Related Pull Request: https://github.com/ppy/osu-wiki/pull/5223

Similar (not the same) previous threads I have found:
community/forums/topics/893272
https://osu.ppy.sh/community/forums/topics/1260714 this is recent but i made another thread since that is a proposal of manipulating the rule and this is a proposal of removing the rules (PLURAL), if this is too similar then i can just post there if wanted instead

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So currently we got 2 rules regarding the restrictions of what songs can be currently in qualified which can be seen here:
I am suggesting to completely remove their existence Lol

This is going to seem reductive but here are the list of reasons FOR keeping this rule that I can think of/have seen:

1. "I like speedrank wars"
2. Reduces the content bloat with respect to the types of songs that are incoming to ranked
3. Removes possible "abuse" of mappers ranking the same song a bunch of times at once
4. Incentivizes merging beatmap sets heading to ranked

Here are the reasons why I think it would be a GREAT idea to remove these 2 lines from the rules and why the reasons above are not good reasons

1. Creates restrictions for when a set that is ready for rank can be nominated
2. Speedrank wars are a terrible concept in the first place and participating in such gets you punished, counterintuitive to the added incentive this rule creates for speedranking (not saying this is the only incentive, but to say it doesn't plays a large factor in it would be wrong, and saying it's not the only factor invalidates point 1)
3. Point 2 isn't actually an issue as the issue lies more on the map that is created being so ridiculously similar to another one for the same song instead of the fact that the same song was mapped a bunch of times
4. The content bloat that occurs within the "fresh" or "recent" instance of ranked does not necessarily matter more than the content bloat that occurs within ranked retrospectively/later on as "new" content is not necessarily what is the most consumed content at a given time in the first place (since there isn't proof this is the case anyway lol) and content bloat in general is an issue that should be tackled more directly than with rules that do not actually tackle it like this one (invalidates point 3)
5. A player seeing a ton of sets of the same song in ranked at the same time is not really an issue since cases of these are already rare in the first place and in the case these happen, it is possible that players tend to want more of those songs being mapped a bunch of times anyway
6. It could easily be argued that the same mapper ranking a long and short version of a song currently is more closer to the definition of the content bloat since it's highly plausible in such a scenario for the maps to be very similar in nature, but most people (including myself) do not have an issue with this; something like this is arguably worse for content bloat, or, technically a much worse scenario, someone ranking a full version sidetracked day alongside a short version sidetracked day
7. "Abuse" should be treated as they come regardless and I would question the idea of calling a mapper ranking a song a bunch of times as abuse as this can easily be treated as an aesthetic choice easily shown by the example of ailv's Saifu maps, would need to be discussed on what "abuse" entails exactly
8. Mappers tend to rather have their own sets rank instead of joining someone else's as the host name tends to be far more prominent to the public eye than a GD name which a host would rather prefer (invalidates point 4)

Of course some of these points don't stand if the approach of the definition of content bloat is different but then I would argue that directing the definition of content bloat to the types of songs that get ranked is a bad slippery slope to go down compared to the type of map thats created from songs, continuation of the topic of content bloat: community/forums/posts/8003733

Sure there is an argument of "focusing on the specific points like speedranking and some BNs acting out of pocket" instead of this but this does not consider the fact that these lines play a factor into these issues and can easily also be considered as a step that kills x amount of birds with 1 stone.

We also have to consider the fact that this is really not handling the issues presented regarding the topic of content bloat as this focuses solely on the idea of same song a bunch of times = content bloat and nothing else, especially when this will usually happen at a time when players want more of that type of content to come in

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tl;dr remove these 2 lines because the pros outweight the cons in removing them

vouch

really nothing else to say please remove these rules they suck

yes

agree

Agree

ye

agreed

yeah

Vouch

agree completely

i agree

yes

shit like time and qilin's prance demonstrates the obvious inability of nominators to hold themselves back from not abusing their position for petty speedrank wars

loctav mentioned in the previous thread "Every other semi-politicial shenanigans you guys come up with are all first world problems you need to deal with in a more all-embracing manner. If you don't like speedranking, do something about speedranking itself. If you don't like BNs acting in bad faith, kick the BNs in their face."

yeah cuz we totally did stuff about speedranking and BNs acting in bad faith XD

VINXIS wrote:

