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[Discussion] Remove spread requirements for all gamemodes

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abraker
This thread is a complementary thread to the mania specific one and is made to figure out how to keep rules for spreads consistent for all gamemodes. Consensus in that thread is that mania would benefit from a trial period without spread rules, however there may be issues applying this to other gamemodes.

I'd like people from all gamemodes to contribute in this discussion.

Here are relevant points made in the other thread
From: community/forums/posts/8295617

UberFazz wrote:

the logic here is that the low diff output will remain the same (or very similar) while also allowing sets that *don't* have these low diffs to have leaderboards

to elaborate, the idea is that the majority of mappers/BNs who push low diffs for rank already will continue to push them while getting sets without low diffs to rank as well

yes, more likely than not it'll result in a decrease of ranked low diffs, but the argument is that this decrease will be too minor to offset the benefit of ranking sets without low diffs

again, we can't know what would happen for sure which is why a "test run" of sorts seems like a nice idea — we can gague the change in ranked low diffs and use that information to make a more "final" decision, and worst case scenario we go a month or 2 with very few low diffs
From: community/forums/posts/8295591

Nao Tomori wrote:

dunno why you are framing it like low diffs will still exist if you remove these guidelines. this situation exists because people don't even make low diffs for the express purpose of ranking their sets, you expect them to make them after they aren't needed? that's why your bns and nats are suggesting to loosen the criteria rather than remove them entirely.
From: community/forums/posts/8296101

MCPXiaoBai wrote:

Back to spread requirements, the reason why the whole thing exists is because mappers won’t make lower diffs voluntarily. I think relying on mapper’s self-discipline to create lower spreads is too idealistic. I also wanted to add a point that spread requirements are encouraging mappers to map longer songs as they have less spread requirements. (as well as hitsound requirements) If these requirements are no longer existing, it will very likely lead to mappers spamming TV size maps towards ranked section. With the limited amount of nominations per month, will the rank scene become more diversified? Or being dominated by TV sizes?
From: community/forums/posts/8299974

UberFazz wrote:

There's a huge difference between forcing people to comply with rules to increase the quality of a map, as you yourself say, and forcing people to create more content to cater to a specific audience.

I agree that the RC exists to uphold quality; anyone can agree on that. However, mapping more diffs DOES NOT increase quality.

One is improving already existing content. The other asks for more content.

clayton wrote:

also, apparently this is a more extreme view than most have, but I find the idea of making mappers do significant extra work to immortalize their otherwise enjoyable maps appalling. osu! is a game, for the creators too, and the fact that many people enjoying mapping avoid Ranked for a reason like this shows that something important has been lost along the way.
As peppy himself said, ranked is meant to immortalize maps that players enjoy. It's NOT made to appeal to new players, intermediate players, or anyone in particular for that matter. Upholding such arbitrary standards leaves heaps of maps without this "immortal" status, and all because they need to provide extra content that's totally separate from the thing they want to immortalize. This just makes no sense.

To the argument of "new players want to see a song they like and play it," what happens when there is no map of a song, something that I'm sure happens quite frequently? Should we start forcing experienced mappers to start mapping songs they don't even enjoy just to cater to these players? No, of course not, that's ridiculous.

That's how I see the current system.
From: community/forums/posts/8299962

Nao Tomori wrote:

BNs broadly will fall into two camps - either they will agree with the removal of low diffs and nominate these higher diff maps, or they won't agree and refuse to nominate those maps. The BNs that refuse will run out of maps to nominate as mappers by and large will do the minimum and not create unneeded low diffs. Therefore, the population will change to align with the ranking criteria - more selective BNs will be less active and represent a smaller portion and absolute number of maps being nominated, and therefore the incidence of spreads will be lower.
_underjoy
Spread reqs are literally halting progress of ranking in mania, that has lots of lower level content anyway.
Noffy
I can't bring myself to agree with bringing it to other modes. osu!mania is part of a very broad VSRG genre, many players come from and can also play very similar VSRG games, changing the learning curve and general approach.

An issue on other level making game communities where custom levels are a thing is the majority of user made content will cater to the harder end, since they get into making stuff after playing for a while.

This can be frustrating and restrictive from the player's point of view and reduce their available song choice significantly, especially for osu! Which is entirely community content.

I think this is a bigger problem for osu! and osu!catch which don't have much for other active and equivalent games that players can additionally use to learn from. I think it would be unhealthy going forward as many more songs would be left without accessible options.

The current spread rules are pretty balanced as they are to account for amount of work involved and the endurance of newer players not being able to play longer songs as well to start with, doesn't seem like something that needs changing IMO
Nao Tomori
agree w noffy, we dont have 17 other very similar games to borrow new players / maps from
moonpoint
Sure, do it as a trial period. I'd be interested in seeing how many (new) sets go for ranked while still making lower diffs despite not requiring them.
Mordred
awful idea
UberFazz
i don't see any possible harm in a trial period fwiw, even in the worst case scenario (0 low diffs ranked somehow)

but yea my pov has already been shared in the mania thread

tl;dr forcing work that doesn't improve quality is a very strange mindset to have for a system that's supposed to give quality maps a "permanent" status

another key point: if so many BNs are against the idea then this won't change much in the grand scheme of things since they're in control of the ranked section, it'll just allow more freedom in ranked for the people that support it
Eni
From a music point of view this could be cool. Some music genres are genuinely very hard to create low diffs for, and by removing this limitation we enable more music genres to get ranked in osu!

