Github post

Hello, I'm here to spread a feature request that me and many other players feel would greatly benefit numerous areas of the game. That addition being, to either have the ability to upload maps directly to the Graveyard (limiting it to "reputable" users), or the ability to send Pending maps to the Graveyard. I’ve been told that the “bss” wasn’t intended for something like this, along with the fact that I’m more than aware Lazer is highest priority for everyone. I’m ignorant to how much work it would take to implement this, but I would like to plead the case if there’s a possibility here, as I know many would gain from the inclusion.

To start, this addition would improve the mapping landscape and overall ease for players outside of the game to come and share their content. Personally I can only speak as a mania player, but from what I’ve seen this is where this situation holds the most relevance. As the current system stands, the number of maps that you can upload is incredibly restricted. The people who have been creating content in other games for years (i.e., Etterna, Quaver, o2jam) are prevented from migrating their content in mass and instead need to wait months just to get a chunk of their work over to osu. The alternatives present are to either upload said content through a media sharing site, or to create “packs”, both of which are less than ideal for most people. On one hand, the maps are not even accessible through osu directly and on the other, a mapper is forced to work around the janky constraints of how making a pack works on osu to begin with. Not to mention that in a packs case, players would be forced to download something that may only contain a fraction of content they’re actually interested in. The pack format for many people has been a way to cope with the upload limitations, rather than being the decision that they wanted to actually make. If this may sound overblown, I would implore anyone who isn’t savvy with these other rhythm games to take a look at the library of maps there, and just how many have come from single individuals. Forcing people who have created so much material to turn to these alternatives because they don’t want to wait indefinitely, seems hardly fair.

Now another reason this feature would be great, is for isolated events that reach out to mappers on a whim needing some kind of change on a map in question. As a Loved captain and staff member of multiple tournaments in the past, I can say that I’ve seen this come up an innumerable number of times. The mapper in question has full slots and can’t revive a map? Well, the only options are to either wait if the time frame allows it, upload the map yourselves (assuming a tournament situation), or to bother a GMT and see if they will move something to the Graveyard manually. This moving maps to the Graveyard or being forced to wait scenario is especially relevant to Loved, and multiple recent examples can be given if need be. It’s become more confusing over time as to why it has to be like this, and the inconvenience has been a detriment on all fronts. When tournaments end up having to upload something themselves, the majority of the time those uploads are deleted post-event, which leads to the index archive missing map links. As for Loved, the bottom line is it just causes everything to run behind.

These are the two biggest points that I just wanted to discuss. From asking others, it seems that this limitation was set in place to prevent players from dumping mass amounts of potentially low quality/unfinished content into the game and flooding the Pending, or the Graveyard section if players could just submit to it willy-nilly. Preventative measures need to be in place so that this doesn't happen. It’s because of this that I know the solution wouldn’t be to just turn the Graveyard into the junkyard, but maybe create some kind of middle ground here. I’ve just come up with a number of alternatives myself that I would like to share, and all of them keep the current Pending slots number untouched.

1. Add the ability to upload maps directly to the Graveyard, limiting it to only users who are proven to be reputable (have Ranked or Loved a Beatmap, or are a part of the staff team)

2. Add the ability to Upload/move Pending Beatmaps to the Graveyard, and mirror the maximum slots a player has in Pending, to the Graveyard. This effectively doubles the number of "active" uploads a player can make.

3. Give players the option to move any of their maps in Pending directly to the Graveyard as above, but add a cooldown each time you can do this (24 hours or something).

4. Significantly decrease the current 4 week period it takes for a map to automatically move from Pending to Graveyard.

I hope I've made some case here for this addition, and I would love to hear if there's maybe another way this can be implemented that I'm just not thinking of. Thanks for bothering to read through this 😊

I feel like people on the Loved team should just have the option to move beatmaps around from pending to graveyard. I'm all for just adding more slots, but to keep the current system in place, just give Loved team members that much just to avoid cases where the maps going for Loved can't be updated due to the map upload cap.

Pending has been something I was never a fan of in Osu. A long time ago before I started to upload more frequently, I gave permission for anyone to upload my maps with or without crediting me as a means to spread the enjoyment that I personally have with VSRG's with everyone. This was in due part to this limitation that I had of 4 maps per month when I had at that point in time roughly 300 completed maps from Stepmania (etterna didn't exist at the time). Now I have 500+ maps I have created, if I were to start uploading from scratch today and had the limitation of 4, it would take me 125 months to upload all of my content, which is a little greater than 10 years just to put this in to perspective.

