In light of the recent discussions regarding certain RC proposals such as the removal of spread requirements (mania edition) and the removal of spread requirements (all gamemodes edition), I've thought up a proposal that I believe could not only alleviate these issues, but also provide additional benefits to the mapping scene.

Featured

This idea mostly revolves around attacking what I see as the core issue behind the current ranking system: Mixing immortalization with promotion.

Currently, ranking a map results in two separate outcomes: Your map becomes permanent, with a permanent leaderboard and a permanent place in the database. This is the process of "immortalization."

Additionally, this map gets promoted by way of the main "content feed," both in-game (with the form of osu!direct for example) and on the website (with "recently ranked" or "most popular" or even the old "most played"). This is the process of "promotion."

This often turns into a problem with discussions regarding the ranking criteria or the state of ranked. Many people see ranked as the main system of promotion, and believe that it's a privilege for the mapper to have their map ranked. Others see it purely as a form of immortalization, where any map that achieves the basics (i. e. times their map correctly and places objects in a manner that's enjoyable for one player or another), with promotion simply being an afterthought or a side-effect of the system.

This is where my proposal comes into play. I believe introducing a system that separates these two ideas into two separate "content streams" could be a massive upgrade in terms of how content is digested by the community.

"Okay, cool... but why should I care? Ranked is already in a great state and I have no issues with the current content stream"

First of all — answering the "why." What's the point of implementing this in the first place?

Similar to what I've stated earlier, mixing "immortalization" and "promotion,"

1. Slows down or even halts innovation in the form of ranking criteria changes (such as the threads on spread removal)
2. Provides dissatisfaction for certain players or mappers when stumbling upon "low quality" maps — there's currently no way to tell the difference
3. Bars people from experimenting with their maps or nominations, often going the "safe" route for the sake of avoiding controversy
4. Removes the possibility of incentives being given to mappers to make their maps higher quality or higher effort (with the sole exception being Mapper's Guild)
5. Forces the ranking process to be overwhelming, especially for newer mappers

I'm sure there are more reasons, but these are the ones I was able to think of off the top of my head.

"You've convinced me. But what would it look like?"

I've had a few ideas in the past, such as an entirely different section, but I don't believe this is really necessary. The category of all of these maps would still be "Ranked," as it always has. This is done for the sake of simplicity and dev time. However, "featured" maps could have a multitude of different features, including:

1. A "featured beatmap" tag, similar to the current "featured artist" or "explicit" tags (this is the "ground floor" of this feature, but the name might need a bit of a rework to reduce confusion... that's not too important right now tho)
2. Some sort of "glow" or "outline" on the beatmap card on the website and in-game (lazer)
3. A specific feed for these maps, possibly as a replacement for the current "ranked maps" feed on the home page. Could have something similar in the main menu of lazer as well, if possible.

...and possibly more, depending on what ideas there are and what's possible to do with current developmental limitations.

That sounds great, but what would make me want to get a featured map? How difficult would it be?

The incentives above are the ones that I believe are the most feasible at the current moment, but I'm sure other great ideas are out there as well. To think of a very ambitious one, implementing something like Mapper's Guild but for high quality sets directly into the osu!site or osu!lazer with a point system that's integrated into an official leaderboard could be really cool.

Regarding what would separate ranked from featured, here's what I came up with so far. To stay as objective as possible, I'd like to set certain guidelines for featured that would more or less guarantee you the status:

1. Having a spread that appeals to a wide variety of people, or a spread that requires considerable effort to produce. Examples could include 15+ minute marathons or 5-6 difficulty spreads (all of varying difficulty, not just 3 or 4 Extra diffs) of songs that are 3 minutes or longer. This would also allow for a loosening of spread rules and address earlier issues, especially for the mania community.
2. Having a map that's widely accepted as "high quality" by a notable portion of the community. This one could cause contention, but I believe if there's any disagreements over whether a map should be featured or not, it's better to err on the side of featuring the map. If enough people (likely BNs) agree with featuring the map, it should be featured.
3. Mapping featured artist songs
4. Mapping a "clean" style that most players would enjoy playing; something that genuinely benefits from being promoted to the wider community
5. On the contrary, mapping in a "unique" style that goes out of its way to be different from the norm yet still enjoyable to a large playerbase

As for the promotion process, it would involve a certain number of BNs (likely 4-8, depending on gamemode) to press a certain button that would effectively "vote" a map forward to featured. It would be similar to the ranking process where said map would automatically gain the tag upon receiving a sufficient amount of votes. Leaving it up to BNs is the best method that I can think of for promoting these maps.