From a mapping point of view I don't think this is realistic. Mappers consistently do the lowest effort required to rank their maps, and I admit that less difficulties makes modding and pushing sets easier. Since doing the least amount of work possible is human nature, a bare minimum is necessary.
DeletedUser_10235296
I would like to just say in the greater context, what would a trial period of spread guideline removal do that's negative? To those worried about the potential for lower diffs to disappear, a trial period literally prevents that. Would we not like to gain the knowledge of whether or not these guidelines are actually essential for each mode? I'll implore anyone here who hasn't to read up on the mania thread here as even though a lot of the topics are incredibly specific to mania and the communities that migrate to it, there are still topics discussed that apply to osu as a whole.

Nothing ventured nothing gained as I see it. If we gave a spread removal a trial period for any of the modes and it proves detrimental to the mapping landscape, that's why it's a trial period.
Noffy
The thing about a trial period is unless it's extremely long most of the maps going for rank will have already existed and have spreads for the previous rules too, making it hard to see if it's actually accurate to long term reality.

It's not like they're gonna see the rule change and be like "oh gonna delete these diffs I was made to make"
UberFazz

Noffy wrote:

The thing about a trial period is unless it's extremely long most of the maps going for rank will have already existed and have spreads for the previous rules too, making it hard to see if it's actually accurate to long term reality.

It's not like they're gonna see the rule change and be like "oh gonna delete these diffs I was made to make"
We could have an announcement in advance that could attempt to mitigate this issue.

It's not like new maps/maps that have never had sets would suddenly disappear either. There would be an opportunity to push sets like these and see what the landscape looks like (what BNs are push and what people are mapping) while also keeping the aforementioned factor in mind.
DeletedUser_10235296

Noffy wrote:

The thing about a trial period is unless it's extremely long most of the maps going for rank will have already existed and have spreads for the previous rules too
It can be made longer then to yield results if that's the concern. I'll also reiterate what many of us said in the other thread, regarding poor quality lower diffs. If I were forced to create lower difficulties I wasn't interested in making because my map fits within an abstract time parameter, I would gladly delete them if my map would suddenly become viable without them as that isn't the content I wish to put out there.

There's a surprising number of people in the community who heavily bias accessibility and inclusivity over quality, which while that's great for those purposes, it's also shafting plenty of maps in the process that aren't created solely for that reason. We can spin in circles over what defines quality as well, but it's just my two cents. I don't like seeing seasoned mappers forced to create bloat just for the purpose of newer players hearing a song they like in the game.

EDIT: Here is also a link timestamped to around when spread guidelines were discussed in the recent osu!dev meeting for any who missed that
Mimari
agree w/ mordred
-White
agree w/ mimari
Hivie
agree with mordred/mimari/others, this really seems like a mania-only problem so why involve other modes in this? almost no one complains about spread requirements there and it will surely do much more harm than good
ZiRoX

Penguinosity wrote:

There's a surprising number of people in the community who heavily bias accessibility and inclusivity over quality, which while that's great for those purposes, it's also shafting plenty of maps in the process that aren't created solely for that reason. We can spin in circles over what defines quality as well, but it's just my two cents. I don't like seeing seasoned mappers forced to create bloat just for the purpose of newer players hearing a song they like in the game.
Other modes besides mania don't have 893382 clones you could relay on to have players learn how to play, so you need those lower difficulties. And since they are a need, you can't call that bloat content.

Besides, what's the issue with these quality maps that don't fit the spread rules getting loved instead?
UberFazz
it's not what loved is for. if we had something like old approved (see: big black or airman) i could see something like that happening, but not with the current systems
yaspo
This trial seems okay for gamemodes that suffer a lack of content - mania specifically, not so much for gamemodes that already have a plenty abundant amount of maps being ranked.

One reason is that this trial very intentionally spikes up the content available for ranked by targeting maps that would otherwise be a single diff in the graveyard. For a mode like standard this kind of spike is a complete disaster. The ranking queue won't be able to hold it, which will have significant consequences for how the ranked section is interacted with.

Another is yeah, other gamemodes work fine with the current spread rules, so let's not hastily try to fix what's not broken? Significant issues have been explained and identified for the mania side of things, but those issues don't necessarily translate to other gamemodes. If there's things we'd like to see change or improve in terms of spread requirements for other gamemodes, let's start there and not with opening the floodgates.

