Did some skimming through the RC's suggested guidelines for difficulties and saw some things that stand out to me.

SALAD


Approach Rate / Overall Difficulty should be between 6 and 7.

I propose this to be changed to "should be between 5.5 and 7."

This would be better for the spread between cup-platter, as cup currently lists 4-6 while platter lists 7-8.5. Having salad start at this slightly lower spot for suggested difficulty just makes sense progression wise. Taking into account my latter suggestion for platters, this makes even more sense.


PLATTER


Approach Rate / Overall Difficulty should be between 7 and 8.5.

Having platters reach all the way to 8.5 is slightly excessive. At this point it should really be taken into question whether this difficulty would be considered a rain or not. I had Zak who has every ranked CTB map downloaded check how many ranked platters there are above AR8.2. There are approximately 10-15, with a good amount of those being older 2013 maps, and another good amount being ranked recently.

I propose this to be changed to "should be between 6.5 and 8."

Raising the starting AR puts this more in line with the following Rain guideline of "should be between 7 and 9." Lowering the cap of this to 8 puts a more solid foundation that standardizing platters above ar8 should not be generally accepted and only to be used when there is good reason to (certain gimmick, high bpm). If somebody would want to use a higher ar of 8.1-8.5, they would need to provide a reason to break the guideline, similar to the rest of the RC.


Implementing these two changes to the RC should hopefully encourage some lower AR spreads for salads/platters which are frankly starting to slowly get higher and higher.

Agree with Salad / Disagree with Platter

Removing AR8.1~5 from the guideline would result in mappers having some trouble with utilizing an higher AR for platter when they are really needed, so I feel like it does only harm but we get no benefits in return.

Also AR8 is commonly used for Platter. Having 8 as an extreme value isn't really idealistic

Spectator wrote:

Agree with Salad / Disagree with Platter

Removing AR8.1~5 from the guideline would result in mappers having some trouble with utilizing an higher AR for platter when they are really needed, so I feel like it does only harm but we get no benefits in return.

Also AR8 is commonly used for Platter. Having 8 as an extreme value isn't really idealistic

Responding to this, this would be almost the same exact case as the current way that Rain is worked

A good portion of rains are ar9. ar9.1-9.2 rains are acceptable and used sometimes.

8 wouldn't be an extreme value in this case, it would just be the higher end of the norm (which is whats frequently used already for cup, salad and rain). You can justify using AR above 8 for any platter that is needed in the same way that you justify anything else that breaks a guideline.

If removing 8.1-8.5 is too much, then another option would be to change the guideline to 6.5-8.2. I thought about this initially, but i just didn't like the way 8.2 looked, but it does the job well

edit: also there are difficulties for cups, salads, and rains that all break the respective upper limit guideline currently ranked. There are only two ranked ar8.5 platters, (discounting illumiscape for obvious reasons), and none above 8.5.

My view of the "Difficulty setting guidelines" is to give a sort of baseline for how each difficulty should look like. For example, for Rain's we have AR 7-9 as the proposed difficulty settings (which probably should be AR 8-9.2). When we look at the actually made difficulties ar 9.1/9.2 seems to be used once in a while.

I disagree with you that we should change the AR/OD of a Salad below 6, if we really want to change them, then I think the current value of 6-7 is fine, although I would think having 6-7.2 instead would be beneficial to create more challenging diffs for high BPM songs.

I do agree with you on changing the Platter's since 8.5 is in my eyes way to high and should never be used, mainly easier Rain's get this kind of AR when being used, so specifying them for the Platter's as a "baseline setting" is odd. Changing it here to 7-8.2 would be much better in my eyes since high BPM songs can still benefit from the use of AR 8.2.

i don't really agree for salad here. low AR 5,5 in Salad might confusing some players to read for dashes stuff (at least it happened to me). imo current RC about Salad is good as it is now

About Platter yes i agree 8,5 feels too much sometimes and we have some examples with 8,5 AR and they feel too fast for platter level players imo.. i do agree changing to Platter here. Sometimes we need a bit higher AR like 8,1 until 8,3 but we can break the guidelines if we have a good reason. Current using 8,5 AR with reason "yeah i use it because RC written it's okay" is not really good

Lowering Platter AR range to 8 makes sense but I hope that won't result in forcing AR change on similiar cases to Embraced by the Flame which is very good example of AR8.5 usage on platter.

Mixed feelings about this one but here's what I believe

I would love to see AR 6 Preferred over AR 5,5 on salad unless used intricately. While 5,5 isnt that much of change I would feel like we're slowly treading into territory where the AR Can be too slow and this wont be that beneficial for hand to eye coordination on dash hitting by salad-accustomed players.

Personally I would love to keep looking at AR options on a higher range since i would prioritize dashing on higher fruit scroll speeds to set up salad players for platter as I feel a e.g 5,5 -> 7,5 discrepancy will hinder the players ability to react to not only faster scrolling dashes, but to HDashes as well

Thus,
Keeping the lower bound of the guideline AR on 6 is currently Ideal as something lower than 6 can still be used with proper reasoning and how it will benefit the map, but personally it should be avoided as it can also hinder play experience and dash timing with how slow it is.

Now for platter, I would definitely support you on lowering the upper bound of the AR on platters as I also feel like anything higher than 8 treads on rain terittory and can seem excessive in usage. 7,5 - 8 AR is ideal for me and to be fair, anything below and above the current threshold can still be used with proper reasoning since this is a guideline and this could be a better way to handle platters with AR higher than 8. I would prefer to handle these scarcely present ar>8 platters in case by case basis instead of just putting them in thebounds of the guideline.

In general, current AR guideline promotes a linear progression from salad and to rain. 8,5 feels like it doesnt fit in the current context, only under extreme cases where they can easily be handled in a case by case basis under the supervising modders/BNs ( e.g a high bpm song would probably benefit from ar 8,2 and this ar can be accepted through discussion with the supervising BN without any need for the value to be included in the guideline.)

Hi

After some discussion within the NAT we've come to conclusion that we partially agree with the proposal, no for Salad and semi-yes for Platter.


Salad

Keeping the lower bound of the guideline AR on 6 seems fine. Lowering the bar more than 6 would make some newer players struggle, as Xinely and Nokashi mentioned, since players nowadays in general are more friendly with higher AR. Higher AR would also benefit the players who are getting used to the dashes for the first time since they are more distinguishable on higher AR.


Platter

We do agree that the higher bound of the guideline AR of 8.5 feels too high and should never be used as Greaper said. Considering we still need the use of a bit higher AR for the fast-paced songs, changing the higher limit of the guideline for Platter from 8.5 to 8.2 would make a lot of sense.

About the lower limit, we've checked most of MBomb's Platters as a reference since he used to map quite an amount of slow songs, and only a few of them were under AR7. There might be not many attempts by other mappers to reach that lower limit so we think keeping the lower limit as 7 should be fine.

- beatmapsets/343159#fruits/758290 > 6.3 (compensated with CS6)
- beatmapsets/707670#fruits/1496346 > 6.0
- beatmapsets/943803#fruits/1971060 > 6.4
- beatmapsets/1195922#fruits/2491270 > 6.5
- beatmapsets/769843#fruits/1618670 > 6.5


In conclusion, we are proposing our decision and will be waiting for next 24 hours. If no further discussion happens below change is going to be applied and the thread will be archived.

before "(Platter) Approach Rate / Overall Difficulty should be between 7 and 8.5."
after "(Platter) Approach Rate / Overall Difficulty should be between 7 and 8.2."

Created a PR at https://github.com/ppy/osu-wiki/pull/4960
Will finalize once merged