All other maps will stay in ranked, as is the case currently.

This is the category that I believe should reward effort. There's currently no real incentive for people to go out of their way to make something cool, interesting, or especially beneficial to ranked.

How would we prevent abuse? Are you sure BNs would be willing to do this?

Regarding "abuse," where BNs would go out of there way to vote up something that they don't actually believe is high quality, we'd deal with it in a similar manner as we do with nominations. Regarding BN motivation, I believe BNs would enjoy this system of promotion as much as they currently do with normal nominations. To be fair, I don't have much to go off of, but just thinking personally and observing the behavior of some BNs (posting their "favorite nominations" on social media for example), I believe this wouldn't be an issue.

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Giving people more freedom and more incentives in ranked while still providing players with a content stream of high quality content is something that I think would be a genuine improvement. Some players could play every map that gets ranked and enjoy all the weird maps, while others could stick to featured maps and enjoy that form of curation.

As much as I love this idea, it ultimately comes down to the court of public opinion. Please share your thoughts on the topic if you have any and thanks for considering my proposal! There are lots of different numbers and features to discuss as it's a rather complex topic, so any and all ideas are welcome.

P.S. I understand that this would require dev time and that could be an issue. I'm trying to think of the mapping environment in the long run, and I'm optimistic that my ideas aren't too out of reach for an eventual implementation.

this is literally what loved should be. just get more captains and go through more maps instead...

what's the idea there exactly? loved maps act in a similar way where they are promoted and have leaderboards, but they are never "immortalizations" and they have a relatively strict and lengthy process to go through. im not sure i even get the comparison as loved maps can contain game-breaking mechanics and can't be promoted in a way ranked maps can

just as a reminder, my proposal does not include a new category, but an expansion on the current ranked system

featured maps are supposed to be based on effort, quality and accessibility, and not so much popularity, which is what loved is based around (i. e. "loved" by the community at large)

Some sort of "glow" or "outline" on the beatmap card on the website and in-game (lazer)

rule 130

this paragraph sounds good though


my thoughts on the rest:

Having a spread that appeals to a wide variety of people, or a spread that requires considerable effort to produce. Examples could include 15+ minute marathons or 5-6 difficulty spreads (all of varying difficulty, not just 3 or 4 Extra diffs) of songs that are 3 minutes or longer.

5-6 diff 3 min spread is not something I would consider outstanding enough (cutoff for this should be 5+min spreads / multiple diffs by the same person), super long maps would make more sense

Having a map that's widely accepted as "high quality" by a notable portion of the community.

having a seperate page / ranking feed would not make people see maps as high quality unless they literally can't think for themselves at all

Mapping featured artist songs

I don't think simply mapping some random fa song is good enough, especially considering stuff like this exists which hardly anyone would consider outstanding quality

Mapping a "clean" style that most players would enjoy playing; something that genuinely benefits from being promoted to the wider community

forcing mapping styles is a stupid idea

On the contrary, mapping in a "unique" style that goes out of its way to be different from the norm yet still enjoyable to a large playerbase

unique=/= good but sounds ok, would need actual testing for this

As for the promotion process, it would involve a certain number of BNs (likely 4-8, depending on gamemode) to press a certain button that would effectively "vote" a map forward to featured. It would be similar to the ranking process where said map would automatically gain the tag upon receiving a sufficient amount of votes. Leaving it up to BNs is the best method that I can think of for promoting these maps.

how do you decide on the bns doing this? personal opinion from X and Y people? how do you decide on the maps? making another queue like the one the bn website has obviously wouldn't work and making only the responsible bns suggest maps would result in a lot of maps missing out on their chance (and also lead to everyone and their mom pming those bns)

