NOT RC but I'm putting it here for easy access thanks

So guys. You and I have issues with the veto system in its current state. Let's discuss!


Please review relevant information pages before posting, so that decisions can be informed based off of both the current existing rules and current existing problems

help/wiki/People/The_Team/Beatmap_Nominators/Beatmap_Veto
help/wiki/People/The_Team/Beatmap_Nominators/Rules#veto


This has also been discussed on twitter, on vetoed beatmaps, on discords, in the osu!dev server on occasssion but mostly ends up as noise that has gotten lost and lead to no changes and only the mood of discontent with the current state of affairs is left. I do have some ideas of my own, but would like to hear other's opinions as well. This thread is to discuss issues with vetoes as a system presently, and ideas on fixing that. Anything targeting specific users may be subject to removal, as this can lead the thread to go off the broader topic.

This thread will periodically be edited to summarize current issues and solutions pointed out. Other NAT and GMT may edit this post for that purpose.

Ideas for improvement may be implemented individually or in tandem with other ideas and proposals. If entire system rewriting proposals are written those will be linked and briefly summarized as a point for the improvement ideas.

Present Issues
this list is not final
this list is a mishmash of varying opinions of issues, some may disagree these are issues. that's fine, let's figure this out

1. Veto mediation outcome may not represent general community opinion.
2. Vetoes can take up a lot of unnecessary time when outcome is already clear.
3. Vetoes can be initiated for basically any reason big or small.
4. Mediation only includes the voices of mediators, and not others who are invested in beatmap discussion.
5. Mediation results can be confusing and long to read.
6. Vetoes may include multiple issues, which can be unclear how to vote on during mediation.
7. Vetoes should be to prevent low quality maps from ranked, not shoehorn disagreements.
8. A veto immediately halts the ranking process before seeing if it's valid or before the mapper responds
9. Some mediators may not care about the veto or may not be knowledgable for that speicifc issue.

Ideas for improvement
this list is not final
this is not what will happen or is planned to happen, but a collection of floated ideas for discussion for potential implementation.

1. NAT summarize mediation outcome and link to the list of individual mediations on the BN website, making what needs to be fixed easier to parse.
2. Make vetoes require 2 agreeing BNs to go to mediation. This would be equal to how many BNs are required to push a map to qualified. If a disqualified map can not find a 2nd BN to support the veto, it would be immediately dismissed.
3. Reduce the time on mediation for issues which are quickly checked. Problems such as background images or difficulty names could have their time reduced to 3 days for instance, while spread and entire difficulty quality issues would remain at the standard 7 days mediation.
4. Give NAT or someone else the express power to dismiss vetoes if general community opinion is clearly against the veto. This could happen both before and after mediation.
5. Instead of the above, allow vetoes to be appealed in cases where community opinion is against the veto, this time mediated by NATs. This would allow the veto to be re-evaluated with the community thoughts better in mind.
6. Move mediation to the NATs hands
7. Weigh "bad" vetoes more heavily in current BN evaluations
8. In response to this, make each single definable issue in a veto be voted on separately?
9. Clarify the purpose of mediation - for opinion or for should never be ranked?
10. Make mediation yes/no only and get rid of neutral entirely. If nominators don't feel strongly on an issue they would be directed to vote to dismiss. This way only substantial issues multiple people agree on would be upheld.
11. Represent both mapper and vetoer opinions and base arguments clearly on the veto site itself.
12. Allowing other community members as part of mediation, handpicked, or apply to a selection specifically for that purpose. Such as non BN experienced mappers, modders.
13. "Suspend" the qualification timer for the veto discussion, keeping the map in qualified but unable to be ranked. *note: this was brought up in several posts, so i linked just one
14. For each veto, call specific people who are experts in the field when applicable.
15. Require at least 1 NAT to agree to place a veto
16. require 5 bns to start a veto, then 5 mediate. Other numbers to balance could be like 3/7 or so.
17. In tandem with removing neutral, allow people to opt-out if they don't care to mediate a particular issue.
18. Kite's proposal on how to handle mediation, requiring a step for vetoes to reach that point by a vote of the mapper, 2 bns, 2 vetoing bns, 2 NAT. If the discussion leads to no results, hand to the NAT. *note: this propsal has many other details as well, some overlap with the rest of this list. some don't. click for full post.
19. suggestions should be made and responded to in order to be considered grounds for a veto
20. Make staying a BN harder to raise the competence floor and the rest of Mun's post! very thought out proposal. please read
21. If issues arise after mediation, allow mapper to go through mediation again, but with exclusively NATs.

