This thread is a complementary thread to the mania specific one and is made to figure out how to keep rules for spreads consistent for all gamemodes. Consensus in that thread is that mania would benefit from a trial period without spread rules, however there may be issues applying this to other gamemodes.

I'd like people from all gamemodes to contribute in this discussion.

Spread reqs are literally halting progress of ranking in mania, that has lots of lower level content anyway.

I can't bring myself to agree with bringing it to other modes. osu!mania is part of a very broad VSRG genre, many players come from and can also play very similar VSRG games, changing the learning curve and general approach.

An issue on other level making game communities where custom levels are a thing is the majority of user made content will cater to the harder end, since they get into making stuff after playing for a while.

This can be frustrating and restrictive from the player's point of view and reduce their available song choice significantly, especially for osu! Which is entirely community content.

I think this is a bigger problem for osu! and osu!catch which don't have much for other active and equivalent games that players can additionally use to learn from. I think it would be unhealthy going forward as many more songs would be left without accessible options.

The current spread rules are pretty balanced as they are to account for amount of work involved and the endurance of newer players not being able to play longer songs as well to start with, doesn't seem like something that needs changing IMO

agree w noffy, we dont have 17 other very similar games to borrow new players / maps from

Sure, do it as a trial period. I'd be interested in seeing how many (new) sets go for ranked while still making lower diffs despite not requiring them.

awful idea

i don't see any possible harm in a trial period fwiw, even in the worst case scenario (0 low diffs ranked somehow)

but yea my pov has already been shared in the mania thread

tl;dr forcing work that doesn't improve quality is a very strange mindset to have for a system that's supposed to give quality maps a "permanent" status

another key point: if so many BNs are against the idea then this won't change much in the grand scheme of things since they're in control of the ranked section, it'll just allow more freedom in ranked for the people that support it

From a music point of view this could be cool. Some music genres are genuinely very hard to create low diffs for, and by removing this limitation we enable more music genres to get ranked in osu!

From a mapping point of view I don't think this is realistic. Mappers consistently do the lowest effort required to rank their maps, and I admit that less difficulties makes modding and pushing sets easier. Since doing the least amount of work possible is human nature, a bare minimum is necessary.

I would like to just say in the greater context, what would a trial period of spread guideline removal do that's negative? To those worried about the potential for lower diffs to disappear, a trial period literally prevents that. Would we not like to gain the knowledge of whether or not these guidelines are actually essential for each mode? I'll implore anyone here who hasn't to read up on the mania thread here as even though a lot of the topics are incredibly specific to mania and the communities that migrate to it, there are still topics discussed that apply to osu as a whole.

Nothing ventured nothing gained as I see it. If we gave a spread removal a trial period for any of the modes and it proves detrimental to the mapping landscape, that's why it's a trial period.

The thing about a trial period is unless it's extremely long most of the maps going for rank will have already existed and have spreads for the previous rules too, making it hard to see if it's actually accurate to long term reality.

It's not like they're gonna see the rule change and be like "oh gonna delete these diffs I was made to make"

Noffy wrote:

The thing about a trial period is unless it's extremely long most of the maps going for rank will have already existed and have spreads for the previous rules too, making it hard to see if it's actually accurate to long term reality.

It's not like they're gonna see the rule change and be like "oh gonna delete these diffs I was made to make"

We could have an announcement in advance that could attempt to mitigate this issue.

It's not like new maps/maps that have never had sets would suddenly disappear either. There would be an opportunity to push sets like these and see what the landscape looks like (what BNs are push and what people are mapping) while also keeping the aforementioned factor in mind.

Noffy wrote:

The thing about a trial period is unless it's extremely long most of the maps going for rank will have already existed and have spreads for the previous rules too

It can be made longer then to yield results if that's the concern. I'll also reiterate what many of us said in the other thread, regarding poor quality lower diffs. If I were forced to create lower difficulties I wasn't interested in making because my map fits within an abstract time parameter, I would gladly delete them if my map would suddenly become viable without them as that isn't the content I wish to put out there.

There's a surprising number of people in the community who heavily bias accessibility and inclusivity over quality, which while that's great for those purposes, it's also shafting plenty of maps in the process that aren't created solely for that reason. We can spin in circles over what defines quality as well, but it's just my two cents. I don't like seeing seasoned mappers forced to create bloat just for the purpose of newer players hearing a song they like in the game.

