Hello everyone! As of recent, we have had issues with backgrounds and how they can be seen as “out-of-context” and “non-atmospheric”, resulting in maps having issues with people deeming these backgrounds as unfit for certain themes and songs. Lately, this has been a small problem and I think to add a guideline to stop this confusion of what backgrounds are fine and what are not for certain songs.

The RC Proposal is as follows:


Now there isn't a guideline on this (as these types of issues should be pretty uncommon to come across), but adding it wouldn't hurt, but rather avoid confusion on which backgrounds are appropriate for usage on a song and which ones are not, inevitably helping both new and current mappers.

Happy to provide more context if necessary, and open to rewording if needed.

Genshin BG is universal so its still relevant :jerry:

This will definitely stop people from slapping random anime BG (me btw) and make it ranked (me btw).

A guideline like this won't hurt, besides we will gain more than the losses.

I don't think this is really a problem that needs to be addressed with a guideline. Current wording just implies that anyone can choose any background so long as they provide any reason, not excluding excuses made after the fact. Especially with a vague term like "atmosphere".

If this suggestion ever gains traction from most of the community, it's probably better to just set in stone a rule that explicitly states that backgrounds must be directly associated with the song or artist, rather than "context" and "atmosphere".

Oh yeah, I'm against this by the way. Again, I don't think this is enforceable as a guideline and making it a rule is too Draconian.

ps: no one will stop me from ranking beatles songs with anime backgrounds

It's just discouraged to use irrelevant background. It's not enforced, and people are still able to choose whatever background it is. The proposal is not for the rules, but rather the guidelines. Guidelines can be broken.

sisig wrote:

Again, I don't think this is enforceable as a guideline and making it a rule is too Draconian.

Even if this is not transformed into a guideline, would it be considered that it could turn into one of two solutions?



Either or the other helps avoid confusion and would create a bit more coherency.

Rather than atmosphere, I suggest "relevance" would be better here.

I agree with this being a guideline to help mappers choose background for their maps rather than have it being enforced during the ranking process.

I do agree that making backgrounds relevant to the song is an absolute must, but I don't think there is a proper way to make this a rule. This will always just be something very subjective and vary BN to BN.

The only thing that I could see that could be made into a rule is using official artwork for the song in question. Not to point to a specific example, but something like the ranked 7k set "Last Wish" that uses a Genshin Impact character in the background and not the official art as the BG even though the song has official artwork. Some rule can be made that the official sleeve artwork should be used/incorporated into the background.

For stuff that don't have official art, I don't think there is any proper rule that can be made that doesn't just vary BN to BN.

edit: Just a side note, but I do think using official artwork looks better for osu! in general. This is solely just my opinion and speculation, but I think music artists would rather see their official artwork for their songs rather than something people make themselves or something random. Maybe less takedowns (:?

I have no idea how you'd want to enforce this 😅

anyone could make up arbitrary levels of bullshit to just bypass this, no?

if this would imply that we have to use song/album cover art (it doesn't rn), this would make it harder to look for backgrounds, as these are not always available at decent enough resolution, not to mention the square aspect ratio they are in, when bgs usually need to be 16:9

Oh... right. I misread the proposal once more.

Yes, I think we should encourage mappers to use related background. However, enforcing it is not a great idea.

this is like the third time i see this kind of proposal in the last three years lol

1, 2

i think my opinion would still be similar to my take about it two years ago. preventing meme edited background when its not necessary. I generally disagree if choosing BG based on "atmosphere" is regulated as rules/guidelines as its interpretation varies a lot between people.

To give some better idealization, because I was recommended to make this less-wordy, rather straight to the point.

1. NO, you don't have to restrict yourself to song cover's/artworks. This is generally because of course life would be so much harder. It was meant to give an idea of "relation to the song", or the emotion given through the background. For example,
osu!mania - Arche
osu!taiko - Cocoon
osu!std - Riptide
osu!catch - Pretty Little Psycho

The idea of "atmosphere" is given by subjectivtiy. That's the main idea of atmosphere in the guideline. To give the mapper some general census about what they feel or interpret when it comes to the song, they are able to maintain a bigger image of how they want it represented, instead of being limited to the certain few images they can create.

