In light of some internal discussion, this proposal will make a case for why the rule surrounding musical justification for notes should be removed. The rule in question in the mania RC is this:

“Every note should correlate to a sound present in the music. This should be a distinct sound, but can also coherently represent a continuous sound with an indistinguishable start or end. Exceptions in favour of simplification should be made when following the music completely accurately.”

This rule is used to justify mapping bursts that represent shorter, distinct sounds. Examples are the many camellia maps in ranked, where bass wobbles or wubs (the continuous sound) is represented as a shorter burst. I won’t go into too much detail on dumping to keep the post concise, but this rule excludes other types of dumping.

Another widely accepted type of dumping is one that represent a musical layer or an “intensity aura”. This is not covered in that rule but is prevalent in other rhythm games similar to mania. Examples of such maps that are ranked are AiAe, ranked in 2014 and Azure Arbitrator, ranked in 2021. Azure Arbitrator sparked discussion of the rule.

The main problem of the rule is that it is restrictive to mappers wanting to get their maps ranked. The way it is worded only suggests a specific approach towards using dumps. It is not inclusive, and I have to ask what the real point behind it is. Shouldn’t trust be relegated to the community, bns, and mappers to decide what is acceptable use of dumping rather than a rule? What does the rule accomplish other than restrict mappers towards a specific style? I think the mapping community would be better of getting rid of the rule.

Another thing to change with the RC is remove an unneeded part in the general RC about hitsounding. "In cases where hitsounds are not used, no additions may be placed, and no sample control points should be used (ie. to adjust volume)". This was added after the hitsounding change which does not really have a point to it. Why would you have to enforce the sample control point, it is benefitial to have it no matter if it has hitsounding or not.

Please keep the discussion in simple english, no one wants to read walls upon walls.

charts are some interpretation of music. not all interpretations have to have notes that correspond to peaks in the waveform. however, the BNs should be enforcing anti-dumping insofar that it makes sense with the music. e.g. something like vocal dump would probably get a lower tolerance for error than a dump going to low frequency wubs (which a player can actually kind of "feel" if they're hitting a stream to that).

that's both a response to the OP and the impressions i got out of reading Shoegazer's doc on ghost notes.

i will keep it concise here.

But my point is that, what you guys should do is not about removing the entire clause of the rule, but rather "re-new" the clause of that RC into something that define what kind of dump that are qualified to go into the official content of the game.

Dump definition and their proper usage is very arbitrary as it is, and having some kind of new set of boundary guideline to follow up is what you need to actually seek in order for everyone to be on the same page. Deleting the RC not only made everyone's idea very scattered on the proper dump usage, but with the lack of proper guideline it's very easy to justify pretty much "anything" into dump, frankly speaking.

And also, How do you even delegate the trust into community, bns and mappers in the first place when pretty much everyone have different and arbitrary idea on what makes a proper quality dump in the first place? in fact, the deletion of that clause simply will only spark even more unneeded long conflict that are caused by the big ambiguity and huge amount of dissimilarity of that dump clause, which can be avoided entirely by making proper set of guidelines of defining proper dump instead of removing them entirely.

If you guys understand the nature of dump and the proper quality dump usage, i don't really see the reason of not simply "re-new" and re-implement that clause of words into the RC. But if not even you guys cannot really understand how to implement the clause rule of the proper dump into the RC, then how do you expect the rest of the community to be delegated of the responsibility to actually rank a good dump either?

My point is that, it's simply much better creating a clause of new rule instead of removing them, which i don't really agree due to the previous reason i mentioned beforehand.


But yeah, that's the only thing i want to say. I have no comment about the hitsound because i don't know who added that clause.

So maps like this bad boy were wrongly ranked if we are to strictly follow the rules? I'm not sure I get it.

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very true

My question for you maxus is, why the mistrust? Why do you not trust or believe in bns? They are the main driving force behind ranked after all, no one else is really involved as much as them in the system. So if there's no trust for them to do the right thing, why even have bns at all?

I think you understand that the entire system isn't run by pure trust, that's why we have rule in the first place. If the system run purely on trust then why we have RC in the first place right?

Delegating trust is never be run on pure trust towards single aspect of thing (in this case, community), but also need to be balanced with responsibility and proper amount of same mind of what proper content can be made to be in the ranked section. This is not only applied on in game kind of thing, but even also from IRL aspect as well.

Is it that problematic to actually re-new and re-implement new clause of word for dump though? I felt like it's better for you to explain that in all honesty because i believe shoegazer docs already provide good start-off.

In the end rules are for what the majority of people can agree with. If we don't have consensus on what is actually proper use of it, it is much better use to relegate the responsibility of what is considered good enough or bad enough to the bns. They have the power to veto, they have a lot of control over the official ranking section. If enough people agree with something being bad you can set a more clearly defined limit, but right now I don't see that happening any time soon.

Why we should have RC is so there's a set of standards when it comes to more important aspects that can be controlled, such as spread, song length, background size, difficulty standards and so on. Dumping is more or less a creative aspect of mapping. The community should then decide what is good or not, if there is consensus then yes a rule is better.

