Hello everyone!

Let's talk about BN activity stuff

Currently, activity is checked on the first of each month, and manually during evaluations, the messy area here is how leave of absences (LoA) is handled, which has been a bit inconsistent so far and has lead to issues like

1. LoA not being communicated well. Sometimes BNs tell one NAT and it gets forgotten about, but the alternative is in a public channel which can be discouraging for some BNs to post in
2. BNs going under the radar with extremely non existent activity for months at a time because the manual inputs can be inconsistent and flawed, extremely long leaves of absence that would be better handled with a resignation and return when they have more time.
3. The mix of automatic checks monthly and manual checks is confusing with some people thinking it's just 1 or the other.

Proposed Changes:

1. Activity requirements will be automated and checked the first of each month, separated from evaluations completely.
   
   1. 9 nominations / 90 days regular activity
   2. 5 nominations / 90 days bottom line activity
2. If a BN falls below the 9 noms / 90 days requirements, but is above the bottom line, they would be warned first and removed if no improvement.
   
   1. If it happens again within a year of the last warning, remove.
3. BNs can file a Leave of Absence on the BN Website, limited to a set amount of time.
4. If someone posts a LoA on the BN website, the activity check will only check for bottom line which is 5 noms / 90 days and not get a warning.
5. Those below the bottom line would be removed either way. No warning at that point.

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Ideally with rejoining being easier, people can come and go if they need/want to be away, but this would be a back up set of checks for when that doesn't happen.

Like are you busy for any reason? Can't? Etc? Post in the BN site, and it will be accounted for consistently.

The goal of this would be to have more consistency and ensure that those who are BN are active as one.


Talking points ->

1. Is the proposed bottom line amount suitable? Higher, lower?
2. How should mania's activity be set? Previously, their activity requirements are lower, with 6 noms per 90 days due to having less "rankable maps" to push through. I'd think this isn't an issue anymore with the recent hitsound and spread changes for mania? Do mania people have input on this?
3. Should there be a length limit on absences? I personally think a month would be fair, since any longer than that you could just like.. resign and come back.
4. Limit per year if any? Maybe a cooldown instead between them so people don't use long absences back to back?
5. With activity checks being more existent, would people still be against easy rejoin for those removed for activity reasons?

_____________________

Feel free to add if I'm missing anything as well to the discussion!

tl;dr: Website doing more for bn activity checks -> strict + consistent. Integrate LoA in bn website. Add bottom line activity where warnings wouldn't be given.

Let's take a week to discuss this unless something goes terribly wrong, I've already checked with pishi and this is all doable website wise.

imo leave of absence should just be removed given the fast-rejoin system. if ur gonna be dead more than a month just leave.

If the minimum activity is 9/90 and with an absence notice you can get away with 5/90, but your proposed limit is also 1 month absence maximum this math doesn't add up. Averaging out you'd get 6/90 (excluding the 1 month absence) so the 1 less nomination probably isn't going to make as big a difference as intended.

Personally I think that absence notices are not nessecary. I think we should keep minimum activity of 9/90 and warn anyone that drops under it. 9/90 is 1 map per 10 days which is not a huge ask. If you have to take time off due to irl reasons and cannot make up for the activity in the rest of the 90 days you could resign and rejoin later due to the recent change to rejoining on good terms?

Regarding Mania stuff, I absolutely don't think increasing our activity requirements is a good idea by any means. By definition the mode requires way more thorough checks even with the changes on spreads and hitsounding requirements, and getting stuff ready to rank if it's unpolished is a really heavy workload due to the multi-dimensionality of the maps (and this is the case for a lot of the stuff that we can now get to rank after the changes).

Also we've discussed this between Mania BN and NAT, and believe that multi-keycount sets should def award more activity than the corresponding to one simple nomination (since they count as separate gamemodes by all means)

Quenlla wrote:

Also we've discussed this between Mania BN and NAT, and believe that multi-mode sets should def award more activity than the corresponding to one simple nomination (since they count as separate gamemodes by all means)

Do you mean multi keymode sets?

for a length limit for an absence 1 month sounds legit, over that might be too much

also agree with ikin that math doesn't work that way, should be 6/90 instead

Mania's activity should be kept because the recent RC changes only make more maps rankable, but do not necessarily make nominating maps easier. The fact that each keymode needs its own spread can still make nominating some maps very time-consuming than others. On the other hand, in my opinion, mania has been known to be stricter in terms of maintaining a reasonable difficulty gap with each other, which also adds difficulty to nomination. These are my experiences in doing nominations for mania, so they can be different for others. Would like to hear other mania people on this.