I mean it when I say I've really grown to like osu and its community, I sincerely enjoy multiplayer and engaging in chat channels, playing the game, and content that others have created. The only thing I don't like necessarily is this arbitrary limit in place. Multiple incredible people have been kind to gift me osu supporter just so that I may upload more maps, and working with project Loved has also gained me some additional slots and I really appreciate the community and projects that go on here, you guys are awesome! If something can be done to help out others in my position that are interested in sharing backlogs of content without the frustration it would be one of the greatest things that can be changed in osu!

I definitely understand not wanting to let people abuse the privilege of unlimited uploads if that were to exist, and believe a middleground can be reached somewhere.

PS, I did the packs thing early on and I did not like that just as Penguinosity mentioned.

ok lol

This was one of my problems amidst hosting the SVSE (SV: Summer Exhibition) tournament with Orca- and we experienced this "map submission" issue multiple times when updating or fixing map offset as emergency fixes. This thread would definitely help the player, mostly mappers, throughout so they won't be stuck with a limited amount of submissions for important purposes.

As Arccat said this was also one of the problems that happened while I was hosting the TBO!M2 (Torneio Brasileiro de Osu!Mania 2) we often run out of slots and had several issues when trying to update or hotfix a map.
This not only would help players and mappers but also pool selectors when it comes to tournaments.

do loved maps currently expand the amount of pending slots available? if not, that would be a good place to start (assuming the system is kept in place). ranked maps also increase it by 1, up to 8 (20 for supporter). uploading straight to graveyard is a good idea as well. though really the solution here is to let loved captains move things straight from graveyard to loved instead. the issue is that the whole back end of that is still using the old forum system with pending / wip / ranked / graveyard all being different forums, so it might be hard to implement.

For your first point, I think that this is a great idea, but it shouldn't be limited to members with "reputable" status aka they have a map with leaderboards/part of the staff. Maybe a better criteria would involve account age (the older it is, the more maps you can upload directly to the graveyard), or getting even more slots for being a supporter (which already gives more "active" mapset slots). These are just suggestions, though, and I can see the reason behind limiting it to people who've already proven themselves to making quality maps. But for the "sake of everyone", this change could be a positive impact on all players and mappers.

For the third point, I'm not entirely sure on why a cooldown would be necessary. To add on to this, though, I think it would be helpful if a map receives a certain amount of hype and is in the Pending state, then the user will be given a warning before sending it to the Graveyard indicating that they will lose the hype on their mapset. Or, just not be allowed to graveyard maps that have started the ranking process.

These are just my takes on the suggestions you've put forth. Otherwise, I think this is a great idea; I am looking forward to seeing this being put into the game. So take my 13 votes for this idea lol

Nao Tomori wrote:

do loved maps currently expand the amount of pending slots available? if not, that would be a good place to start (assuming the system is kept in place). ranked maps also increase it by 1, up to 8 (20 for supporter). uploading straight to graveyard is a good idea as well. though really the solution here is to let loved captains move things straight from graveyard to loved instead. the issue is that the whole back end of that is still using the old forum system with pending / wip / ranked / graveyard all being different forums, so it might be hard to implement.

Loved members can move maps from Pending or Graveyard to the Loved section. The issue like I said though, is stemming from us having to wait if that mapper already has their Pending slots filled. We've tried telling mappers ahead of time to leave a slot open for a future viable pick of theirs that we need updated but, things don't always work out that smoothly. It would be much nicer if we didn't have to jump through hoops just to try and work around the less-than-ideal system.

edit: I don't actually know if Loved maps expand someone's slots. if not then wtf?
edit 2: yes they do expand your slots! so thats good to know

4 slots/month is pain, I rarely have a free slot because of that and prevent me to post a lot of map (I probably have at least 10 maps that I can't upload + some graveyard maps that I would like to update) and I know that a lot of people have the same issue. I really hope that this will change soon 🤞

IcyWorld wrote:

This was in due part to this limitation that I had of 4 maps per month when I had at that point in time roughly 300 completed maps from Stepmania (etterna didn't exist at the time). Now I have 500+ maps I have created, if I were to start uploading from scratch today and had the limitation of 4, it would take me 125 months to upload all of my content, which is a little greater than 10 years just to put this in to perspective.

Is there a reason you aren't intending to push your maps through to ranked as per the standard osu! systems? If they are already well established beatmaps, it seems like you could quite quickly expand your maximum slots while also getting your beatmaps in a permanent state on osu!.

