i like to stick with a formula i made up. create a normal version, then from their, add notes to make harder, or reduce them for easiness using normal as a basis for the difficulties.

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hey if you want to head the project your way, feel free. im doing it the way im used to - sending myself and other people out to find stuff and then assigning myself and other people to take care of the stuff ive found. this is in no way connected to BAT - completely separate team of those of us who are sick of the overly hard lowest difficulties; that is to say the ones that arent quite bad enough to be withheld from ranking but are still pretty damn hard.

if the lowest diff is UNRANKABLY hard i generally just tell the mapper to fuck off and make a new lowest diff the right way next time.

Wow that was a terrible statement; I think my former post went right over your head.

Agreed.

Let's try making topics for projects instead of PMing difficulties randomly. For example, the Easy Series:

viewtopic.php?f=53&t=16250

As far as difficulty goes? If your lowest difficulty isn't FCable by me in a few tries and you're going for rankage, you're probably doing it wrong. This has been the case lately, sad to say... Also, Hard =/= Insane and Normal =/= Hard, people. If your map has lots of 1/4s in it, it's probably an Insane (unless it's a slow song) and you should make a Hard (and a Normal) for those who aren't that good at this game.

All i care is whether a map fit the song well.
if yes, it's rankable/approvable imo
Overmapping. ridiculous large spacing and meaningless jumps are bad (which are common in recently ranked maps tho imo).

And also i think there'r no such sayin like 'maps are not hard enough to play'
good map = expressing the music well
We play music games for fun and feeling for the music, not aimed for improving our mouse/keyboard skillz
If proplayers would like to see some more challenging maps, just find some more interesting songs like UNOwenwasher, songs like these can't be mapped too easy.

tho we see there's a trend that nowadayz mappers like to make their map INSANE, ignoring playing-comfortability (i once heard somebody says 'oh i mapped it too easy, people will fc/pass that without effort, must raise difficulty!', feeling sad for those

mappers should stop competing on difficulty of their maps
try to make your maps good not try to make them insane

p.s. easier diffs should always be remained for new players

if there is an easy, normal difficulty for newers, I don't think there is any problem to make an extremely hard difficulty.

But I agree with darri, making maps extremely hard just for making people failed and rage is meaningless, I used to be that and I call my old maps like that craps.

If the music fit, there are easier difficulties for players, then why not?

awp wrote:

The star rating is not very reliable.

http://osu.ppy.sh/s/3545
yes look at the patient in osu! 4.5 stars

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I said something like this in another thread, but I'll be clearer this time.

Overall, osu! has gotten harder. However, the max difficulty was almost a while ago. I blame Reikin (sp?). Emerald map, Max Forever, and awp's SSII are the hardest I've seen. Two of those are old.

If you think osu! will get significantly harder than that, then FC all 3 of those, and do it multiple times to prove it wasn't a fluke, say, 3 times each. Then we'll talk about making maps harder than those. :P

P.S. Max difficulty =/= overall difficulty. Overall = average. Max = the hardest map on osu! (that is a real map and not like Phoenix Wright's Breakdown), whether it's approved, ranked, or unranked.

BTW, I mainly play maps that people are talking about being difficult. Play them a couple times, almost never submit my score. Also play them before they're ranked lots of the time (some are... INSANE!). Pause button abuse FTW (I'm such an accuracy whore)? Then I FC a random Normal to make myself feel better.

As long as mappers keep creating difficulties for all kinds of players and label them right, I think we are going in a good direction.

DaRRi MIx wrote:

All i care is whether a map fit the song well.
if yes, it's rankable/approvable imo
Overmapping. ridiculous large spacing and meaningless jumps are bad (which are common in recently ranked maps tho imo).

