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[Discussion] General state of ranking criteria

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Topic Starter
Noffy
Thoughts on current Ranking Criteria

From my point of view, ranking criteria is pretty big and hard to go through. This comes from 2 main things:
  1. -> It shows you ALL rules and guidelines ALL the time even if they're not relevant to your map. Compare this to programs like mapset verifier or aimod which only show you points your map is currently breaking or is at risk of breaking.

    Like why would you care about a giant storyboard section if your map has no storyboard? Why care about skinning if you have no skin? Why care about metadata (TV Size) standardization if you're mapping a full length English pop song?
  2. -> With the community growing over the years, a lot of things that used to be "commonly understood" became more obscure with more new people coming in that didn't know those "common sense" rules yet, so more and more of the common understanding for the basic tenets of what we expect from every map had to be written down to keep it accessible and relatively easy to learn.
However the issue is, basically all of RC DOES have cases where it matters, and can't be easily removed or trimmed down or we would have the same issues that lead to it getting written like this in the first place. It's useful but really intimidating for new mappers and modders.


I think there's a few things to be done to address this:
  1. From my knowledge many of the features of mapset verifier will be built into lazer, so right now we're in a bit of a limbo where it's not in-game but is very helpful in showing you only what you need to know and check for your map. Something in-game to help direct you to getting the program when you upload your map could be very helpful.
  2. Break RC into more sub pages, so people can just check the pages they care about. Just General, Beatmap, Audio, Timing should be kept on the main page as they ALWAYS apply to ALL maps.
  3. Use the breathing room this gives to add images, graphs etc when needed. Many people are visual learners and a wall of text can be a huge turn off. For example, an image would be really helpful to glance at instead of having to read all of the bullet points for how spread requirements scale based off of beatmap length.
Idk this is just a general discussion inspired by what was said at last Sunday's dev meeting https://twitter.com/ppy/status/1439557323245043715?s=20 and I want to know other's thoughts / ideas on how we can improve it as is.
Annabel
PLEASE break up the rc into sub pages it is so long and unnecessarily confusing to new people and foreigners as the massive amount of text is just a lot to sift through to find the handful of things that one may actually need
ZiRoX
I think breaking the RC into more sub pages does more harm than good.

- Having the RC broken into more sub pages would mean someone that isn't that knowleadgeable with the RC would have to potentially look at multiple pages looking for what they need, instead of on a single one.
- It could be argued that is it clear what section everything goes in, so multiple pages wouldn't be an issue. However, the current RC pages have a table of contents to their left, which allow for navigation through the sections in a similar manner.
- Having everything on a single page makes it easier to use Ctrl+F to find relevant stuff, as you search in one go.

If anything, I would suggest having collapsible sections, in order to reduce the amount of text that is displayed at once. Also, maybe it would be worth having a small paragraph near the beginning of the RC stating that the General, Beatmap, Audio, Timing and Metadata sections apply to all beatmaps, while the rest apply only if the mapset in question has said elements (Storyboard, Skinning, etc.).
yaspo
I think subpages would be cool, beyond using images it also allows us to codify certain goals/ideas/whatevers that are associated with certain sections eg. describe the general principles behind metadata and not just the specific rules. Same idea, more space = more different kinds of content

"Audio" and "Timing" could probably be made into subpages as well, for Audio some information relevant to spectrograms might be useful! The "ALWAYS apply to ALL maps" thing doesn't really function here, all maps have backgrounds too y'know - the RC is a fairly universal ruleset.

"Beatmap" is the only one I'm tentative on cuz its rules are the ones that seem the most ambiguous to search for, bad for subpaging. Rather, I'd propose to reword that section completely to make it an extension of "General", covering topics like "drain time", "beatmap host rules" and "difficulty naming" for example. In the event of subpages, grouping rules under "Beatmap" is less necessary.

checking zirox' counterargument ..
I don't think the Ctrl+F argument is all that strong, you'd only Ctrl+f if you know what you're looking for, an extra step in the process doesn't particularly slow that down imo (technically going through unrelated hits already does anyway)
Anyone unfamiliar with the RC trying to Ctrl+F will probably skip past necessary information that applies to their case
Otherwise the second point invalidates the first so lol ?, the RC is indeed split up clearly enough to work with subpages
clayton
was there another discussion involving "page length" or somethn, this seems like a really random non-problem to bring up among the others