Please keep in mind that proposals that are basically get rid of vetoes entirely will not be accepted. While the system is not perfect, it is necessary for the push and pull quality maintenance of the ranked section. Improving the system is what is being looked for here, and basically anything goes so long as stopping maps for quality issues would exist in some form or another.

The ideas listed so far are quite good imo, i don't think the first one is ''that'' useful, since the bn explanations individually would make it more reliable and open to discussion. Also, i personally like the 2 BNs needed for vetoes and also the power to someone dismiss vetoes depending on general community opinion + analysis, ideally someone from within NAT or a group of people within the NAT that are more motivated for that extra task, this could potentially work well and give mappers/community more chance to overcome questionable vetoes.

I think the potential solutions presented by the post are already good enough and idk why it wasn't implemented from the start as it's seems like the most logical way to make vetos work. I also think that vetos should only focus in gameplay issue, veto on a diffc name, a bg, etc don't hinder the maps quality, gameplay or how a player will see a map as the most Importen thing about mapping is gameplay. I also think that vetos should be more closely followed and punished when abused. The veto button comes with responsibility abusing that for small nitpicks is toxic and is also stopping the flow of mapping in general. I also think cross mode vetos are terrible a taiko bn should not be able to veto std, Mania, ctb and other way around.

most of the ideas for improvement seem pretty good but im heavily against

"Give NAT or someone else the express power to dismiss vetoes if general community opinion is clearly against the veto. This could happen both before and after mediation."

This just creates a contest to see who can shout the loudest to overturn the mediation, would prefer that in cases of clear community opinion going the other way that cases could be appealed and then NAT could vote and come to an agreement among them. If the NAT agrees with how the BNs handled it then i see no real use in overturning it.

Vetoes shouldnt just be dismissed because they people are angry, they should be dismissed if clear counterarguements have been made.

PS: can also give veto mediation back to NAT cause the current BN rng for each mediation is pretty bad. Furthermore the fact that some BNs really shouldnt be mediating as seen in some of the mediation posts from recently. I trust the expertise of the nat more way more than that of your average bn.

1) perhaps? personally don't have the biggest issue with reading mediation posts as within the first few lines it says whether it was upheld or not upheld. (though at times responses are omitted based on what they voted and it never really seemed too clear. ie votes that disagreed were not present. note: does not include thrown out votes.)

2) definitely support the idea of having 2 BNs necessary to veto something, it would allow for a more visual representation of, "hey there are other bns with similar issues to me!" instead of it just being said in the original post. (sometimes people just note they asked others but aren't too transparent about it, making it more on the ambiguous side.) i like the reasoning of 2 BNs to push a map = 2 BNs to veto a map, it makes things seem more fair. i say this as it has been argued sometimes about how 2 BNs looked over the map and thought everything was fine but 1 BN comes and takes it down.

3) for general, not specific to the map issues, i agree that cutting the time in half to like 3-4 days would be much better. (a la mamma mia veto as of late.) because realistically, it is not hard to open a background or look at a difficulty name. given the example i noted, multiple people on the thread, on twitter, and on discord were complaining about how the host would have to wait a week over something like this. that creates unnecessary community uproar, putting aside the legitimacy of the veto at hand, just the content of what it contains.

4) neutral, possibly against this last one, but it depends. it is very similar to how the QAT used to be, (i mean even having a bn jury is similar except a bigger pool.) but "someone else" is what worries me because it is not clear. (i don't really expect it to be right now, but that is my general concern.) citing the veto on vell's map again, the position of the community was quite clear, and emphasized multiple times but a) the vetoer stood their ground and sent it to mediation. (the idea of having a second bn necessary to veto with would help to remedy this and provide better transparency when necessary.) b) the community, bns, etc felt that the veto itself was wrong and who knows, sometimes against the odds things get upheld. it just depends on who gets picked. but i digress, in theory i feel that being able to dismiss some vetoes would be good and more reliant on the community which is important in this kind of game, it's community based.

tl;dr i feel the current list of improvements are worth thinking about as well.. improvements to the current system, but they won't necessarily make everyone happy.

i think i like your ideas, and i have one to propose

how about making maps still QFed until community decides to DQ the map after veto process? (but can't be moved to ranked until veto ends)

since veto's real problem for mapper is 'wasting time unnecessarily with controversal/silly issues'. let's keep instant DQ for significant RC related things

Give NAT or someone else the express power to dismiss vetoes if general community opinion is clearly against the veto. This could happen both before and after mediation.

I like most of the other ideas, though unsure about requiring more than one BN.

