My proposal is to remove these 2 rules from the taiko specific RC:


If that seems too drastic, I propose the following change to the rule which is similar to how drain time requirements are handled in catch the beat:


From my perspective, the only purpose these rules serve is to maintain some form of balance in the ranked section by ensuring there's difficulties for players of all sorts of skill levels, but given the fact that the majority of the maps that get ranked have a drain time lower than 3:30, I don't think these rules are necessary to maintain that balance. If anything, the group of players who have the least content available to them in the ranked section are high skilled players who want to play difficult maps and I think that removing these 2 rules would definitely help alleviate that.

Mappers who like making multiple difficulties for their mapsets regardless of length would still be free to do so and mappers who don't like doing that will now have the option to rank their maps instead of either forcing themselves to make more difficulties or having their maps end up in the graveyard.

Sounds like it would make it a lot more motivating to rank hard maps without much of a downside ^^ Taiko IMO is lacking more higher difficulty maps

While I agree with the sentiment, mapping low diffs for longer songs can be really demotivating, I think outright removing these rules is a little too much. A map below 3:30 needing a full spread down to at least a futsuu while a map above 3:30 not needing any minimum diff whatsoever feels like a bit of an extreme jump. I think maybe shifting up the requirements by 1 diff would be a good way to not demotivate mappers as much while still having a pretty consistent scale.

Maybe something like this:


(And maybe have a fourth one around the 2:00-2:30 range that requires a futsuu)

I am in support of this proposal. Some songs that are very well suited for difficult levels can be very hard to make easier difficulties for that are both fun and adhere to the ranking criteria. One example of this that I have come across is the guideline encouraging a rest moment every few measures in difficulties up to Oni. Faster songs do not always include a rest or break in the rhythm, which can make it difficult to properly follow the pacing of the song while following the guidelines in the ranking criteria. Some mappers are also just better at creating difficult maps, and a high quality 9 star map is still a high quality 9 star map regardless of whether or not it has a 4 star attached to it.

Also, this is just a personal opinion, but I think it would be fun to see more plays without Double Time in the top plays of top players, since there are only a few 9 star maps for people to play without it.

Daanny wrote:

While I agree with the sentiment, mapping low diffs for longer songs can be really demotivating, I think outright removing these rules is a little too much. A map below 3:30 needing a full spread down to at least a futsuu while a map above 3:30 not needing any minimum diff whatsoever feels like a bit of an extreme jump.

Although I personally don't see the issue with that, If the jump between the requirements for <3:30 and >3:30 feels too drastic then I think something like this would work:


This way, it would still address the point I made in the original post as there would be no spread requirement for maps longer than 3:30, while also making the rules scale evenly.

Genjuro wrote:

Although I personally don't see the issue with that, If the jump between the requirements for <3:30 and >3:00 feels too drastic then I think something like this would work:

...lower than 2:30, the lowest difficulty cannot be harder than a Futsuu.
...between 2:30 and 3:00, the lowest difficulty cannot be harder than a Muzukashii.
...between 3:00 and 3:30, the lowest difficulty cannot be harder than an Oni.

This way, it would still address the point I made in the original post as there would be no spread requirement for maps longer than 3:30, while also making the rules scale evenly.

Yeah that seems fair, I'd personally have the no diff requirement threshold be at the lowest 4 minutes

I actually strongly disagree it is the open door to minimum effort set and the destruction of our game by stoping making low diffs and impact people who wants to play the game at lower level/ discover it in these or those song. So to me it should clearly not be removed maybe reduced (as ctb do)

Making lower diffs in taiko is relatively low effort compared to other modes in terms of how much time is generally needed to make them. Especially considering that spreads in taiko only really need the required difficulties to be rankable, I don't really think this proposal should be pushed forward.

Also (correct me if I'm wrong) but the taiko diffs that get the most plays are the lower diffs, which means that we should make sure there is content for the biggest audience.

agree w maxie

I think it shouldnt be removed out-right for the following reasons:

1. Mapping for taiko require way less effort compared to other mods, especially for making lower difficulties since you can just copy the top diff and delete notes and tweak rhythms and patterns to fit RC instead of mapping from scratch.

