forum

Difficulty of Osu!Mania songs

posted
Total Posts
12
Topic Starter
sozy
Problem details: Not necessarily a problem but I'm curious as to why lately the osu!mania songs have been incredibly hard for their star rating. For a while I've only been playing songs that are around a year old and I can consistently beat them with 700k+ scores on 4*+ versions. With the new songs that I've been downloading I'll be playing 3.5-4* stars that I struggle to get even 600k scores on.

Has the meta changed to rank different versions of songs? Like, I'm more curious of if it's me that's just bad or did something change recently that has caused new songs to get a lower star rating than usual.
tgnehs
Short answer, because they are making better maps.

As you know osu mania star rating system is broken. The SR formula favors simple patterns like jumptrills. PP farming osu mania players end up playing those highly inflated maps over challenging tech maps. As a result many of the "older" songs which you play are just the popular ones which take advantage of easy patterns for higher SR and PP. Believe it or not, there are older songs which are similar to the "difficult" maps you are describing, such as Eternal Drain, Kamui, Mastication Numerique, and The Empress scream off ver.

The patterns that cause maps to be underweighted are jackhammers, LN layering, streams, offbeat timings, trills, and a variety of others. What I'm assuming is that the community has become aware of how lame it is to abuse jumptrills and started using patterns which actually match the music and make for an interesting map.

But maybe someone who actually does mapping can chime in, as I have pretty much zero experience. All I know is I'm looking forward to a larger variety of maps which are fun to play
Evening
if you'd list examples, it'd be easier to explain
Topic Starter
sozy

tgnehs wrote:

Short answer, because they are making better maps.

As you know osu mania star rating system is broken. The SR formula favors simple patterns like jumptrills. PP farming osu mania players end up playing those highly inflated maps over challenging tech maps. As a result many of the "older" songs which you play are just the popular ones which take advantage of easy patterns for higher SR and PP. Believe it or not, there are older songs which are similar to the "difficult" maps you are describing, such as Eternal Drain, Kamui, Mastication Numerique, and The Empress scream off ver.

The patterns that cause maps to be underweighted are jackhammers, LN layering, streams, offbeat timings, trills, and a variety of others. What I'm assuming is that the community has become aware of how lame it is to abuse jumptrills and started using patterns which actually match the music and make for an interesting map.

But maybe someone who actually does mapping can chime in, as I have pretty much zero experience. All I know is I'm looking forward to a larger variety of maps which are fun to play

Thank you for the reply this actually matches exactly with what I had in mind and listed songs that I was thinking of!

Evening wrote:

if you'd list examples, it'd be easier to explain

Songs that I've been having issues with are 'Fly like you' mapped by UnluckyCroco, 'Rubber Band' mapped by Jackal Queenston and 'Ta9-5 - Positive (Feat. Looci) [Loop Loop Loop]' mapped by Dubstek, as well as a few others.

Songs that I'm able to beat easily are 'Puppet Theater of Twee-Box feat. Hatsune Miku by sasakure.UK', 'MariannE by Yooh', and 'Kanshou no Matenrou by Halozy'
Evening
tl;dr maps have been evolving to be more complicated

To give context on how SR works:

1.It's mostly based on density, hence if a pattern is "rough", it'll still award the same star rating as one that's "smooth".

1.1 Tech maps pivot on intentional "rough" patterns for difficulty, however, osu cannot discern between these 2 types of patterns, hence awarding them the same star rating.

1.2 SV's are not considered into the star rating. Hence if you have a hard to read SV, the map will be underrated.

1.3 Hybrid maps are where you have LNs and notes at the same time, usually they are more confusing to players who just started out since it's basically 2 types of notes to consider.

---
Why you may be struggling on some

Not sure which marianne you're looking at

2.1 The ones you struggle with have traits that makes them lean towards a hybrid map < Fly Like You; Rubber Band >
Whereas the ones you are comfortable with are more ricey < Puppet; Kanshou >

2.2 The note rhythms of Rubber Band and Positive are much more complex than that of older maps because nowadays it's justified to dump notes (i.e. map notes that aren't explicitly there, but can still represent a sound as a pattern).

2.3 LNs are harder

2.4 Minijacks, believe it or not, older maps avoid minijacks because there's a stigma that it's a bad pattern. It's just hard, and more maps nowadays use it

2.5 SVs, old maps avoid complex SVs because stigma, nowadays it's more accepted. That's why you don't see many difficult and complex SVs for old maps

---
Topic Starter
sozy

Evening wrote:

tl;dr maps have been evolving to be more complicated

To give context on how SR works:

1.It's mostly based on density, hence if a pattern is "rough", it'll still award the same star rating as one that's "smooth".

1.1 Tech maps pivot on intentional "rough" patterns for difficulty, however, osu cannot discern between these 2 types of patterns, hence awarding them the same star rating.

1.2 SV's are not considered into the star rating. Hence if you have a hard to read SV, the map will be underrated.

1.3 Hybrid maps are where you have LNs and notes at the same time, usually they are more confusing to players who just started out since it's basically 2 types of notes to consider.

---
Why you may be struggling on some

Not sure which marianne you're looking at

2.1 The ones you struggle with have traits that makes them lean towards a hybrid map < Fly Like You; Rubber Band >
Whereas the ones you are comfortable with are more ricey < Puppet; Kanshou >

2.2 The note rhythms of Rubber Band and Positive are much more complex than that of older maps because nowadays it's justified to dump notes (i.e. map notes that aren't explicitly there, but can still represent a sound as a pattern).

2.3 LNs are harder

2.4 Minijacks, believe it or not, older maps avoid minijacks because there's a stigma that it's a bad pattern. It's just hard, and more maps nowadays use it

2.5 SVs, old maps avoid complex SVs because stigma, nowadays it's more accepted. That's why you don't see many difficult and complex SVs for old maps

---
Thank you very much for the in-depth comment over why I'm struggling on some of the newer maps. Guess i'll have to keep practicing these more accepted patterns now. greatly appreciate the thought out comment!
tgnehs
Woah, that's an expert opinion if I've ever read one. I'm enlightened. Would it be fair to say osu!mania beatmaps are developing their own gimmick/tech based style and finally abandoning the dark days of jumptrill?
Evening
I don't follow ranked map trends too much, but generally they lean towards a more unique way of representing music.

The trends does seem to lean towards grabbing as much detail as possible from a map which has the consequence of making them too complex.

There's also somewhat a stigma against jumptrill now because pp inflation, so I'm not surprised mappers are shunning it.
Bobbias
As a 7k player, that was interesting. A note about LNs:

As far as I'm aware, LN heads (the beginning of the LN) are counted as 1.5x a normal note for density calculation. This means that by simply making a fast pattern out of small LNs, you actually get an inflated PP which doesn't represent the difficulty correctly because if the pattern is fast enough you can treat the LNs as though they were regular notes. On the other hand, patterns with complicated LN usage become underrated because holding the correct LNs while hitting the patterns around them becomes much harder, but there are relatively few LNs so the star rating boost ends up being rather small and inconsequential when compared to the actual difficulty increase.
tgnehs
Huh, never heard about that 1.5 density boost. That explanation makes sense as maps like Blue Zenith which are filled with easy LN patterns are inflated like crazy. What other specifics do we know about the osu!mania pp system? I tried putting 1/4 rolls for 100 notes and 1/4 jackhammers for 100 notes and although it was the same number of notes per time the SR for jackhammer was ~3* while it was 2* for the rolls.
abraker
tgnehs
Whoah I had no idea this was out there, I know what I'm doing for the rest of the evening. Thanks
Please sign in to reply.

New reply