Lastly, from the pro-side of the argumentation that I'm reading, this idea has a completely different set of values and goals than the current spread-rules do. It's basically jumping from one extreme to the other, regardless of which extreme we're at there will always be people who aren't satisfied. So, there's really no good reason to make this jump without discussing things and considering alternatives (when it comes to other gamemodes)
-mint-
agree w/ whoever said the least amount of words here

edit: there just has to be some sort of way to make it so that mappers dont have to feel *obliged* to make difficulties they would rather not want to. im pretty confident a lot of mappers will still enjoy mapping spreads, and continue to do so. after all, lower difficulties are what carry a lot of the popularity for mapsets. lest there be an absence of a rankability incentive for mapping obligatory lower diffs, there is a separate reason for mappers to strive for accessibility. maybe lower diffs wont be cluttered with stuff that mappers didnt give a shit about, and will rather be filled with maps in which the mappers actually gave a damn about the players of that skill range
Davvy
I guess I'll post some quick thoughts.

It seems extremely strange to me that we'd need to make spread rules apply to all gamemodes, when in reality all of these separate gamemodes are FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT GAMES. Because we are fundamentally different, we have different problems plaguing the community, therefore applying it to everyone doesn't make everyone happy because not all injuries are the same. There might be some crossover sure, there might be people who are really good at every gamemode, but that still doesn't change that the overall audience, where they come from, where the mappers are coming from, how the community is structured, every variable matters in making it a different game. And when we are different games, why do we need to share the exact same system when it comes to arbitrarily drawing the line on what is considered good enough to pass the official ranking threshold?

And just for good measure, arguing that "all these maps go in loved duhhhhhhhhhhhhh" is so backwards, because loved moves extremely slow (like 6-7 maps a MONTH) and even if you were to speed it up, it's still going to be a popularity contests and should that really be the goal for maps that can't pass an arbitrary threshold for ranking? Is everything suddenly a popularity contest? A BN should have the power to choose what type of content they wanna see ranked, and I can't tell you how many times I've been blocked from seeing stuff I really like getting ranked because the mappers don't really wanna bother making spreads/hitsounds for it, it's actually fucking infuriating.
UberFazz

yaspo wrote:

This trial seems okay for gamemodes that suffer a lack of content - mania specifically, not so much for gamemodes that already have a plenty abundant amount of maps being ranked.

One reason is that this trial very intentionally spikes up the content available for ranked by targeting maps that would otherwise be a single diff in the graveyard. For a mode like standard this kind of spike is a complete disaster. The ranking queue won't be able to hold it, which will have significant consequences for how the ranked section is interacted with.

Another is yeah, other gamemodes work fine with the current spread rules, so let's not hastily try to fix what's not broken? Significant issues have been explained and identified for the mania side of things, but those issues don't necessarily translate to other gamemodes. If there's things we'd like to see change or improve in terms of spread requirements for other gamemodes, let's start there and not with opening the floodgates.

Lastly, from the pro-side of the argumentation that I'm reading, this idea has a completely different set of values and goals than the current spread-rules do. It's basically jumping from one extreme to the other, regardless of which extreme we're at there will always be people who aren't satisfied. So, there's really no good reason to make this jump without discussing things and considering alternatives (when it comes to other gamemodes)
This is a fair response. It's true that in the grand scheme of things the rules aren't a "big issue" for other gamemodes, but I personally disagree with how it's done in principle.

My mindset is the same as peppy's; ranked is for giving leaderboards to maps people enjoy and shouldn't be unnecessarily restrictive.

I'm all for seeing steps towards loosening the rules, even if the steps are small.
RandomeLoL
Okay I'll have to explain this properly as to not go against my other claims in the other post, but I'll quote Davvy on this as to why this should NOT be applied to all gamemodes.

It seems extremely strange to me that we'd need to make spread rules apply to all gamemodes, when in reality all of these separate gamemodes are FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT GAMES. [...]
I'm extremely confused why the issue has spread (No pun intended) to all gamemodes in the first place. I was already confused to get opinions based on other modes basing myself on the same premise that all modes are different and it's hard to generalize such rules.

This comment is said both to negatively go against global changes on spreads, whilst reinforcing the Mania-only change: But I believe that for proposals whose problems want to mainly tackle one mode's issues should not be applied globally. These issues should be solved CASE BY CASE by its respective gamemode. So yes, I am against this global proposal. Each respective mode as a whole should be able to comment what's best for its mode.

Therefore, while I wouldn't mind changes on Mania spreads for the reasons posted on the original Mania-Only suggestion, I'm fully against globalizing it. I just hope to envoy that we should stop generalizing completely different games, as the standards of quality for ones might be fully stagnating or conflicting with those of other modes.
Noffy
Yeah I definitely think mania has its own needs and ecosystem, with so many mappers and players coming from other places, so I didn't have an issue with the mania-centric hitsound and spread changes. Just big no for other modes atm
Quenlla
Absolutely necessary for Mania, probably not desireable for other modes.

For Mania, I think a trial run would be necessary, and I'd personally prefer a middle ground (that is, pretty relaxed spread requirements in terms of drain time vs. spread requirements).
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