The following changes serve to make contributing more easily accessible to the community, which consequently improves upon and simplifies all current systems in place for the mapping and modding community.

Is the only way for BNs to be kicked with this proposal now only low activity? Since probation doesnt exist?

Or is it from full to kicked

Other wise seems alright. Might be discouraging to get high activity for some users now though, not sure how much of a risk that is. Maybe x amount of noms within a month triggers an eval?

BNs can still get warnings for mod/map quality or behavior, they'll just stay as full, then be kicked if things don't improve.

For the BN activity would that mean that:

2-0-2-0-2-0 etc.. would be okay for a BN to do since all it takes is two warnings in a row for a kick in this regard? Since it also says that the number of non-consecutive warnings don't matter

Monoseul wrote:

For the BN activity would that mean that:

2-0-2-0-2-0 etc.. would be okay for a BN to do since all it takes is two warnings in a row for a kick in this regard? Since it also says that the number of non-consecutive warnings don't matter

Correct.

I like it very much

wafer wrote:

Is the only way for BNs to be kicked with this proposal now only low activity? Since probation doesnt exist?

Or is it from full to kicked

Other wise seems alright. Might be discouraging to get high activity for some users now though, not sure how much of a risk that is. Maybe x amount of noms within a month triggers an eval?

girl it says that they get evaled when they reach 30 noms or in 3 months whichever comes first lol

wafer wrote:

Other wise seems alright. Might be discouraging to get high activity for some users now though, not sure how much of a risk that is. Maybe x amount of noms within a month triggers an eval?

I think it has its pros and cons.

On one hand, more evals means more frequent eyes on someone, but it also means we can be more proactive to help people that are struggling before an issue balloons up too much using hopefully gentler methods. It can also provide more balanced evaluations since we'd have a better idea of how they're doing by being able to look at their nominations more comprehensively, both the good and not as good ones.


And rather than limiting a BN's nominations for sanity, there is the freedom to nominate more often too.

^ Yea, I'd say its pretty necessary because we are removing the upper activity limit.

I believe that the change done to the probation role is a good one. It will actually serve it’s original purpose of being an introductory stage for people who are new to the BN scene instead of a punishment.

Changes to probation feel spot-on, it always felt as more of an inconvenience than anything.

overall good changes, no complaint

what i like most is this part: Giving BNs a say in mapping system developments
and removal of max activity, never understood why that's a hard rule, if quality drop just kick for quality, or kick for behavior.

Would clarify that old bns rejoining after a year (or whatever the cd is for it) would be placed in probation. Since this kinda implies that I can rejoin bn after x years and be made full right off the bat

:nyab:

No real comments to add. For the most part I like the changes, especially with simplicity in mind.

However, I'm still a bit mixed on the activity changes. I understand the goal is to avoid that members stay more than 2 consecutive months without meeting activity requirements, and that they're encouraged to resign and then return with relative ease whenever they can continue.

I just hope the activity kicks aren't fully automatic, and that the NAT has agency on all the cards generated by low activity so they can maybe approach the BNs, see what's up, and ultimately either postpone the activity card for an extra month to dismiss it, or to act on it immediately.

In support! Nothing much to add other than what RandomeLol has said, hope the system is not automatic.

I remember when elicz1 used to reach out to BNs when their activity fell low (for standard). Please continue doing that! It's very humanizing and gentler way to handle activity issues imo.


EDIT: Some non-BN users brought this up to me

Are 2-0-2-0-2-0-2-0 accepted? Like I know under the rules this is not wrong but is it frowned upon or would NATs not care and say it is acceptable?

Seems like a good way to farm tenure while not doing anything if you ask me.

i really hope the considerations for acitivty do not really get all that automated (some leeway is given), cause it discourages giving extra effort to complex or heavy sets for checking, or at least it encourages having activity padding on the side while checking said complex sets

consider the weight of effort between a 2 diff music box set vs an 4 diff 5min+ set.

Said this before about my concern, but i do think the activity part cannot be completely automated and still need to at least have some NAT touches in it, even if the original intention is to completely simplify things.

I sort of agree about the potential concern happening from constant 2-0-2-0 happened, this was already voiced to me multiple times, so there needs to at least be some adjustment on that to not demotivate BNs further down the road.