EDIT: Here is also a link timestamped to around when spread guidelines were discussed in the recent osu!dev meeting for any who missed that

agree w/ mordred

agree w/ mimari

agree with mordred/mimari/others, this really seems like a mania-only problem so why involve other modes in this? almost no one complains about spread requirements there and it will surely do much more harm than good

Penguinosity wrote:

There's a surprising number of people in the community who heavily bias accessibility and inclusivity over quality, which while that's great for those purposes, it's also shafting plenty of maps in the process that aren't created solely for that reason. We can spin in circles over what defines quality as well, but it's just my two cents. I don't like seeing seasoned mappers forced to create bloat just for the purpose of newer players hearing a song they like in the game.

Other modes besides mania don't have 893382 clones you could relay on to have players learn how to play, so you need those lower difficulties. And since they are a need, you can't call that bloat content.

Besides, what's the issue with these quality maps that don't fit the spread rules getting loved instead?

it's not what loved is for. if we had something like old approved (see: big black or airman) i could see something like that happening, but not with the current systems

This trial seems okay for gamemodes that suffer a lack of content - mania specifically, not so much for gamemodes that already have a plenty abundant amount of maps being ranked.

One reason is that this trial very intentionally spikes up the content available for ranked by targeting maps that would otherwise be a single diff in the graveyard. For a mode like standard this kind of spike is a complete disaster. The ranking queue won't be able to hold it, which will have significant consequences for how the ranked section is interacted with.

Another is yeah, other gamemodes work fine with the current spread rules, so let's not hastily try to fix what's not broken? Significant issues have been explained and identified for the mania side of things, but those issues don't necessarily translate to other gamemodes. If there's things we'd like to see change or improve in terms of spread requirements for other gamemodes, let's start there and not with opening the floodgates.

Lastly, from the pro-side of the argumentation that I'm reading, this idea has a completely different set of values and goals than the current spread-rules do. It's basically jumping from one extreme to the other, regardless of which extreme we're at there will always be people who aren't satisfied. So, there's really no good reason to make this jump without discussing things and considering alternatives (when it comes to other gamemodes)

agree w/ whoever said the least amount of words here

edit: there just has to be some sort of way to make it so that mappers dont have to feel *obliged* to make difficulties they would rather not want to. im pretty confident a lot of mappers will still enjoy mapping spreads, and continue to do so. after all, lower difficulties are what carry a lot of the popularity for mapsets. lest there be an absence of a rankability incentive for mapping obligatory lower diffs, there is a separate reason for mappers to strive for accessibility. maybe lower diffs wont be cluttered with stuff that mappers didnt give a shit about, and will rather be filled with maps in which the mappers actually gave a damn about the players of that skill range

I guess I'll post some quick thoughts.

It seems extremely strange to me that we'd need to make spread rules apply to all gamemodes, when in reality all of these separate gamemodes are FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT GAMES. Because we are fundamentally different, we have different problems plaguing the community, therefore applying it to everyone doesn't make everyone happy because not all injuries are the same. There might be some crossover sure, there might be people who are really good at every gamemode, but that still doesn't change that the overall audience, where they come from, where the mappers are coming from, how the community is structured, every variable matters in making it a different game. And when we are different games, why do we need to share the exact same system when it comes to arbitrarily drawing the line on what is considered good enough to pass the official ranking threshold?

And just for good measure, arguing that "all these maps go in loved duhhhhhhhhhhhhh" is so backwards, because loved moves extremely slow (like 6-7 maps a MONTH) and even if you were to speed it up, it's still going to be a popularity contests and should that really be the goal for maps that can't pass an arbitrary threshold for ranking? Is everything suddenly a popularity contest? A BN should have the power to choose what type of content they wanna see ranked, and I can't tell you how many times I've been blocked from seeing stuff I really like getting ranked because the mappers don't really wanna bother making spreads/hitsounds for it, it's actually fucking infuriating.

yaspo wrote:

This trial seems okay for gamemodes that suffer a lack of content - mania specifically, not so much for gamemodes that already have a plenty abundant amount of maps being ranked.