2. Removing wouldn't promote harder maps, it would promote less easier maps. Having easier diffs will always be a good thing since it makes the map more accessible. Even if a song is 5 minutes long, if a players likes it enough, they will want to play it, regardless of skill level. There might be a way to promote harder maps, but its not this approach

While i agree with this, I have been more on the side that the drain times should be adjusted like catch has them - given Taiko has a low playerbase compared to other modes, this would at least settle down some things for the better.

maxie wrote:

taiko diffs that get the most plays are the lower diffs, which means that we should make sure there is content for the biggest audience.

There are still a lot of sets being ranked which do not apply to the drain time rule/change, therefore I believe this statement is sort of invalid. It should be evened out so both sides of the playerbase can reach satisfactory.

Linkff001 wrote:

So to me it should clearly not be removed maybe reduced (as ctb do)

The Law wrote:

While i agree with this, I have been more on the side that the drain times should be adjusted like catch has them

I think this works too so I edited the original post to also include an alternative proposal similar to the catch the beat RC.

Not in support of this change because these rules were made upon previous experiences that almost broke our neck in the Taiko community: Our mode especially has the longest history of having no spread rules, which incentivised people to make no lower difficulties at all. It led to less new people that could potentially have become modders and BNs since the entrance level into Taiko was too high, and led at the end to a stagnation for years until we started regulating it more. Once there is no rule enforcing a spread anymore, people will start to make no use of the spreads.

Also, people might remember that I asked ppy for data on "unique plays on each difficulty" which I will gladly share in here now. It shows (even tho there was a decline of lower players in the year 2023) that for the most part, lower difficulties are played the most:

From it's creation till the year 2023 there were 4.247.930 unique plays on all maps.
156.664 plays on Oni and above. That gives us a play count of 3,69% for ALL difficulties that are Oni and above, while all other plays are distributed on Muzukashiis and below. Catering towards removing that rule and denying people the possibility to play a song on their level range because of just a few high players (or because we mappers are lazy) is less than ideal, and rather carless if anything.


All time
+---------------------------+------------+
| count(distinct h.user_id) | version |
+---------------------------+------------+
| 1298415 | Futsuu |
| 2387136 | Kantan |
| 405715 | Muzukashii |
| 156664 | Oni |
+---------------------------+------------+

2022
+---------------------------+------------+
| count(distinct h.user_id) | version |
+---------------------------+------------+
| 148671 | Futsuu |
| 363229 | Kantan |
| 59455 | MUZUKASHII |
| 26244 | Oni |
+---------------------------+------------+

2023.08.17
+---------------------------+------------+
| count(distinct h.user_id) | version |
+---------------------------+------------+
| 68352 | futsuu |
| 142408 | Kantan |
| 31619 | Muzukashii |
| 17895 | Oni |
+---------------------------+------------+


Let me be honest: I want to be lazy. I don't want to have to map every single time 6 difficulties for each set I make. I would love to be not always forced to make a spread. But not for the cost of denying other people to play a song just because I am too lazy to do so. Especially not, when there is already leniency about spread - being able to have only a KFMO + a very hard difficulty under the BN/NAT discretion. It's just that almost no one of us uses it even tho we can.

Again: 96,31% of ALL plays are below Oni. I hope after this some of you find it also presumptuous to consider any further changing that rule.

Edit: More posts appeared while I was writing this. I'm currently not in favor of changing the rule either.

I agree with the post, my main issue has generally been that in order to rank a song that's around 4:30 in length, or just even under 5 minutes, you'll still have to make 2 more diffs anyway. At that point why not just go map a song that's 30 seconds longer rather than spending the time to map 8+ more minutes, it's a bit stupid imo

Due to that I feel like a decent amount of fun maps or songs that would be cool to map won't bother being pushed for ranked. Taiko is extremely lacking in ranked maps for higher skilled players and some sort of change like this could potentially help

Also I get that the majority of the playerbase aren't going to be able to play a super hard solo diff map, however we already have so many low diffs that I don't see how this would impact anything in terms of newer players.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to assume that such a change in the RC would suddenly mark the end of low difficulties. The most common things people like to map are anime openings, rhythm game music etc. which is shorter than 2:30 most of the time, so these maps would still have to form a proper spread, providing content for new players. The idea behind this proposal is to promote more content, not less, by allowing high quality maps that would otherwise end up in the graveyard to be ranked.