The main problem of what you said is that majority of people still don't really have proper understanding of a proper good dump, and even in the context of BNG, dump is also still too arbitrary of subject that it's very easy to set a very inconsistent standard on people. That is something that we want to avoid at all cost.

Deleting the rule will set an extremely vague standard that applies not only for current BN but also future BN as well. And because anybody from community can apply to be BN, the issue will eventually spread to the entire community instead of set limit amount of people only.

If there is an option where we are able to discuss the proper consensus with the community by implementing and propose new set of RC then i don't see the reason why we can't go for it. You did even also mention that realm will gives rule a better possibility.

The thing is that the proper consensus of discussion with the community through the new rewording proposal is something that we can do right now instead of rushing through deletion of rule. So if there is potential option for the better long term profit then we should go for it.

so I can create a program that randomly generate note without taking into consideration the actual song, and call it a dump and make a big paragraph about why it make sense, and if there's enough ppl agree with me, then it will be ranked, nice!

Drum-Hitnormal wrote:

so I can create a program that randomly generate note without taking into consideration the actual song, and call it a dump and make a big paragraph about why it make sense, and if there's enough ppl agree with me, then it will be ranked, nice!

bad faith interpretations and passive aggression are not welcome in this thread. say something that actually contributes or dont say anything at all

Drum-Hitnormal wrote:

so I can create a program that randomly generate note without taking into consideration the actual song, and call it a dump and make a big paragraph about why it make sense, and if there's enough ppl agree with me, then it will be ranked, nice!

Yeah you see the thing is, people wouldn't agree with you. So there's that. Now go away unless you have something meaningful to contribute.

I do think you are underestimating the bng maxus. It's not the same group of people that were active 3 years ago, and things have changed a lot since. Many many dumps have gotten ranked and no one is really batting an eye at it because the bng has gotten good at judging their merit.

This vague standard that you are referring to might even be benefitial because I fear that one rule might exclude other perfectly legitimate types of mapping. It's hard to be as inclusive as possible while also excluding the bad cases. The bad cases are more up to the bng to sort themselves, either by not nominating (which is the most standard response to bad mapping) or vetoing. They have lots of power already over the ranking section. I do think more current bns should have their say on the matter before I made up my mind what the best way forward is.

I do believe that BNG do work hard for the rank section and of course i appreciate them (as i'm a BN as well, i understand that sentiment a lot). However i cannot help but think that the lack of criticism stems from the lack of proper knowledge about dump and also ambiguity that happens with the rule from the community side, which will be even more pronounced if the rule got deleted. I personally don't think it's a good idea of the future map to simply pass because the community doesn't have proper knowledge of good dumps.

And i do understand your concern about exception map that might get hampered there, but that's exactly more of the reason why boundary guideline about dump is needed there.

To reverse the logic of what you said, what if some great dumps turn out to be veto'd instead because of lack of proper knowledge about dump from the boundary RC? Wouldn't that make it even more unfair than the potential map that got hampered due to guideline?
At least with the proper wording of rule, those case of inconsistent judgment will be much less happened.

And moreover, guideline also being designed to be able to be broken under special circumstances, so that special case you talking about should be even less happened as long as the mapper able to explain their own logic of mapping.

Maybe it's better to move that to general guidelines instead of rules then and reword it to clarify how dumping should be handled? I have written a lot about dumping and so have april, and we did brainstorm a few ideas a while back. What do you think about instead just moving it to guidelines?

Do you mean about moving it to the guideline and propose the new guideline that you and april already brainstorm about to the community?

If that's what you mean, then it sounds like cool idea for me and i do agree.

Yes, what I suggested was something like this: "ghost notes should correlate to a musical layer, collective of musical layers, or an improvised layer. They should not distort, shift, and/or contradict the pace and intensity of the music."

I think since i assume you have some more ideas of the guideline that should be added after the brainstorming, how about re-post the entire proposal in the new thread regarding the new ideas of the guideline and also the proper wording for it and let's see what the community say?

I felt that discussing about the guideline in this thread will gives misunderstanding to other member of the community regarding the flow of the discussion and what the discussion tried to do, and i think creating new thread about it will solves that problem so that we can get a clearer feedback from the community

I'll write a full-fledged response at a later point (I'm currently at school), but the main reason for not rephrasing the clause is that we don't know how every form of ghost note use works on a mechanical level. There are some established forms of ghost note use in the mapping community, but there are a few others like improvising rhythm (think ghost notes from DDR charts like Elemental Creation) that are hard to explain even by the most experienced of mappers. And I don't think a concrete guideline for dumps would help these edge case uses of ghost notes either because it's hard to explain and justify.

I understand the concern of the RC being too open-ended about how ghost notes can be used here, but the ranking criteria was never supposed to be a quality evaluation of maps. Even among BNs and experienced mappers there is a very wide range of ideas of what makes some ghost note use more acceptable than not; I think BNs tend to nominate maps that represent the preferences of the circles that they participate in more than anything else, and I think it's fine to do so, especially given what the o!m ranked sphere is supposed to be: a pluralistic hub representing various communities in the game.

edit: I think it's a very good idea to have a larger community discussion about how the clause should be formulated (if at all) though, I just don't know how fruitful of a discussion it would be