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[Proposal] Remove maximum activity limit

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Topic Starter
Hivie
title

I think this was supposed to be included in the initial batch of changes but it slipped between the cracks?

ever since The Incident (that caused this rule to be put in place), the maximum activity limit proved to be a hassle and a mental hindrance to whoever reached it, as it usually felt quite superficial/arbitrary and would cause some silly but technically correct warnings. it basically punished BNs for being good which is quite backwards.

another negative side-effect of this limit is that it was made inconsistent across modes to fit the relevant mode's specific needs (taiko being at 100 while every other mode being at 75). this added an extra layer of complexity, and made confusing edge cases for hybrid BNs, who were subjected to different maximum activity limit, which made things even more confusing.

one of the primary reasons this existed is to allow the NAT to reasonably keep up with very active BNs, and now that evals can generate whenever 30 nominations are attained, the limit serves no positive purpose now.
Okoayu
w/ way evals were changed this should be doable +1

I would still like to keep a reminder around that people should maybe not overdo it and tie their entire existence to their osu! tenure around to have _some_ grounds to tell people to chill the hell out, though
Drum-Hitnormal
agree
Topic Starter
Hivie
I'd add a "don't overwork yourself" clause to BN expectations, so it can be treated like a flexible but enforceable guideline rather than a hard rule.
BlackBN
thank you hivie!
Maxus
Discussed previously, but generally support this one with additional expectation clause , should be fine!
Nao Tomori
I do not agree. I still believe there are diminishing returns to activity plus I think that it's harmful for BNs to focus more on activity than anything else (i.e. their raison d'etre becomes "being the most active BN" rather than "promoting good maps to ranked") - this rule was instituted for a good reason that is still relevant even notwithstanding evaluations being triggered at 30 nominations
yaspo
Eval workload was only part of the reason that rule existed. The other part is like nao said, some BNs will start pushing their nomination amount to a point where they optimize out things that matter. They'll typically make more mistakes when it comes to unrankables in favor of speed. Their peers will often feel like they have to do their work for them, these complaints are not new.

Even members that you would think can handle higher amounts of nominations do eventually falter in these aspects.

And I do agree with Nao that I prefer BNs actually choosing maps they nominate rather than beginning to press buttons on anything that has 5 hypes and a metadata check.
Ryuusei Aika

Nao Tomori wrote:

I do not agree. I still believe there are diminishing returns to activity plus I think that it's harmful for BNs to focus more on activity than anything else (i.e. their raison d'etre becomes "being the most active BN" rather than "promoting good maps to ranked") - this rule was instituted for a good reason that is still relevant even notwithstanding evaluations being triggered at 30 nominations
I understand your perspective, but with the recent change of removing subjectivity in BN evaluation I think it is less logical to enforce the "I want you to rank good maps" mindset in any fashion, setting an upper limit of nomination included. If any BNs want to be known as "the most active BN" -- let them be. If this mindset causes problems such as noticeable amounts of vetoes/resets or behavioral issues, NAT should still be able to punish them for these.

yaspo wrote:

...Their peers will often feel like they have to do their work for them, these complaints are not new.

Even members that you would think can handle higher amounts of nominations do eventually falter in these aspects.
Then I'd suggest just letting them to balance between the amount of nominations and the huge workload and complaints from their fellows (potentially also some mappers). If they're not determined & skillful enough to "be known the most active BN" their nomination counts will eventually fall down. What the NAT needs to do is to not bar the individuals who possess sufficient modding skills & enough determination to reach this goal.
yaspo

Ryuusei Aika wrote:

just letting them to balance
It will really be the NAT that'll have to step in and balance it for them and deal with the reports

Ryuusei Aika wrote:

it is less logical to enforce the "I want you to rank good maps" mindset in any fashion
There's a difference between having somewhat tight quality standards and having none at all. The nomination cap is a sanity limit meant to keep things "within reason" rather than enforcing anything specific.

I can see what is "sane" changing with the less restrictive attitude from the recent changes, but there should still be a limit.