Please do also note that the idea of this in discussion doesn't relate to the idea of... more meme backgrounds rather than others, but it's not the idea of "What is considered fine?", rather "Why is it considered fine?". People are able to still pick their backgrounds as usual, and still pick what they want, but this statement was to enforce or discuss the idea of restricting backgrounds in which did not correlate or have any context to the song's main purpose/representation.

This seems to be way different when it comes to things such as joke-like songs, such as these for example:
osu!taiko - killer fish from mario paint
osu!mania - BIG DICK
osu!catch - Unpaid Intern
osu!std - Roundabout

Although some are more joke-like than others, they all share context in each one of their backgrounds, and show relevance in a song title, song name, general representation/context of the song or just a general idea that they're trying to put forth. So theoretically, the idea isn't harmful in cases where this would be enforced in EVERY map.

2. Please do refer to:

[ Decku ] wrote:

Even if this is not transformed into a guideline, would it be considered that it could turn into one of two solutions?

Where I have stated, even if this doesn't NEED to be a guideline, considering as people have mentioned it does seem to.. force a lot of idea onto the mapper. Think that it could at least be mentioned in Visual Content Considerations:

[ Decku ] wrote:

The idea should be transferred into the "Visual Content Considerations", to give a better ideal on what's considered fine.

I do think if not enforcing it just to give them a considerable amount of guidance in order to help them figure out what is ok and what is not. There does not have to be a complete yes or no party, but I do think making this a guideline wouldn't hurt anyone. It's more of an extra layer of protection when it comes to really ambiguous backgrounds.

The VCC is definitely not the right place for this. The purpose of that page is to help determine whether an image is suitable for the game as a whole (i.e. whether it breaks the actual rules of the game), not whether a bg fits the vibe of a song.

I don't think this is useful at all. Background choice is already basically left up to the BNs nominating the map. Nobody that uses anime backgrounds on non anime songs is going to stop using them because of this; they clearly already think the background fits the song, or they would have used a different background. Nothing would change about the process of complaining about an unrelated background other than giving whoever doesn't like it a new buzzword to use in their post.

nah no need for this, let ppl do what they want for bg tbh

Rivals_7 wrote:

this is like the third time i see this kind of proposal in the last three years lol

1, 2

i think my opinion would still be similar to my take about it two years ago.

Yeah same, I'm just gonna link my post from that other proposal because it's still relevant: community/forums/posts/7746695
Basically, only backgrounds from sources that are completely unrelated to the song should be discouraged by the RC, especially if the song actually has relevant source material.

I feel it's extremely unenforceable and could be easily circumvented to get around it. I think just let the people who wanna be stupid be stupid and let it fall to the bns to decide if it matters enough.

Guidelines are meant to be rules unless given a solid reason to break them, but how valid would "song talks about a girl so i put some random anime girl in the bg" be. If thats enough logic to go around the guideline then the guideline becomes useless. If that doesnt work then would the Tokyo Ghoul backgrounds work for the random jrock songs where the logic is "song is edgy so i use edgy anime background" idk my point is i dont see how a line could be drawn since its going to be subjective unless you go nuclear and restrict only to offcial art which would be a huge annoyance.

My stance on this would be to only restrict backgrounds when they're misleading in relation to the song content/map

If I could bring up a fairly recent example, I was in agreement with the Dakara Hitori Janai veto beatmapsets/1474832/discussion/-/generalAll#/3603847 where a K-ON bg was used over a MHA song. Taking a look at the mediation and comment section for that map I would say that most people agree that it was too much of a stretch from the original source material, and would be generally considered misleading to the song's content.