Noffy wrote:

Break RC into more sub pages, so people can just check the pages they care about. Just General, Beatmap, Audio, Timing should be kept on the main page as they ALWAYS apply to ALL maps.
isn't this the point of ToC? you already get easy navigation to every section(+sub-section) and without extra page loads. splitting into more pages seems like a loss of convenience for no reason.

eiri- wrote:

PLEASE break up the rc into sub pages it is so long and unnecessarily confusing to new people and foreigners as the massive amount of text is just a lot to sift through to find the handful of things that one may actually need
again I just don't see the point, the amount of text does not change, comprehension requires more clicks and navigation, finding specific bullets becomes more tedious

the only possible change about pages to fix "confusion" is if the groupings created by the pages were better somehow, but then it could just be a matter of changing groupings by section...

yaspo wrote:

I think subpages would be cool, beyond using images it also allows us to codify certain goals/ideas/whatevers that are associated with certain sections eg. describe the general principles behind metadata and not just the specific rules. Same idea, more space = more different kinds of content
page length isn't a restriction. people contributing stuff = more different kinds of content. these are all good ideas that can be added right now if anyone wants to

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Noffy wrote:

[...] add images, graphs etc when needed. Many people are visual learners and a wall of text can be a huge turn off. For example, an image would be really helpful to glance at instead of having to read all of the bullet points for how spread requirements scale based off of beatmap length.
yeah that's a big missing area, I remember pishi talking abt this (images for a lot of rules & concepts) but I guess that never took off. would definitely be a huge help if done right
Topic Starter
Noffy

clayton wrote:

was there another discussion involving "page length" or somethn, this seems like a really random non-problem to bring up among the others
not really page length specifically, but it being hard to approach and difficult to parse, my op is just my perspective on how that could be addressed but we can look at other methods too.
ZiRoX

yaspo wrote:

Otherwise the second point invalidates the first so lol ?, the RC is indeed split up clearly enough to work with subpages
Uh, the second point doesn't invalidate the first? I'm just saying that splitting into subpages doesn't provide a major benefit given that there's already a ToC that does the work in a similar manner.

Noffy wrote:

clayton wrote:

was there another discussion involving "page length" or somethn, this seems like a really random non-problem to bring up among the others
not really page length specifically, but it being hard to approach and difficult to parse, my op is just my perspective on how that could be addressed but we can look at other methods too.
You said it yourself: there's barely any content in the RC that could be trimmed out. Split into multiple pages or not, it would be equally daunting.

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I agree some information could be useful (spectrograms could be a good example, as yaspo mentioned), but I don't think they should be part of the RC, but maybe more like "companion guides". Those would be cool if they had their own page.
Solitaire
this feels like a really really silly comparison but i think the rc is similar to smth like the chicago manual of style in the way that it's supposed to act less as a guide for what a good map looks like, but is more of a reference tool that aims to have the answer to as many different mapping edge-cases as possible.

imo it should be optimized for speed rather than accessibility, through making the table of contents as clear and comprehensive as possible. ask a person doing research if they would want to split up the cmos book into a bunch of different editions and they'd be like wtf no

that being said the online version of the cmos is set up in a similar way to what noffy's proposing but that's honestly because it has far too much content to have it be done any other way

i guess it's a matter of where people think that cutoff should be - does the rc have too much info that it's more reasonable to compartmentalize it or just use one page with a good toc
UberFazz
with the power of ctrl+f and the pinned ToC on the left of the screen, i personally don't think this is much of an issue

especially with the currently ongoing process of integrating MV into lazer, this kind of thing becomes less and less relevant

besides, im not really sure how you would "fix" something like this. splitting it into separate pages might be beneficial but might also just make things messier if you're trying to look at multiple sections at once

+1 for the images tho, visual learning is very nice and it exists in some glossary pages already
SilentWuffer
images would be absolutely phenomenal good proposal op
YyottaCat
The idea of adding reference images would be really great though.
Nao Tomori
tbt to loctav randomly saying "rc isnt a picture book" and banning images
YyottaCat

Nao Tomori wrote:

tbt to loctav randomly saying "rc isnt a picture book" and banning images
Just make short videos with like 1 frame (totally doesn't count as images right?).
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