One reason is that this trial very intentionally spikes up the content available for ranked by targeting maps that would otherwise be a single diff in the graveyard. For a mode like standard this kind of spike is a complete disaster. The ranking queue won't be able to hold it, which will have significant consequences for how the ranked section is interacted with.

Another is yeah, other gamemodes work fine with the current spread rules, so let's not hastily try to fix what's not broken? Significant issues have been explained and identified for the mania side of things, but those issues don't necessarily translate to other gamemodes. If there's things we'd like to see change or improve in terms of spread requirements for other gamemodes, let's start there and not with opening the floodgates.

Lastly, from the pro-side of the argumentation that I'm reading, this idea has a completely different set of values and goals than the current spread-rules do. It's basically jumping from one extreme to the other, regardless of which extreme we're at there will always be people who aren't satisfied. So, there's really no good reason to make this jump without discussing things and considering alternatives (when it comes to other gamemodes)

This is a fair response. It's true that in the grand scheme of things the rules aren't a "big issue" for other gamemodes, but I personally disagree with how it's done in principle.

My mindset is the same as peppy's; ranked is for giving leaderboards to maps people enjoy and shouldn't be unnecessarily restrictive.

I'm all for seeing steps towards loosening the rules, even if the steps are small.

Okay I'll have to explain this properly as to not go against my other claims in the other post, but I'll quote Davvy on this as to why this should NOT be applied to all gamemodes.

It seems extremely strange to me that we'd need to make spread rules apply to all gamemodes, when in reality all of these separate gamemodes are FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT GAMES. [...]

I'm extremely confused why the issue has spread (No pun intended) to all gamemodes in the first place. I was already confused to get opinions based on other modes basing myself on the same premise that all modes are different and it's hard to generalize such rules.

This comment is said both to negatively go against global changes on spreads, whilst reinforcing the Mania-only change: But I believe that for proposals whose problems want to mainly tackle one mode's issues should not be applied globally. These issues should be solved CASE BY CASE by its respective gamemode. So yes, I am against this global proposal. Each respective mode as a whole should be able to comment what's best for its mode.

Therefore, while I wouldn't mind changes on Mania spreads for the reasons posted on the original Mania-Only suggestion, I'm fully against globalizing it. I just hope to envoy that we should stop generalizing completely different games, as the standards of quality for ones might be fully stagnating or conflicting with those of other modes.

Yeah I definitely think mania has its own needs and ecosystem, with so many mappers and players coming from other places, so I didn't have an issue with the mania-centric hitsound and spread changes. Just big no for other modes atm

Absolutely necessary for Mania, probably not desireable for other modes.

For Mania, I think a trial run would be necessary, and I'd personally prefer a middle ground (that is, pretty relaxed spread requirements in terms of drain time vs. spread requirements).

Ditto the idea that other modes don't need this whatsoever, and if you're going to run a trial for mania I can agree with the notion of giving mappers a few weeks in advance to see how new for-ranked sets will be made

To give an example for how this could be harmful for other modes, in taiko its typical for the lowest difficulties on mapsets to be the most played by like 5x. Our mode benefits a lot from low difficulties attracting new players and if they weren't forced, I doubt anyone would map them (they also arent very hard to make)

The influx of new maps on standard is already too big to keep up, there is really no reason to loosen ranking criteria unless you want to make ranked more like a graveyard-with-leaderboards instead of a coherent package of content.

Unnecessary and bad idea for standard as others have said, and a trial period would be immensely confusing for about 90% of the player base.

Low diffs are played a lot, and that should be taken into account in the ranking criteria by enforcing spread rules.

What about just relaxing requirements for maps of songs that already have ranked maps?

In general, I disagree with relaxing it for all modes since low diffs are valuable but I also don't believe every new set of an existing song should need one either.

IOException wrote:

What about just relaxing requirements for maps of songs that already have ranked maps?

In general, I disagree with relaxing it for all modes since low diffs are valuable but I also don't believe every new set of an existing song should need one either.

Maybe already ranked spreads is a better choice of wording? But lowkey agree

Really like what io proposed

Not stating a position one way or the other, but consider these factors:

- The prevalence of PP mapping shows that players are willing to go out of their way to create maps that garner high playcount. Similar logic applies to low diffs.