I can only speak for myself but if this change were to be applied it wouldn't affect the way I map, I make proper spreads because I want to and not because I'm required to and I would like to believe that this is also the case for other mappers too.

OnosakiHito wrote:

From it's creation till the year 2023 there were 4.247.930 unique plays on all maps.
156.664 plays on Oni and above. That gives us a play count of 3,69% for ALL difficulties that are Oni and above, while all other plays are distributed on Muzukashiis and below. Catering towards removing that rule and denying people the possibility to play a song on their level range because of just a few high players (or because we mappers are lazy) is less than ideal, and rather carless if anything.

I don't think its very meaningful to provide these stats without also providing the amount of ranked maps there are for each difficulty level. I think it's only natural that there would be a lot more plays on lower difficulties when there are a lot more lower difficulties in ranked. I'm not denying that there's a lot more players who beginners than experienced ones, but that doesn't mean that there isn't an audience for difficult maps and that audience could really use more content!

As we talked already in discord, it's a long process. But once we lose the influx of new players and we have after some year a valley that cannot be filled quickly because we are missing people that could have been educated in becoming modders and BNs, we won't get out of it so fast anymore. Same goes for once we get too used in mapping no spread maps. Also, most play the new beatmaps. And denying them to play something else than anime, rhythm game music etc. is not really a game design we should strive for, for said reasons.

As mentioned before: that "ban anime" meme didn't come from nowhere. People were really fedup back then with having only anime and nightcore maps. New players incentive is to play songs / gernes they like. If they don't find these, they won't stay for long.

OnosakiHito wrote:

Not in support of this change because these rules were made upon previous experiences that almost broke our neck in the Taiko community: Our mode especially has the longest history of having no spread rules, which incentivised people to make no lower difficulties at all. It led to less new people that could potentially have become modders and BNs since the entrance level into Taiko was too high, and led at the end to a stagnation for years until we started regulating it more. Once there is no rule enforcing a spread anymore, people will start to make no use of the spreads.

Also, people might remember that I asked ppy for data on "unique plays on each difficulty" which I will gladly share in here now. It shows (even tho there was a decline of lower players in the year 2023) that for the most part, lower difficulties are played the most:

From it's creation till the year 2023 there were 4.247.930 unique plays on all maps.
156.664 plays on Oni and above. That gives us a play count of 3,69% for ALL difficulties that are Oni and above, while all other plays are distributed on Muzukashiis and below. Catering towards removing that rule and denying people the possibility to play a song on their level range because of just a few high players (or because we mappers are lazy) is less than ideal, and rather carless if anything.


All time
+---------------------------+------------+
| count(distinct h.user_id) | version |
+---------------------------+------------+
| 1298415 | Futsuu |
| 2387136 | Kantan |
| 405715 | Muzukashii |
| 156664 | Oni |
+---------------------------+------------+

2022
+---------------------------+------------+
| count(distinct h.user_id) | version |
+---------------------------+------------+
| 148671 | Futsuu |
| 363229 | Kantan |
| 59455 | MUZUKASHII |
| 26244 | Oni |
+---------------------------+------------+

2023.08.17
+---------------------------+------------+
| count(distinct h.user_id) | version |
+---------------------------+------------+
| 68352 | futsuu |
| 142408 | Kantan |
| 31619 | Muzukashii |
| 17895 | Oni |
+---------------------------+------------+


Let me be honest: I want to be lazy. I don't want to have to map every single time 6 difficulties for each set I make. I would love to be not always forced to make a spread. But not for the cost of denying other people to play a song just because I am too lazy to do so. Especially not, when there is already leniency about spread - being able to have only a KFMO + a very hard difficulty under the BN/NAT discretion. It's just that almost no one of us uses it even tho we can.

Again: 96,31% of ALL plays are below Oni. I hope after this some of you find it also presumptuous to consider any further changing that rule.

Edit: More posts appeared while I was writing this. I'm currently not in favor of changing the rule either.