The content bloat that occurs within the "fresh" or "recent" instance of ranked does not matter more than the content bloat that occurs within ranked retrospectively/later on as "new" content is not necessarily what is the most consumed content at a given time in the first place (since there isn't proof this is the case anyway lol) and content bloat in general is an issue that should be tackled more directly than with rules that do not actually tackle it like this one (invalidates point 3) A player seeing a ton of sets of the same song in ranked at the same time is not really an issue since cases of these are already rare in the first place and in the case these happen players tend to want more of their favourite song being mapped a bunch of times anyway

i feel like these two are really important.. there's no real difference between 'too many' of a song being mapped and ranked around the same time compared to them being months apart. like who actually cares

and the people that DO care are usually excited about it. "oh shit new anime opening just dropped and there's 4 different sets, let me find my favorite!" compared to "oh shit new anime opening dropped but this mapset is trash, that sucks"

vouch

so true

rep vouch

have wanted these rules removed since they were added, they do nothing good

yes please
thanks

yes please remove these ancient rules

vinxis already stated everything i would want to say. adding my support to the pile.

+rep

Personally like most people think that rule is stupid, if they perhaps still refusing to remove it I’d suggest to put a limit to 3 sets at the same time and here’s why:

There’s less reason to make a speedrank war with 3 sets, rank wars are already rare and I believe this would already kill them forever

I also don’t think that ranking 2 songs in different sets at the same time hurts anyone, also avoids bloat in case they rule gets completely removed and a bunch of mappers decide to rank the same songs at the same time

And to end I wanna say that avoid content bloat is part of the nomination team, what I mean is that if per example rule gets removed and a bunch of mappers try to rank same songs at the exact time it’s the nominator work to avoid that by checking and if anything denying it to avoid (At least give a delay to the sets).

can i make the pull request

Vouch

Vouch

VINXIS wrote:

can i make the pull request

@ppy and @ephemeralis on it and it can't be merged w/o their approval since that's whereabouts the original restrictions come from anyway

i technically skirted this by doing the 3 remix thing (since remixes used to just be included which sucked) but having it wholly removed is more likely to have some paintpoints

PERSONALLY what I'm missing most here is an actual value proposition for players, just saying "they want this" alone doesn't hold up. Something like what Logic Agent mentioned is better. Technically the whole pp/content bloat stuff also goes against what players want so it's a bit scuffed as reasoning.
When designing an experience it's as much about what players want as what kind of experience you want to provide.

For myself I feel like osu should value unique songcontent a lot, I think playing lots of different songs is the best way to experience a music game. From there I find the proposal hard to agree to, it puts a dent in that thought.

Even though I won't "vouch", I can somewhat see this within a larger movement to break open the ranked section and direct those values that people like myself have to something else.

Also don't think you're really solving speedrank wars, if people want to enter war they'll find a different way to do it and it might be just as bad.

/2c

yaspo wrote:

PERSONALLY what I'm missing most here is an actual value proposition for players, just saying "they want this" alone doesn't hold up. Something like what Logic Agent mentioned is better. Technically the whole pp/content bloat stuff also goes against what players want so it's a bit scuffed as reasoning.
When designing an experience it's as much about what players want as what kind of experience you want to provide.

It's true that players are the largest group, but you can't just focus on players because that's not the only active group. Having your map dq'd and seeing another set of the same song get qualified, forcing you to wait a week as the hype of this specific song dies down, can feel really bad.

Even if you were to focus on players though, I feel like Logic Agent has a really good point regarding hype around new songs is very valid for players and mappers alike.

yaspo wrote:

For myself I feel like osu should value unique songcontent a lot, I think playing lots of different songs is the best way to experience a music game. From there I find the proposal hard to agree to, it puts a dent in that thought.

I agree that variety is important, but removing a one week delay isn't going to realistically affect the flow of unique songs. The 1 or 2 slots in the ranking queue that'll occasionally get used up for duplicate songs is more or less negligible when you consider the crazy variety that already exists and constantly flows in. If anything, Logic Agent's point already outweighs this.

yaspo wrote:

Also don't think you're really solving speedrank wars, if people want to enter war they'll find a different way to do it and it might be just as bad.

Yes, this won't completely get rid of mapping competition but this rule is a big driving force for people to try to get their sets qualified as soon as possible because of the way hype works around trending media. Being "late to the party" almost always leaves you with less eyes on your work and it feels especially bad when it's outside of your control.

