On May 2nd 2020, QAH started awarding 1/4th of the activity of a nomination. This was mainly done in order to encourage people to do QAH since it was pretty dead at the time.

Fast forward to current times, it's been very apparent that the state of QAH hasn't changed at all, with forum threads like this one recently appearing in order to address the whole problem with QAH.

QAH activity was implemented to incentivize people to do QAH but currently there's a concerningly low amount of BNs who actually do it, with most maps going entirely unchecked.

This activity change proved that it has barely any benefit to QAH, and you could even argue that it does more harm than good:

To elaborate on this point, it basically only benefits people who constantly fail to reach minimum activity requirements, so they use QAH as a way to bypass the activity warning/kick. And with how easy it is to "cheat" QAH by just adding yourself as a checker a few hours before the map ranks and "hoping for the best", you can possibly fill out your requirements by clicking some buttons only. This possibility alone should be enough of a concern by itself, and it shouldn't matter where you can't confirm that someone has done it or not.
Also I'd like to add that most people who care about QAH wouldn't need the extra activity score because they tend to be regularly active BNs.

All of these encouraged some BNs to constantly stay under 5 nominations per last 3 months, for around 1.5 years and counting for example. (this is currently happening by the way)

I strongly think that QAH shouldn't contribute to activity because of its abusable nature, it only benefits people who barely contribute to the ranked section and stay for selfish reasons, while at the same time it doesn't give any benefit to the few people who genuinely care about quality assurance. And the activity points barely made any impact on the state of QAH in general so it's clearly doing more harm than good.

What do you think? please voice your opinions down below.

I completely agree

1000% agree on this one, sticking to the *absolute minimum* activity while using QA as a booster for activity just isnt right

upvote

The problem with the current implementation is that people don’t even leave comments in thread or on the bn site but get given activity for their QAH checks anyway.

Whilst some QAH cases take effort and time like vetoes id be happier getting no tangible credit for cases like this in order to ensure people don’t cruise by with only empty checks to give their activity

main focus as a bn should be on nominating maps, agree on removing activity so bns have to do the n part. cant believe that ppl are allowed to stay without doing their intended job.

+1

QAH shouldn't make up for diminished nomination activity, completely agree with this

and as ikin said, a good amount of them don't drop anything on the threads anyways so no point on having it contribute to activity imo

I agree. There are many BNs who seem to become very interested in QAH a week before their evaluations with little to no prior QA, and then never touch it after. This is the 330-day nomination history of one BN whose first non-probation evaluation landed on February 14th.

Most people aren't as blatant as this, but it is completely valid to say that BNs have and will abuse QAH activity to pass an evaluation. To elaborate on why this is happening, I will perform a small exercise in arithmetic. This specific user actually joined last October and has 25 nominations, which conventionally would make them consistently under the minimum activity (approx. 2.27 nom/month), but since they spammed 16 QAH within 2 days one time in the past 11 months, their activity is raised to the equivalent of 29 nominations (approx. 2.63 nom/month). This is still under the minimum required activity, but throw in a couple of months of absence notices (which is reasonable) and anybody can stretch QAH abuse to cover for their lack of nominations (if you discount 2 months, the activity levels out to 3.22 nom/month, which is a passing activity).

As you can tell, QAH activity can be and is used to purposefully manipulate nomination activity without actually encouraging BNs to consistently contribute to QAH. This can be seen by this user not having done a single QAH before and having only done 2 QAH within the 6 months after the bulk of the work. A new incentive should be created to encourage consistent QAH activity that doesn't allow for such easy abuse. (I'd also like to encourage people to not attack the behavior, but the system that allows for it; lots of people would do the same thing in the same position)

Yeah agree 100%, if you're barely getting minimum activity and using QA to boost it further just doesn't seem right

In all honesty, despite this not being an issue in Mania as the QA is quite commendable, I can see how this can be an issue. Specially if we take into account that the main drive behind this addition has laid little to no results on what was expected to help.

Personally, the issue with the lack of QA shouldn't fall upon BNs and BNs alone. I firmly believe that one of the biggest issues with QA is the stigma that the community has against it, specially when it involves Qualified maps and certain mappers or even Nominators being very reluctant to not have their maps DQd. Hence, sometimes this helped can be frowned upon, which has discouraged a bunch of people that have told me their experiences themselves.

But back to the main point, QA'ing as is only adds more loopholes to the BN system than not. The main task that a BN should have is to Nominate maps and QAing shouldn't be reserved to meet the activity criteria. However, this also means that absences should be very important to mention in order to notify our respective NATs.

agree

Big agree on this

yes qah is broken

so true oomfie

I agree on this. While I still think QAH is important, BN people shouldn't be able to abuse it like that for their BN membership being upheld, despite little to no actual ranked section participation whatsoever. Good post<3

huuuge agree, qah is usually used for people who dont need the activity and its usually used to reach a bare minimum

its usually and rushed at the end of an eval period (like the noms as well), and they might not even do the qah check as hivie said: "by just adding yourself as a checker a few hours before the map ranks and `hoping for the best`"


we are bns not qat :<

+1

Tbh yeah, we've had issues in the case where some people warned for activity would then make up for it with QA,,, then also stop doing QA and be pikachu faced when they're kicked for being inactive later on

People that like to do it, do it anyways, and people that don't, do it for free internet points. On top of that there's the issue that a lot of people that look at qualified don't even use the BN website QA system to start with so it doesn't track most genuine efforts anyways.