^ +1

with how low effort it is to make rankable lower diffs this change seems a bit pointless, along with the arguments presented by ono and maxie about how low diffs have most plays i personally disagree

As someone who proposed the current catch rules, IMO you guys should work towards either adopting our rules or mania's. The overall net positive from the rule change has HEAVILY outweighed the "negatives".

I think Ono's point is quite disingenuous towards the reality. OFCOURSE there's going to be more plays on lower difficulties. This is obvious. This is because over time, the player base gets BETTER. in 2017 nobody was playing super high SR maps and the overall playerbase was weaker than it is today. If you want to use stats like this, you need to get gameplay stats from *only* the year 2024 for it to be somewhat relevant.

Also, I want everyone to think of this change not as removing lower diffs, but adding the possibility for newer higher diffs to come into play. In catch, we saw that there was a very sizeable portion of mappers who would still make full spreads regardless. We also saw alot of mappers take the spread rules as a welcome opportunity to actually MAP LOW DIFFS in the new allowable range, creating even more Hards and Insanes than before simply because the new spread rules allowed them to beforehand. The big thing was changing solo diff marathons to 4 minutes, which has absolutely brought a new breath of life into both the mapping meta and playing meta at a higher SR.

tldr; I don't think the numbers you have are good, you should use catch/mania's numbers instead as a starting point. But frankly, the positives will assuredly outweigh the negatives, and this is speaking from the POV of a mode that has undergone this change after witnessing mania also have a successful outcome with it.

edit: even after looking at your own stats that peppy pulled, you can quite easily see the upward trend in playcount on Oni's vs all other diffs with the two latter data sample points. Your own stats are contradicting your sentiment.

Secre wrote:

I think Ono's point is quite disingenuous towards the reality. OFCOURSE there's going to be more plays on lower difficulties. This is obvious. This is because over time, the player base gets BETTER. in 2017 nobody was playing super high SR maps and the overall playerbase was weaker than it is today. If you want to use stats like this, you need to get gameplay stats from *only* the year 2024 for it to be somewhat relevant.

These are unique plays. So each play you see in the data is counted only once. This is a huge difference. 2023, which was a year ago only, had 6,9% unique plays on everything starting from Oni. 93,1% for Muzukashii and below. The problem is that this is a huge discrepancy. Even if you would argue that the lower diffs are also played by all higher players with DT which bolsters the numbers, they would still heavily be outweighted by people who play lower difficulties. Even if we put an error margin of 25% on it to account for the missing 4 months in 2023, it would be still ~30/70. I'm not a data expert, and I know that that there is always the possibility to interpret data in a different way. But we are not talking about 50/50 or anything near that. The majority of plays is in the lower category.

Secre wrote:

Also, I want everyone to think of this change not as removing lower diffs, but adding the possibility for newer higher diffs to come into play. In catch, we saw that there was a very sizeable portion of mappers who would still make full spreads regardless. We also saw alot of mappers take the spread rules as a welcome opportunity to actually MAP LOW DIFFS in the new allowable range, creating even more Hards and Insanes than before simply because the new spread rules allowed them to beforehand. The big thing was changing solo diff marathons to 4 minutes, which has absolutely brought a new breath of life into both the mapping meta and playing meta at a higher SR.

This is not correct. I would agree with you if we didn't had that in taiko, but we have since several years already the possibility to have the usual normal spread from Kantan to Oni while the hardest difficulty is allowed to be detached from the rest of the set (I proposed this back then in 2014 or so and MMzz, Tasha and I implemented it). It's just that most people don't know about it because it goes under the discretion of the NAT/BN and got unconsciously carried into the new era. So what we should probably rather do is to make this more visible to people. This make the proposal obsolete, as this tackles that problem Genjuro mentioned, while still giving lower players something to play. (In fact: Genjuro didn't even know about it prior his posting of this proposal until we talked about it in discord)

Secre wrote:

tldr; I don't think the numbers you have are good, you should use catch/mania's numbers instead as a starting point. But frankly, the positives will assuredly outweigh the negatives, and this is speaking from the POV of a mode that has undergone this change after witnessing mania also have a successful outcome with it.

edit: even after looking at your own stats that peppy pulled, you can quite easily see the upward trend in playcount on Oni's vs all other diffs with the two latter data sample points. Your own stats are contradicting your sentiment.