- Replying to Noffy's comment, I think most of the new maps being pushed during the trial period wouldn't be old maps with full spreads, they would be maps by mappers who map for graveyard and prioritize mapping for themselves that are revived in order to push for rank now that spread requirements are relaxed.

Noffy wrote:

I can't bring myself to agree with bringing it to other modes. osu!mania is part of a very broad VSRG genre, many players come from and can also play very similar VSRG games, changing the learning curve and general approach.

I agree that this is a concern that separates this thread from the other, maybe not for taiko ig but for standard and catch at least. same as my comments in the other thread, I argue that taking this into account can support this change, bc not requiring mappers to invest minimum effort into lower diffs should improve the quality of those that are left going forward, providing better experience/introduction/etc for newer players that will be using osu! as their first exposure to this kind of game.

Noffy wrote:

An issue on other level making game communities where custom levels are a thing is the majority of user made content will cater to the harder end, since they get into making stuff after playing for a while.

This can be frustrating and restrictive from the player's point of view and reduce their available song choice significantly, especially for osu! Which is entirely community content.

I think this is a bigger problem for osu! and osu!catch which don't have much for other active and equivalent games that players can additionally use to learn from. I think it would be unhealthy going forward as many more songs would be left without accessible options.

also from other thread I have a hard time seeing where reduction of song choice would impede on accessibility for newer players. I don't buy (from what other ppl said in other thread) that there's a significant population that comes to osu! with such rigid expectations that they're disappointed right away by not being able to play particular songs. even if that were the case, it's unlikely that mappers motivated by satisfying popular demand would give up that opportunity just because the rules changed, so naturally the individual songs most likely to be singled out by search would still be most likely to have been mapped. I think.

I'd get the concern if we were talking about shrinking a small library, but this is on the scale of tens of thousands vs. thousands of maps in coming years. not to mention that existing maps aren't going anywhere.

the extension of this thought I can agree with is that some general variety is nice to have, but I don't think that is in jeopardy by removing spread requirement

Noffy wrote:

The current spread rules are pretty balanced as they are to account for amount of work involved and the endurance of newer players not being able to play longer songs as well to start with, doesn't seem like something that needs changing IMO

this is with the assumption that the extra required work is helping anything which I don't think is fair. apart from having more songs available like mentioned above, nobody is even trying to argue other upsides and nobody argued so far that the main/clear downsides are invalid.

is having more songs available at low difficulties really more valuable than supporting and expanding the involved community? can you be sure that this is a question of tradeoff in the first place, rather than a relic of the past that doesn't have positive effect today?

---

Noffy wrote:

The thing about a trial period is unless it's extremely long most of the maps going for rank will have already existed and have spreads for the previous rules too, making it hard to see if it's actually accurate to long term reality.

It's not like they're gonna see the rule change and be like "oh gonna delete these diffs I was made to make"

things have a chance to get really unusual either way if this rule goes into effect, I don't think it's unlikely that we'd see a sudden wave of maps going for ranked that used to not be eligible just cuz the mapper didn't want to make a full set for it

"trial period" is questionable to me, i think it might be an unproductive way to gather thoughts in this situation because the end of that period will leave lots of mappers feeling like something was taken away from them, diverting focus to the "forced mapper work" part of this argument even tho that is not the only consideration

that said i dont have better alternative... besides treating this like normal rc and just removing the rules if consensus goes that way, which is what i want :^)

ok i argued only with what noffy said but its cuz she summarized everything to respond to sorry noffy i dont hate u

---

other thoughts:

other RC rules are there to ideally promote a quality standard and technical requirements for the maps going into ranked. this set of rules does not do that, it mandates creating more maps in certain cases, which I don't think is what RC should be for. or what anything should be for. why are we forcing people to create stuff against their will just to make their other stuff eligible for exposure?

spread requirements apply to all mappers & mapsets currently but it doesn't require that to meet its end. they exist (according to people in these threads) to create choice and accessibility for players of lower difficulties, which does not have anything to do with the maps that mappers happen to be pushing through ranked, it was merely convenient to give mappers some homework since they'll probably do it in order to rank their sets. this is main reason I think the spread requirement setup is so ridiculous, it's offloading time and effort to other mappers for a passion project they don't even care about, and that their maps are not related to.