Agree with ikin about the math

Cant speak on mania activity

1mo absence notice length seems fair esp considering the new good terms stuff (we might wanna be more lax on what good terms means if people are like genuinely getting owned by IRL circumstance)

Seems odd to limit absences considering you never know what'll happen to people, but also with the proposed activity reqs you could only pull off ~4 a year anyway, so that can be the limit if we want

Im still against easy rejoin for activity, because getting kicked for activity is very different than resigning if you know you're going to be inactive

My personal thought about this is we'd better keep the Mania's activity for now. At first, I wanna say something about mania, probably everyone already knew so sorry for my nagging.

1. Mania is the only multi-soundtrack mode in all modes.
   That means most of our checking in mania mode does not just focus on one sound and how it changed. When we focus on multi-sound for each one of them, we need to pay attention to the combination as well with no matter 4k -> 10k (more keys, more complicated.).
   -
2. Mania has many different keymodes. Different keys decide different workloads
   I won't say 4k is easy to check, just like I said above, checking them with multi-sound at sametime is hard enough, let alone there are many different combinations of it with "notes (single hit-object) and LN (long note)". If this comes to 5k, 6k, 7k, or higher key, this problem will become more obvious. More col means we can catch more sound, but more sound we need time to check them more complicated.

hitsound and spread changes for mania sounds a good thing but that just "Lowered" the threshold of rank. Our workload of checking hasn't changed. That means it does not change our checking way.

Those are my immature little suggestions. I'm not too good at writing such large paragraphs of content, and my English level is poor,so forgive me if I said something wrong or misleading expression, I'll fix them asap.

I'll quickly post my thoughts first on the talking points then go into some personal opinions of mine!

1- Is the proposed bottom line amount suitable? Higher, lower? How should mania's activity be set?

Reason why I'll concatenate both questions is because they lay out the same answer: Currently no, the current amount is too low (And it even surprised me it was kept like this for this long since a lot has happened since that exception was first introduced).

As pointed out, with two major changes done in our RC which will broaden the spectrum of maps to choose from, this activity definitely has to go up. I personally believe checking certain mania maps is... quite a waltz in the park. They can be literally be done in just an evening (From my experience with Tandem Nominations).

2- Should there be a length limit on absences?

I believe this depends on what is considered a Long absence with what is considered a short one and getting to know the middle ground in which you'd still be able to ask to rejoin. Personally however, I believe there can be 3 distinctions made out of this:

1. LONG and INDEFINITE leave: If the BN has to go for a long period of time and cannot give an EXACT date of when will he be able to be back, then they should simply leave for the time being and be able to come back afterwards. Currently I cannot comment if they have to go through an exam again or not as my opinions on the test are beyond the scope of this conversation.
2. LONG and DEFINITE leave: If the BN has to go for a long period of time for whatever reason and this time limit exceeds the extreme on the Website, they should be able to talk with their respective NAT about their situation and NATs should be allowed to go over the limits in the page.
   
   HOWEVER, despite this, there should still be a hard limit that no one should be able to overwrite, and that should probably be between 1-3 months MAX (Really arbitrary number, should come up with more precise ones). If their leave is Definite but still outrageous, then it might be better to just leave and come back whenever they can, free of charge!
3. SHORT leave: In this case then the page would directly be used. Maybe setting a 2-4 weeks maximum would be reasonable. Should a BN be available to join in again then they can shorten their leave directly afterwards.
   
   However, this might be abusable (Joining and Leaving, back and forth). So if a BN chooses to leave early they must be sure that they're able to continue as per usual. This can be controlled with two things, one being a hard cap and the other requiring of some NAT work behind the scenes.
   
   1. HARD CAP: Add a Cooldown between absence notifications to avoid joining and leaving back and forth.
   2. SOFT CAP: Require of a reason to leave that NATs would have access to. This reason shouldn't be documented but it shouldn't just be made up bologni and actually be reasonable.

3- Limit per year if any?

Following my previous talking point, I believe this cooldown shouldn't be yearly capped.

4- With activity checks being more existent, would people still be against easy rejoin for those removed for activity reasons?

Personally as commented previously, I have no objective criteria as to decide whether a test would be needed or not for people who leave. I believe this should be assessed on how the BNs performed prior to leaving. If the concern is if they've lost experience along the way, you can always force them into Probation for just a month even with a 1-Month evaluation deadline as to give them a practical test.

But again, no preference on this. I do not have enough experience as to determine how much modding/BN Activities degrades over time of inactivity.

EXTRA THOUGHTS:

Is this system necessary? It streamlines things a lot, I'm all for it!

Is the bottom line system good? The warnings, yes, I get that. However I do not believe it might be a good idea to reduce activity to 5/90 if someone has to leave for 5 days or so. It's not proportional.