Regarding "abuse," where BNs would go out of there way to vote up something that they don't actually believe is high quality, we'd deal with it in a similar manner as we do with nominations. Regarding BN motivation, I believe BNs would enjoy this system of promotion as much as they currently do with normal nominations. To be fair, I don't have much to go off of, but just thinking personally and observing the behavior of some BNs (posting their "favorite nominations" on social media for example), I believe this wouldn't be an issue.

checking this sounds pretty difficult, there is no way to prove that someone only voted yes because a map is made by their friend (people already nominate maps for that reason, which I think is fine if the map is ok), but since this is supposed to be something special you'd want to avoid this

personally I wouldn't treat most of my nominations any different but I can't speak for everyone

Giving people more freedom and more incentives in ranked

you can already rank whatever you want if you have connections or get lucky

I understand that this would require dev time

gl with that



generally speaking I think the idea is good but implementing it properly is not possible

UberFazz wrote:

As for the promotion process, it would involve a certain number of BNs (likely 4-8, depending on gamemode) to press a certain button that would effectively "vote" a map forward to featured. It would be similar to the ranking process where said map would automatically gain the tag upon receiving a sufficient amount of votes. Leaving it up to BNs is the best method that I can think of for promoting these maps.

So how would this work as years go by? As bn come and go the maps are more likely to receive votes from newer bns, eventually reaching the 4-8 threshold required. Setting thresholds only make sense relative to the number of people able to vote, and the number of people able to vote increases as the beatmap ages.

i think the pre-reworked spotlights was cool. i'd like to see that revived

of course the spotlights only curates ranked maps. putting graveyarded/pending maps in an official state is kinda questionable imo, since its state isn't immortalized

Mordred wrote:

5-6 diff 3 min spread is not something I would consider outstanding enough (cutoff for this should be 5+min spreads / multiple diffs by the same person), super long maps would make more sense

just examples, it'll ultimately be left up to the people promoting these maps

having a seperate page / ranking feed would not make people see maps as high quality unless they literally can't think for themselves at all

not quite sure what you mean by this, my idea involves featured maps going into specific feeds regardless of whether or not they're seen as high quality by the people they're being promoted to. it's a curation system instead of throwing all the hundreds of monthly ranked maps at players

I don't think simply mapping some random fa song is good enough, especially considering stuff like this exists which hardly anyone would consider outstanding quality

once again just an example of possible factors that could contribute to a map's featureability, same for the next few points

how do you decide on the bns doing this? personal opinion from X and Y people? how do you decide on the maps? making another queue like the one the bn website has obviously wouldn't work and making only the responsible bns suggest maps would result in a lot of maps missing out on their chance (and also lead to everyone and their mom pming those bns)

was thinking of this just now as well. ideally, any bn would be able to do this, and they'd be able to do it on any map (with the aforementioned criteria in mind). this is definitely the most difficult part of the process, but i believe it could happen with enough discussion. regarding bns getting pm'd, id imagine theres not really much you could do about it other than the way mod reqs are treated currently. preferrably, people wouldn't "request" these maps, but instead bns would just naturally "nominate" maps they enjoy for featured.

more ideas for this process would be really appreciated for sure

checking this sounds pretty difficult, there is no way to prove that someone only voted yes because a map is made by their friend (people already nominate maps for that reason, which I think is fine if the map is ok), but since this is supposed to be something special you'd want to avoid this

i feel like it ultimately wouldn't be a big deal, not like the ranking process at least. at worst a map or two slips through the cracks, and there would ideally be a way to remove the tag if any abuse actually happens since no leaderboards will be lost or anything (vs an unrank)

personally I wouldn't treat most of my nominations any different but I can't speak for everyone

this is also only considering current rc! my idea supports loosening of rc so maps can be immortalized without having to conflict with other, higher quality maps

generally speaking I think the idea is good but implementing it properly is not possible

this idea specifically might be a bit of a stretch but i think the general idea of adding a new system of promotion could happen

abraker wrote:

So how would this work as years go by? As bn come and go the maps are more likely to receive votes from newer bns, eventually reaching the 4-8 threshold required. Setting threasholds only make sense relative to the number of people able to vote, and the number of people able to vote increases as time goes on.