2022: 4,4% Oni+ (26244 from 597.599)
2023: 6,9% Oni+ (17895 from 260.274)

Quite frankly, a plus of 3% is not an "upward trend" and rather a fluctuation. However, even what I say cannot be really proven or disproven, because we would need at least three years to see a "trend". The problem is rather getting data from ppy is unbelievable hard. It took me months to just get this. Speaking of numbers, if you have any hard values, feel free to post these to be able to compare game modes. As for taiko, currently the numbers speak for itself.

(I know very little about taiko and how it operates).

I am a firm believer of allowing more content to enter the ranked section because of how much osu relies on community based work. Mappers are generally self driven individuals who all have there own reasons behind mapping. Making things easier by loosening regulations is a good thing in my eyes.

Based off of reading this thread a lot of people are making the claim that "lower difficulties are easy to make on taiko". If this is truly the case, then would the mappers that currently create lower difficulties suddenly feel obligated to stop because of this change? (Based off of when catch went through the change the answer was "no" but for taiko it may be different).

I don't think the unique plays argument is the most fair. Of course for Oni's and above it will be really low because it takes a lot of skill to reach that point. Lower difficulties having a lot of "unique plays" is self evident. What isn't self evident is the result.

What I mean is, when newer players are searching for maps, is recency really relevant? You can easily search "Futsuu" and yield hundreds if not thousands of results. This is more a philosophical question that doesn't have an exact answer. Its easy to suggest that the new player base is "fragile" and that the odds of gaining new players would increase if more of these difficulties were being generated which is a fair argument to make.

With that being said, I believe newer players will have the ability to find maps within their skill range to play. And, if this change were to go through, that life would continue with enough mappers creating lower difficulties while simultaneously throwing a bone of those interested in "being lazy".

Maybe the change could be balanced better as mentioned above to not be the most drastic, but that's more of a question for the people familiar with taiko.

Even as someone who personally prefers most sets feeling "complete" with a decent spread, if mappers truly feel discouraged from mapping futsuu's and lower, I would vouch for making things more lenient.

I think taiko ranked section really lacks variety in high level content, so I think it's worth taking steps to encourage that. Meanwhile low level content there's more than enough of, and I imagine most newer players would have more enjoyable of a time sticking to 2 minute maps anyways.

Don't take it the wrong way wwwww (as well as Secre), but your lack of knowledge in taiko does indeed show. The same goes for the younger taiko people who either mostly argue feeling based or without experience. You disregard the argument with the unqiue plays too much without the prior knowledge what actually is happening spread and set wise in taiko. Will mention this now a last time because I am more than certain that we are going nowhere with this suggested rule change:

1. We had this in the past. People did not map lower difficulties. I will not wager the future of Taiko once again just because some of us are lazy, while we have the possibility to either A. have K-O spreads with an extra diff. or B. to get GDers.
2. It makes no sense to disregard the biggest player base. Lower players usually don't search for difficulties at the beginning: they search for the songs they love to play. And if they don't find it, they are less interested in the game mode. So having low difficulties for new sets is very much needed, and not a "philosophical question". It's game design.
3. Our problem lies somewhere else, which is the jump between Muzu and Oni. Making some sets/songs even less accessible is contradictonary, because it doesn't even give any proper jump to higher diffs.

roufou wrote:

Even as someone who personally prefers most sets feeling "complete" with a decent spread, if mappers truly feel discouraged from mapping futsuu's and lower, I would vouch for making things more lenient.

I think taiko ranked section really lacks variety in high level content, so I think it's worth taking steps to encourage that. Meanwhile low level content there's more than enough of, and I imagine most newer players would have more enjoyable of a time sticking to 2 minute maps anyways.

Again: People are allowed to make K<->F<->M<->O<--------------->I/U spreads or have GDers.
If we wouldn't have had all these possibilities, I would be all on board with you guys. But since we have these leniencies, it isn't a question wether we are being discouraged or not, but rather if we are being lazy or not.

4th Edit: I asked for more data from ppy. I hope we will get it in some months or so.

I definitely think 3:00 to 3:30 should have a muzu diff.

I honestly doubt new players searching for x song makes a big difference cause at least 90% of the time it's probably gonna be too short for the rule to be applicable.

