in all of the spread threads there's a few people that say to the effect of "new players will be harmed by this". aside from that low-difficulty maps won't stop being made by people who like to make them, I don't think a new player needs to be constantly catered to. people quickly move on from that phase, and if you were absolutely dependent on topical/recent songs to play the game, you probably weren't going to last long anyway. in mania, I'm a "new" player (to keyboard-focused 4K and 7K), have an overwhelming amount of low-difficulty maps to play, and I haven't even downloaded anything newer than 2018 or so.

clayton wrote:

in all of the spread threads there's a few people that say to the effect of "new players will be harmed by this". aside from that low-difficulty maps won't stop being made by people who like to make them, I don't think a new player needs to be constantly catered to. people quickly move on from that phase, and if you were absolutely dependent on topical/recent songs to play the game, you probably weren't going to last long anyway. in mania, I'm a "new" player (to keyboard-focused 4K and 7K), have an overwhelming amount of low-difficulty maps to play, and I haven't even downloaded anything newer than 2018 or so.

As you said, osu! mania already has enough easy difficulty for Newbie.
But what if there's no easy difficulty with new songs coming out over and over again?
Newbies who search for keywords in tag and encounter osu mania! can easily cool down by seeing that there is no easy difficulty of a new song they are interested in.

After all, Newbies should be the mapper and ranker of the future, but we should never be the first steps in the way of such a path.

Niks wrote:

But what if there's no easy difficulty with new songs coming out over and over again?

I think it's too early to immediately assume to such extreme. The previous spread rule changes did even more extreme changes back in 2021, and skepticality also exist 3 years ago, only to be proven that there are still a lot of lower level difficulties being made right now.

If you really felt that way, i recommend you to present factual evidence of data, on why you think the changes will lead to the scenario that you think, then it will be more productive discussion to continue on.

It's easy to immediately assume "the worst" out of changes, but it's not easy to present immediate data to prove why you really feel the way you feel.

Otherwise, i think constantly "assume the worst" won't lead to anywhere for anyone, and won't be a productive discussion either.

--------------------------

That aside, the NAT side also trying to ask ranked data from peppy before continuing the discussion, so i recommend for all of you to wait for additional data of mania ranked map from 2022-2024, and make "logical" analyzation and conclusion from those, before we continue the discussion.

what data are you looking for? the last time this happened, with OnosakiHito requesting unique playcounts grouped by difficulty level for a similar taiko spread discussion, there was (imo) very little value in the result because it only confirmed that low diffs get the majority of unique playcounts and everyone already assumed that. you can make a reasonable guess this is the case by looking at regular playcounts across diffs

I don't think there is any existing data that would help to understand the potential effect of reducing the amount of new incoming low diffs to Ranked. the best we can do is see a relationship between current low diffs and new player behavior, which depending on your perspective, may be entirely irrelevant because existing maps aren't going anywhere.

Last time both a mix of user surveyed data and a couple queries was of use when tackling a similar proposal.

I believe there is value in knowing where we currently are as to gauge whether the sentiment pushed in this post is reflected in the different maps ranked ever since the first proposal was made 2 years ago.

Hydria's data analysis:

ok so thanks to hydria we have some data regarding the number of diffs ranked relative to SR since the last major change in spread rules (graphs posted above by yyotta)

to conveniently categorize difficulties we are using SR (not the best metric but it should be an ok approximation) to make the following assumption:

- easy/normal diffs are all diffs below 2.5*

- hard diffs are all diffs between 2.5*-3.5*

- insane diffs are all diffs between 3.5*-5*

- expert diffs is everything above 5*

based on this the total number of diffs ranked for each drain time interval under current spread rules is:


my main takeaway here is that this data supports the original assumption that optional lower diffs will continue to be ranked at a high enough amount, even when they are not required.

another takeaway is that the vast majority of ranked maps fall towards the lower end of drain time in which spreads are required anyways

i think this proposal can be worth trying, and within 6 months to a year we can collect data again and see if the impact was detrimental to newer players or not

I am also not a big fan of "preserve low end diffs" but this proposal seems too radical and discussion isn't refined now for me

The proposal's pros and cons are very clear; however I was surprised nobody thinking backfire of this proposal

As a proposal said lower than 2 minutes songs are mostly a cut ver of other rhythm games but the trend changed; most rhythm game music songs exceed 2 minutes and very few or old songs are following this, if you doubt about this please search first "length<120" in ranked section. I can see more than a half is filled with tv size; I am very sure not every newbies like to play tv size for skill training or feel like dressurf or myuka