if you passionately believe that bare-minimum ENH diffs in volume help the game in some way, is there anything stopping you from building those yourself? if so, what justification do you have to move the responsibility to other people?

other important thing to consider that many people may not have thought about: spreads are an important vector of socialization. by forcing mappers that want to rank a map to either suffer a lot alone or talk to others and presumably ask for/trade GDs, mapping communities are developed as a result. spreads are a nuisance, but they're one that, if removed to streamline things, could result in the game feeling more dead as a whole.

also disagree with ioe's proposal, we should be discouraging mapping already oversaturated songs

In line with what I've been pointing out in the OG thread a lot of factors that result in the proposal seem to be mania-specific at the very least ("People are already having a bunch of charts they created in other games on their backlog", "Having a strict Ranking Criteria rules and guidelines for lower diffs is not beneficial on many occasions", etc.) and I... don't think the situation can be generalized into other modes just like that.

In a sense I'm okay with IOE's idea of relaxing the spread requirements further I guess, but on the idea of completely quote-on-quote "abolishing" the spread requirement I don't think that would be a good notion for the game going forward.

Niva wrote:

I'm okay with IOE's idea of relaxing the spread requirements further tho, but for completely quote-on-quote "abolishing" the spread requirement I don't think that would be a good idea for the game at large going forward.

Absolutely agree with this^

agree with uber, clayton and io wholeheartedly

i. did you come to osu expecting a certain song with low difficulties? if yes you probably wouldnt be playing now because not every song people come to play (especially popular western songs on a very western-centric game) are even mapped, let alone ranked with low difficulties. Removing the opportunity for beginners to play certain songs is not really a valid point because you could argue that opportunity did not exist in the first place for 99% of songs, nobody comes to osu with rigid ideas of the songs they want to play and if they are not available they leave; and even if it were the case it would just be natural selection at that point and that is not the mentality needed for a rhythm game.

ii. i believe some spreads just seem very bloated or are unnecessary, i feel like we should be promoting foward-thinking in mapping which is why spreads are a massive burden. there is no reason to have a 2* on a 9* set because;
1) that map is not targetted at ALL for that level of difficulty, arguably the map was made to challenge and not accomodate
2) if a song is able to fit and be represented accurately by a 9*, arguably there will be a significant amount of absent song representation on a 2* that will start to balance on a thread of logic, it eventually just won't make sense

perhaps we could tweak spreads to make them fit 'brackets' of difficulty instead of specific difficulty requirements (sort of similar to quaver), for example if you had a 5* map it perhaps would require a normal, but a 7* would only need an insane. we can still have accessability for the right crowds and for the right intentions this way.


NOTE: if we all stopped mapping low diffs from today there is still enough content to make it to an intermediate level (4*~), we should really be focusing on these set-centre core diffs rather than lowest diffs because realistically you spend a week on normal difficulties and move on, that journey off of insanes is the majority of your osu career, these diffs are arguably more important to keep.

normal difficulties generally garner higher playcounts on certain types of maps (e.g anime tv size maps), i dont understand who sputnik's normal diff is appealing to with that genre of song which is obviously not targetted at players of that level (and this goes for more maps/songs that are styled like this and are even longer)


just my two pence ^^

Hold on, have an idea here

What if we further reduced spread requirements based off drain time?

Purely hypothetically (literally just throwing random draintimes out there), 0:00-1:59 could be Normal minimum, 2:00-3:29 could be hard minimum, 3:30-4:14 could be insane minimum, and 4:15+ could be any diff

Something along these lines would still keep a steady supply of lower diffs, but would help alleviate some of the pressure for making lower difficulties.