I will concede that the laziness statement might be true to some degree? But even then I assumed this was mostly applicable to heavy high diff sets and/or songs where lower diffs are likely to feel bad (tech).

I'd have to see examples of sets that benefit from this rule to make a true judgement on whether I agree with it, I think.

I will say though if you rank an 8* map at 3:30+ that sounds pretty silly to me.

tldr: I might agree that the current rules aren't lenient enough if I see some map(sets) where the leniency would feel worthwhile.

edit: also is the "we had this in the past" thing even true? I remember single diff GDs being the only way to rank taiko, but I don't remember single taiko diffs getting ranked at shorter lengths.

another thing to consider is how some maps could end up in limbo due to BNs not liking the easier diff(s) for whatever reason, even if it might be "rankable".

@OnosakiHito What I discussed in my post wasn't exclusively taiko specific but an ideology of osu itself. Allow me to ask you the following question. Do you think drain time rules should be adjusted in ANY way shape or form to allow for an easier ranking process? I said in my original post that I was not sure if this was the best way to do it, however, that I think something like this should be pushed for as the reception seems mostly positive thus far (just that a different way of ease might be better).

wwwww wrote:

Do you think drain time rules should be adjusted in ANY way shape or form to allow for an easier ranking process?

Currently, no. For said reasons. The current ranking way is easy. A bit annoying? Yes. But as mentioned before, we have for that already rules in place that make it less annoying. I mean, I'm all open for a change for the betterment of the community if we have some tangible data as Secre proclaimed to have. Something that might show or indicate a different direction to be beneficial. But what I currently have -again, I am no data scientist- seems to be pretty self telling. This is the more objective way of things.

Additionally, if the CTB and Mania community is still anything that it was back then, then these rule changes seem to suit their community much better than the taiko one. I really don't know why but for some strange reason, whenever we have the opportunity in taiko, we are super lazy. And we go that path whenever possible. roufou asked if we really had this in the past - that people use no lower difficulties. And yes: it was before the creation of the RC when we only had Onis, and once when people wanted to change the rule for what is deemed as approval map (when it was still drain lenght base), got it changed, and wanted to go even further down with the minutes till we reinstated the old rule. This is the more subjective, experienced based way of things.

Is the last point a bit over dramatized from my perspective, considering those were different times than now? A bit, yes. I won't deny that. But:

wwwww wrote:

I said in my original post that I was not sure if this was the best way to do it, however, that I think something like this should be pushed for as the reception seems mostly positive thus far (just that a different way of ease might be better).

Of course the reception is positive when mapper and higher players gain out of it. But what about the lower ones? This is how it looks to me:


You can actually even disregard everything I said above and just take the TL;DR: I disagree with this rule change because with the current way, we have at least more low + High difficulties. But if we change it, we will have even less of such sets and more only-high-diff. ones. We discard a huge amount of a playerbase. Call it even unfair. And we do it already with our current rules: whenever people can, they use only one diff.. Now imagine we lower it even further:

1. beatmapsets/2186279#taiko/4622147
2. beatmapsets/2229728#taiko/4731316
3. beatmapsets/2191269#taiko/4634935
4. beatmapsets/2189380#taiko/4630654
5. beatmapsets/2202791#taiko/4662237
6. beatmapsets/2031183#taiko/4233537
7. beatmapsets/2224971#taiko/4719298 (this one especially, it's not even hard)
8. beatmapsets/1280928#taiko/2660687

Considering how little time and effort many of the current lower difficulties are I find it hard to imagine that relaxing the spread rules will result in a net positive, as it will simply encourage people to do even less.

