Following up from my previous proposal regarding the unbalanced difficulty progression for higher keymodes in https://osu.ppy.sh/community/forums/topics/977666?n=43, we have concluded that keymode-specific Ranking Criteria would be needed, as that is in everyone's favor in that discussion. After spending a bit of time figuring out the balances and adjustments needed for each keymode-specific difficulties, I have finally come up with drafts for higher keymodes, from 5K to 9K!

Bottom here are the links to all the drafts:

5K - https://pastebin.com/51vEM27G
6K - https://pastebin.com/uHvJ0dx3
7K - https://pastebin.com/DmU8PCfz
7k+1 / 8K - https://pastebin.com/sJ7tnDV1
9K - https://pastebin.com/9hNcNrFq

Keep in mind that most of their contents are overlapped. As the current osu!mania RC only gave guidelines more clearly to 4K and 7K, the result of these new keymode-specific criteria would serve as a better guideline to help mappers/modders better in mapping and modding keymodes that are currently not listed in the current osu!mania RC, such as 6K, 7K+1, 8K and 9K.

Things that have changed from the original Ranking Criteria:

1. The approximate rhythm guideline BPM. As the keycounts increases, the difficulty getting into learning higher keymodes would increase as well. So it would make sense to reduce the approximate rhythm guideline BPM as the keycount gets higher.
2. The number of consecutive notes allowed for specific rhythms in Easy and Normal difficulty. This point closely ties to the first point. As the approximate BPM gets lower, it would give more room to put more notes while maintaining the supposed difficulty. Additionally, this leniency would also allow mappers to fully utilize the key columns in the keymode that they are mapping.
3. The additional rules imposed on difficulty in a mapset if it is the lowest difficulty. Personally I do not think that these rules should be there, if the difficulty follows the difficulty-specific guidelines perfectly, the additional limitations dropped on these difficulties would be not of any use.

Also be mindful that these Ranking Criteria are still drafts, meaning that it should be getting feedback from all of you in order to improve it! Thanks for taking the time to read through all of these, I believe this would be in everyone's favor at the end of the day


EDIT: After a small discussion in the BN server with MEGAtive, it seems like we would have 2 possible ways of determining the approximate rhythm guideline BPM.

MEGAtive's point:

1. Easy and Normal across keymodes doesn't add much difficulties regardless of BPM due to the simplistic rhythm and chord count. Easy and Normal doesn't have big learning curves across all keymodes because it will always be mostly single and double at 1/1 and 1/2 beats.
   Averaging the approximate rhythm guideline BPMs actually would make them consistent.

My point:

1. Lowering the approximate rhythm guideline BPMs as the keycount gets higher. This can only be true if and only we assume more keycounts = exponentially higher learning difficulty, which seems to be that case most likely. More leniency should be given as the keycount gets higher, so that more consecutive notes can be used, which also result in fully utilizing all the columns given even better. This number of consecutive notes can be reduced as the BPM gets higher to act as a compensation to maintain the suitable difficulty (case by case).

We would like feedback on this one too, so any feedback would greatly help with the final decision!

yes pls

Can we finally get 3K to be rankable? please?

won't this massively bloat the mania ranking criteria, making it inaccessible to newcomers?

tatatat wrote:

Can we finally get 3K to be rankable? please?

No

ok so tl;dr these are more or less the same guidelines with different bpm settings and occasional number changes, there should be an easier way to represent all this info than SIX different key-related guides

Hydria wrote:

ok so tl;dr these are more or less the same guidelines with different bpm settings and occasional number changes, there should be an easier way to represent all this info than SIX different key-related guides

agreed, but I wouldn't want something like the current RC where everything is fit into one page that vaguely explains stuffs for other keymodes.

Feerum wrote:

tatatat wrote:

Can we finally get 3K to be rankable? please?

No

Further explanation requested

abraker wrote:

Feerum wrote:

tatatat wrote:

Can we finally get 3K to be rankable? please?

No

Further explanation requested

Im sure you can find enough reasons against it in https://osu.ppy.sh/community/forums/topics/736772 because they are still all valid

Feerum wrote:

abraker wrote:

Feerum wrote:

tatatat wrote:

Can we finally get 3K to be rankable? please?

