Context
Collected Data
Conclusions and Proposal
As previously stated, the gathered data shows an overwhelming consensus from the community that a change in the Spread Requirements section of RC needs to happen as soon as possible to help solving the current stagnation of the mode as whole, and specially to improve the quality and variety of the ranked section. How to achieve this change is of course a matter of disagreements, and therefore we have tried to modulate the proposal in order to accomodate the preferences of all positions involved.
This proposal's objective is to act both as a relaxation and also as a re-definition of how spreads are built and defined: instead of only being able to define spreads from the lowest required difficulty, mappers would now be free to define them from their topdiff. This model would come with various benefits:
Cheers! ♥
P.S: The PR in Github to implement the changes will be created in the next couple days after we figure out where to include these in the mania-specific RC page
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During the last month, various threads and proposals have arised to discuss and propose changes to the spread requirement sections of Ranking Criteria. The excessive usage of graveyard as a permanent map storage was deemed partially a result of the stagnation of the mode's ranking section in an initial discussion that intended to increase the limit of pending maps; this thread saw a common opinion be conceived, about both hitsound requirements and spread requirements being major roadblocks to achieve a higer diversity and quality in the ranked section. Full mapset hitsounding is not necessary anymore after this week's changes, so now it's the time to finally get to work on spread requirements.
Abraker contributed to the matter with two proposals vouching first for a relaxation of the requirements, and later a complete removal of those. These discussions, as expected, weren't totally able to reach a common consensus but gave a clear hint that a majoritary part of the community saw changes on spread requirements as necessary. This is understandable, as it constitutes a much broader topic than hitsounds with longterm consequences on the mode's ecosystem way larger as well, as spreads seem to be both a pillar and a limitation to the current Mania ecosystem.
This difficulty for reaching for consensus with a lineal forum discussion was what drove us to conduct a proper data collection process in order to listen to the community and ensure that every opinion is heard and accounted for.
Abraker contributed to the matter with two proposals vouching first for a relaxation of the requirements, and later a complete removal of those. These discussions, as expected, weren't totally able to reach a common consensus but gave a clear hint that a majoritary part of the community saw changes on spread requirements as necessary. This is understandable, as it constitutes a much broader topic than hitsounds with longterm consequences on the mode's ecosystem way larger as well, as spreads seem to be both a pillar and a limitation to the current Mania ecosystem.
This difficulty for reaching for consensus with a lineal forum discussion was what drove us to conduct a proper data collection process in order to listen to the community and ensure that every opinion is heard and accounted for.
Collected Data
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To gather the playerbase and mapper's opinions on the topic, we designed a survey in which respondants were asked both general profiling questions and spread-related ones. This has been repeated over several times, but of course the survey was designed in order to be as neutral and objective as possible, and was reviewed by multiple NATs and BNs to ensure it.
The results and numerical findings of the survey have been publicly shared in the following website:
> Survey Results <
From here on, we would like to conduct some unbiased result analysis:
The results and numerical findings of the survey have been publicly shared in the following website:
> Survey Results <
From here on, we would like to conduct some unbiased result analysis:
- In all cases, we have seen that Keeping the current rules is an inmensely minoritary option, even among mappers used to ranking sets and therefore used to the current spread criteria. There is a consensus that a change needs to happen.
- We have observed an always theorised disconnetion between the mapping and playing faces of the community: most non-mapping players give a higher priority to a complete removal of the spread requirements (>63%), while those who do map lean towards a relaxation of the requirements, and a good portion of them tend to disagree with a removal. It's important to take into account though that the data here is certainly biased and may overrepresent removal preferrencies between the playing face of the community: more than >80% of respondants where rank #10k or higher, and therefore naturally less dependant on full spreads for their playing necessities.
- Lower skilled players have a higher tendency to believe Keeping the current spread rules would be more benefitial for them than Removing them (albeit keeping still being the minoritary option). In all cases and skill ranges, a relaxation is still the overall preferred option, both as first and second choices.
- Mappers with ranked maps have a stronger tendency to prefer a Relaxation than mappers who don't have any ranked maps. This could be interpreted in different ways: new faces to the ranked section could arise with a more aggresive revamp of the requirements, and/or mappers experienced in making spreads understand the cruciality of mantaining a sufficient influx of content for players in all skill ranges. Both hypothesis are consolidated looking at the results from the "Mapper-specific questions" in the survey results.