The rest aside of that seems fine enough though.

Why not go with average of 6 nominations every 90 days? I think that’s harder to game the activity check. allowing something like 2-0-2-0-2 just allows people to do lower than the intended minimum activity.

Plus, it’s more forgiving and having bn to quit and rejoin for a month causes more overhead which doesn’t seem like simplification to me.

Mainly get some concerns about the activity requirement, and i think some have brought up that too. Just that under this change it would kick BNs with activity like 10-1-1, while case like 2-0-2-0-2, will survive if we solely check monthly activity, which doesn't feel that right

Another thing i get from it is that it seems unclear how good terms resign should be measured if the 90d activity check is gone

Overall looks good, and I agree with the above people that the BN activity check system should not be automatic.

Also, looks like BN kicking is not mentioned in this proposal, could I assume that it's same as before? Like:
- Instant kick for really severe modding/behavior issues
- Formal warning for concerning modding/bevavior issues, then kick if no improvement/not significant enough

---

Edit:
gzdongsheng has a good point. Would that possible to give some leniency for high activity BNs? Like if a BN reached x amount of nominations then they can get a "ticket" in the system and have an exception from activity check for one or two months.

removal of mock evaluations is fine since you guys shifted mostly to BN evaluator rounds (though that brings up a separate issue of having the evaluator rounds being more accessible to those who are genuinely interested in participating in them)

cooldown simplification i guess is fine? i'm not really too sure if that would greatly increase the workload on the NAT, though -- i feel like the cooldowns were intended to help with that

early evaluations for super active BNs, yeah, this was kinda overdue imo ever since cheri's nomination-spree back in 2019/2020 to be honest

giving BNs a say in mapping system discussions, sure, more transparency is always appreciated, i don't necessarily think everything should be relegated here though

as for the other two

simplifying activity requirements

i like some aspects of this -- consecutive activity warnings should result in a removal (imo), but i kind of feel like setting the bar at two nominations is a bit too low in this case. personally, i never found it too much of a struggle to at least find three maps to nominate per month (the current threshold), and i feel like reducing the amount required would be detrimental to the overall mapping scene if anything since, in a worst case scenario, BNs can just skirt the requirements of activity and refuse to accept maps outside of that. i obviously don't think this will happen 100% of the time (or at all), but it is a possibility that should be accounted for imo

repurposing probation

i'm kind of confused about this -- probation is staying for new BNs which is fine, but i don't really think probation ever served a purpose as a "public shaming tool"; what i saw it as was moreso a stern warning which comes across as much more serious than something written in text ever would. i'm not really against removing it (i've worried way too much about being put into probation after DQs throughout my tenure), i'm just not really sure how this would be implemented the same way through warnings in practice

fieryrage wrote:

repurposing probation

i'm kind of confused about this -- probation is staying for new BNs which is fine, but i don't really think probation ever served a purpose as a "public shaming tool"; what i saw it as was moreso a stern warning which comes across as much more serious than something written in text ever would. i'm not really against removing it (i've worried way too much about being put into probation after DQs throughout my tenure), i'm just not really sure how this would be implemented the same way through warnings in practice

ok maybe wording thehre wasnt the best, but the thing was with probation it often just didnt work as a "corrective" measure cuz people would lay low, push safe maps, get back to full, go back to whatever else they watned to do

so at that point i think it's fair to say just warn them instead and if they keep doing that they can come back with an app in 2 months? instead of going back and forth between probation, warnings, full, probation warnings etc

For the BN activity one, I personally think it could be going easier with BN. Assume that 2-0-2-0-2-0 won't be removed but 15-1-1 got removed I feel it's not very good... Maybe could be like:
**Every BN should nom 2maps / month
OR
nom 9maps / 3months.** The first time BN reaches none of them will receive the warning. The next month the BN still didn't reach it got removed.

8-1-0 yes
8-1-0-1 no

This is just an example.

Some people's real lives may be busy at one time and free at another because of work and so on. I don't think it's good to have these bn's resigning and applying over and over again because of the new activity rules.

as far as i understood the idea it is supposed to encourage resigning on good terms => no cooldown

over staying there and being dead if you can help it

though i would suggest just giving the activity kicks like this good terms unless their nominations sucked or something. like sure you sat around for 2 months doing nothing and should have resigned but i dont see how that would inhibit them coming back and being active again

if you go and abuse that just get standard terms and done i think?