This one though is kind of difficult to define, beyond using "common sense" which fails more often than it should. My main questions are:

1. What constitutes "clearly against"?
   Even the most controversial vetoes have some amount of support usually, and vice versa (e.g. My Movie). It's very difficult to get an accurate reading on community opinion because that usually differs between groups and between sites (osu, discord, credit, twitter...). Thus it is also not really possible to justify such a decision on evidence, which could lead to people being unsatisfied with the decision and perhaps questioning the integrity of those making the ruling, in all but the most clear-cut cases (e.g. beatmapsets/934576/discussion#/1577482). Especially because staff/NAT may have connections to the mapper/vetoer and though I generally trust the NAT to remain impartial, its still a valid concern I believe.
2. What is the "general community"?
   As mentioned above, discussion in the osu community is split across multiple groups and platforms. I don't think it makes sense to weight all these people's opinions the same when it comes to more in-depth mapping questions - then again players being the ones the maps are made for, their opinions should matter. beatmapsets/1052935/discussion/-/generalAll#/1441566 is an example of where player/community opinion is very relevant to a veto.

I dont think that option should be implemented anyway, but if people argue for it the points above need to be clarified/discussed imo.

Also adding another idea that I saw quite a few times:
Make "bad" vetoes (more?) relevant in BN evaluations.

Unsure if this is already the case since eval criteria are untransparent, and this could lead to BNs being afraid to voice valid concerns and do QAH out of fear of probation/being kicked, but I wanted to mention it nonetheless.

Reading this and seeing all the recent discussions on vetoes, mediations etc, I do think that having vetoes need 2 BNs to go into mediation would make it not look like one person has all this power and all to stop a map from getting ranked which will stop these almost random vetoes over stuff that really doesn't matter. Also having a group who can completely dismiss vetoes that the majority of disagree with will definitely get rid of long drawn out and pointless discussions over something people don't agree with anyways. Maybe have a vote on if it should be dismissed or not. But yea that's my opinion :3c

I feel like the whole veto thing became more complicated than it has to be

"Having to get a second agreeing BN to veto as well or else it'll get dismissed"

This doesn't discourage BNs who are actively circlejerking.

Even when I was a BN as Bubblun, there was still an issue of vetoes / DQs over minor issues, the nomination team has become such to where there's more reward for bringing maps down than it is to bring them up. (Example: starting the QAH thing) I say that because there seems to be little remorse in how maps are handled now when it comes to DQs / vetoes.

They need to remain for issues bigger than "Adjust timing by 10ms" and "Add hitwhistles on these notes"

Big issues that used to be just enough of a reason for a valid veto:

Inconsistent difficulty fluctuations / bad spreads

Lack of hitsounds

Metadata, timing, Storyboard issues, video / lyric content

Rankables (Unsnapped notes, silent hitcircles / heads, etc)

Questionable mapping choices overall (This wasn't always a bad thing, as vetoes were at one point just a simple way of coming to an understanding with the mapper)


There's really no reason for a veto outside of technical things, plus general issues with the map. A missing hitsound is not worth another 7 day wait, I thought we as the nomination team cared for the mapping community enough to give some leniency with that stuff.

We team as a whole shouldn't be actively venting out maps, because there's still a demand of pushing maps out there for the community. Before BNs were allowed to DQ, only the QAT / NAT could do it, and that created a balance of quality and also quantity. With even fewer BNs now than before, I don't know why they all have permission to halt the ranking process like an NAT can.

The issue with community vote is the community doesn't always want what everybody wants. What that means is, if enough people say "yes" then surely everybody wants this, right? No.

There's little understanding for mapping / nominating how you want to nominate and allowing others to do so the way they want to.

I bring this up because I think the issue is less-technical / political and more-so moral. We as a community should have the decency to work with the system we have now. Changing it up for the sake of changing it won't fix the problem

i feel like sometimes it's not necessary to veto if the bn can communicate with the mapper privately and see if there will be any agreement before dropping a veto to the mapset
also would it might benefit the veto outcome to be more justified if you can pick some mappers who has specified expertise in what the veto is about, for example hitsounding, or metadata etc. its better to get a "general community opinion" if its also given more power to the community itself rather than limiting the bng to represent a "general community"

Moecho wrote:

i feel like sometimes it's not necessary to veto if the bn can communicate with the mapper privately and see if there will be any agreement before dropping a veto to the mapset
also would it might benefit the veto outcome to be more justified if you can pick some mappers who has specified expertise in what the veto is about, for example hitsounding, or metadata etc. its better to get a "general community opinion" if its also given more power to the community itself rather than limiting the bng to represent a "general community"

↖↖↖↖
damn i mean cho

Moecho wrote:

i feel like sometimes it's not necessary to veto if the bn can communicate with the mapper privately and see if there will be any agreement before dropping a veto to the mapset

usually they dont, thats why veto happens

the manner would be:
-ask the mapper if he could change it privately or in forum both works, like a normal mod
-and if both sides doesnt reach an agreement than proceed veto

but most just veto because a side think the issue is very troublesome

Since I personally think most of the issues listed aren't issues I won't comment on that, just on the proposed solutions.