I'd see this issue being addressed at the source of the problem (ie. why not ranked) rather than the result (wanting a method to get bigger faster graveyard workflow).

Also, a separate issue, but the graveyard has never been a permanent storage. It is purged over the years, and cannot be used as such. It seems recent new mappers may be unaware of this fact, so we're going to need to address it before purging happens again. Luckily it hasn't been run for a few years now.

Let's keep this thread about slots and why getting ranked maps and increasing slot count (as most mappers do) is not feasible.

Regarding my personal intent not to push my maps through to ranked, I am at odds with the requirements for the ranked system. I create maps that don't strictly follow ranking criteria, including requiring multiple difficulties to comply with the drain time parameters, justifications for each note that I’ve mapped, hitsounding, and any other rules that I may have missed. A lot of what I create is to my own satisfaction in what I get from creating maps and playing. In short, ranked appears to be too many extra steps to do after I already feel like I'm done with a map. Thank you for your responses here and at github, I appreciate your time.

Ranked is probably something a lot of mappers would like to achieve, but the current ranking criteria doesn't allow it. In mania, we have a bunch of skill sets that are created and to the point that some people even specialize in playing and mapping these skillsets. The closest comparison I can think of is someone that specialized in making jump maps in standard will create ranked maps that fall in line with jumps and someone who specializes in streams will make ranked maps that fall in line with the stream patterns. For mania, we just don't have that privilege to just rank any kind of skillset that we have. Things like Full LN/Inverse and chordjacks have patterns we know that just won't be rankable, so we resort to just creating them for graveyard so people can have easy access to the maps while still being able to practice the skillset. These are just a couple examples of the many many skillsets that mania has and have had for many years that just won't be seen in ranked since they need to follow parameters that they simply just can't achieve.

In order to have maps for skillsets that can't be ranked though, we need the graveyard. For things like multis in mania, majority if not all maps will come from graveyard. It just isn't realistic for all players in a multi lobby to go to a file sharing site to get the maps they need. Having the maps appear on the osu site is much more user friendly and safe. Not to mention that it's much easier to get maps in graveyard when players have supporter since they don't even need to open a browser. Basically, the graveyard is the source of every mania player's daily play time and a much needed aspect that we rely upon to store these maps for certain skillsets.

Here's a chart that shows types of patterns in mania since I used some terms that may not be entirely known to people outside mania : https://i.imgur.com/gta7ScK.jpeg


TL;DR For a mania player, we are very reliant on the graveyard to search for skillsets we need to practice and when only looking at ranked stuff, we won't be able to practice at the skillset's full potential due to the ranking parameters in place for mania.

It's not really viable for every single map that gets uploaded to be going up for ranked. Not every one charts/maps to reflect ranked criteria, especially some of the requirements are just kind of silly. Basically forcing a mapper to create a difficulty spread of easy/hard/insane or whatever is kind of meaningless since the star rating is useless to a certain extent. Also tying into that is the time constraint, I don't really know if it's changed now, but I remember the difficulty spread being forced if the map was shorter than 5m. All in all, I don't think you consider this useful for the overall game since it's mainly an issue for osu!mania players and it's also one of the many reasons people aren't willing to migrate over.

peppy wrote:

Let's keep this thread about slots and why getting ranked maps and increasing slot count (as most mappers do) is not feasible.

Mappers have their own visions for what they create and are not willing to alter their maps from those visions no matter what the ranked rules say or any few modders may request. Hence, ranking maps would not be an option. Well despite not satisfying ranked criteria, these maps can still be popular.

Playboi Carti wrote:

Basically forcing a mapper to create a difficulty spread of easy/hard/insane or whatever is kind of meaningless since the star rating is useless to a certain extent. Also tying into that is the time constraint, I don't really know if it's changed now, but I remember the difficulty spread being forced if the map was shorter than 5m.

it's changed now. Even short maps can have only 1 difficulty, but only if the lowest difficulty meets the one in each respective drain time. Spread issue isn't a good argument for this anymore.

I'd rather go with the reason that it's because not everyone always made their maps specifically for ranked, just like what some people already said earlier.

The glaring issue to me is that you're effectively removing user content that is possibly still used and appreciated. The biggest example would be that the tournament scene does not use ranked maps, and in extremely specialized skillsets the amount of maps to exist in the first place is barely enough. Maps from 2016 and also way earlier are used to this day, and will continue to be used in the years forward.

