My proposal is to completely remove this guideline from Platters:

All distances should be clear on whether they require the player to walk or dash. This is to ensure that players can easily recognize patterns that require dashing.

Reasoning falls under multiple categories of thought which I shall go into.

1. Platter-level players should already be expected to know how to dash.

Having this RC guideline for Salad difficulties is understandable, it is the first difficulty in which dashes are rankable. Having this guideline in platters is a bit unnecessary as at this stage in a player's development, they should be able to know how and when to dash. Platters are for learning hyperdashes, not dashes.

2. This guideline is restricting platters overall and making them harder than they need to be.

I hate to bring up pp in the topic, but it has its own valid spot. With the recent pp changes, we received buffs to edge dashes with regular "pp patterns" being nerfed. But platter SR did not change much, infact it went up slightly (along with salads). This is a symptom of nearly every platter being shoehorned into this guideline where every dash needs to be "noticeable". This "noticeable" distance is quite honestly very far alot of the times for both Salads and Platters.

Having this guideline in place reinforces the thought that dashes can NOT be ambiguous (yes, I know its a guideline, but many times people think "guideline" as rule). With the guideline removed, I feel new types of platters where distances are smaller (slightly ambiguous) will be able to make a resurgence. Alot of platters nowadays feel very cookie cutter in the sense that, "super strong sound, hdash, strong sound, dash, everything else, walk". By removing this guideline you could add another level to this with light dashes.

Overall, I feel this guideline is doing more harm than good to the state of catch mapping and restricting platter mappers on a basis that doesn't exist (platter players don't know when to dash). Removing this guideline has several benefits regarding opening up more variability in platter mapping (Which already got reduced quite heavily with past changes).

Yeah, I'd agree with this change. Platter players should already be used to the dashing mechanic, and would add more variety to the dashes in Platter.

For a Salad it'd be understandable to have this guideline as you've mentioned, since it's the first difficulty where dashes get implemented. This would also ease the dashes for higher BPM (200+) songs, where dashes would otherwise be rather far when having to map them unambiguously.

This would also be more lenient on the difficulty curve for Salad > Platter > Rain in my eyes, since the higher-snapped h-dashes in Rains are less forgiving than h-dashes in a Platter (where no dashes can be used afterwards). With this addition a Platter difficulty would be good for both introducing the h-dash mechanic and also "mastering" the (tap-)dash mechanic.

Too many times slightly ambiguous dashes have been constantly been pointed out in modding discussions, just to satisfy the guidelines, as it's currently what's written in the guidelines and need to be upheld nearly every time, unless there's a good reason to have them ambiguous (200+ BPM). I feel this is getting unnecessary as the gamemode keeps evolving. By allowing this change, the mappers would have more emphasis / flow tools at our disposal as opposed to mere non-ambiguous dashes.

I agree

I need know when to dash

the reason everyone complains that converts are better than catch specific maps is primarily because people are over enforcing this rule.

it does more harm than good and should not be included anymore

Only counterpoint I would still have is that it might be too soon in the learning curve for ambiguous dashes.
"Platters are for learning hyperdashes, not dashes." Sure, but I feel like at this stage players are still in need for more training to learn how to properly judge distance between objects to determine wether or not they need to dash. I've heard of multiple newer players in the past that judging distance is the hardest aspect of learning ctb. This includes a few players that were already at a level where they could play rains. I really think players would need more time to get adjusted to dashing, making this harder in the 3rd stage of the 'learning curve' so to say would feel unfair.

Also wanted to mention Dako's comment: "With this addition a Platter difficulty would be good for both introducing the h-dash mechanic and also "mastering" the (tap-)dash mechanic.". I really feel like a platter would be waaaaay to early for a player to even start thinking about tapdashing. Having to deal with tapdashes alongside learning how to hdash sounds like a horrible idea. Barely any rains even make use of this mechanic iirc so being able to put them in platters wouldn't make much sense.

I do agree with this proposal, thanks for bringing this out

I don't fully agree with this one. For platter on average to low BPM sure. But high BPM? Man, I have seen some newer players are really struggling in terms of dashing when they're playing platter with a fat amount of fruits. Tap dash? Uh oh, you said platters are for learning hyperdash. But, what will happen if someone put more tap dash than hyperdash? Isn't that going to make them harder to learn the difficulty?

In my opinion, if platters are for learning hyperdashes then you shouldn't add more things to a platter. I recommend you to consider Chatie's point. You probably should ask opinions too on people with lower rank to support this proposal. Just in case.

Just in my small brain. Deep down I want this to be in RC instead of just guidelines because you can still break the guidelines.

Dapuluous wrote:

In my opinion, if platters are for learning hyperdashes then you shouldn't add more things to a platter. I recommend you to consider Chatie's point. You probably should ask opinions too on people with lower rank to support this proposal. Just in case.

Salads are for learning dashes. If you're playing platters, you should have learned dashes already and be able to use this skillset. Does this also mean that we should only have 1/4 hdashes in rains because rains are for learning 1/4 hdashes? No. The reason that players are so bad at this skillset of ambiguous dashes are BECAUSE they are only introduced in later difficulties. Convert players are much better at tapdashes/ambiguous dashes than non convert players are simply because of this RC guideline. If you want to fix the reason why players are bad at tap dashes, then you go to the reason why. The reason is because they are introduced TOO LATE into the curve. Keeping this guideline in place only makes it so players are forced to either play easier converts or play rains which are too difficult most of the times to be able to learn this skillset.

edit: also because everything is so cookie cutter because of this "ambiguous dash" nonsense.

just take a look at any older map and the main difference you see is that nobody cared about ambiguity, and thats one of the reasons why they were so nice. Another good example is ajamez difficulties back when he was under his old name, they were quite nice and utilized this alot in rain-

Greaper and I have been discussing about this proposal, and we both agree to nuke this guideline. Secre's reasoning makes sense, and while mappers will probably keep the described tendency of "super strong sound > hdash / strong sound > dash / everything else > walk", there are situations in which you don't want to force a clear dash (which imo increases the difficulty level unnecessarily in some cases).

Plus, the removal of this rule would help,as stated in the thread already, to add more variety for Platters and make them more interesting to map and play > one of our concerns while selecting maps for the Spotlights (hi Sinnoh).

There were some concerns about tricky tap-dashes, though those kind of patterns can be tackled down while modding. There shouldn't be any need to have an extra rule/guideline for those.

The thread will be open a few days more in case further discussion is needed, though it should be merged at the end of the week.

https://github.com/ppy/osu-wiki/pull/4041

and merged!