There's also larger scale effects like some BNs being the 2nd BN on basically every map being awkward for other BNs because now those Big Nominators are hard to reach due to how busy they've made themselves. Let alone that we recently received a report from mappers who are unhappy that a BN acts "too busy for them".

Or that having a few BNs that nominate basically everything makes it so the choices of other individuals are less relevant.

Or the fact that this would undoubtedly allow ranked maps to skyrocket and then players will be able to keep track of what enters the ranked section even less (or infinite qualified queue I guess)

Both the interactive nature of the system and how barebones Ranked is as content delivery really makes power users a lot more painful than actually helpful.
clayton
agree w yaspo

Hivie wrote:

it basically punished BNs for being good which is quite backwards.
when this rule was first put in place I didn't like this phrasing some people used and I still don't. nominating more maps does not make you a better BN
RandomeLoL
I am not sure how much of an unpopular opinion this is, but the limit is very generous already. I don't see how removing this failsafe is beneficial, when you can count with one (or two?) hands the people that'd be affected by it.

I don't think going beyond the limits is healthy nor indicative of being a good BN. Nor do I think that the BNs are only focusing on activity, I think that is a bad assumption to make mind you. Either way, encouraging to "go ham" may be for the worse imo. The limits, as said, are very generous already.
wwwww
+1 thank you hivie :3
Maxus
I would say the main crux of the issue for the current rule is that we are actively "punishing" BN who are actually passionate and wanting to contribute more to the community if they nominate up to certain point, which is kinda a backward thinking when we supposedly giving more leverage to people who are willing to put more efforts to the community as a whole.

Of course, it's understandable if people worry BN will just nominate on whim without cares, but i think that's already supposed to be NAT job to actually filter out those BNs who using their power unresponsibly, which is the main reason why evaluation and NAT even exist to begin with. (And what we already done since long ago.)

Also, just because that rule is removed doesn't mean that BN will suddenly going rampage on nominating. I don't know if this is the assumption people shares but it seems weird for me to think like this.

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The way i see it is that, the reason and purpose Hivie propose this changes is to change the stigma that "people who contribute more should be punished", which is not what's supposed to happened.

Instead, what this changes want to do is to give separate filter towards those who "contribute a lot properly" with "contribute a lot but doing it badly". The first one isn't supposed to be punished, we only punish the 2nd one (while current rule punish both). The additional clause that got added to the expectation wiki + NAT doing the work of filtering the baddies should be what we are going for.
Basically makes the changes to be more "case by case" basis instead of just firm number alone.
-White
I don't personally see the current activity limit as a bad thing. We can maybe bump it up but I'm not sure anyone should really be putting so much time into the game that they consistently exceed it. Now, obviously, people can put time into the things they want to put time into, but I fear that I dont believe it is realistic for someone to maintain a high level of modding ability (catching unrankables, improving maps, etc) while having that level of activity.
yaspo
I don't really want to be overpresent here but in response to maxus I do want to touch on why I'm wary of this quickly going out of control. It involves a bit of lore which is why I feel the need to clarify.

For standard, BNs have typically encountered issues before even coming close to the cap. In the past, users like Nevo, SonnyC and Aika would already show issues at around 50 nominations. These were way before "The Incident". Smokelind was a good example after that too.

Though where the lack of a cap really started showing was in taiko. At some point a few taiko BNs were nominating maps at such a rate that they hit the daily nomination limit of 10 on a regular basis. I think Capu comes to mind as having to specifically plan around this, but I may be mixing up names.

In essence, if you remove one limit users will end up hitting the next one. In the case of checking after each 30 nominations, know that at the highest throughput this means you might see some BNs multiple times a week. Not only that, none of the maps will even have hit ranked to begin with. Based on past experience this is not unrealistic.

It's also so that due to these blistering nomination speeds no form of QA would be able to keep up. Those few taiko bns seemed to have great records because they easily overwhelmed the system. The NAT back then realized this and had a mountainous task of rechecking hundreds of maps ahead of them to provide a proper evaluation.