With all that being said, I definitely think the rule should be removed since the positives of the removal outweigh the negatives.

some random chaos thoughts

well frankly i believe the rule is made to avoid bloating ranked section with 53890829589 instances of one song, idk having 10 hitorigoto or 30 Chikatto Chika Chika sets in a few days feels quite dumb and generally boring, overwhelming and unnecessary i'd guess.

worth mentining that there's a ranked-per-day cap so i can imagine half or more of maps being the same song which feels kinda... out of place for a rhythm game that should likely promote some diversity in levals?

also gotta agree with yaspog that speedrank wars will liely still exist just some other way around.

maybe just raise limit of qualified maps at the same time to like 2-3 or so to avoid overflooding ranked along with softening it a little? idk just throwing random ideas

@logic agent: would be cool if we lived in reality where people would be picking between cool sets but it feels like it's gonna end up on new hyped anime op unlimited pp any% somehow

@uberfazz: speedrank wars exist cuz people want to get their map ranked first and therefore get most hype and plays i guess, having them all qualified at the same time won't really change a lot here i guess? people who qualified their set later might still wanna dq other competitor maps for sake of being first to rank?

Man i was gonna respond to yaspo but then i had a sudden urge to shit and now theres 2 more posts

Ok just for the record I do agree with everything yaspo said (yea the reasoning looks really scuffed in that perspective too Lool) and venix's first 2 paragraphs, BUT

What is the issue with giving the players what they want? The only answer that really comes into my mind at least is that it bloats the content, and states a lower standard for mapping; i think the second point is out of scope for this discussion since it's unrelated to this topic though since these rules afaik are not meant for that anyway

I think we all agree that content bloat is an issue, but I want to make sure that we are on the same boat as to WHY that is an issue

Personally my issue with content bloat is solely because it makes it harder to find what I value because there is a ton of content that I don't value coming in, and I think that is the same case for others here as well(?) and probably anyone but I could be wrong

I can see how removing this rule potentially makes it even harder to find content as well, but I think the effect of removing these rules provide with regards to that is not much or even nonexistent.

These rules are usually only in full force for openings of popular animes as venix has pointed out a few examples, and these happen like 2-3 times a year? Somewhere around that.

Having like a couple days in the year filled with Le Chika XD type of song beatmaps getting ranked IMO is not an issue at all since it barely contributes (if any) to the ever so large issue of attempting to find content that you value

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ALSO I Know Lol i dont think it solves speedrank wars

tried to make it clear that it's a VERY LARGE factor that helps in perpetuating it, not the ONLY factor

that is out of scope of what this is for anyway since this isn't about fixing speedrank wars but rather to remove a restriction, it's simply a side effect of the very large incentive being reduced

Venix wrote:

@uberfazz: speedrank wars exist cuz people want to get their map ranked first and therefore get most hype and plays i guess, having them all qualified at the same time won't really change a lot here i guess? people who qualified their set later might still wanna dq other competitor maps for sake of being first to rank?

same day or 1-2 day difference in rank is much bigger than 7d+ is how i see

basically the rule seems like an arbitrary way to deal with content bloat but it just comes off as an annoyance more than anything

the unfortunate part to me is that when it's time for Le Chika you get a lot of the ranking queue taken up by it--- it's good for people who want more of a popular song, it sucks for people who don't like it. attempting to solve this at the stage of qualified is lame for all reasons mentioned in this thread so far, so I support removing these rules, but I don't think that's the only way to solve the problem.

out of scope for the RC discussion, I don't see why this couldn't be handled at the level of the ranking queue itself? if The System notices more than one of the same song are scheduled to be ranked, it could make all but the first map not "count" as taking up a queue spot, so that they don't block other maps. everybody wins... i think?

VINXIS wrote:

The content bloat that occurs within the "fresh" or "recent" instance of ranked does not matter more than the content bloat that occurs within ranked retrospectively/later on as "new" content is not necessarily what is the most consumed content at a given time in the first place (since there isn't proof this is the case anyway lol) [...]

you didn't present proof of the contrary either so I don't think it's right to say "does not matter more". it's just that we don't know if it matters cuz nobody looked into it. wouldn't change my opinion about the proposal, just sayin'

Yea true Lool I edited it

changing how ranking queue works to that way seems interesting though I'm not really sure if that actually does anything (?) for le chika moments

Venix wrote:

@logic agent: would be cool if we lived in reality where people would be picking between cool sets but it feels like it's gonna end up on new hyped anime op unlimited pp any% somehow

true but not everyone just plays for pp farming, a lot of people would define cool as a very mundane map in a mappers eyes, and those people might not even know that their preferences in what makes a good map is also what makes a pp map. if the first ranked version of a hyped anime op is a set that has a topdiff with tricky rhythms or like..... even something as small as just not being cs4, the whole thing can be looked at like it's a flop by the average player.

and like vinxis is saying, a couple maps of the same song around the same time would only really happen a few times a year with highly anticipated anime ops. and even then how many maps would it realistically be? 4 or 5?