Those below the bottom line would be removed either way. No warning at that point. Very fair. If this gets implemented and the system changes, BNs should be responsible for their leaves. Other people shouldn't be around (Unless it's an issue that they cannot convey through any means, in an extreme case scenario that they get completely cut off from the Internet)

Some inputs

bottom line 6 / 90d is fine

length limit on absences.. I would say a month is a bit too short imo, some BNs they do need a little bit more than a month, and the resign and come back thing... it could take another additional month if BN evaluation is slow. I'd say 2 months would be better.
There's also the additional bottom line they have to follow either ways so if they want they could cram a bit of time to check maps before they leave a absence notice, so ye I don't think limiting the leave on absence notice time would do anything

Limit per year doesn't really make sense if you're imposing a bottom line already, just use the bottom line to check for activity

Ofc above all bases on there being a absolute bottom line so that has to get through

There's a worry tho, that's BN cramming 9 nominations every separate 3 months and be dead for 2 months (so basically 9 0 0 9 0 0 cycled), no way to prevent that with the system at the moment

Edit: oh one more thing you can’t prevent people from doing noms that are all low effort 1-minute EN sets, but I think that is being factored in in the BN evaluations already, just a considering point I think

I agree with the suggested activity limits, seems like a more efficient way to manage things for both NAT and BNs

I think RandomeLoL idea of making the reduced activity requirement is quite interesting. It would avoid cases where someone puts a LoA for something that only lasts a week or two to get the reduced requirement that is equivalent to being gone for longer (about 5-6 weeks). So you'd get something like:

Requirement = floor(9 * (90-x)/90) if x <= 40, with x being the extension of the LoA
Requirement = 5, if x > 40 (basically the hard limit of 5 noms / 90 days)

Since there's a bottom line for activity, the duration of the LoA doesn't really matter, as long as the BN can fulfill their activity for the 90-day period. It's up to the BN to evaluate the risk of not being able to cram the activity equivalent to 50 days into a shorter timespan. So a single LoA could last up to 89 days (anything more would be the same as not being available for the whole "cycle").

However, there needs to be a limit to how many LoAs can be used, their combined duration over multiple 90-days periods or their combined reduction in the activity requirement, to prevent someone from using multiple LoAs to have a permanently reduced activity requirement.

Honestly im not really sure about this change since there isnt anything that stops people to just send LoAs every eval period and then effectively their req becomes 5/90 instead of 9/90 and then the 9/90 limit basically becomes nonexistent or wotever but yea



as long as i dont get fucvked doing corsace projects where i sometimes end up only nomming 1 map a whole month (like this september) im chillin

VINXIS wrote:

Honestly im not really sure about this change since there isnt anything that stops people to just send LoAs every eval period and then effectively their req becomes 5/90 instead of 9/90 and then the 9/90 limit basically becomes nonexistent or wotever but yea

to be fair isn't there quite a few things about being BN that are like "there isn't anything that stops people from something", and things generally works just about fine? Then again this does seem a bit less transparent than some actions in comparison ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

anyways changes seem pretty nice, consistency is always good thing to have

personally I'm kinda bit worried with supposed automatized strictness though, considering I tend to be sitting on several maps for months on end just because metal often enough doesn't have many takers to be the 2nds. Makes notable part of my activity reliant on when they happen to be picked by someone else ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Speaking of activities I think proposed change is reasonable however, this may be a bit offtopic but are we able to proceed checks with more granularities when counting activities, i.e., considering the set size and draining time?

Should definitely limit loas to like. max 1 month/year

Mafumafu wrote:

Speaking of activities I think proposed change is reasonable however, this may be a bit offtopic but are we able to proceed checks with more granularities when counting activities, i.e., considering the set size and draining time?

This was something that has always been talked about, but never ended up happening, imo, if activity is to be autochecked, total drain time should be considered too.

ikin5050 wrote:

Personally I think that absence notices are not nessecary. I think we should keep minimum activity of 9/90 and warn anyone that drops under it. 9/90 is 1 map per 10 days which is not a huge ask. If you have to take time off due to irl reasons and cannot make up for the activity in the rest of the 90 days you could resign and rejoin later due to the recent change to rejoining on good terms?

big agree, 9 maps in 90 days is already basically nothing and adding a "bottom line" of 5 maps is really unnecessary...

hard agree with ikin, minimum activity is pretty easy to achieve and we shouldn't encourage it when the BN can simply resign to take their break, and return as a full BN right after (assuming they left on good terms)

I think there shouldn't be any change unless they change the activity score allocation that considering each map's draintime and difficulty sets