I already said why it's an abomination.ziin wrote:
Fixing stupid problems with maps is exactly that: making the beatmap enjoyable to the player by removing the aspects of the game they don't like.
you may see 100% dim as a red herring, but there are plenty of maps designed to blend in with the background, and I certainly didn't intend it to be a red herring since I see no moral difference in dimming backgrounds/removing storyboards and changing difficulty settings. Backgrounds and difficulty settings add artificial difficulty to a map.
This can absolutely NOT go for unranked because it encourages players to play maps without it affecting their score at all. This is what spun out used to do and why peppy made it ranked. If you have a valid reason why having this as a ranked mod is such an abomination (who does it hurt? who does it help?) then I'll listen to you.
As far as AR/aim: I disagree and I still haven't realized why so please enlighten me. Last time I checked, osu's motto wasn't [b]aim[b] is just a click away.
Relax is unranked but adds to your playcount (I just checked to make sure) and I assume this would do the same thing - and if it didn't, would that be a problem? To use your words, who does it hurt? This would actually encourage the opposite of what you're saying though - using this mod would be easier than making a diff with altered difficulty settings, so people would have more of their plays count towards their playcount rather than less.
"Artificial difficulty" is a fun little buzzword that people like to use to handwave away parts of a game they don't like, so let's break this down a bit using real words. Backgrounds/storyboards? That's artificial difficulty. A distracting background/storyboard is like giving someone special glasses to wear while playing that are actually just a really dirty pair of glasses with the wrong prescription. It has nothing to do with gameplay, it's just there to make the game more difficult. Difficulty settings? Not artificial difficulty with the exception of hp drain. HP drain doesn't make the game harder, it just decides (at times almost arbitrarily) that you're not doing well enough and causes you to fail. Mendes+HR, happy30 spinner maps nomod, etc. I fail to see how any other difficulty settings are artificial difficulty. CS is very obviously not artificial difficulty. OD is only artificial difficulty if you discount rhythm/timing as a part of osu! (which your final paragraph indicates is not the case). AR....this one's more complicated and ties in with what exactly aim is, so it deserves its own paragraph.
Let's get on the same page first though. Your "aim is just a click away" thing seems to indicate that you don't think osu! is about aim, but I hope we can agree that it's a legitimate component of osu!. In fact, it's pretty much the only thing that sets osu! apart from other rhythm games, so I'm going to assume that we can agree on this. Aim has a physical component and a mental component. The physical component is muscle memory. It's knowing by feel that going a certain distance across the screen requires moving your mouse or pen a certain amount or that reaching a certain spot on the screen requires moving your pen to a certain spot on your tablet. The mental component is everything else and it's exactly what we normally refer to as reading, but it's more than just "can you read this AR??". It's the obvious things like being able to figure out which note is next on low AR and being able to see notes in time on high AR, but there's also a component of reading that is 100% specific to aim - determining exactly where an object is relative to previous objects and/or relative to the rest of the playing field. THAT is the type of reading that makes people hate low AR. Having objects on the screen for longer and having more objects on screen makes it much harder to determine exactly where notes are, which makes it much harder to aim. However, this kind of difficulty is affected by....well, kind of a lot of things. It's affected by object density because the more objects there are on screen at once, the harder it is to focus on the specific one you want and to switch to the correct new object after. It's affected directly by AR in a way that has nothing to do with note density because holding an object in working memory longer before needing to use makes it more difficult to use previously-gathered information about the object to help your reading (this is why DT sometimes doesn't make aim as much harder as you'd expect despite having the same patterns and the same visual density of notes at 1.5x speed). However, it's also affected by things other than AR. High SV causes the same exact type of reading issues. Certain patterns (mostly ones containing wider angles with larger spacing) cause the exact same type of reading issues. The same type of reading that goes into being able to play a map at slightly lower AR is present everywhere and to discount it as a part of osu! is to reduce "aim" to "muscle memory". Sure, the purpose of increasing AR (in theory) is to bring the amount of this type of reading required for a map to approximately the same level as the amount of high AR reading required, but being allowed to do so as part of a mod that you want to get ranked as a way of removing "artificial difficulty" is utter nonsense. It's not artificial difficulty if it's half of the real difficulty of what sets the game apart from other games in the genre. Ultimately, most maps that get ranked have AR overtuned if the purpose of choosing an AR is to balance out the reading required across the two types. That's fine for individual maps if mappers want to do that, but that's exactly it - it's something the mapper chooses. If the mapper chooses to put a lower AR on a map, it's putting a form of real aim difficulty into the map that you would allow people to eliminate with this mod.
You're right that people should be able to remove aspects of the game that they don't like - but they shouldn't be able to do it and still have their plays be ranked. Calling it "fixing stupid problems with maps" is attempting to shift the blame from player skill to poor mapping decisions ("help help the circles are too small and I can't aim, this map has a stupid problem!!!"). If a map highlights your weaknesses and you don't like it, just don't play it.
/words