For me, it mainly comes down to whether or not the background and song can be traced back to a well known source such as an anime, game, etc. Here's my thoughts:

Non-Sourced BG + Non-Sourced Song — Fine
Sourced BG + Non-Sourced Song — Fine
Non-Sourced BG + Sourced Song — Fine
Sourced BG + Different Sourced Song — Not Fine

This still allows people to slap genshin characters onto their electronic songs and tokyo ghoul on their edgy metal, but would prevent something like a digimon BG appearing on a pokemon song. It all comes down to clarity imo

Ryax wrote:

My stance on this would be to only restrict backgrounds when they're misleading in relation to the song content/map

If I could bring up a fairly recent example, I was in agreement with the Dakara Hitori Janai veto beatmapsets/1474832/discussion/-/generalAll#/3603847 where a K-ON bg was used over a MHA song. Taking a look at the mediation and comment section for that map I would say that most people agree that it was too much of a stretch from the original source material, and would be generally considered misleading to the song's content.

For me, it mainly comes down to whether or not the background and song can be traced back to a well known source such as an anime, game, etc. Here's my thoughts:

Non-Sourced BG + Non-Sourced Song — Fine
Sourced BG + Non-Sourced Song — Fine
Non-Sourced BG + Sourced Song — Fine
Sourced BG + Different Sourced Song — Not Fine

This still allows people to slap genshin characters onto their electronic songs and tokyo ghoul on their edgy metal, but would prevent something like a digimon BG appearing on a pokemon song. It all comes down to clarity imo

Agree mostly but you are preventing other context like same CV in multiple anime for example.

also don't think there's a need to add more subjective words to already subjective guideline, there's not much clarity to be added, its still up to mapper and BN's common sense and whos louder.

i dont think this guideline needs any change, its very subjective thing, and this issue will always occur.

completely disagree

I guess people mistaken the intention of this post(?)

[ Decku ] wrote:

Even if this is not transformed into a guideline, would it be considered that it could turn into one of two solutions?

• 
  [1]The idea of this should either be a guideline to help avoid confusion to newer mappers about what backgrounds are fine to use.
  [2]The idea should be transferred into the "Visual Content Considerations", to give a better ideal on what's considered fine.

Either or the other helps avoid confusion and would create a bit more coherency.

Based on what Decku said here, it seems like the intention is not to enforce it, but act as a "guide" for people to find bg for their maps.

(ig guides are less strict than guidelines, which is why this doesn't work for RC?)

Basically, I think if the way guidelines are being perceived in the RC is that it has to be enforced (and can't just be there as a purpose of "guiding" people) then this is a no.

Still why couldn't we have this written somewhere that's proper/official-ish for beginners etc to look up on this topic?

Drum-Hitnormal wrote:

Agree mostly but you are preventing other context like same CV in multiple anime for example.

Can you give me some instances where this context was acceptable in ranked scenario? I never recalled any, as the main source usually predates "same CV" reference, unless it's a joke/meme song at the first place.

[Ping] wrote:

Basically, I think if the way guidelines are being perceived in the RC is that it has to be enforced (and can't just be there as a purpose of "guiding" people) then this is a no.

Still why couldn't we have this written somewhere that's proper/official-ish for beginners etc to look up on this topic?

I've seen some beginners/new mappers having this kind of issue, so putting this as guideline at least will definitely help reducing this kind of unrelated/non-correlated background on their maps.

Ryu Sei wrote:

Drum-Hitnormal wrote:

Agree mostly but you are preventing other context like same CV in multiple anime for example.

Can you give me some instances where this context was acceptable in ranked scenario? I never recalled any, as the main source usually predates "same CV" reference, unless it's a joke/meme song at the first place.

here's an example where anime is so old and i cant find any good BG to use
beatmapsets/1460209#mania/3447352

my point is there's so many reason why someone think a BG can fit, and others may not agree, but its impossible to add a clear guideline for that. Keep RC short and concise, and leave those subjective issues to BNs.