I get 2 nominations per month for other gamemodes, but I still think it should stay at 3 for standard because the gamemode is a lot bigger so its much easier to find 3 maps per month. Would also uphold the previous threshold of atleast 6 nominations per 90 days before getting kicked.

I think the point was to standardize between gamemodes for simplification purposes. However, I feel like its a net positive to sacrifice a little bit of that simplification to adjust for the gamemode's needs.

I wanna chime in on the 2-0-2-0 debacle.

We can make the system automated, but I think the current proposal is too exploitable.

I think a good way to implement this would be to check the past THREE months of activity every ONE month.. The first check that falls below 6 noms over 3 months will get an automated warning. Second check in a row that falls below 6 would get a kick (or at least a potential kick that the NATs can first manually review, to address Randome's concern)

For example:

The BN nominates as follows:           10 1  1  3  3  10 1  1  1  1

The corresponding automated checks go: __ __ 12 5  7  16 14 12 3  3
                                                ^              ^  ^
                                               warn         warn  kick

This would make it so that the BN is granted some leniency in the following months if they had a month of high activity, but also cannot exploit the system by nominating extremely minimally in a specific pattern.

I like hugged's proposal for activity, as long as we can illustrate it simply enough.

I like hugged's proposal here. I kinda forgot to get back to this when I first asked about the activity, but my biggest concern was indeed how exploitable the current proposal was and how..unrewarding it felt. High activity would be treated the same as minimum activity in that case (15-10-5-1-1 vs. 2-0-2-0-2-0-1).

Not that there's anything wrong with minimum activity but a system like that would just encourage everyone to stick to the bare minimum because there's no incentive to do anything more after that point since it would be treated the same as any other kind of activity.

So yeah I think hugged's proposal works better in this case as long as there's something for everyone to be able to understand it (like an illustration or such)

I still don't understand why the activity isn't assessed via an arithmetric mean (aka an average). It all boils down to people being under a certain average activity threshold over the course of multiple months. So why don't you use the average amount of nominations in real-time (like "now minus 3 months" is the reference point of view) and dish out warnings as soon as they land below the magical threshold that you consider the minimum average that people should somehow maintain within 3 months

Let's construct an example with the 8-1-0-1 case, to hopefully make clear what I mean (please stay with me!):

January 2024, some BN nominated 8 maps in total, one per day on the following dates
1/1/24 | 1/3/24 | 1/6/24 | 1/8/24 | 1/12/24 | 1/18/24 | 1/24/24 | 1/31/24

February 2024 just this:
2/1/24

March 2024 was a sad month:
no nominations found

April 2024 it gets better:
4/14/24


Using averages would cause the following: If we view the average activity on 3/31/24, the average would be 3 per month. If we check the arthimetric mean on 4/14/24, it would be 2.6667 per month already and on 5/1/24 it would drop down to 0.6667.

(Disclaimer: For the sake of simplicity, I calculated rather unsharply per month instead of using a daily average (which boils down to 0.0667 nominations per day if we assume 2 nominations per 30 days), so the *most precise* number that is then used with this method might be different in a real implementation)

A live observation of the daily maintained average (which appears to be possible?) and triggering an alarm bell when someone drops below said threshold for a certain amount of time seems like an easy-to-understand and hard-to-exploit method.

Let's keep in mind that a central task for all these changes is simplification. Now you are arguing about relatively obfuscated number rows that can turn out one way or another depending on the case and constellation. A daily assessment of averages gives an appropriate overview of how much contribution has been provided over the course of a defined timespan. And this covers all cases: burst activities with then followed low phases and continuous activity without peaks. And it slowly fades people into a danger zone, which allows for most flexibility for the BNs on how they want to distribute their workload. How long they have to stay in the danger zone before this method triggers a slap on the wrist is up to debate, of course (e.g. they entered the danger zone and need to stay there for several days until something is triggered, hoping that they will pick up their activity by themselves, fixing their average activity)

Maybe I am completely missing what the main concern is. Is this about

mmddyy breaks my brain. i think what ure proposing is synonymous to what hugged proposed but broken down to days instead of months.

dunno if that is more complicated or not; it should be easy enough to understand given that you can already see stats like this on ur bn site listing

>removal of mock evaluations

I'd still keep them nonetheless for the bns who just want to try out evaluating apps themselves without taking up a potential slot during bn evaluators from someone who is already actually interested in becoming nat

re: activity, personally in favor of Hugged's proposal

Not a fan of the proposal for activity requirements, and even less of a fan of the early evaluations for highly active BNs.