Finding the right drain times for each minimum required diff is a bit of work but pretty sure we can just tweak what we have right now.

ok but that assumes what we have right now doesnt work fine. i think what we have right now works fine; what makes you think it doesn't? my argument is that we have some of the most ranked maps ever in the history of osu in the current system, and if the spread rules were overly restrictive, that we wouldn't (and would be suffering a content drought, like mania seems to be)

im leaning for spread requirement removal in standard specifically but idrc if it isn't removed either considering these factors:

1. most players that play for more than 5 maps play [Normal] level difficulties for like a week or so at most before moving on to [Hard] for the next month or so (though I could be wrong, mainly from what ive observed from players who i knew before osu who joined after me, and players that i randomly stumbled upon that were just starting out)
2. players at this level are usually just searching up songs they like (and not looking at the latest ranked maps) to play more than anything, the chances of such a song they like being recently ranked are pretty low intuitively speaking in that regard already unless they are looking for the latest pop single that got released around the same time they started playing osu or something
3. theres actually a ridiculous amount of [Normal] level diffs and this diff range has the highest density of all difficulty ranges in standard, to where u could might as well equal the amount of content to the equivalence of like 17 other paywalled games similar to osu
4. most if not all song tastes have essentially more than enough low diffs from the past 14 years already to get players good enough to move on to the next difficulty level
5. mainly functioning now as just barring maps that are fine for rank aside for spread from ranked... which to be fair doesn't really matter much anymore considering the very high flow rate of content currently

i dont think spread req rules are necessary at all in the current circumstances of osu today for those reasons, its not broken or really negatively (or positively) affecting anything in standard so idrc either way, dont think it needs to be changed from currently or anything but i dont think this whole discussion of "accessibility" has any value anymore

BUT i do worry about mappers with the mindset similar to Sotarks and the like that dont give a shit about many things speedranking 342589349583 tv size 7 stars tho, thatd look kinda disgusting and i think if i were to see that when i open Ranked back in like late 2014 when i was just an insane diff player i would be like "this is dumb as fuck"

so maybe if there could be a way to ensure some dumbassery like that wouldnt happen id be Fully on board with it, but yea (also dunno how many ppl share this sentiment)

(Also i do think a trial period is useless considering having a long enough period to get new maps in would just basically be like as if keeping the change forever and not having a long enough period would tell u nothing considering how many of them are older maps)

.
.
.

Tho I think it'd just be better to have an auto low diff generator for the modes if we really wanna still be scared about something that isnt an issue/concern anymore (accessibility) L:ol . Tho the point about affecing the social environment of osu is interesting tho, might be worth looking at if this is going to stay seriously considered

I agree mania but not for other modes.

i don't know if other modes has same issue but mania having trouble trying to get hard content, we already have lots of lower contents so it will going to the right direction. considering that we got only 14 high contents (above 6*) in this year it's really poor. but it would be nice to have a middle ground instead of removing spread, i think we'll need another discussion if mania decided to having a specific spread rule.

Kawawa wrote:

i think we'll need another discussion if mania decided to having a specific spread rule.

I'm not sure if it's what you're referring to and I'm pretty sure you've seen this already, but there's already a mania-specific thread, it would be great if you could share your thoughts there.

VINXIS wrote:

most players that play for more than 5 maps play [Normal] level difficulties for like a week or so at most before moving on to [Hard] for the next month or so (though I could be wrong, mainly from what I've observed from players who I knew before osu who joined after me, and players that I randomly stumbled upon that were just starting out)

It's bad enough IMO that Easy diffs basically don't even get mapped anymore. While the above^ is pretty much spot on, there are many players (not even just score farmers) who enjoy playing through low diffs and full spreads, while at a higher skill level. Not all of osu! is pushing skill/getting better. Playing at a level you are already proficient at or lower is perfectly enjoyable (at least with the right mindset I suppose).

VINXIS wrote:

theres actually a ridiculous amount of [Normal] level diffs and this diff range has the highest density of all difficulty ranges in standard, to where u could might as well equal the amount of content to the equivalence of like 17 other paywalled games similar to osu

VINXIS wrote:

most if not all song tastes have essentially more than enough low diffs from the past 14 years already to get players good enough to move on to the next difficulty level

Yeah I'm pretty sure 50% of all ranked o!std maps are 0-3.99* from what I've seen, however that doesn't mean that players don't want new low diffs, to keep things fresh, or on new songs/genres that come out etc. For example, my music taste has really only been mapped in the past year or so, there hasn't been much of it around until now, meaning there's not many low diffs for them either.

vernonlim wrote:

Kawawa wrote:

i think we'll need another discussion if mania decided to having a specific spread rule.