I hate subjective wording in RC, like the one based on popularity for doujin circle.

let people do what they want, if they have a valid excuse other than "haha funny bg" (which is completely reasonable for some beatmaps), id say let them. If someone has a problem with the bg they can always remove the background and replace it with a black one or just use the dim feature (which most already do)

RE: VCC: that defines what sort of images are fine to use on the site, doesn't really seem like the place to discuss that you should maybe consider using a relevant background

RE: RC Guideline: As already mentioned, the guideline you're speaking of would act as a rule unless you have good reason to break it and on this topic the opinions differ so wildly that defining it there doesn't make much sense to me

Drum-Hitnormal wrote:

here's an example where anime is so old and i cant find any good BG to use
beatmapsets/1460209#mania/3447352

This can be a good example where this proposal's guidelines can be broken. Though I'm still with the proposal.

There should be some acceptable cases where this can be broken, but I'm not sure how should we word it.

There might be ways to stop the unnecessary background debates.

But personally think the one here might not work

Adding a guideline to address subjective thing don't have much feasibility.. but would lead to more confusion.

I believe that something like this actually existed before as a part of guidelines, however I think that this is just a common sense and doesn’t really need to be included.

Many people have already stated that let an idiot be an idiot, if someone wants to use a weird background they definitely have a reason to, making this whole guideline obsolete and rather makes it easier to abuse.

Discussions about background suitability in cases where it’s actually needed do not need to have a clear statement in the ranking criteria to make the discussion valid.

Rather than make a subjective guideline about BG suitability on the basis of "context/atmosphere" to the song, I believe the crux of the issue that birthed this proposal have been modders commenting on beatmap sets regarding using a background from one game/anime on a song that comes from a different source (e.g. beatmapsets/1930737/discussion/-/generalAll#/3647591 used a genshin background on a Touhou song). Trying to make a guideline on something as subjective as context and atmosphere for a song is going to result in more pain and tension between mappers and modders than the guideline is supposed to fix. Instead, if you focus on creating a guideline about mixed song/background content sources, you'd have more success in trying to address this frequently recurring issue.

I think what Ryax said summarizes the recent conflicts quite well, and I'd support a guideline in favor of addressing those rare instances instead.

misleading backgrounds i slightly agree with, but every other case is barely an issue. can't think of a single case where majority agreed on some background being a bad idea. if you want guides that's better done through other means, not RC

policing backgrounds beyond nsfw isn't really worth the effort imo

"A background to a beatmap should not give misleading impressions to the song. The exceptions of this guideline are when the original or thematically-related backgrounds would violate the Visual Content Consideration, and insufficient backgrounds that correlate to the song."

this?

honestly these backgrounds are fairly irrelevant in the scope of things, and you can argue for and against like almost any subjectively fitting bg, proposal seems to just add pointless restrictions where common sense should prevale disagree with adding anything.

While it's irrelevant, most "random anime bg" or "random digital bg" maps you mentioned have at least acceptable quality that it doesn't mislead to the extreme extent. The only cases I remember where the misleading BG is deliberately used is beatmapsets/1956910 .

Even though an issue of this kind is mostly subjective and pretty much impossible to enforce without barring mapsets from ranked individually, as mentioned above, I do support the idea of guiding mappers towards (at least a little) related backgrounds (coming from someone with the "I don't care" attitude in most discussions in this manner)

A few people in the thread have had valid valid concerns though - should this be included as a separate guideline to the already existing one? If yes, whether in Ranking Criteria or VCC?

In my opinion, it doesn't feel fitting for VCC since it lists pointers used to determine media's suitability in the game as a whole (meaning nsfw or not) instead of contextual/emotional relevance to the audio coming alongside it. Furthermore, there's seemingly no need to add much more text into an already massive document that is the RC to make it that much more offputting

Proposed solution:


Also, setting a little sidetracked here although I'd focus a lot more on "policing nsfw backgrounds", like Uber called it, as the current system has actual humongous flaws while the topic at hand isn't even an objective issue in the majority of cases

No regulation attempting to regulate association/relevance via subjective experience can ever succeed.

I can encounter a song for the first time while eating a particular type of cheesecake and then use a picture of that cheesecake as the beatmap background. To me, that piece has consummate relevance - it denotes the origin of my first experience with the work and holds intense personal value. To someone else, it's a cheesecake picture background on a 295bpm breakcore map that has lyrics about driving trucks into buildings.

