important regarding what would be stated by the NATs, the BN.mg site, and the wiki, as well as the question presented to the BNs to answer. If not careful, this can cause a lot of problems regarding what is being looked for by most people regarding vetoes and mediation. In the case a better statement and question are not thought of, I believe that the statement and question provided above are very good ones to use, as they are direct and to the point, and directly addresses what the final mediation result should / will do.
2. There will be BNs who will still be indifferent regardless if you remove the "neutral" option or not. While i 100% believe it should be removed, this will ultimately cause most BNs who come in this scenario usually side with the mapper instead now. I do believe this is a better result than just pressing neutral since this clearly answers the original question that is presented to the BN, but the issue regarding BNs feeling indifferent will still stand. A possible solution is to create "specialist" groups where people may apply to be considered as a "specialist" in the specific field of mapping, and are called when mediation regarding a topic in their field is created, but this creates A LOT of management work to handle, and will have the issue of what the categories of "specialization" would even be; however, this would also allow us to avoid using the RNG system as well as just having people in that specialized group mediate it would probably not require RNG selection since I assume they would be much smaller groups for the most part compared to the BNG.

Increase transparency regarding QAH work as a whole

There's still quite a lot of transparency missing regarding the whole ordeal. Nothing in the BN.mg site is directly accessible, as well as when mediation posts are created, there is no direct contact that's even possible between the mapper and any of the mediators who had participated. In fact this is the main cause and reason for the mapper having almost no say about anything in their side outside of the veto thread, as well as a lot of misinformation as to how this whole system is even working in the first place.

Doing the following may help in alleviating both issues:

1. Final mediation result should be posted at the top of the post since that is far more relevant to the discussion than the specific points stated by each mediator.
2. Post ALL points regardless of what the mediators choose as their answer, and regardless of what the final result is.
3. In the mediation result posts, Mediators are stated alongside the Y/N option they chose and their reason for choosing such instead of having a list of them at the bottom. It's entirely easy to pinpoint who said which point in mediation posts already and just creates an extra step for mappers when trying to discuss with any mediators.
4. All pages related to QAH work, mediations, and the like should become public. The more information that is given out to people, the more misinformation is suppressed in general, and the more educated opinions will sound regarding any of this.
5. Related to previous point, allow mappers to apply for mediation as well instead of only allowing the vetoer. All mediation applications will require clear and concise points from both the vetoer and the mapper stated before mediation begins. This would require the mapper to have access to apply for mediation in the first place to happen.
6. Actually have discussions occur during mediation. Servers where this may occur should be available to the public only for viewing purposes (only the mediators, vetoer, nominators, and mapper can talk in the discussion channel essentially). Lack of discussion between others is quite detrimental and having discussion actually occur will provide far more healthy results.

I believe this is the most important one of the 3 since I believe in providing more information to and between people whenever its possible as this helps in educating people, solving potential issues that may occur, and deterring misinformation; however there are potential issues here too:

1. Anonymity keeps mediators safe to a degree. I believe that removing this anonymity with the points above is a more than fair trade off for keeping mediators safe. Many people will point out the scenario regarding the mediation result of deetz's worldenddominator veto where (8) had given a clearly false statement regarding the whole ordeal and was later removed. While I do think the punishment for that BN was still not strong enough since I see this as FAR WORSE than qualifying maps with clear unrankables as this is an official statement that clearly states misinformation; however, I believe this was FOR THE MOST PART the fault of the NAT for not assuring statements were clear, concise, relevant, AND correct to the veto and mediation beforehand. The NAT SHOULD BE EVEN NOW checking statements given by the mediators before they are posted in the first place. I have observed that the mediator in question regularly does give rash statements in general but this is unrelated to the topic and more related to a report on the BN site (which ALSO has another problem in itself). Furthermore, if there was actual discussion that had occurred between the mediators, such a statement like the one provided by (8) will not have occurred either. Keeping the mediator "safe" for these cases that will become even rarer I believe is not worth it in this trade off.
2. This will also require some non-trivial amount of managemental work to handle, as this will require a revamp on stuff regarding how the BN.MG site works, as well as having a server in place where mediations can be discussed. Whether this is feasible or not depends on how much is on the plate for NATs already currently.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Responses

Will start from latest to earliest

@hypercyte that is definitely a good idea to have including the changes I propose. This can allow for vetoes to address multiple issues that are not exactly related whenever needed. The NATs can just post 2+ times in the beatmap modding page and it would be good enough, or just literally have the mediation result(s) on the BN site somewhere when everything is actually public.