BNs already abuse the activity quota for free supporter and the accolades BNs get, especially hybrid BNs of the past and present (this isn't a secret, if you think people are just coincidentally nominating EXACTLY 3 maps per month, you're being way too charitable). Lowering this limit will only give people even more excuses, and as mentioned earlier, this limit can and will be abused as all limits have been with the 2-0-2-0 hack, or whatever the absolute minimum activity required is. I personally would be pissed off if somebody could stay in the BNG nominating effectively one map per month, especially in modes like taiko where it can take 30 minutes to completely check a set. Even my local animal shelters require more dedication than that to stay in their volunteer program, and being a nominator is 100x easier and more accessible than giving medication to kittens.

If anything, the activity quota should be higher (4-5 per month, no exclusion for hybrid BNs), since there is currently a dichotomy between members (at least in taiko) that causes a small group of top performers to contribute an incredibly disproportionate amount of activity (which I'll touch on later). Closing the gap between the least and most active members would increase group morale and incentivize more collaboration; as it stands now, there are maps I will simply not accept because the other nominator is so inactive that it's almost impossible to work with them in any manner conducive to ranking a map in a reasonable time frame, and I have seen mappers simply give up on BNs due to their inactivity and find an entirely new one. This isn't a diss on the BNs, I think it's the activity requirement's fault we are in this situation, and this is a move in the wrong direction.

Absolutely hate the evaluations every 30 nominations idea, anything even remotely punishing BNs for being active members is terrible. It will NOT make active BNs more careful with nominations, it will just scare them into nominating less and nominating safer maps. Even if you're doing fine with resets, it's still ridiculous to let people nominate 2 maps every 2 months and have a 6 month long cooldown while people who are working 10x harder to contribute to the game are subjected to more pressure due to having like, 4 times as many evaluations. If this was already a rule, I would have had two evals within my first three months of being a BN, which is nuts.

Mistakes just happen more when you nominate more maps, which typically falls in line with nominating more interesting or difficult maps that other BNs don't want to take, and I think that is a sacrifice the NAT needs to be ok with, because these super active BNs are incredibly important to the game. For the last 90 days in taiko, the most active 5 BNs have nominated 45% of the maps. 244 nominations out of 544, I'm not shitting you. 5 people (17% of the group) are contributing almost half of the entire workload of a 30-person team, and the 10 least active BNs (not including NAT or new members, so >30% of the group) are contributing 13% (68) of the nominations (you'd think it would be closer to 90 cause 90 days, 3 noms per 30 days, 10 people... if you needed more proof of how common activity requirement abuse is, here it is). I can't overstate the importance of keeping these highly active members around, and tightening restrictions or creating a heightened sense of surveillance on them is not going to do that, and will only be made worse with the accompanying proposal of making the least active members able to be even less active. If there's anything out of all these proposals I would want dropped, it's this.

> quota should be 4 - 5 a month

this may work for osu! and taiko, maybe also for mania but probably not for catch and i think we really wanted to have a uniform approach

> hate the evaluate every 30 noms idea
I dont think people are punished by evaluations, if you actually dont make major mistakes this should be fine?

You're talking from a pov of assuming every huge-activity-bn is pushing stuff worth getting warned over which i think is a weird position. I do agree that keeping high activity people around and motivated is good

How do you expect anyone to keep on top of what people are doing if they just throw 120 maps or something in a 3 month duration and just like. idk expect the NAT to just check a large enough sample as well to be able to ascertain if your performance is good or bad?

6 month long cooldown idk where that comes from, i think that's just gone

I wanna throw some ideas ,

how about reintroducing the system points ?? Im not an expert in formulas but i tried to make something that can be rewarding for the most active members and pretty punitive to the lazy ass workers

hope its easy to understand

@Harbyter They want to simplify the system, if I have to read through a whole formula to understand a point system THEN calculate how many points I have or how many maps I need to nominate to meet requirements then this definitely will not work.

achyoo wrote:

@Harbyter They want to simplify the system, if I have to read through a whole formula to understand a point system THEN calculate how many points I have or how many maps I need to nominate to meet requirements then this definitely will not work.

idk i think i may just have formulated it in a complicated way lmao but i think that those basic calculation can be easly be done with programs ???__???