Adri wrote:

The glaring issue to me is that you're effectively removing user content that is possibly still used and appreciated. The biggest example would be that the tournament scene does not use ranked maps, and in extremely specialized skillsets the amount of maps to exist in the first place is barely enough. Maps from 2016 and also way earlier are used to this day, and will continue to be used in the years forward.

I think you are in the wrong thread. Please read my last post once more, and please stay on topic, thanks!

Is there a reason you aren't intending to push your maps through to ranked as per the standard osu! systems? If they are already well established beatmaps, it seems like you could quite quickly expand your maximum slots while also getting your beatmaps in a permanent state on osu!.

Really, really want to forgive me when I say this, but this statement holds quite a huge disconnection with... a lot of stuff. And I want to explain some of them here, both as a person involved in the Ranking process of these maps, as a player in the osu!mania community, as an avid VSRG fan and player, but most importantly as someone who wants to get the point across.

First and foremost, to any avid VSRG player/mapper, IcyWorld is quite a reputable name when it comes to the mapping scheme. He created maps that even today are still played and enjoyed by the community. It's undeniable that most people in the (osu!mania/VSRG) community know him for his content. However, most people should know by now as well that as Icy pointed out, most of these maps would be COMPLETELY unfeasible to rank, and I'm talking from a BN standpoint as of now. Currently, most of his maps lack objective aspects that would deem the spread rankable with our current Ranking system, both Community wise and Mode wise.

Note that with this I'm not requesting said criteria to change as to let all of this in. But realistically, were the case be that Icy wanted to rank his entire curriculum, it would still be unfeasible. And he's only ONE out of MANY mappers that would stumble upon the same problem. At the end of the day, BNs would be limited and that's yet another chokepoint to account for.

So, with that in mind, I just want to reiterate that despite the maps being overwhelming enjoyed, they're not suitable for the ranked section. What's the alternative then? The Loved section, and yet that still has its limits, such as monthly limitations, Icy obviously not being the only mapper to account for, ...

With all of this I just want to mention that getting some people's maps permanently engraved in osu!mania's legacy is not feasible by any means, and that's limiting the amount of players who can enjoy those maps.

With all that in mind, I at least want to point out that yes, storage isn't infinite. We do understand that changes like this would affect all modes, and that only a quarter of said modes (Mania in this case) has such a big split between platforms. But I refuse to believe that absolutely nothing can't get done.

This is a fairly, fairly wild suggestion out of the blue. But creating a new category similar to Graveyard that wouldn't delete maps could be an option. And you could even add a way to encourage mappers to get their maps Ranked/Loved! The suggestion at hand would let mappers "store" maps based on the amount of maps they have contributed to the Ranking/Loved section. It doesn't have to be linear as going to mention, but if every time a mapper's map got Loved/Ranked if they could permanently gain a spot on this "Storage" category that would reassure them that it will not be deleted, could be quite a good middle point for everyone.

This system would encourage mappers to try bringing and officialize their stuff in the osu! community, while offering them the advantage of displaying more of their charts in return. This would only make more people get access to those charts, which means more chances of getting Loved or more reception by the BNs who'd be willing to rank those maps, making a vicious cycle.

I agree that such sudden suggestion would have to be better thought out, but making this kind of category has its advantages! Letting mappers have a way to reassure their maps not get deleted if they contribute to their community would let graveyarded maps to be purged more frequently, which basically would render storage problems basically... useless!

I also agree that the suggestion above might've stayed off-topic. But if the underlying problem to all of this is that there's no way to secure your maps' safety in the platform, that should also have to be discussed.

So to sum it up, with this I only want to give my insight of the issue that the current system has for mapper's to reliably leaderboard their maps and a suggestion that would both help mappers and the maintenance of the Graveyarded section.

Many thanks for whoever might've read this.

peppy wrote:

Adri wrote:

The glaring issue to me is that you're effectively removing user content that is possibly still used and appreciated. The biggest example would be that the tournament scene does not use ranked maps, and in extremely specialized skillsets the amount of maps to exist in the first place is barely enough. Maps from 2016 and also way earlier are used to this day, and will continue to be used in the years forward.

I think you are in the wrong thread. Please read my last post once more, and please stay on topic, thanks!

In your 1st reply on the thread you mention beatmaps' purge. In his post, Adri replies to you mentioning the purge. I think that he isn't in the wrong thread at all.