And the problem is if the propoosal make worsen the ranked section, is it possible to undo easily like now? Reality isn't. Nobody will agree to restrict themselves and pressure to do more effort, and it will withdrawed for sure

For now my opinion, I fully agree this opinion and its intention but the timing is very worst and too risky if the proposal was not a good option. This should be dealt more carefully imo

Rurvker wrote:

And the problem is if the propoosal make worsen the ranked section, is it possible to undo easily like now? Reality isn't. Nobody will agree to restrict themselves and pressure to do more effort, and it will withdrawed for sure

can agree with this part. if this or something similar is merged with the premise that it can be reverted later, then I think there should be an explicit time for later review set so that nobody is surprised when this discussion is raised again

Rurvker wrote:

As a proposal said lower than 2 minutes songs are mostly a cut ver of other rhythm games but the trend changed; most rhythm game music songs exceed 2 minutes and very few or old songs are following this, if you doubt about this please search first "length<120" in ranked section. I can see more than a half is filled with tv size; I am very sure not every newbies like to play tv size for skill training or feel like dressurf or myuka

This is based on the preassumption that a decreased threshold necessarily decrease the number of "rhythm game music" with lower difficulties. However as with data provided this is most likely not the case, and from experience a lot of "rhythm game music" maps have way more difficulties than their lowest requirement.

As mentioned before, my only precondition to accept the proposal now is that after 6-12 months the same data gathering efforts are carried out to see how impactful the proposal has been.

If it results in an unreasonably lopsided bias towards higher difficulties, then we'll have to agree on a revert.

+1

I agree +1, this will give us more maps to enjoy in ranked. The more the better

Simply I have no much opinions for it. But it is good for people who like to map long songs.
Nowadays I still see people having problems like, “Can a 3:59 song extend a second to apply to 04:00 rule” or something like this.
Reducing 30 seconds may just simply resolve their problems.

But of course, few of people have concerns about the lower difficulties will reduced more by that. It’s actually a little troublesome.

agreed

+1

+1

More time can be spent making quality content rather than forced spread (goes for all star ratings)

+1

+1

That’s an interesting proposal. I’m curious to see what changes it might bring

yummm +1

+1

As a spread lover, I'm still supporting this. I don’t think that reducing the required duration by 30s will really hurt the existence of lower diffs, as there should still be spread mappers who want to create lower diffs. If we are aware of the single diff flood due to laziness, I think it's more on the BNs who are responsible to provide a good beatmap on their nominations. Even if only a single diff is available, as long as the quality is good, I don't see the negatives in that.

+1

+1

easily a +1 from me

Definitely a huge fan of this change. However, I strongly believe that 3:30 is just not enough for modern mapping standards. The necessity to fill essentially a long marathon length in difficulties, which in terms of quality often drop due to mapping the same song twice or three times even. For really interesting and technically complex maps it doesn't cut it, as a mapper will have all their motivation exhausted after the first two, and that would result in the third difficulty being lower in quality. Burnout is a thing, and 3:00 is a safe and reasonable length, not a marathon, but a single difficulty for interesting songs which don't call for multiple difficulties.
There is a plethora of very interesting songs in that timescale, which wouldn't come unnoticed. This is my stand on this, anyhow, any change to that is great.

Rurvker wrote:

And the problem is if the propoosal make worsen the ranked section, is it possible to undo easily like now? Reality isn't. Nobody will agree to restrict themselves and pressure to do more effort, and it will withdrawed for sure

i guess we should set a fixed date (6 months or a year after implementation) to re-evaluate the quantity of diffs being ranked so we can determine the impact of the change. reverting shouldn't be too difficult since it's pretty much just changing stuff in the wiki

I agree with this proposal

+1

+1 alllll the way with this one

THIS MIGHT BE HUGE!!?

i never touch RC proposals in a whole cause i mostly just upload stuff for fun, but ranking things can be a huge changer for such mapper's experience. ranked section gives alot of publicity. I went from no one into a good SV mapper just by ranking one SV heavy map. if this RC proposal also aims for people like me who likes mapping stuff experimentally, not having to concern about spread would save alot of time, since you can spend more time actually being experimental, and not struggle overexpressing (i struggle at this way too much)

about the lower diffs dilemma, i dont think we're gonna see low diffs dying anyways. there are people who just enjoys doing low SR maps, and people that actually like GDing lower diffs, for their own reason. so i think the dilemma is invalid, because from what i saw, the argument was talking about the "death" of low sr maps but thats just not reasonable enough to invalidate people that like doing low sr stuffs.