Noffy wrote:

NAT summarize mediation outcome and link to the list of individual mediations on the BN website, making what needs to be fixed easier to parse.

This is good. The post could be split into two parts which are "what needs to be fixed" and then a list of all ideas for possible solutions provided by the mediators / vetoing bn.

Noffy wrote:

Make vetoes require 2 agreeing BNs to go to mediation. This would be equal to how many BNs are required to push a map to qualified. If a disqualified map can not find a 2nd BN to support the veto, it would be immediately dismissed.

I think this achieves nothing except making the process more complicated. There is almost always atleast one BN that will agree with a veto considering how many BNs there are. Even if that's not the case, almost every one of us has good friends in the BNG that we could probably convince to support our vetoes, which is what is realistically going to happen.

Noffy wrote:

Reduce the time on mediation for issues which are quickly checked. Problems such as background images or difficulty names could have their time reduced to 3 days for instance, while spread and entire difficulty quality issues would remain at the standard 7 days mediation.

Sure, this makes sense.

Noffy wrote:

Give NAT or someone else the express power to dismiss vetoes if general community opinion is clearly against the veto. This could happen both before and after mediation.

This point sounds like a bad idea to me. "General community opinion" is never clear - in most cases, on the map threads, it's the mapper and their friendcircle arguing with the vetoing BN and their friendcircle plus a few engaged mappers on both sides. If you want to consider more than that, how exactly are you gonna get an opinion from the "general community" and even then, there are certain aspects of mapping the vocal part of the general community doesn't care much about (low difficulties, hitsounding, ...) while other aspects they care a lot about (maps that are "controversial" in some way or another) so it would be just dismissing any veto based on certain aspects of mapping, which seems nonsensical.

Sylvarus wrote:

Also adding another idea that I saw quite a few times:
Make "bad" vetoes (more?) relevant in BN evaluations.

Unsure if this is already the case since eval criteria are untransparent, and this could lead to BNs being afraid to voice valid concerns and do QAH out of fear of probation/being kicked, but I wanted to mention it nonetheless.

this has been talked about sometimes, but from what i've noticed from some other BNs is that this creates a mindset that they should not be vetoing because it can hurt you. i can understand if it's multiple times, ie 5-7. (just a rough number because it really depends on your mode.) but i don't think BNs should be made to be scared of voicing their concerns as that goes against the nature of what vetoes are supposed to be. as subjective as someone can think a veto is, the poster thought it was a serious enough issue to go as far to veto that, and making this be feared is almost as bad as taking it away entirely.

basically, please don't make vetoes be feared because it can be detrimental in a different way.

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unrelated to the above portion, something that i feel is a big issue is when multiple things are being submitted for veto mediation. say for example the vetoer has multiple problems that cannot be summarized as one idea. but not every mediator will react the same or even address all of the issues at hand. this feels quite faulty as it gives either a wrong or incomplete idea as to what the mediators feel with the issues.

NAT summarize mediation outcome and link to the list of individual mediations on the BN website, making what needs to be fixed easier to parse.

good, no objections here

Make vetoes require 2 agreeing BNs to go to mediation. This would be equal to how many BNs are required to push a map to qualified. If a disqualified map can not find a 2nd BN to support the veto, it would be immediately dismissed.

While I don't think this is a bad idea, I'm not too sure if implementing it is. As you can see from lots of recent events, vetoing a map often results in the vetoing nominator recieving lots of hate (justified or not doesn't really matter here). A great example would be Cheri's veto on worldenddominator, she disqualified the map for something she considered an issue (and I think 9 other mediating bns agreed with her), yet she, and only she (except for maybe #8, but that's a different story), was met with an incredible amount of hate, simply because she veto'd a map by a well known mapper and people disagreed with her reasoning. Now, if we implement this rule, you would obviously require 2 nominators to veto a map, but I seriously doubt most people would want to be the 2nd bn for this, because of reasons I mentioned above. Being the 2nd vetoing bn puts you in the position of the responsible person, while no one cares if you simply state you agree with the veto in the replies. I'm very certain most people wouldn't want to be "the big bad veto guy", even if they actually agree with whatever the veto reason might be. Adding this rule might make it too hard to actually veto stuff imo.