id imagine this number would be updated whenever required, or a different system entirely could be used for curation (maybe the way spotlights does it? though im not quite sure how it works)

we could even have a system similar to loved that somehow incorporates player votes into this system, potentially making it semi-automated. if a ranked map gets enough attention or high enough of a score it could be dumped into some place that bns could look at, for example, or we could use a similar process that's entirely automatic. that of course has its ups and downs, but it's an idea that could hold merit

To be honest, this sounds like too much of a hassle just so people are more receptive to the idea of loosening spreads requirements

should be loved

+1 nao

"immortalization" - afaik, maps don't get unloved and lose their leaderboards unless the mapper wants them to. so they both get promoted under the "has leaderboard" section, the loved section itself, and are immortalized by never being deleted from graveyard and permanently having a leaderboard. the process being lengthy isn't an inherent requirement of loved like ranked ostensibly is (i dont think ranked takes that long either tbh...) it just happens to be lengthy because the community has made it that way due to the massive amount of maps going for loved.

the comparison is obvious - the category is for people to bypass ranked requirements with, which is also the main feature of loved, so loved can just be modified a bit so bns can also nominate maps to there and then it works out fine. if you want a category based on effort, quality, and accessibility, ranked already exists in its current state. the only maps this category actually would service are short top diffs which dont have spreads, because literally everything else can be ranked as-is or with reduced requirements. and for short maps without spreads, the option to bypass the ranked system entirely should not be given imo.

Nao Tomori wrote:

"immortalization" - afaik, maps don't get unloved and lose their leaderboards unless the mapper wants them to.

the fact that they can be unloved is the problem and what makes them not immortalized. we could probably change this, but right now, loved can't serve this purpose

1. loved would need a rework that would take away the "community voting" aspect of the section
2. even if this did happen, mixing ranked/high quality maps with loved is a bad idea, those should be ranked instead (see: game breaking/aspire maps and the like). bypassing rank requirements is not the goal
3. giving people more incentives to put effort into their maps is a good idea, reworking loved would void this benefit
4. giving bns the ability to nominate maps for loved sounds like it would prevent all the "lower quality" maps that would go there, even if they're popular. im sure you know the way bns perceive the loved section. who's to say they'd even want to do this anyway?
5. sure, there are high-effort, high-quality and high-accessibility maps in ranked, but a lot of them just aren't any of these things. the whole point of the proposal is to separate the two and hopefully encourage more mappers to go out there and make that kind of content

UberFazz wrote:

1. even if this did happen, mixing ranked/high quality maps with loved is a bad idea, those should be ranked instead (see: game breaking/aspire maps and the like). bypassing rank requirements is not the goal

Note that maps in the ranked section awards pp, and the nature of aspire maps means that making these "ranked instead" can have unpredictable implications on the pp system.

AncuL wrote:

i think the pre-reworked spotlights was cool. i'd like to see that revived

of course the spotlights only curates ranked maps. putting graveyarded/pending maps in an official state is kinda questionable imo, since its state isn't immortalized

yea this would be nice but according to loctav when he killed it two years ago nobody cares and instead his stupid ranking project that would totally incentivize people to play lazer was more important!!!!




anyway the only way I could see this proposal being feasible if promotion were a status that could also be given to already ranked maps, but then ultimately you would see the majority of maps eventually become promoted and that would also no longer be anything special. otherwise, i agree that it should be integrated into the Loved system.

UberFazz wrote:

abraker wrote:

So how would this work as years go by? As bn come and go the maps are more likely to receive votes from newer bns, eventually reaching the 4-8 threshold required. Setting threasholds only make sense relative to the number of people able to vote, and the number of people able to vote increases as time goes on.

id imagine this number would be updated whenever required, or a different system entirely could be used for curation (maybe the way spotlights does it? though im not quite sure how it works)

we could even have a system similar to loved that somehow incorporates player votes into this system, potentially making it semi-automated. if a ranked map gets enough attention or high enough of a score it could be dumped into some place that bns could look at, for example, or we could use a similar process that's entirely automatic. that of course has its ups and downs, but it's an idea that could hold merit

How about a time period window? Like only votes in the past year count, where older ones are discarded. Also yes, under this if a person is still bn after that time they will need to revote if they still want their vote to count.