@Abraker Taiko and standard would be fine, but mania and catch probably would not be fine consider how few maps of those modes already get ranked anyway.

@Mun and @Voli I agree with what Voli is saying here regarding the topic of being far more punishing to BNs is definitely not going to help in this rate; especially considering that the BNs that the general public believe to be the better ones are the ones that are currently losing BN due to vetoes on maps they nominate. I do believe however that there should still be punishment regarding unrankables being ranked as this is essentially the main job BNs are given in the first place, and ranking unrankables is essentially just not doing their job. This, and clear abuse / lack of care of their power like forcing changes they dont believe to be that major using the veto system, and "yolo-ranking" beatmaps for example should still be definite reasons for punishing BNs.

@Many people: WHO are we to believe what proper competency and capability are? I am seeing a lot of people here saying that BN competency is on the low currently, but as it stands, BNs are simply just RC checkers and making sure nothing they think is a "major issue" exists. You would need to change the definition of BNs as it stands completely in order to create it to something that many of us would believe as "more competent / capable". I COMPLETELY agree with what Noffy has stated regarding this. Looking at BN competency is not the right way to go about this as it stands and could even be considered unrelated to the original post.

@camellirite essentially what my points aim to propose as well. It would be a very good idea to create this qualified limbo in the way I suggested via version history, and to remove the neutral option altogether

@tz8zs and Left: I do not believe changing vetoes to function like that will be efficient for things. If the one who will veto is COMPLETELY unsatisfied with the responses given, or is just straight up not given responses, then I believe this this should cause for a DQ which would ultimately be a veto for further discussion to occur.

@Kite: I believe far more action is required while mediating such as actual discussion occurring and more of the mapper themselves partaking in it as well, and I don't think the proposal will change much in the grand scheme of things, but I do think that your proposal is a 100% upgrade from current.

@Smokeman: Completely agree. While ur post was before GN Junior's veto regarding Vell's difficulty name which caused him to lose his BN title (which to be COMPLETELY HONEST I didn't even think it was that bad considering what other vetoes that had happened the past 3 months were for, NATs plz), your point is still valid. I do believe however that hypercyte's method of having multiple points in a veto is a very good idea. In the case where this has been circumvented / abused / loopholed, it should be grounds for punishment.

@Bibbity Bill: It's a good agree to opt out, but I believe there will be cases where the overwhelming majority of mediators will opt out at the end and will end up having far too many people actually partaking in mediation.

@Crissa: An anonymous jury is NOT avoiding bias at all. In fact this is all completely built upon the idea of bias where we are discussing about an issue that is to be considered majorly subjective. If this is the reason for anonymity then I do not think it's doing anything at all. I agree regarding the 3 day time limit being far too short. 7 days is good especially if we do add the discussion factor into mediation as well.

@Drum-Hitnormal: I'm sure you've been told already but when u never see a map until its qualified then it's quite literally impossible to.

@DeviousPanda: Agree with you on making vetoes harder since they are supposed to be a last resort in any case, and not increasing punishment for BNs. In fact I think there shouldn't be punishment in the case where there's subjective DQs in the first place. I don't believe having ANYONE override whatever they may believe is "right" or "wrong" themselves is the best option to go with in any case ever as well, and I think this shouldnt be the case for minor issues as well, even when it's obvious almost no one agree with the veto.

@Serizawa: 100% agree with ur first and second points, I 100% disagree with the handpicked idea to solve the "representation" issue. Letting someone just choose who will be allowed to say something on a whim is bad, and I think even the RNG factor is far better than that. I do think if we do go with the "specialized" group idea I stated however, I think we could have them stay small and just have them mediate instead. Again though, it's not entirely a practical idea. 100% agree on having problem stamps not immediately DQ however, and have the veto/DQ occur after any form of discussion happen.

@Cheri We already discussed about this but the reason vetoes don't have any "drama" to them is because the mappers dont't really care about the point in the first place either way and just changes it because it's whatever to them. These issues should not be considered as vetoes and instead should just be created as problem stamps first if the modder believes it to be major, and suggestion if minor, and then fixed quickly while in qualified. The veto should occur after discussion occurs / if there has been no case of the mapper trying to discuss. I 100% agree with ur last point however since they won't change a thing, but can be good. Having different timers for different things is really iffy though so just going with 7 on everything is fine as it is.