/hide

If it were to be implemented then a calculator must be made available for everyone, yea.

But I think the goal of these changes were to simplify everything and make everything more intuitive. You could argue that having a calculator available that BNs can use would make things simple, idk if that's what the staff wants though.

> this may work for osu! and taiko, maybe also for mania but probably not for catch and i think we really wanted to have a uniform approach

I sincerely don't understand why there is a need for a uniform approach when the modes are so fundamentally different, a mode with 20-30 qualified maps per week should not be held to the same standard as a mode with 5-10 qualified maps per week. Otherwise, you end up managing a group like taiko, where the bottom 50% of active BNs are contributing less than the 2 most active BNs combined (the NAT already spends more time evaluating some BNs than the BNs probably spend checking maps). We already have methods of immediately extracting nomination data for every BN, it can't be difficult to check the different activity requirements of each mode's BNG manually (or even automate by usergroup). Except for maybe standard due to the number of BNs, but I'm not a fan of making global changes due to one mode's problems.

> You're talking from a pov of assuming every huge-activity-bn is pushing stuff worth getting warned over which i think is a weird position.

This is what I see as somebody who is high-activity and high-pushing difficult/weird maps, who collaborates with all the other high-activity BNs (at least every person who isn't an anime BN). There are mappers who are so experimental that when I left the BNG, they stopped ranking maps, and if more pressure is put on BNs pushing these maps (high-activity, non-anime BNs), these mappers will struggle to find BNs again due to the inherent volatility of their mapping. Somebody nominating a double barline in a 1:30 4-difficulty anime opening is at fault far more than somebody nominating a double barline in a 10-minute, 5,000 note, sv-heavy, variable timing power metal marathon. Regardless of how much effort the BN puts into it, mapsets with experimental methods or extreme drain times are always more volatile than simpler ones. This is why people avoid them, especially people without the nomination activity to pad a few inevitable dq's from pushing such monumental stuff often (which, when half of your BNG is nominating 3-4 maps per month, creates a large impact; even if two of these maps are difficult checks and get some small dq, they're basically fucked, only high-activity BNs can afford to take such risks).

> 6 month long cooldown idk where that comes from, i think that's just gone

Is it? I remember is being implemented if you got something like two eval passes in a row, but I never caught word of it being removed. Ok, then, even evaluations every 3 months, activity like the top 5 in my mode pushes people to be evaluated basically every 4-6 weeks. At that point, NAT should just play every qualified map to keep track of what people are pushing, lol, if we're keeping the 2-week evaluation window then that gives NAT a whole 2-4 weeks between evals for highest performing members, aka rotating between the most active people would be a constant cycle of evaluations for a specific group of people. Sounds fun?

Fully in acceptance with Hugged's statement, but I believe if this was the case BN evaluations need to be done monthly.

This would both make things quick and easy in terms of statements for the NAT, as someone could lead their own message with everyone in favor or against. And to give the average number they must get (depending on their respective mode) with nominations, as a lot of people aren't going to check how many nominations they've done in 3 months, so a there's a fine-line between them all.

Autonomy on this proposal is definitely tricky, but it is doable with a touch of NAT approval.

Decku wrote:

... but I believe if this was the case BN evaluations need to be done monthly.

Don't disagree with what you or Hugged said, but I just wanted to chime in from STD perspective. Monthly BN Evaluations is 100% not happening, it's not doable for std unless things regarding the evaluations themselves are changed.

so far, the implemented changes are:

- removal of probation as a demotion option
- removal of mock evaluations
- simplifying cooldowns
- giving BNs a say in mapping system developments

rest of the changes will come over the next few weeks, and concerning this thread, the changes are:

- early evaluations for highly active BNs
- reworking minimum activity requirements by implementing Hugged's proposal

okay so everything but the minimum activity changes have been implemented, and the latter has been moved to its own forum post so it gets more attention without halting the flow for every other change.