UberFazz wrote:

Nao Tomori wrote:

"immortalization" - afaik, maps don't get unloved and lose their leaderboards unless the mapper wants them to.

the fact that they can be unloved is the problem and what makes them not immortalized. we could probably change this, but right now, loved can't serve this purpose this doesn't make much sense as presumably the mapper would be consenting to their maps being added to this proposed category, so hypothetically they wouldn't unlove their map for no reason

1. loved would need a rework that would take away the "community voting" aspect of the section or simply add this into loved and leave the voting aspect alongside it
2. even if this did happen, mixing ranked/high quality maps with loved is a bad idea, those should be ranked instead (see: game breaking/aspire maps and the like). bypassing rank requirements is not the goal
3. giving people more incentives to put effort into their maps is a good idea, reworking loved would void this benefit
4. giving bns the ability to nominate maps for loved sounds like it would prevent all the "lower quality" maps that would go there, even if they're popular. im sure you know the way bns perceive the loved section. who's to say they'd even want to do this anyway? plenty of bns would love to give maps leaderboards without ranking them. i don't see why this has to be mutually exclusive.
5. sure, there are high-effort, high-quality and high-accessibility maps in ranked, but a lot of them just aren't any of these things. the whole point of the proposal is to separate the two and hopefully encourage more mappers to go out there and make that kind of content

i may be completely misunderstanding the point of this but it sounds like spotlights v2 which was an abject failure in terms of players giving a flying fuck about the same maps mappers do (because mappers don't really care about a map being ranked or not, because they mostly aren't playing it but rather looking at it in editor theoretically, and players mostly care about the leaderboards or the pp). again, if the goal is to highlight a bunch of cool graved maps that people generally enjoy, that is *literally* the value proposition of loved. all the random red tape can be removed and streamlined there - that's the entire point of the section. if the goal is to incentivize mappers to make cool spreads, i don't think a special section would work well because either it has lower standards than ranked and now everything goes into this section instead or as well, or it has higher standards that only mappers care about and players don't and the vast majority of players don't pay attention to the section anyway, defeating its purpose (what happened to spotlights to some extent).

i get what you mean about ranked just being a giant blob of maps with nothing making the "really good ones" stand out - i don't think another section will alleviate that issue without running into the same issues as spotlights does over and over.

@UberFazz I think you need to put in huge letters somewhere that this is not asking for a new category but for tagging maps already in ranked. Many people dont want to read the huge wall of text or just miss the important details in it.

if this system should exist, mapsets with awesome storyboards/gimmicks such as keysounds should at least have a chance of getting in

I'm a big fan of any motivation these days that aims to better separate concerns of ranked categories, but that's about as far as I got in agreement with these ideas

working backward through OP:

1. the things separating "featured" from the rest of the catalogue don't really seem to warrant a separate identifier; diverse spreads naturally get more search hits and are shared around more, featured artist just seems irrelevant, widely appealing styles r abt the same as diverse spreads for this purpose, "unique style" all grouped together defeats the point(I feel like u might have had more specific idea than these words in mind though?), "high quality" I think Mordred and Nao wrote everything I would've said
2. the proposed implementation is confusing--- it's a marker/filter that doesn't signal anything in particular about the state or content of the map. I think that's a downgrade for understandability and separation of concerns, which are already large issues with ranked categories as a whole
3. boiling the situation down to a simple combination of "immortalization" and "promotion" feels wrong in the first place, ranked & loved have more unique effects on maps than this and I think to get a proper development here u'd need to break it up into more pieces conceptually

Nao Tomori wrote:

or it has higher standards that only mappers care about and players don't and the vast majority of players don't pay attention to the section anyway, defeating its purpose (what happened to spotlights to some extent).

some players have expressed their opinions that the current ranked maps are the same bland anime op maps with the same jump patterns all over again. with a new section (whatever that section is), we can at least tell them they're wrong

you can already tell them they're wrong