+1

+1 for easier approachability for any mappers alike but also another thing i wanna mention:

I remember reading through the previous spread requirements relaxation thread when it was first proposed, but an idea I had was what if we also relaxed the spread requirements for all the gamemodes in general so its a bit more equalised in a way?

This isn't an argument against considering that I don't mind how mania criteria evolves as long as the overarching scene is happy with it, but at the same time i'm not sure if it'd "feel" a bit unfair for mappers in other gamemodes (namely STD and Taiko at least) as its mainly just Mania and Catch that is getting these changes, and obviously I don't think we should nerf the requirements so much to the point where it just becomes useless as it does have a purpose to begin with.

Understandably so, I acknowledge that a good ton of Mania mappers (myself included to some degree with certain ranked maps such as Calm Down Juliet, Heartbeat, etc) have benefitted from having spread requirements being nerfed due to the workload it took off from building "rankable" sets, but also this is mainly something that applies to shorter songs between 0:30 to 4:00 or so given that sometimes they take shorter to map depending on said concept or song choice of course, so as much as people may want to bring down the requirement even more than it has been established 3 years ago I think this is something that should be considered a bit considering that in the past the spread requirements were more or less the same across all 4 gamemodes before proposals began with Mania and Catch in specific.

epic man 2 wrote:

I remember reading through the previous spread requirements relaxation thread when it was first proposed, but an idea I had was what if we also relaxed the spread requirements for all the gamemodes in general so its a bit more equalised in a way?

Not viable. I'd suggest looking at the proposal threads done for other game modes to understand why it can get so divisive there. It is hard to compare the context of one with another, so we shouldn't force all modes to follow the same rules for different reasons.

As much as I like the idea of relaxing requirements in general, this proposal doesn't make much sense to me. I don't think it's a clean solution to mappers' problems.

As I see it, there are only 2 approaches to mapping regarding spread:
- make a reasonable spread
- make one diff

First approach is what ranked mappers usually do. This already requires additional planning and thinking about difficulty progression between diffs. If you can pull this out, one more diff is not a problem. Yes, it's more work but the work is not different from what you're already doing and it's for the quality of ranked section. Can you all imagine someone abandoning a 2:15 map with a HIX spread just because they can't make Normal? That's probably not happening.

What's really happening is many mappers follow second approach and make just one diff pouring all their ideas into it and exhausting themselves. These maps can have a lot of value being more creative than typical diff from a spread. But because of that creativeness it's also difficult to build a spread around them even if the mapper wants to.

So the only value I really see in this proposal is reducing the time requirement for marathons specifically. But that's a half-measure that only helps maps in 3:30-4:00 range. I can suggest two alternatives to address the issue instead:
1. Keep the current requirements but allow single diff maps of any length if the patterning is creative and difficult to embed into a spread.
2. Put more effort into Loved section which is technically aimed at those maps.

I also strongly support _Kobii's suggestion to allow cutting a few seconds from the requirement if BNs agree to it.

Kurisu Makise wrote:

As much as I like the idea of relaxing requirements in general, this proposal doesn't make much sense to me. I don't think it's a clean solution to mappers' problems.

As I see it, there are only 2 approaches to mapping regarding spread:
- make a reasonable spread
- make one diff

First approach is what ranked mappers usually do. This already requires additional planning and thinking about difficulty progression between diffs. If you can pull this out, one more diff is not a problem. Yes, it's more work but the work is not different from what you're already doing and it's for the quality of ranked section. Can you all imagine someone abandoning a 2:15 map with a HIX spread just because they can't make Normal? That's probably not happening.

What's really happening is many mappers follow second approach and make just one diff pouring all their ideas into it and exhausting themselves. These maps can have a lot of value being more creative than typical diff from a spread. But because of that creativeness it's also difficult to build a spread around them even if the mapper wants to.

So the only value I really see in this proposal is reducing the time requirement for marathons specifically. But that's a half-measure that only helps maps in 3:30-4:00 range. I can suggest two alternatives to address the issue instead:
1. Keep the current requirements but allow single diff maps of any length if the patterning is creative and difficult to embed into a spread.
2. Put more effort into Loved section which is technically aimed at those maps.