RandomeLoL wrote:

This is a fairly, fairly wild suggestion out of the blue. But creating a new category similar to Graveyard that wouldn't delete maps could be an option. And you could even add a way to encourage mappers to get their maps Ranked/Loved! The suggestion at hand would let mappers "store" maps based on the amount of maps they have contributed to the Ranking/Loved section. It doesn't have to be linear as going to mention, but if every time a mapper's map got Loved/Ranked if they could permanently gain a spot on this "Storage" category that would reassure them that it will not be deleted, could be quite a good middle point for everyone.

This system would encourage mappers to try bringing and officialize their stuff in the osu! community, while offering them the advantage of displaying more of their charts in return. This would only make more people get access to those charts, which means more chances of getting Loved or more reception by the BNs who'd be willing to rank those maps, making a vicious cycle.

I really like this idea. It would be possible to automate to a point, for example by a map's playcount, and it would provide a viable alternative to... somewhat-known, often played maps in the graveyard getting deleted.

The only other way of mitigating this issue I can see is drastically increasing the number of monthly loved slots and loved captains to incorporate all maps which currently are in a status of "This map kind of deserves to be loved but there's 300 maps I would sooner give this status to"... But honestly that seems like it would create a whole new batch of issues to take care of.

A new category has already been suggested multiple times and is one obvious path, but comes with implementation and infrastructure overhead.

@RandomeLoL yes I get that angle. But let me take a step back for a moment, to a point in time where I was more involved in the ranking system.

The point of ranking is to get maps that are solid and enjoyable into a permanently engraved state. That's literally why the whole system exists. It has obviously evolved into something more stringent and opinionated over the years, but it doesn't necessarily have to be.

I'm asking if maybe there's a middle ground where we can alter certain criteria to allow even a subset of mappers to get a subset of their maps ranked, increasing their slots to where it would no longer be a bottleneck.

peppy wrote:

I'm asking if maybe there's a middle ground where we can alter certain criteria to allow even a subset of mappers to get a subset of their maps ranked, increasing their slots to where it would no longer be a bottleneck.

That would be great. I can speak for me and many others who I know that there are some specific big turn-offs regarding ranking criteria, and in this context for Mania specifically. Two of these things I can mention are:

1. The requirement of hitsounding
2. Difficulty spread requirements

I will never pretend that both of these don't have cases to be made for keeping them as they are, but as a long time player and mapper from this scene I can tell you that these are two of the big ones. There are other things as well but I'll leave mentioning that to others. I'll shortly elaborate on these two.

Hitsounding does not make sense for this community. This community is comprised by an absolute majority of people who play with effect sounds set to 0%, and I would be more than willing to prove that with a public poll of sorts if that would be necessary. Look at any video of someone playing mania, they will not be using hitsounds. Is the purpose of requiring hitsounds not diminished when the majority of a playerbase plays without them? At this point, the requirement is archaic and serves no purpose.

As for difficulty spreads, we have been constricted by an arbitrary system, based on arbitrary difficulty measurements.



I'm sure there was plenty of deliberation and reasoning that was put into these guidelines. However, they couldn't be further from what the majority of the mapping community feels is fair or sensible. I could make suggestions here to how they could be changed, but for now I will just say that the inclusion of these requirements have felt forced at best. A preference of difficulty spread should be left up to the mappers discretion, and not up to whether the song they chart fits within a predetermined time and difficulty range.

The whole ranked system definitely has its usage and effectiveness, but if its purpose is to ensure that maps that are solid and enjoyable received a permanent spot, there are other means to achieve this outcome. There are 2 possible ways that come to mind from my experience within Stepmania.

The most extreme use case that I would suggest is allowing verifiable reliable mappers to have more streamlined access to achieve ranked maps. The streamline can be in this type of manner. I'm provided with a special status and have special access to a tool where I independently mark maps I feel strongly about that should receive a ranked status; perhaps by accessing the beatmapset page and checking a box or something similar indicating this intent. From there it gets ranked. This is essentially the process I work off of when creating Stepmania content, I set my own standards, create my own packs, and release the pack when I feel it is satisfactory. There's a lot of freedom involved in this methodology and it works for me.

This will achieve what we both want but is an obvious manner of circumventing the current ranked process. You get more quality maps ranked by entrusting mappers like myself to share content in a streamlined process. It would be beneficial in alleviating the amount of work put into the ranked process (currently there is no way they can review every map uploaded) and allow Beatmap Nominators and Modders to focus more on newer mappers and help them to obtain the skills neccesary to create quality content, and it wouldn't require a separate category to be implemented, it would just be more ranked content.