No

Further explanation requested

Im sure you can find enough reasons against it in https://osu.ppy.sh/community/forums/topics/736772 because they are still all valid

Just as you can find enough reasons for it, because they are all still valid.

I think we can make a single RC page for osu!mania work to accommodate all of these, given how similar they are. I'll play around with it soon to make sure that's possible without making it too cluttered

for 3k discussion make a new thread (or necro the old one) pls

clayton wrote:

I think we can make a single RC page for osu!mania work to accommodate all of these, given how similar they are. I'll play around with it soon to make sure that's possible without making it too cluttered

that'd be very much appreciated

for the "Lowering the approximate rhythm guideline BPMs as the keycount gets higher" suggestion:

I think this makes RC too complicated, because the person reading the RC has to remember to interpret each of these rhythm rules with a different approximate BPM in mind--- meaning that something like "1/2 of a beat" can mean a different thing depending on where you read it. that just seems confusing to me. The whole point of having 180 BPM rhythm guidelines on the RC is so that it's easier to make sense of, because 180 is a decent average for osu! maps where people can intuitively understand the length of "1/2" or "1/4" etc.

and fwiw this makes "Scaling BPM on the Ranking Criteria" invalid

so, while I understand the point of this change, I think you need to change the actual rhythm guidelines instead of the BPM they are based on

clayton wrote:

for the "Lowering the approximate rhythm guideline BPMs as the keycount gets higher" suggestion:

I think this makes RC too complicated, because the person reading the RC has to remember to interpret each of these rhythm rules with a different approximate BPM in mind--- meaning that something like "1/2 of a beat" can mean a different thing depending on where you read it. that just seems confusing to me. The whole point of having 180 BPM rhythm guidelines on the RC is so that it's easier to make sense of, because 180 is a decent average for osu! maps where people can intuitively understand the length of "1/2" or "1/4" etc.

and fwiw this makes "Scaling BPM on the Ranking Criteria" invalid

so, while I understand the point of this change, I think you need to change the actual rhythm guidelines instead of the BPM they are based on

I agree that it would make it slightly more confusing for the mappers/modders or any other people reading the RC, but I believe this won't be a problem because people will get used to it with time. And also I do understand the 180bpm rhythm guideline is a decent average for maps to start with. This is true to almost all cases but considering each keymodes play super differently due to its exponential increase in difficulty as the keycount gets higher (main reason being the level of finger independence increases significantly, next being the density, and lastly different combination of keys from that requires longer time to build up the muscle memory).

One of the reasons that I proposed the change to the approximate rhythm guideline BPM is because with this 180bpm, the rhythm density allowed on the current RC makes it overwhelmingly hard for intermediate players when it reaches the Insane difficulty level. I've had players telling me that the jump from a Hard to an Insane is too huge to be considered a linear increase in difficulty, even when the density is being followed perfectly according to the guidelines provided.

That leads me to think what could possibly be the root of this problem, and after a considerable amount of time of reviewing the RC, I've come to the conclusion that the players aren't getting good basics foundation in lower difficulties of mapsets. The easier difficulties in a mapset are too easy while the harder difficulties are too hard, that's really the main problem from what I've seen. The main goal of these RCs is to adjust the difficulty level across the difficulties, by allowing more notes being used in higher keymodes, this will ensure the full utilization of all the keys being used, which is essential for players building up their foundation in skills and reading. (Take this for an example, a 9K Easy map that follows its current difficulty guideline, which states that you can only use up to 5 consecutive 1/2 rhythm, that means that 4 columns will be left empty for an amount time before it can be used, which makes it less than ideal for learning the keymode efficiently.) So I think all of these should be accounted for.

Next one here is just purely my opinion; in case if people asked me why Insane's guidelines couldn't be nerfed, the biggest problem that I could think of is that there are no limitations as to what you can map in Expert difficulties. Of course you can also have lower level of Expert difficulties to make up the spread in case you have a super high difficulty of an Expert, but to ensure that Insane difficulty can progress more linearly to lower Expert territory, the current Insane guidelines cannot be changed.