Nothing good or productive will come from attempting to play this out in the RC. Aesthetic expression is fundamentally a mapper's choice and each mapper has the right to exert whatever aesthetic they wish upon their creation (so long as it fits into content rules, of course) for whatever reason they like.

No matter how much you think you want to see this regulated, I promise you that you don't. This is not to diminish the frustration some might feel at seeing seemingly random BGs on maps - those feelings are valid, but expressions of confusion about aesthetic application are better levelled towards individual mappers over being enshrined in rules or guidelines.

I believe what Ryax said can reasonably be listed as a guideline. It addresses a common dq reason of putting an anime bg on a song from another unrelated anime. Most importantly, it is objective and draws a clear line.

By being a guideline, it allows the mapper to argue about niche cases like same CV or no good bg as what Drum-hitnormal said.

Sample:

I think this is a really good way to stop mappers from getting away with putting sexualized backgrounds that have nothing to do with the song just for the sake of doing it and getting more attraction from the p*rn addicts that this community is filled off. I'm willing to support this rule because it was one of the things that i hated the most when i started to play the game

except it wouldn't and wasn't ever even meant to do that lol

probably could put something like "You may not put an anime background if the song is not associated with anime"

nah, think it should just stay this way - not like this is done so often these days, let em cook

Kaly wrote:

I think this is a really good way to stop mappers from getting away with putting sexualized backgrounds that have nothing to do with the song just for the sake of doing it and getting more attraction from the p*rn addicts that this community is filled off. I'm willing to support this rule because it was one of the things that i hated the most when i started to play the game

Changing the way inappropriate content moderation is handled isn't the goal of this thread so were I you, I'd go elsewhere to discuss it (you definitely have a valid point though). What is talked about here is purely preventing completely irrelevant media from being included in maps

no

this is stupid 99% of players play with 100% bg dim and wont look at the bg for more than 1 second max

Again, if this can't be a rule (which is honestly it's a really bad idea if this even become a rule), a guideline about background relevancy is the best thing we can do.

This reminds me of the map I modded before. I marked the mod as a problem because the background and the source clearly doesn't correlate: beatmapsets/1751103/discussion/-/generalAll#/3549329
Just because the source has the word "heroine", you shouldn't put SaeKano background out of nowhere. That clearly throws my expectation off, and if this were qualified with its previosu background, I would report it as a problem due to unrelated background. The mapper of that song can use the background sourced, or fanart of the source, or instead use another correlated background that doesn't mislead.

That Pokemon and Digimon mixup (beatmapsets/1930737/discussion/-/generalAll#/3647591 ) and K-ON! and MHA mixup (beatmapsets/1474832/discussion/-/generalAll#/3603847 ) also some of the reasons why this background relevancy discussion is important. However, there maps mentioned on few posts above (beatmapsets/1460209, beatmapsets/1956910 ) are few real exceptions where a song with unrelated source background may be used. That's why rather than making it as a rule, a guideline is a better compromise.

(who wants to stress themselves finding a background of a really old anime, or risking their account for restriction for using phallic background?)

Being artistic and subjective with background choice is fine, but please at least make the background use makes sense. Also, put your reasonings if you ever really need to break the sense of using correlated background.

Loserotaku wrote:

this is stupid 99% of players play with 100% bg dim and wont look at the bg for more than 1 second max

That doesn't mean that we always has 100% big dim. If there's a cool storyboard/video, I would tend to put the bg dim at 70-60%. It's often when I play maps that I want to FC that I remove the background

strong disagree with even a guideline as someone who regularly sticks to relevant bgs

Nao Tomori wrote:

Nobody that uses anime backgrounds on non anime songs is going to stop using them because of this; they clearly already think the background fits the song, or they would have used a different background.

Ephemeral wrote:

Nothing good or productive will come from attempting to play this out in the RC. Aesthetic expression is fundamentally a mapper's choice and each mapper has the right to exert whatever aesthetic they wish upon their creation (so long as it fits into content rules, of course) for whatever reason they like.

agree with smolship's proposal

With the OP's request, and also most of the feedback leaning towards no, move this proposal into denied/invalid