I also strongly support _Kobii's suggestion to allow cutting a few seconds from the requirement if BNs agree to it.

Single diff mapsets only work when the song is long enough. This would create a different problem altogether, like you see in Quaver. I think the way to go is to lower the requirements further to 3:00 minutes for single diff mapsets.

m666 wrote:

Single diff mapsets only work when the song is long enough. This would create a different problem altogether, like you see in Quaver. I think the way to go is to lower the requirements further to 3:00 minutes for single diff mapsets.

I agree, the minimum threshold can (and probably should) be set anyway. My main point is that single-diff maps should have separate requirements from mapsets.

UPD. I think that maybe instead of hard requirement on drain time they should require a rich variety of patterns or something like that. You can't have a lot of different patterns in a tv size anyway.

Kurisu Makise wrote:

m666 wrote:

Single diff mapsets only work when the song is long enough. This would create a different problem altogether, like you see in Quaver. I think the way to go is to lower the requirements further to 3:00 minutes for single diff mapsets.

I agree, the minimum threshold can (and probably should) be set anyway. My main point is that single-diff maps should have separate requirements from mapsets.

UPD. I think that maybe instead of hard requirement on drain time they should require a rich variety of patterns or something like that. You can't have a lot of different patterns in a tv size anyway.

This would create a window of abuse. Unfortunately, not a good idea, because how would you class this? No way of making it fair for everyone, that's it

m666 wrote:

This would create a window of abuse. Unfortunately, not a good idea, because how would you class this? No way of making it fair for everyone, that's it

I have faith in our NATs. They have the experience to mediate this process. However, I do agree that it creates a window for some drama at least, with some people being discontent about rejections. But BNs already reject a lot of requests due to lack of quality currently and it's somehow working.

UPD. I will also note that having just 3 minute requirement is not enough. 3:01 single-diff map with simple patterning doesn't have that much value, and it's quite easy to increase that value by making a proper spread.

I do not think such an approach described above is realistic, nor that in the case that it exists should remain on us NAT to solely decide. I'm aware of the optics, but I do not think a group of a handful of people should have the final word on something that should be built by the community, for the community.

Whether a map has variety or not is independent of the spread concerns risen across the proposal. This also seems to be somewhat out of the scope of the thread.

Personally, I do not think the ideal solution is facilitating single difficulties. Spreads do have a value and offer a wide variety difficulties for all players to enjoy. Relaxing them for the sake of relaxing them should not be the point of the proposal, but rather making things easier for mappers pushing content from the higher end of the spectrum and for players to enjoy said content. Going below 3:30 minutes for single diff marathons (or 2:45 for Insane difficulties which is quite reasonable) would be a wrong move to make.

I can see the intention for lowering the duration criteria, but really for 30s? I think it was already a huge change from the previous proposal like relaxing around 1 minute and it works well on my perspective. But it doesn't mean that the duration criteria needs to be lowered again. Instead of relax the spread, Imo it is more appropriate to encourage more based on mapper needs, like how to improve the map or trick to make a proper beatmap.

If there's an urgency to relax the spread again, I think lowering it by 10-15s is more than enough.

+1

+1

Most of the people who have spoken here are rather intensive mappers. As a half afk casual mapper who doesn't have time to do stuff, I think this change means a lot to me.

There had been two thresholds that kills my motivation to rank a map: custom hitsounds and spread requirement for mid/long length maps. And for sure, I'm willing to see restrictions getting loosen, simply because the change will unleash a large number of full length songs that haven't been rankable from my perspective.

As for quality, even under the current spread requirement, I've seen plenty of low diffs of a map that definitely have room for improvement. Most likely since people are forced to fill stuff they are unwilling to make to meet the spread requirement. Adding more restrictions on spread won't increase quality of maps, nor easing will result worse maps. It's not the spread that causes low quality maps.

Yet again, if quality is really an objective problem, why don't we set ranking criteria on patterns, rather than restricting unrelated stuff?

+1 (mostly)

Syadow- wrote:

Imo it is more appropriate to encourage more based on mapper needs, like how to improve the map or trick to make a proper beatmap.

Realistically speaking that only applies to mappers who are new to ranking maps.