That being said, I'm okay with making all the approximate rhythm BPMs the same, however I think 180 is still a tad bit too high for me, so a lower value would be better in my opinion. Or just go with my alternative lol

the logic checks out, I'm just suggesting that you write it into the rules/guidelines themselves instead of changing the approximate BPM part. my concern is only about how it's presented, not the actual effects on gameplay

I guess it's better to wait for more opinions here regardless. maybe this won't even be an issue by the time the community decides which parts to change

As for how it should be written out in the RC, I think we should first figure out how to organize all these rules/guidelines, as you said all these can be fit into one page, given how similar they all are. I can definitely figure out a way to implement the ideas into the main rules/guidelines once that's sorted out. I'm just worried that everything might look cluttered when all of them are in the same page lol

_Kobii wrote:

The approximate rhythm guideline BPM. As the keycounts increases, the difficulty getting into learning higher keymodes would increase as well. So it would make sense to reduce the approximate rhythm guideline BPM as the keycount gets higher.

I don't have a lot to say about this, but it makes sense to me.

_Kobii wrote:

The number of consecutive notes allowed for specific rhythms in Easy and Normal difficulty. This point closely ties to the first point. As the approximate BPM gets lower, it would give more room to put more notes while maintaining the supposed difficulty. Additionally, this leniency would also allow mappers to fully utilize the key columns in the keymode that they are mapping.

This is going to sound weird, but I feel as if very few notes is actually harder than just slightly more dense patterns in higher key counts at low levels. It's difficult to keep concentration for me personally. I don't think players learn the fundamentals of 7-key very well from hitting just one note at a time very slowly, either.

Something more important to mention is that currently there is room for massive jumps between difficulties. Using this beatmap as an example, there is a very large gap between the Hard and Insane difficulties, and there is arguably another large gap between the Normal and the Hard difficulties. This is all within the guideline, though.

While not the greatest evidence, here are my scores for Hard and Insane difficulties, set consecutively and with no time delay. I put forward my best effort on both and I performed the same on both maps.



I have no doubt you'll find more than one person who has the same sentiment about this map set. Since it follows the ranking guidelines, it's strange to me that they potentially allow for such difficulty gaps as this.

_Kobii wrote:

The additional rules imposed on difficulty in a mapset if it is the lowest difficulty. Personally I do not think that these rules should be there, if the difficulty follows the difficulty-specific guidelines perfectly, the additional limitations dropped on these difficulties would be not of any use.

Ties back into the first two points.

Generally speaking I agree with this; even if the key-count-specific stuff is more tedious to maintain, it would overall improve the Ranking Criteria, imo.

yeah formatting this is a pain. I wish I could use dropdown boxes on the wiki or something like that ;__;

maybe separate pages for each keymode, but only listing the guidelines that changed... it may be annoying to look at 2 (or 3) different RC pages but this is already how each game mode handles their specifics with respect to the global RC

bumping this

i've only looked at 7k so far, but these are a few things i've noticed.

hard:

"Note snapping of consecutive 1/8 and higher should not be used." and "Note snapping of consecutive 1/8 should be used sparingly."

these two guidelines contradict each other. i would personally prefer going with the 2nd as 1/8 in hard diffs is pretty reasonable especially at 150 bpm and in short bursts. perhaps rewording it to something like "avoid using more than x consecutive 1/8 notes."

"Keep chord distance in a chordstream at a 1/1 or higher interval. Anything denser than that can deter readability."

this guideline is already covered by the last few guidelines of hard difficulties regarding long chordstreams which already prevents having chords being on the 1/2 or 1/4. would suggest to remove this one.

insane:
"In the middle of a long chord stream with a chord every...1/2, there should not be more than 3 notes."

i feel this should be reduced to 2 notes as the density would be really high if every chord was 3 notes. this would also give better progression to the hard diff guideline which recommends using single notes if there is a chord every 1/2. if there is clear musical justification to use 3 notes on the 1/2, then this could be allowed.

about how the bpm works, i would prefer going with mega's approach. once you get to 9K the guidelines are based on 130 bpm which is slower than the majority of songs that get mapped in mania so most of the time the guidelines won't directly apply. i think it makes more sense to pick the bpm based on what most songs will fall around, rather than the difficulty of the keymode.

@_Kobii any response to the post above?