I'd love to see speedrank wars being harder to come by as I think the concept of it is stupid, and as long as the idea of content bloat in qualified is being tackled in another way I'd be in favor of this. Removing these rules just seems to me like creating a situation where a mapper can supposedly qualify the same song in 10 different sets of theirs in a row - a very extreme example I know, but definitely something that sounds feasible when they're removed.

You might argue that you don't see this as an issue but I do agree with yaspo that qualified should at least promote some level of diversity, and I just don't see some mapper not attempting what I said above.

Also adding that it's not entirely exclusive to popular anime OPs, it happened aswell with songs that are exploitable for PP (i.e sidetracked, honesty, etc), even flavor of the month songs like yoru ni kakeru, I defintely think it happens way more than 4-5 times a year and probably will happen more when these rules are removed.

Those were different because instead of many people wanting to map a song a once, it was rather people wanting to map it after the hype of one map took off.

Sidetracked day for example had one map that was ranked that was moreso the driving force rather than the song's existence. There's a total of 6 ranked maps of it currently for standard:

1. Ranked in March
2. Ranked in May
3. Ranked in May
4. Ranked in June
5. Ranked in September
6. Ranked in September

Removing this rule, it would be likely that there would be duplicate songs that happen twice, and it would be two maps each time. Same with Honesty. 5 ranked for Yoru ni Kakeru all spread out. Hidamari no uta is similar,

Now obviously there's more than just 3 songs with this case where it's used for disgusting PP exploits by mappers or for FOTM songs but this rule is not really helping in the first place for that honestly especially in the retrospective sense; at most it just spreads out dupes by a week which I would say is not much of a difference than if duos were ranked at similar times

I'm also not sure if saying that this circumstance can possibly be perpetuated more is a strong con. These cases are already usually pretty spread out in the first place, and having 2-3 maps of the same song being ranked in the same day isnt really the same as like 5+ or something dunno

I am inclined to believe that even if it does it won't be much more honestly

Sorry for late reply. All I can say is I hope you're right...just hoping the fiesta that happened in 2016-2017 won't happen again.

If the 16-17 fiesta u mean the tatoe miiro shit then I think it'll happen regardless if this rule exists or not since this was already there at the time anyway and doesn't really provide an incentive/touch on that otherwise, though I agree it would be nice that stuff like that doesn't happen

dunno if u are talking about something else though

I thought it was for adding more variety into the qualified beatmap pool. But if a song is trending, it's trending.
If a song is trending purely because of how easy it's able to be exploit for pp then it's more a fault of the system than the people trying to rank it and it'll be ranked eventually anyways...?

bump, i dont want this to die as i believe a change should be done

aaaaa ill get to it unless if someone else can pr the lines deleted to osu-wiki in the meantime and link it here that would be nice

I see basically no downsides to this, both as a player and as a mapper.

Edge cases can be easily resolved by BNs/NAT exercising an ounce of common sense.

PLEASE remove those 2 restrictions

support this

so true!

agreed

Venix wrote:

some random chaos thoughts

well frankly i believe the rule is made to avoid bloating ranked section with 53890829589 instances of one song, idk having 10 hitorigoto or 30 Chikatto Chika Chika sets in a few days feels quite dumb and generally boring, overwhelming and unnecessary i'd guess.

This is so blatantly not even close to what happened with either of these two examples that I can't even tell if you have legitimate concerns about content bloat within a short timeframe (which don't exist for either set in question that the qualified rule would prevent) or just want to see speedrank wars stay for your own amusement.

Out of all the Hitorigoto sets, the first one was ranked in April 24, 2017, and the next one was ranked in June. The qualified rule did absolutely nothing to dripfeed these sets into the ranked section. There was an entire month in between the two sets where nobody had a Hitorigoto in qualified.

Out of all the Chika sets, the first one was ranked on February 8, 2019. The next Chika that was ranked was in March 14, 2019. Again, there was a full month in between these sets.

The fact that you think the huge quantity of Chika and Hitorigoto sets feel dumb and generally boring is completely irrelevant to the qualified rule existing because it doesn't prevent any of that.

ok well the rules are gone now so

kinda wish this thread had less of a "what a stupid rule!" vibe even if it's clear this is the case now, I think we should encourage experimenting with RC rules and guidelines, and not all experiments pan out. it's valuable to try something like this even if it ended up doing nothing. maybe I'm looking into people's words too much though lol

merged

Ya agreed

Moving this to Finalized/Denied Amendments as the GitHub PR has been merged and the change has come into effect.