So in short just like
be careful with what you wish for
-White
Agree with yaspo. Perhaps the limit should be based on the number of maps the BN currently has within the qualified phase so that when qualified has less maps they can nominate more, and it meters activity when qualified is overfilled with maps. Seems like a good way to ensure NAT has a consistent workload.

How this would look is that no BN can have more than X maps qualified at a time, say, 10 maps. If a map gets through qualified in 7 days, that means the BN can nominate 10 maps a week. If qualified has too many maps, the time a map is in qualified increases. So if a map takes 14 days to rank, the BN can nominate 10 maps every 14 days.
Maxus
The concern of lacking proper QA system or group in the system is fair enough there. All the other concern that i read so far actually can be immediately solved if we have proper QA group that basically prevent tons of maps with problem from getting to ranked, which means that those BNs will automatically got easy bad record which leads them to fast removal > hence also encourage others to be careful when large scale QA does exist. It's true that the lack of QA in the system right now makes it harder to identify qualified maps with problem without certain incentives.

I would say the main thing needs to be solved is probably just the implementation of QI (Quality Inspector) all over again, having certain incentives and also encouragement for people to keep qualified section sane, which was unfortunately cancelled before. Otherwise that should be the last key point to automatically balance the entire ecosystem by itself.

So tl;dr, having QI (Quality Inspector) be possible to implement, then we can probably able to try tweak this part of rules.
Nao Tomori
I don't think relying on QI to clean up after people's mistakes is good (+ it keeps failing every time it's attempted cuz it's pretty boring). The BN is responsible for not nominating maps with issues. Making mistakes on that causes unnecessary headaches for other people, which should be minimized. We know the incidence of such mistakes increases with activity as BNs stop checking things closely to try and bubble as much stuff as they possibly can. That's why super active BNs end up with relatively high DQ rates, which represents a lot of extra friction that would be avoided by just slowing down a bit.

That stuff aside, it also makes our jobs much easier and I don't think it hurts mappers much to wait a bit longer as long as they eventually get the nomination.
Maxus
The main point is not about having QI clean up people mistakes, but rather having the group becoming the presence that actually encourages people to be careful enough in their nomination, in similar principle as having GMT presence alone can preventing people from actually try breaking rules, presence of QI does the same. Having QI helping to pointing out mistakes is just the "tool" to help achieve that control (in also similar vein as GMT mod tool is the tool to achieve the same thing), which clearly already missing since long time ago. Sure mistake will keep happened but that control alone does make the differences in how people work and that decreases the mistake to some extent. The group itself was tested in taiko scene and proven to be really effective so we cannot assume it will be failing this time.

In any case, QI is kinda out of topic and probably should be separated from the current proposal. I only said that group presence is the key before we even considering changing something regarding the rules of this. As for the existence of that group itself and whether people agreed it's gonna work/not is another separate discussion before we can even continue anything about this proposal.
Net0
Discussion got dead locked, so I'd like to give further input here to maybe help a bit.

2 points of view in dispute;

->"BNs who want to be active are punished for being too active."
->"BNs who nominate too many maps will lower their checking abilities due to the amount of maps and create trouble for the team."

Simply put, just change the perspective of 'nomination limit' to a 'mistake limit' instead. In this manner, there should be no problems with nominating as many maps as you're capable of nominating. If you pass the limit, you're kicked.



In this suggestion case; evals are generated per number of mistakes (which have a nomination proportinal rate) || period of time in case no mistakes are detected (to check minimum activity requirements).

e.g: 2 mistakes per 30 nominations. After 2 mistakes, an eval is generated, if they happened in a nomination activity of 29 or less maps, BN is kicked. Of course this number is arbitrary and should be ruled by NATs to make it fair.

Side note: Mistakes here are unrankable mistakes, things that would unrank an already ranked map in case they pass qualified without any fixes. (timing, unsnapped objects, slander in slider points, offscreen, etc). Other DQs can be graded in different ways similar to what already happens in evals.

I agree that how pratical to implement such a change is an important factor as well as workload to fix mistakes in post ranked status, but I think qualified status exist for the later and dev side shouldn't be much of an issue if you're not in a hurry to implement changes.
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