On a more middle ground approach there can only be an overall more lenient revision of the current ranked process that would allow for more variety in to the ranked pool. I don't typically participate in community led projects within stepmania but can provide some insight still. The goals of the project should be clear (which they are not right now), and the rules of the project should reflect what both the project leader and any prospective submitter may have common ground in. Also submission to the project should be clearly outlined for how a submitter should proceed if they want to be included.

Currently not everyone that uploads to osu wants to be ranked because our goals are not in line with each other, I recommend obtaining community feedback for each of the 4 projects (osu, taiko, ctb, and mania) primarily from "Would be" submitter who currently don't have a vision in line with current ranking procedures, as well as feedback from current members who are involved in their respective project role what they would like to have changed to make it more lenient. Additionally the current submission process should more clearly outline that any uploads to Osu are an intent for having this content ranked and not a form of permanent storage as this is clearly a massive misunderstanding right now. This is an intertwined issue and I don't see a separate discussion thread, in fact this discussion would not even be included if the preservation of all content was achievable.

From start to finish intent needs to be clarified such as submissions are only for ranked consideration. If the submission is not satisfactory it is rejected or given a timeframe for correction. If it is not corrected it is not ranked and purged in a timely manner such that it is obvious that graveyard is not a permanent storage.

My feedback for osumania would be to not require multiple difficulties, not require hitsounds, and not require extreme scrutiny of each note placed within a map. The variety within osumania is vast in the types and styles of creation, far to great to make an exhaustive and finite list of what is considered "solid and enjoyable". I can only speak to osumania, and wish to leave others to pitch in for osu, taiko, and ctb.

On a much wilder suggestion it may be worth considering how Etterna decides to "rank" content. Packs are simply cataloged on etternaonline.com with leaderboards along with respective rates that are deemed achievable by players. Packs that are cataloged are community created or individual projects. This is so much different from osumania but for the purpose of leaderboarding content it's extremely efficient and could lead to massive restructuring of osu since this game to my knowledge works better based on single songs downloads rather than pack downloads.

In favor of being respectful to the osu community, developers, and anyone involved in the ranking process, I do not mean to sound superior, I view myself as a member of the community and nothing more than that. We all need to work together, as there appears to be much more to take in to consideration than the initial proposition of just increasing pending slots. Your response Peppy to the issue of pending slots has been extraordinarily enlightening to what osu really is, and what ranked really is. I hope my feedback and suggestions can be of some use.

Penguinosity wrote:

As for difficulty spreads, we have been constricted by an arbitrary system, based on arbitrary difficulty measurements.



I'm sure there was plenty of deliberation and reasoning that was put into these guidelines. However, they couldn't be further from what the majority of the mapping community feels is fair or sensible. I could make suggestions here to how they could be changed, but for now I will just say that the inclusion of these requirements have felt forced at best. A preference of difficulty spread should be left up to the mappers discretion, and not up to whether the song they chart fits within a predetermined time and difficulty range.

This one rule was actually set up by the mapping community itself tho, which involved quite a lot of mappers across multiple backgrounds and game modes in the process : http://osu.ppy.sh/community/forums/topics/726474

I don't know how the situation is with osu!mania, but as an osu!standard mapper myself I don't think I have seen any vocal complaint from my fellow osu!standard mappers about the current spread rule being "far from fair" or "not sensible" (esp. given that the spread rule before that was really, *really* unneccessarily demanding).

But umm, yeah, different game mode yields in a different need I suppose

---

Also one thing that I noticed that all the issues and suggestions thrown here so far appear to be... very heavily slanted towards the osu!mania demographics of sorts I guess? Concerns such as "there are mappers who have a backlog of hundreds of charts that they have made in other game(s)" and many others seem to be never (or, at best, very very very rarely) present in the three other game mode(s) if any to my knowledge.

Personally speaking I'm not against the idea of increasing the number of Pending slots (esp. its lower bounds) or having a feature to "send" a map directly to the Graveyard section tho, given that the implementation is proper. However yeah I'm genuinely struggling to see how some of the stuffs voiced here can be related to the situation found in the three other game mode(s).

Here's hoping that a middle ground can be found at least.

If those involved are willing, let's first try and address the concerns in the ranking criteria and work forward from there? It doesn't sound like it's necessarily a huge step.

Sounds like only two specific issues are standing between ranking being feasible for some of the mappers talking here.

I'm asking if maybe there's a middle ground where we can alter certain criteria to allow even a subset of mappers to get a subset of their maps ranked, increasing their slots to where it would no longer be a bottleneck.