@Myxo and @Kite: Lol they definitely arent as transparent as they could be. I am however trying to propose more for it with the suggestions I have stated above.

@Nuvo: Agree 100% with this. It's as impractice to define what the community's opinion is as much as it is impractical to "raise the competency / capability level" of BNs. I suggest that we do not try to tackle either issue currently.

@Mirash: This is impossible to ask for people. If they believe it is a major issue, then they will post it. However, I do think shifting the vetoes to after discussion instead of having them occur immediately when a QAH spots a major issue is a good way of tackling this.

@byfar, Nikakis, and anyone else regarding the suggestion of 2+ BNs to veto: I don't think more than 2 should be required to go to mediation. As there are 2 BNs to push a map via nomination, there should be 2 BNs to call off the map from pushing to rank via mediation. It MOST PROBABLY will not change anything, but it definitely makes a more fairer ground, AND will also cause for vetoes like on Vell's map and similar to occur far less.

@Moecho: Agree 100% with this. In fact discussion should still continue even after the veto has happened via mediation.

@Sylvarus: Also agree 100%. Already stated reasons in other replies but defining these 3 things is definitely non-trivial to say the least.


TL;DR (I cannot TL;DR my 3 main points from the beginning, I would highly recommend reading through all of that part):
I would like to say, it seems like the 3 main points here discussed are regarding giving NATs absolute power, having 2+ BNs for veto / mediation, and vetoes not aligning with the "general public". If it hasn't been obvious I disagree with the first, agree with second (but only 2), and I think that the third is an unsolvable issue.

1. 2 BNs vetoing is a good idea when the mapper does not provide "good enough" reasoning or lack of, as its fair ground due to having 2 BNs nominate. It won't change much aside for killing off vetoes where absolutely noone agrees with which do occur more than once in any case.
2. Giving NATs absolute power is (in my eyes at least) a terrible band-aid fix since it does not address the issue directly, and will ultimately be based on what a single person / some of the NAT think regarding the issue. Trust between the community and the NAT should be created before this is even considered.
3. Nothing that will be done will be completely aligned with whatever that could even be considered as "community opinion". The best that can be done is to make it closer to what we could consider as community opinion which may not even be what we are looking for, nor the best thing to do.

EDIT EDIT EDIT EDIT EDIT: I forgot to write this bit down and I went to break my fast right after posting this.

AFAIK at least from the outside, there's only 1 BN (Cheri) that is doing essentially +50% of the QAH work and noone else, and they are probably doing 100s more than everyone else. I think this is also an inherent problem as relying on just 1 person to do all the work of something that is meant to be done by multiple people is definitely not the way to go even when different opinions are taken before posting any issues. There needs to be far more people doing QAH work so it's not just relied on just 1 person only. Changing the definition of the work that BNs do will definitely help in alleviating this issue, as most BNs probably do not even touch QAH work currently since they aren't necessarily obligated to.



ANOTHER EDIT Updated information regarding timer freezes based on the discussion with clayton below community/forums/posts/7468893 as well as linked an elaboration on the qualified system changes above

Also crossed out 1 of the issues in my 3rd point based on pishi's statement community/forums/posts/7469475

ok I feel dumb saying this for like third time this thread but I think all of this is great ideas for a lot of reasons

so just comments on what I either didn't understand or didn't completely agree with, it's all in the first section "Changing how Qualified works". the rest of your post looks great to me if it's not a monumental task to give to NAT and pishi/milan

2. The mapper will now apply the mods WHILE in qualified, when they upload, the new version of the map folder will be placed in an "unofficial state" (call it whatever u want I will continue calling it unofficial state).
3. Once the unofficial state is up, both the version that was initially sent to qualified, and this version will both be downloadable, and the time the map stays in qualified DOES NOT decrease.

maybe I'm just missing the point here, but what's the reason that the map stays in qualified with a frozen timer instead of just going back to pending here? is it to keep the feeling that the map is on its way to ranked without the pressure of a countdown to ranked? the next step you list is having 2 more BNs confirm changes, which is basically identical to renominating the map from what I can tell, unless you mean that the original nominators would be unable to take part in this step(and again I don't really see the point in that)

I'm also not following what happens if the mapper refuses to apply such a change, because you never mentioned the map gets DQ'd and I'm wondering what the condition is for the qualified timer to freeze. like what if the mapper never submits an update for the unofficial state, not because they didn't get around to the mod, but because they disagreed? I think timer could be frozen when people post mods, similar to how maps are DQ'd today.

