Recent discussions [1] [2] about popular graveyarded osu!mania maps and how they are not eligible for ranked has lead to discussions about what hinders them from being ranked. One of the prominent reasons stated is the need to have a difficulty spread.
I will copy over some of the discussion regarding that to have a starting point.
from community/forums/posts/8289058:
I will copy over some of the discussion regarding that to have a starting point.
from community/forums/posts/8289058:
from community/forums/posts/8290818:Playboi Carti wrote:
Not every one charts/maps to reflect ranked criteria, especially some of the requirements are just kind of silly. Basically forcing a mapper to create a difficulty spread of easy/hard/insane or whatever is kind of meaningless since the star rating is useless to a certain extent. Also tying into that is the time constraint, I don't really know if it's changed now, but I remember the difficulty spread being forced if the map was shorter than 5m. All in all, I don't think you consider this useful for the overall game since it's mainly an issue for osu!mania players and it's also one of the many reasons people aren't willing to migrate over.
from community/forums/posts/8291159:Penguinosity wrote:
As for difficulty spreads, we have been constricted by an arbitrary system, based on arbitrary difficulty measurements.
I'm sure there was plenty of deliberation and reasoning that was put into these guidelines. However, they couldn't be further from what the majority of the mapping community feels is fair or sensible. I could make suggestions here to how they could be changed, but for now I will just say that the inclusion of these requirements have felt forced at best. A preference of difficulty spread should be left up to the mappers discretion, and not up to whether the song they chart fits within a predetermined time and difficulty range.
RandomeLoL wrote:
Keep in mind that I'm still an advocate for spreads myself. Accessibility has to be accounted for newer players. Spreads are going nowhere. But I believe the timings could probably be discussed and readjusted for Mania. Getting an exact timeframe now would be difficult as there's a lot of things to account for, such as where do we draw the line between making mapsets accessible to newer players and where do we draw it to alleviate the requirements for mappers.