Thanks for the hasty response. It's quite alleviating we're open to make changes for this non-marginal part of the VSRG community, and I personally appreciate that!


Regarding the two suggestions suggested:

That would be great. I can speak for me and many others who I know that there are some specific big turn-offs regarding ranking criteria, and in this context for Mania specifically. Two of these things I can mention are:

1. The requirement of hitsounding
2. Difficulty spread requirements

After speaking with plenty of mappers, half of the reason they do not want to rank maps is based around the Ranking System as a whole (The tedious process to get maps ranked), but the other half is without a doubt dissuaded by some aspects of the Criteria. I'll primarily focus on the latter here and discuss the two points in fair detail:

1. Hitsounds are a whole thing by themselves. The idea of hitsounding is not new on osu!, but it's bewildering in most 4k VSRGs and nothing new in Keysounded VSRGs (As this issue affects the people coming from any VSRG with any Keymode). The complex structures that maps in Mania have make it really, really hard to create inspiring hitsounds. Let alone fully consistent ones. This rule indirectly affects the quality of maps, as most people will A) Either opt to make really, really basic and uninspiring hitsounds B) Forces people to wait for Hitsounders, and that's a bottleneck on top of the bottleneck that the Ranking process already offers. I cannot speak with anyone, however I'd love to hear more opinions about it, but having Hitsounds completely optional in Mania would solve more issues than not, on paper that is.

2. Keep in mind that I'm still an advocate for spreads myself. Accessibility has to be accounted for newer players. Spreads are going nowhere. But I believe the timings could probably be discussed and readjusted for Mania. Getting an exact timeframe now would be difficult as there's a lot of things to account for, such as where do we draw the line between making mapsets accessible to newer players and where do we draw it to alleviate the requirements for mappers.

Other than that, all other changes would affect Core values of the game or not help solving the issue and potentially reduce the quality of maps as a whole.

Just wanted to give my 5 cents on the matter!

RandomeLoL wrote:

Other than that, all other changes would affect Core values of the game or not help solving the issue and potentially reduce the quality of maps as a whole.

Current ranking criterias aren't representative of what makes a map a good map. Following perfectly the ranking criterias doesn't guarantee that the map is on a higher quality level, and a map can be very good while not following the RC. So I think changing the RC to something that would be more playability-oriented would be a could thing and that I will only improve the quality of the ranked beatmaps

Ventilo le vrai wrote:

Current ranking criterias aren't representative of what makes a map a good map. Following perfectly the ranking criterias doesn't guarantee that the map is on a higher quality level, and a map can be very good while not following the RC. So I think changing the RC to something that would be more playability-oriented would be a could thing and that I will only improve the quality of the ranked beatmaps

Unsure about this suggestion personally — although yes playability is something that a lot of mappers nowadays consider within their charts (Simple or complex), I wouldn't say that it is entirely the way to go for when it comes to making maps in Osu!Mania as sometimes you might limit yourself on when it comes to expressing a song well and you tend to map some complex sounds in a way that is oversimplified and not really representative for the sound which is something i'm not really a fan of, especially for this gamemode's mapping meta.

All, I made a RC proposal for hitsounds and discussion thread for difficulty spread where we can take the next steps:

1. [Proposal - mania] Remove hitsound additions requirement
2. [Discussion - mania] Relax spread requirements

abraker wrote:

All, I made a RC proposal for hitsounds and discussion thread for difficulty spread where we can take the next steps:

1. [Proposal - mania] Remove hitsound additions requirement
2. [Discussion - mania] Relax spread requirements

Greatly appreciated. I'll contribute to either of those once conversations start happening


I just wanted to shortly address this though

Niva wrote:

Also one thing that I noticed that all the issues and suggestions thrown here so far appear to be... very heavily slanted towards the osu!mania demographics of sorts I guess? Concerns such as "there are mappers who have a backlog of hundreds of charts that they have made in other game(s)" and many others seem to be never (or, at best, very very very rarely) present in the three other game mode(s) if any to my knowledge.

It just seemed odd to specify that the suggestions have some bias with o!m in mind, when that's the basis of what the post stemmed from. Being a VSRG, mania comes with all of the history and connections that these games have built over the years. Many of these games go back before the creation of osu!. The content migration concerns stated in my original post and in a few others can obviously only be applied to Mania, but that doesn't make it any less important to be addressed.

I'm sure you already had taken this into account, but I just wanted to clarify for anyone else. It seems like we can make progress in the direction of creating a middle ground like you said, and I am looking forward to it.