It sounds like you meant to answer these questions already but I just didn't understand what the answers would be from reading ur idea. pls spell out for dumb ppl like me

Of course if the issue is large to the point where the mapper agrees but would take time to fix, then the mapper can call for DQ themselves as well. In fact, I believe that the mapper themselves should be allowed to disqualify their own map as well.

definitely agree with bold part. I'm just confused again what is the significance between DQ vs. Qualified-but-frozen-timer.

IMO with the new changes you propose about freezing and resetting the timer to ranked, I don't see the need for DQs unless the mapper says they aren't interested in ranked at all anymore or completely refuse to apply any changes. this way the ranking process would feel less like push-and-pull and more like push-or-halt (i hope this makes sense lol)

First is that this is a lot of work web-dev side. It would take some time to develop this and it solely depends on if they believe this as well as the many other reasons outside of the ranked system is worth the effort to implement.

there are a lot of great reasons to have beatmap version control, and the main dev team already expressed interest in this before, but there isn't much you can do besides ask those guys because BSS and beatmap storage etc. is all tied into the backend systems that aren't open-source (yet?). I think client-side work would also need to be done to make version control not feel like a super janky system, imagine having 5 seemingly identical mapsets in ur song select with just a few objects changed on each...

Second is regarding how qualified duration would work now. [...] One way to go about all of this is to shorten the duration a map is in qualified, and to have the time reset whenever it gets disqualified / changes are applied and approved

i think this idea is good, the only thing to watch out for is too short of qualified time where some active BNs may miss checking it. gotta consider that some people are only able to do osu! things on weekends and stuff like that

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if ur idea turns out to be supported by a lot of ppl I'd b down 2 try to push on the development side of things cuz I've already looked into beatmap versioning a lot for an unrelated reason

You are correct that this would essentially "feel less like push-and-pull and more like push-or-halt." The reason I am suggesting removing the avoidance of taking back to pending via this system is that from the mappers I had talked to, they are often considering not to apply changes even if they agree with them because they don't want to deal with the "hassle" of getting the map disqualified by someone, updating the changes, and then getting the 2 BNs to recheck the entire map and re-qualify it again. This is also the motivating factor for some regarding why some QAH post problem stamp vetoes instead of suggestions. To have a system where the mapper just updates immediately and gets 2 BNs to check the changes and confirm is seemingly much easier based on what most mappers have told me. It's honestly more of a mentality change than anything else though since the mapper is still trying to get 2 BNs to look at the changes again; however, I do know that most QAH BNs post after asking others anyway, and the QAH BN is essentially 1 BN that can just check the changes and confirm anyway. I see this as something with much less hassle in my view, but it might still be able to be improved.

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Let me try to elaborate more on how the qualified section would work in this case:
After the QAH BN or someone elses posts 1 or a few mod points, the mapper will ultimately take 1 of 3 directions, the mapper changes stuff, the mapper rejects stuff, or the mapper simply does not respond.

When the mapper changes stuff:

1. The mapper will upload their changes and this new update will be an "unofficial state" downloadable by anyone accessible by anyone alongside the "official" version. They can update as many times as needed, the unofficial state version would be the latest update.
2. Some amount of BNs (initially I had 1, some people suggested 2 instead or even include NAT) will then check these changes (usually will be the QAH BN who modded) and approve it.
3. Once approving the changes, the leaderboard resets, and the version that was in the "unofficial state" becomes the "official" version of the beatmap.
4. Depending on which time duration function used, the timer until ranked will resume from when the first unofficial state was uploaded.
5. Le profit

When the mapper rejects stuff:

1. If the QAH BN is satisfied with the response given / discussion with the mapper, then nothing else happens.
2. If the QAH BN is not satisfied with the response given / discussion with the mapper, then the QAH BN or the mapper themselves may veto the beatmap + disqualify it.
3. Once disqualified, the mapper and vetoer both submit their piece to mediation, and then mediation occurs and what not

When the mapper does not respond after a given amount of time, the QAH BN just disqualifies the map until the mapper is back to life.

So DQs would essentially occur in 3 cases: Unrankables exist, QAH BN thinks the mapper's reasons are Terribad, mapper never responds to mods

how MUCH time should be given to the mapper I don't know personally, I think 48 hours would be good enough for that but yea