Ok, so. I talked to RandomeLoL about their data for mania and how they came to their change. In short: They made a poll where community members where able to give their opinion wether they would like to relax their rules or not under some factors and after a discussion within the community. They wanted to bring back some life to the game and make it more interesting for the older/veteran people, which they succeeded to achieve at the end. #1 #2

However, what is missing now is a follow up of this change after 3 years. How it impacted the influx of new users, or as I mentioned here:


We don't have such data yet from mania side.
For taiko as mentioned before, it got requested.

as someone who is typically against this concept (those around from the few internal discussions about it would remember), its important to consider the effect on quality that forcing these lower difficulties has

something that almost always rings true is that on sets which are very close to the drain time requirement, the lower difficulties will be as soulless and effortless as possible, since the mapper mainly wants to rank their higher difficulty anyway. from an artistic & purely mapper focused standpoint, im not entirely against the idea of loosening the restrictions on spreads. there is a vast catalogue of lower difficulties anyway, most of passable quality, and shorter sets (often garnering the highest playcount on average) will still be required to have full, approachable spreads.

a past opinion of myself, one which is floating around in this thread from others, is the idea that this change would promote "laziness". however, in my opinion, not doing something that you're not going to put effort into regardless isn't lazy, rather its a more positive act, you're effectively improving the quality of the ranked section by not including a hastily made thoughtless slop difficulty on your set. ive heard plenty of complaints from new players about bad kantan, futsuu, and muzukashii difficulties that have been ranked in recent years, because most people dont care to map them well anymore, and most bns dont care to mod them properly, or dont even know how to beyond making them follow the ranking criteria in the most cookie-cutter way possible.

it kinda is what it is, if we truly believe that including these difficulties still has a tangible benefit that outweighs the benefit to the more active mapper then so be it. however, id love for everyone to at least consider pandering a bit to the people who are keeping the cogs turning. 9 billion kantans wont fix the playerbase problem alone, its largely an issue that extends far beyond our reach as osu!taiko mappers, and is more to do with the popularity of the game outside of japan lol

I will echo what I mentioned on the standard thread similar to this, I think for extremely high SR maps the bigger drain is all the filler extra diffs. From an effort standpoint it takes 10-20 min tops to map a kantan, futsuu, or muzu, and (imo) the drag is always mapping the diffs that are actual diffs but not the top diff. Formally allowing extremely loose spreads above Oni would alleviate some of the issue with higher difficulty map spreads but still not cause a problem for the 95% of unique players that play low diffs.

On effort and quality - I don't think it matters. Low diff players are more focused on not pressing d when a k comes up and vice versa than worrying about rhythm or song representation. Simply existing and allowing a low level player to play along with the song they want to play is a sufficient amount of value-add to keep in my opinion.

radar wrote:

a past opinion of myself, one which is floating around in this thread from others, is the idea that this change would promote "laziness". however, in my opinion, not doing something that you're not going to put effort into regardless isn't lazy, rather its a more positive act, you're effectively improving the quality of the ranked section by not including a hastily made thoughtless slop difficulty on your set. ive heard plenty of complaints from new players about bad kantan, futsuu, and muzukashii difficulties that have been ranked in recent years, because most people dont care to map them well anymore, and most bns dont care to mod them properly, or dont even know how to beyond making them follow the ranking criteria in the most cookie-cutter way possible.

I mean, those are fair assessments of the state of lower difficulties. This however means that we have to get stricter with the quality of lower difficulties if this happens to be a bigger problem. It would mean our BN or NAT system is failing at some part. And this cannot be a reason to stop mapping lower difficulties. It implies we are just moving that issue of lower quality low diffs under a rug. Unless, we the community consider it in a way Nao mentioned it in his second paragraph.

radar wrote:

it kinda is what it is, if we truly believe that including these difficulties still has a tangible benefit that outweighs the benefit to the more active mapper then so be it. however, id love for everyone to at least consider pandering a bit to the people who are keeping the cogs turning. 9 billion kantans wont fix the playerbase problem alone, its largely an issue that extends far beyond our reach as osu!taiko mappers, and is more to do with the popularity of the game outside of japan lol

My bad if I am beating a death horse by now, but we did pander to the people who are keeping the cogs turning. All the problems we had back then accumuluated in the following solutions that worked so far well:

1. K<->F<->M<->O<----------------->I/U
2. Huge leniency in spread when using GDers (almost none existent as long as it fits the diff. lable)
3. Having the Rules about drain time in the first place. Else you would need to make for 10 min songs a set.

And this makes me come to another issue: that we are chipping away the basic requirements for accessibility to players of all levels. Today it's going to be a drain time of 2:30 min. Tomorrow it's gonna be removing the rule.