Let's talk about higher end contents:
For veteran mappers that solely focus on mapping higher end stuff it is a very welcomed change, especially for those who prefer to map full length songs, and even more so for higher end 7K maps. Maps like those can take weeks or even months to finish, and if there's a need to force an extra difficulty below because of drain time rule that would demotivate a lot of people, nobody likes spending months just to rank a single mapset. It's not like people with this much experience in mapping can't map spread, just that the amount of effort needed is not worth it, and it is definitely not an issue of laziness. 30s reduction imo is a good compromise as a lot of songs these days are usually in the range of 2:45 - 3:30. I see this as giving more opportunities to mappers that want to rank all sorts of songs.

I'm just here to be neutral and express my opinion.

I think this is good but actually I'm more worried about the future impact, even though it does make it easier for new mappers, but experienced mappers will use this to try to do something out of the ordinary, we don't know what the map will be like in the future if we always make rules like this easier.

(I'm talking about ...between 2:45 and 3:30, each key mode and playstyle must either include a difficulty at Insane or lower, or provide a proper spread containing at least 2 difficulties. //covers more full songs, many are between 3:00-3:15 which forces an additional diff under current rules//)

the reduction of 30s is too much in my opinion, more and more people will be more and more lazy to make other diffs than what is needed from the ranking criteria, (although I am one of them) but still I think this is too good to be true.

Besides, even if we change things like this, the decision of whether the map is ranked or not... is up to the BN, I know maybe some BNs are happy with this and some are not because they don't need to check as many diffs. but in my opinion this still doesn't make sense.

I apologize if there are any wrong words or misunderstandings, thank you.

hell yeah!! +1

The proposal has been PR'd to the wiki given the overall positive reception.

It is live on osu!mania ranking criteria

Moved to Finalized/Denied Amendments

too late to the party but still writing this, because I'm good as long as it is here to be read.

k so I brainstormed for the mental gymnastics fun in trying to make a counterargument for what scotty rly said. seeing the proposal fly in just 7 ish days while the thread was fixating on the issue of catering to a part of the playerbase (which was only introduced by himself as rebuttal) prompted me too methinks



1. a reduction across the board looked like it's derived from the purpose of opening up for single diff marathons that sits at 3:30~3:59 in drain time. this thought got to me, because his point with <120s covering all tv-sized songs and game-sized rg soundtracks did not simply stand true, therefore seemed rushed to support the inclusiveness of the change. those soundtracks have always had a handful of songs over two mins, but sega opened for a LOT more, and even closer towards 3:00. and with the proposed change, a substantial amount of (still)game-sized songs are exempt in any way from having to provide a normal level difficulty.

2. returning to his points now the proposal looks targeted towards covering certain full songs that are currently and unfortunately forced an additional difficulty (i.e. making it more logical in terms of matching commonly mapped song types), which is supposed to sound problem-solving. solving problems is definitely encouraged in any place, but this proposal has its limitation where the purpose boils down to just easing requirements as it gets hard to present what is beyond anecdotal evidences for saying it solves a problem.

3. "Why the change?" is underrated, should it be the case. there are reasons why we always see the worried when it comes to lax rules potentially overused.

4. besides 1 through 3, I want to mention that those full songs, let's just say average songs outside game soundtracks, have the common length changing by external factors. we've had 'game-sized' full songs in The Beatles' era. take a look at Billboard's hot 100 and pop songs are getting shorter. surely some can feel the need to adjust, but I believe the rules with the drain time should not possess such adaptive quality as much as they're set arbitrarily. for how many more times do we want to reside in newly handpicked values?

(additional)5. while understanding so well the struggles with mapping (I'm literally in a block) I must say we may as well look for other forms of lax rules. I personally like to believe mappers are happier sitting in their desk not thinking about having to make the next easier diff enforced by rc rules, that is at the same time in compliance with the stupidspecific guidelines and compelling in result (everyone knows this is painful). we could relieve ourselves of this thought by allowing skipping difficulties as long as the existing levels are scaled rationally, but that's the whole other story. I was thinking of expanding this to another proposal in case this one did not pass, but oh well!

(additional)6. it is my gut feeling but the mapping demographic seems to be inclined to work with the song that's not seen on the ranked section. with this presumption I can't be always happy to see efforts that may pertain to encouraging more of single diff marathons.

this proposal isn't finalized, and is open to either modifying the amount of drain time reduction, or even changing spread rules entirely

lastly, it's really worth mentioning scotty was open for fine-tuning the numbers but the proposal just straightly went into effect from too many people saying 'aye'. why such a haste when we are doubling down on drain time?

wah i'm too late cuz actually doesn't wanna care about this anymore

if this changes can make mania got more content so why not?
and hoping newer mapper want to rank their map rofl