I don't think it can be replaced with DQs having a set ratio since those are often done on request or a 2nd bn checking if a report is valid, would sooner just remove the QAH part.

that's just my opinions though and not a final say or something :p

Just to give a brief of what I said on server

Just make it like this

You mod the map, and u care about activity in some form:

1. Go to site, add yourself and note u modded the map

2. regardless of who dqs, you only get the activity if the map was dq
(and since dq reasons already got to be stated, we would know the dq is done more than likely due to the person who qa mods)

This would solve complicated stuff on who dq the map or not (and stuff like dq ratio) while still limiting activity to people who actually try to mod the map vs trying to get free activity.

Still doesn’t solve the problem of people marking themselves as having checked the map during QAH without posting anything and still getting credit but I like cheri’s idea

ikin5050 wrote:

Still doesn’t solve the problem of people marking themselves as having checked the map during QAH without posting anything and still getting credit but I like cheri’s idea

I mean the idea is to basically make it where u have to make a post that warrants a dq one way or another for activity, so people marking themselves would not get anything unless they prove through other means (like showing pics of dms, etc) if it ain't posted in the thread.

+1

think it should only give activity if results in dq

agree with hivie.

I have nothing against the proposal so far. Though I agree with Cheri and Nao Tomori that a QA check that leads to a successful disqualification could be able to count as an activity. Since that would require QAer to post something like their concern on the mapping discussion thread, so we would have evidence that they *actually* check that mapset.

agree with cheri and nao - it steers clear of bns 'cheating' for free activity, and only the ones that actually brought up valid concerns, ensuing a dq, gets recompensed for helping the map in some way. I think that'd be a good compromise to bns that genuinely qah for the development of the ranked section.

The issue with this is that it's really easy to cheese out cheap dqs for the sake of QAH points simply by suggesting optional tags, doing nitpick-tier modding, or NC recet modding. And often times the mapper doesn't know better than to request a dq instead of denying the points that actually barely affects the map in any way.

A BN's job is to nominate maps and that should be their activity resource. QAH was never meant to be a BN task hence why barely anyone gives a shit about it, and the ones who genuinely care will do it anyway regardless of activity, and most of the time they don't even need the extra activity.

It can be considered during an evaluation in some form, but it shouldn't have a fixed score that allows people to reach the minimum activity required, because again, a BN's main job is to nominate maps.

Edit: just wanna say that it's confirmed that DQs count for activity in some form, not as a fixed ratio tho which is the correct approach, QAH should be like this. I think this should solve your concerns of DQs/potentially QAH being fully obselete as activity indicators.

At first I thought that giving people activity for DQing maps was bad because, like Hivie said, people would simply farm DQs by taking advantage of new mappers who don't defend their mapping choices as much and are more prone to self-DQing. However, I do think giving activity based on the level of DQ is a good idea, such as a self-DQ for simple mod changes because worth no activity and a DQ for unrankable issues being worth activity. This would be much more difficult to game as the DQ points system is an anomaly and it's practically impossible to accurately guess how much a DQ will be.

The issue here is somebody would have to manually decide whaht DQs are worth activity and what aren't. One idea I've had on this front is to connect the existing DQ obviousness/severity ratings with how much activity is awarded to the posting BN. But an even easier implementation would be to completely deny all activity for QAH because it's not really a big deal and honestly should just be a normal thing BNs do alongside ranking maps (all it takes is downloading maps as they're qualified and taking 5-10 minutes to look through them for unrankables). There could also be a role specifically for checking qualified maps separate from BN and NAT, if the issue is the added responsibility to BNs being too much pressure, but that may be out of the scope of the community.

i dont think it needs to be overly complicated - there's like 3 ppl that do qah anyway and this proposal is targeting people who don't "actually do it" in a sense that they just mark themselves as having done it to no effect to quickly generate activity. to preserve the goal of incentivizing qah activity (as dubiously effective as this initiative has been) while reducing activity abuse, only giving 1/4 activity to qah checks resulting in dqs (which can be self-reported and verified during bn evaluations by NATs) seems fine

yes

That being said at least in taiko most dqs are marked as 0/0 anyway so there’s really no activity to be gotten there so this seems like a reasonable compromise.

This does however raise the question of is the current severity obviousness rating good because it only really addresses unrankables and not bad quality mapping.

did a poll with NAT and 91% think activity should go, so yeah

we're gonna go update wiki pages and stuff and do a hl

Is PR for wiki pages https://github.com/ppy/osu-wiki/pull/6156

Edit: is merged