Nao Tomori wrote:

On effort and quality - I don't think it matters. Low diff players are more focused on not pressing d when a k comes up and vice versa than worrying about rhythm or song representation. Simply existing and allowing a low level player to play along with the song they want to play is a sufficient amount of value-add to keep in my opinion.

ive heard a lot of differing opinions from actual new players as i mentioned, maybe someone fresh to rhythm games as a whole is going to have that blank of a view, but anyone trying to learn taiko coming from a different mode/rg seems to always have problems with layer choices & the general snooze factor of k/f diffs, but as stated im not going to be a stickler about it..

ultimately, ono raising the point that people should probably care more about low difficulties is an equally adequate solution, but thats a different thread

OnosakiHito wrote:

And this makes me come to another issue: that we are chipping away the basic requirements for accessibility to players of all levels. Today it's going to be a drain time of 2:30 min. Tomorrow it's gonna be removing the rule.

in my opinion, i dont think thats true at all, really just a negative mentality. i sincerely do believe that a slight reeling in of the current drain requirements will relieve some of the annoyance of making spreads with not much of a downside, and wont have a snowballing effect leading to the removal of everything. at least, not in the near future

^no point in throwing out unlimited hypotheticals either, thats what historically slaughters every productive osu discussion

to reiterate, just wanted to make my stance known since i know its one that isnt entirely uncommon, but wasnt fully represented here. may end up not replying further, i will be smiling down upon you from the retirement home regardless of the decision made. amen.

Many of the things you said I can agree to. As for the negative mentality: I would rather say it is experience. Can't throw away 14 years of that if you ask me. Especially when we had this happening a few times during that time. People can ask Loctav for that matter or check archives. We changed this rule way too often. Current iterations was the ultimatum we've set at the end. Anyways, I actually said everything as well! Let's see where this goes.

OnosakiHito wrote:

We had this in the past. People did not map lower difficulties. I will not wager the future of Taiko once again just because some of us are lazy, while we have the possibility to either A. have K-O spreads with an extra diff. or B. to get GDers.

Keywords being the past. This isn't the case anymore, in fact it's the opposite nowadays as more people have gained interest towards Taiko mapping. This can be easily seen by simply looking at the recent ranked beatmaps as well, and there is no denying for that. Frankly I don't understand why this is being considered as lazy nowadays if some simply want to present difficult beatmaps towards a player base that is already very small. Even on recent maps, as well as on many other older maps that also are over 5 minute+ (possibly a few Frukoyurdakul sets that can be mentioned in this case) haven't even reached the 50 score count as of writing this. If not many players on this skill range play most maps, then I don't see a reason why laziness should be a valid term to call the users in question such thing.

In this case, i don't think that the past state should be taken into consideration since the playerbase for Taiko has shrunken a lot with the recent years passing which makes me believe the proposal offers a greater change for those on a high skillset range to make them enjoy the game more than before by simply offering more content to them.

OnosakiHito wrote:

1. It makes no sense to disregard the biggest player base. Lower players usually don't search for difficulties at the beginning: they search for the songs they love to play. And if they don't find it, they are less interested in the game mode. So having low difficulties for new sets is very much needed, and not a "philosophical question". It's game design.

In most cases it likely is not needed because some songs can still be around the drain time range as proposed. However, this could also get players into gaining more interest with playing the game mode to achieve a score they really want to achieve. This feels equilavent to saying that even 5+ minute maps should always require a full difficulty spread so everyone can enjoy it. Doesn't feel right to me at least.

Beginner players will still have a big variety of maps to play whether this change may be applied or not. This doesn't mean that low difficulties will suddenly go extinct or that Taiko mappers suddenly stop creating content for those in this range, worth noting there is a great amount of variety in music in general.

I've already said similar things on other related threads so I'll keep it short, just putting my 2c here as well. I do not think removing requirements to create certain difficulties is "denying other people to play a song". nobody should be feeling entitled to the volunteer effort of mappers, and no quality map should be denied from Ranked solely because an additional map of the same song might also be of value to the Ranked section

I see the unique value in low diffs (introduces ppl to the game mode, and statistically most players are at this level), but don't think mappers should be forced to make them. that's a project for people passionate about it, not to shove on those who aren't interested

so yeah I support this and any proposal that relaxes or removes this part of RC