Conclusions and Proposal
As previously stated, the gathered data shows an overwhelming consensus from the community that a change in the Spread Requirements section of RC needs to happen as soon as possible to help solving the current stagnation of the mode as whole, and specially to improve the quality and variety of the ranked section. How to achieve this change is of course a matter of disagreements, and therefore we have tried to modulate the proposal in order to accomodate the preferences of all positions involved.
Proposed RC wrote:
If the drain time of each osu!mania difficulty is...Difficulties below the highest difficulty can combine break times with drain time to meet the above thresholds. This does not apply to difficulties with less than 30 seconds of drain time. Judgement regarding the suitability of gameplay elements used for any lowest difficulty Hard and Insane difficulties is up to the Beatmap Nominators and Nomination Assessment Team members for the corresponding game modes.
- ...lower than 2:30, the lowest difficulty of each included keymode cannot be harder than a Normal,
OR each keymode must provide a spread starting at least 3 difficulty levels below the highest difficulty.- ...between 2:30 and 3:15, the lowest difficulty of each included keymode cannot be harder than a Hard,
OR each keymode must provide a spread starting at least 2 difficulty levels below the highest difficulty.- ...between 3:15 and 4:00, the lowest difficulty of each included keymode cannot be harder than an Insane,
OR each keymode must provide a spread starting at least 1 difficulty level below the highest difficulty.
For difficulties above the lowest required difficulty level, the spread cannot skip any difficulty levels and there cannot be any drastically large difficulty gaps between any two difficulties. On difficulties Insane and harder, a proper spread is defined by relative difficulty gaps similar to those formally defined between lower difficulties.
Current General RC
Current General RC wrote:
If the drain time of each difficulty is...Difficulties below the highest difficulty can combine break times with drain time to meet the above thresholds. This does not apply to difficulties with less than 30 seconds of drain time. Judgement regarding the suitability of gameplay elements used for any lowest difficulty Hard and Insane difficulties is up to the Beatmap Nominators and Nomination Assessment Team members for the corresponding game modes.
- ...lower than 3:30, the lowest difficulty of each included game mode cannot be harder than a Normal.
- ...between 3:30 and 4:15, the lowest difficulty of each included game mode cannot be harder than a Hard.
- ...between 4:15 and 5:00, the lowest difficulty of each included game mode cannot be harder than an Insane.
Reworded General RC
Reworded General RC wrote:
If the drain time of each difficulty is...Difficulties below the highest difficulty can combine break times with drain time to meet the above thresholds. This does not apply to difficulties with less than 30 seconds of drain time. Judgement regarding the suitability of gameplay elements used for any lowest difficulty Hard and Insane difficulties is up to the Beatmap Nominators and Nomination Assessment Team members for the corresponding game modes.
- ...lower than 3:30, the lowest difficulty of each included game mode cannot be harder than a Normal.
- ...between 3:30 and 4:15, the lowest difficulty of each included game mode cannot be harder than a Hard.
- ...between 4:15 and 5:00, the lowest difficulty of each included game mode cannot be harder than an Insane.
osu!mania beatmaps are binded by a different set of spread rules defined in the osu!mania-specific Ranking Criteria. This is to allow for easier approachability to osu!mania mappers of different upbringings, and to account for the mode's rhythm construction.
This proposal's objective is to act both as a relaxation and also as a re-definition of how spreads are built and defined: instead of only being able to define spreads from the lowest required difficulty, mappers would now be free to define them from their topdiff. This model would come with various benefits:
- More difficulty-focused or complex sets due to song choice may not need to create oversimplified or throwaway Normal difficulties, which was a common request between experienced mappers in the survey.
- Mitigates the problem of "rigid thresholds" from the current model or a simple relaxation, specially for harder sets, by means of more homogeneous spread creation requirements:
- Example: For a set with a very hard U top difficulty (i.e. Blocko's We Want To Run), a difference between 5:00 and 4:59 draintime meant that 5 additional difficulties needed to be mapped to meet spread criteria. With the proposed model, this would be reduced to only 1 additional difficulty, as the spread can be constructed from the top difficulty. We hope this gives the "drain times" model a fairer look compared to the current implementation.
- Protects the influx of basic difficulties on the type of sets that currently provide this type of content (mainly simpler ENHI anime TV Size sets and ENHIX rhythmgame-core/VSRG sets), which expectably make up from the overwhelming majority of ranked sets in the mode.
Cheers! ♥
P.S: The PR in Github to implement the changes will be created in the next couple days after we figure out where to include these in the mania-specific RC page