You could also look at it from the perspective myxo pointed out.

Reduce the time on mediation for issues which are quickly checked. Problems such as background images or difficulty names could have their time reduced to 3 days for instance, while spread and entire difficulty quality issues would remain at the standard 7 days mediation.

good, no objections here

Give NAT or someone else the express power to dismiss vetoes if general community opinion is clearly against the veto. This could happen both before and after mediation.

Bad idea, giving in to peer pressure is not how you should handle issues. The thing with "general community opinion" is that no one will care if you veto a map by some random unknown noname mapper, it heavily depends on whose map you veto (I doubt there would've been much drama if Cheri's veto would've been on some noname mapper's set).

Map should be push back to Pending（disqualify） by the nominators or mapper
instead of who vetos.

I don't agree with veto can directly pushing Qualified map back to Pending.
Map should be push back to Pending by the nominators or mapper instead of who vetos to avoid Re-nominate with mis-veto.
When a map having veto it should delay move to Ranked until the veto resolved.
And it should have a time limit (about 1 week) to deal with vetoed map,to avoid it stay in Qualified too long.

About Ideas
1.Make vetoes require 2 agreeing BNs to go to mediation. This would be equal to how many BNs are required to push a map to qualified. If a disqualified map can not find a 2nd BN to support the veto, it would be immediately dismissed.
I think this will makes bn pairing and helps nothing. unless one of the veto is by one of the map's nominators.

ts8zs wrote:

About veto rules:
if they feel there are significant issues regarding beatmap quality
There should be a standard instad of feeling.
like
1.hitsound missing.
2.alone partten over maps avarage difficulty too much.
...etc
This is also telling what should do to mappers
instead of what nominator want mappers do.

well, most of issues can't be defined with certain categories, will mean nothing eventually since evgerything is correlated each other in mapping.
like worlddominator, cheri vetoed with HS aspect, but deetz' expanded this to larger view

One thing I think is unclear to mediators (from what I know) is that it seems to be unclear what the mediation is for. Is the question whether or not they think something is a good idea, or whether or not something in the map should be rankable at all? One of these two is much stronger than the other, and I don't see the point of mediation if it's the former. Either way, it should be abundantly clear.

Second, and more importantly, I feel like the weight of the mapper themself should carry a little more weight in the discussion. The reality is that the whole process from submitting a veto to mediation to having it mediated can happen without the mapper saying a word. An idea that I think might be good would be to have both sides (vetoer and mapper) clearly present their sides on the mediation site, and then present them to whoever will be doing the mediation in an unbiased manner.

Noffy wrote:

Make vetoes require 2 agreeing BNs to go to mediation. This would be equal to how many BNs are required to push a map to qualified. If a disqualified map can not find a 2nd BN to support the veto, it would be immediately dismissed.

Give NAT or someone else the express power to dismiss vetoes if general community opinion is clearly against the veto. This could happen both before and after mediation.

Except these, the proposed suggestions make sense, and have the potential to make the whole process both faster and more stable in the future.

Why I don't agree with these? Let me explain.

Noffy wrote:

Give NAT or someone else the express power to dismiss vetoes if general community opinion is clearly against the veto. This could happen both before and after mediation.

The power to be able to dismiss a veto over a community opinion would make sense if the community was the one that has been nominating the beatmaps. There can be flaws as the people might not see clearly and yet, due to this issue the team would be required to remove the veto because community didn't support it / liked the map. This is a bad idea. Including community in such deep matters shouldn't be the solution. It might help, but it should not finalize the matter.

I don't support this idea at all.

Noffy wrote:

Make vetoes require 2 agreeing BNs to go to mediation. This would be equal to how many BNs are required to push a map to qualified. If a disqualified map can not find a 2nd BN to support the veto, it would be immediately dismissed.

Even if this would require 3 BNs or more, it wouldn't be an ideal solution. What if the BNs don't want to check the map? They're not obligated to (unless they are assigned in an official mediation). Apart from that, the BNG has already enough people to get somebody that could easily support the vetoer's opinion, which wouldn't achieve anything, apart from getting another BN to support your opinion.

This one requires some tweaking I suppose.

what deetz said

veto wiki says: Beatmapping is extremely diverse and creative differences are to be expected. This is to be encouraged for the sake of creating a variety of content all players can enjoy!

judges should do their work from a more objective view rather than their own opinion