I'm not sure if it's what you're referring to and I'm pretty sure you've seen this already, but there's already a mania-specific thread, it would be great if you could share your thoughts there.

oh thank you so much i forgot this link

I disagree

VINXIS wrote:

most if not all song tastes have essentially more than enough low diffs from the past 14 years already to get players good enough to move on to the next difficulty level

Removing low diff requirements from ranking criteria would remove innovation from low diffs since only old normals are available.

Mapsets are supposed to provide a coherent package of content to the ranked section. There is no need to change the ranking criteria to handhold mappers who can't be arsed to make low diffs or ask 3 friends to make low diffs for them.

I don't see arguments why the ranked section would improve with relaxing of the spread requirements. Difficulties that can be ranked with relaxed spread requirements can also be ranked with the current system, provided that proper low diffs are added.

Even doing a trial period harms the ranked section forever because some mapsets will get ranked that do not form a coherent package of content just like the instarank mapsets from 2007.

Castagne wrote:

Removing low diff requirements from ranking criteria would remove innovation from low diffs since only old normals are available.

people who were never interested in mapping low diffs would stop mapping them, and people who are would continue. does that not leave a higher portion of low diff mappers left who could "innovate"? where r u seeing "innovation" done by ppl who wouldn't make these maps in the first place without a rule requiring it?

Castagne wrote:

Mapsets are supposed to provide a coherent package of content to the ranked section.

I'm also curious where you find many "coherent" mapsets spanning down to low diffs these days, part of the reason I'm very supportive of this change is that the default minimum-effort low diffs made due to requirement hardly ever feel belonging in their mapsets to me to begin with

Castagne wrote:

There is no need to change the ranking criteria to handhold mappers who can't be arsed to make low diffs or ask 3 friends to make low diffs for them.

nobody is saying it's so much effort and they want to escape some responsibility like this. the point of these threads is to reconsider the pros and cons of these rules that have been with osu for so long that the scene has almost entirely changed. you're never going to be open minded about changes if your reaction is to attack views of the discussion that aren't even present

Castagne wrote:

I don't see arguments why the ranked section would improve with relaxing of the spread requirements.

my argument about that is that it'd do away with the bottom denominator of low diff maps that are made with min. effort for the requirement alone, other ppl said things too though, it's all in this thread and some in mania one

Castagne wrote:

Difficulties that can be ranked with relaxed spread requirements can also be ranked with the current system, provided that proper low diffs are added.

that second part is the topic o_o

Disagree with the proposal but cba discussing why lol

whay song taste hasnt been mapped until the past year i can only really think of hyperpop (and that already has a shitton of low diffs too),

i Did say that players usually move on after like a week or so from normal level difficulty so dunno, thats still a shitload of content for hyperpoop consoomers

low diff innovation???? i dontr understand this one its not like low diffs can be innovative aside for in the perspective of spread progression/theming and even then ur not gonna see it from ppl that just get random ppl to gd low diffs cuz they r lazy asf, not like the people that are going to map low diffs are going to stop either

the reasons i was listing were about why i think the rule isnt doing shit not why the rule is breaking shit, removing it doesnt improve or damage ranked from how i see it, and juet having a low diff generator is best i think

easies are still mapped to a decent extent too, iduno why we're assuming spreads just wont exist doesnt seem like the right assumption to make

One of the reasons of low diffs is to demonstrate mapping and modding expertise (at least in standard). Most new mappers don't map low diffs since it's much easier to map a difficulty where you don't have to be aware of the ranking criteria. Experienced mappers can create amazing high diffs, but new mappers just have to make something playable.

From a nominating point of view, a set without low diffs means that the nominating BNs were not tested on their ability to mod low diffs. From a mapping point of view, this means that the mapper is able to create maps without limitations but may not understand the nature of low diffs.

Since higher diffs allow for more freedom, the quality of higher diffs tend to be lower than lower diffs. BNs are more willing to nominate lower quality high diffs due to the effort required to make them (object count, complexity, etc.).

Project Railgun wrote:

From a nominating point of view, a set without low diffs means that the nominating BNs were not tested on their ability to mod low diffs. From a mapping point of view, this means that the mapper is able to create maps without limitations but may not understand the nature of low diffs.

there is a thing called the 'bn application process' that goes over this, don't worry! you wont be added to the bng without understanding of lower difficulties!