I think that this thread moved off topic, it was asking for more pending beatmaps slots in the beginning and then concluded that few ranking criteria should be changed. Surely that's one of the factors that makes so much maps being in graveyard but it's not the only reason and I think that even by applying the RC changes suggestions in the 2 proposals that abraker made, there would still be a lot of maps in the graveyard.

1) I'll take for example every gimmick/SV/storyboard maps that aren't rankable atm and will never be rankable no matter how much we can change RC changes. These maps can be very good and a lot appreciated by the community, considering that some of them are in the loved section. And obviously all of these beatmaps can't be in the loved section because loved status is dedicated to maps that are both high quality and popular (and they're a lot of high quality maps of that style that have almost no playcount or favourites). So these maps will keep falling in the graveyard even after eventual RC changes, and that doesn't mean that they don't deserved to be uploaded.

2) Rates. Idk about other modes (I think I have already seen few std players using that but I'm not sure) but in mania a lot of players are used to change the speed rate of the map. It's good for training, when you're getting good on a map you just increase the bpm by 10%, it extends the number of good maps available for training and most people that came from an other VSRG (such as etterna for example) are used to have rates directly implemented to the game. These map need to be uploaded because uploading them on bancho makes them way easier to find (because they're people who are actually looking for maps with rates) than just dropping some .osz files on some random mania related discord servers.

3) Some mappers that make SV maps (here I will only talk about sightread SVs because I already explained that memo/gimmick SVs are unrankable) sometimes add an nsv difficulty to the set because some players prefer play without SVs or some other reason. This is unrankable because it will have 2 diffs with the same notes layering so this is one more category of maps that will alwayss be in the graveyard.

4) Some mappers are just mapping because it's fun, because they like to map, and ranking a map or not should be mapper's decision. After all, it's their map, they do whatever they want with it.

5) convert maps from other games. They're a lot of maps from other VSRG that have been uploaded on bancho since mania has been released. They're so much maps to convert that it's just impossible to upload everything, even with the maximum amount of pending slots (20 with supporter + many ranked maps(Idk the exact number)). So people upload them as packs, which contain ~10maps each, but people don't like having to do that from what I heard.

6) A mapper that really likes mapping and has a lot of free time. Let's imagine this mapper makes like one map every 2 days. Yes, he can upload everything he wants if he has few ranked maps and a supporter tag. Let's imagine now that this mapper only makes memo/gimmick SV maps or gimmick storyboard maps, or training maps with rates and let's add on the top of that that he likes to upload few convert packs. This mapper will be limited and will not being able to upload every map he makes. That's very frustrating to have to chose which map you have to upload first and having to wait to upload some other maps, and if the mapper keep mapping at the same rythm, he will just have a "waiting for upload" queue that will constantly expand. That example was maybe a bit extreme but note that not every mapper has several ranked maps or an osu!supporter tag

Finally I want to say as a non-osu!supporter that 4 slots is very restrictive, I think I make 10 maps a month and I also frequently look at my older graveyarded maps to improve them and just can't update them because I haven't.
I only used mania examples because I only play and map mania but I'm sure that they're a lot of arguments for osu!, osu!taiko and osu!catch, I would like to see some mappers on these gamemodes giving their opinion on this thread.

Sorry for eventual bad englando, just wanted to give my opinion about pending slots here. If you misunderstand something I can explain with other words.

Ventilo while this thread did "technically" move off topic, peppy made it clear to address ranking criteria concerns before dealing with the potential to increase slot count.

Now while I still believe slot count should be increased for reasons said by me and others before on this thread, it's definitely best for now to focus on RC changes as that seems to be more realistic. Much of what you said I do agree with, and you or any others are of course still welcome to add more to this post. I would however like to point people in the direction of both the spread and hitsound discussions as those are much more pertinent at the current moment.

Ventilo le vrai wrote:

I think that this thread moved off topic...

The point here (and the reason for changing direction of this thread) is that as a mapper, it is rare that 100% of your maps are non-rankable. By ranking *some* maps, you can increase your slot count up to 6 (non-supporter) and 20 (supporter). In fact let me up the stakes - non-supporters can now upload up to 8 (2 + 6 bonus from ranked map count).

My initial goal here is to try and get the ranked status back in line of the original expectations of why the category exists, as it seems like we've veered a bit over the years to the point it's seen as an unusable category by some.

I'm working on spearheading some ongoing discussions to try and get some change happening around these areas, and do intend to address the "graveyard" issue separately.

But the *starting point* is to address the ranked concerns, I believe.

thanks