And also i think there'r no such sayin like 'maps are not hard enough to play'
good map = expressing the music well
We play music games for fun and feeling for the music, not aimed for improving our mouse/keyboard skillz
If proplayers would like to see some more challenging maps, just find some more interesting songs like UNOwenwasher, songs like these can't be mapped too easy.

tho we see there's a trend that nowadayz mappers like to make their map INSANE, ignoring playing-comfortability (i once heard somebody says 'oh i mapped it too easy, people will fc/pass that without effort, must raise difficulty!', feeling sad for those

mappers should stop competing on difficulty of their maps
try to make your maps good not try to make them insane

p.s. easier diffs should always be remained for new players

This pretty much sums it up for me.

General Discussion
Discuss your scores, strategies etc. Challenge people. Anything about playing osu!

srsly, if you're gonna nazi about general stuff getting posted elsewhere, then don't post osu!-related stuff here.

This isn't about scores and strategies.

This is "[t]he place where you don't post crap."

This topic fits here. Stop being an idiot neo@lex.

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Note: I did not read most of the posts in this topic, but I still want to comment on the original subject. I don't know and I don't care if the discussion has changed to something else already.



My view on the situation is quite simple. I think that the game has too few maps for completely new players. I remember how hard the game was to start and I've seen countless new players turned away from the game just because they can't find easy maps to play. If they download a random song pack it's possible that they don't get a single map that they could train on.

Also, to make the situation even worse, people tag maps as "beginner" or "super easy" or something like that when in reality the maps are such that even I have hard time SS:ing or even full comboing them. This further drives away players who think that the game is just too hard for them.

What I would like is:

* Most maps should have a very easy difficulty level. A very easy map is quick to do and quick to mod, so time is not a valid point against this. Even though a new player doesn't need too many maps to start getting better in the game, he needs to find those easy maps easily, so there needs to be a lot of them. Also, players like to play songs that they like music wise, so it's good to have a wide selection of different types of songs with easy difficulty levels.

* Map difficulty naming should be enforced better. Don't let maps be called "beginner" or "very easy" or even "easy" if the maps aren't maps that actually are easy for new players. Sadly a lot of players don't even realize anymore when a map is too hard for a new player, They think that "hey, this map is very easy for me so it must be a ood beginner map" but in reality certain things like overlapping notes and sliders are very hard for new players.

There is no reason to continue the current trend and drive new players away. I would personally even go so far as to enforce a mandatory rule that every map must have a beginner suitable difficulty level in it.

Gemi wrote:

Also, to make the situation even worse, people tag maps as "beginner" or "super easy" or something like that when in reality the maps are such that even I have hard time SS:ing or even full comboing them.

This is actually in violation of the ranking standards; maps that are like this are not suitable for ranking approval. It's unfortunate that you're correct, here.

Gemi wrote:

* Most maps should have a very easy difficulty level. A very easy map is quick to do and quick to mod, so time is not a valid point against this.

Easy maps are not actually all that quick to do. They're quick to mod, but in order to make an Easy map enjoyable, unique, and not repetitive, it actually takes quite a bit of patience. Easy maps typically take longer to do than Normal maps. Because you have less to work with, you need to be more careful with how you use it.

But apart from that, the point does stand on its own.

awp wrote:

Gemi wrote:

* Most maps should have a very easy difficulty level. A very easy map is quick to do and quick to mod, so time is not a valid point against this.

Easy maps are not actually all that quick to do. They're quick to mod, but in order to make an Easy map enjoyable, unique, and not repetitive, it actually takes quite a bit of patience. Easy maps typically take longer to do than Normal maps. Because you have less to work with, you need to be more careful with how you use it.

But apart from that, the point does stand on its own.

The point here being, beginner maps don't need to be "unique". Actually, making a "unique" beginner map would be quite hard since there is so little to work with, as you only have a note now and then. Actually, making a "unique" map would probably mean that it's not an easy map at all. The point is that these maps need to be easy and teach the basics, they shouldn't have special tricks and hart parts. So basically, if you take a lot of time doing an easy map then you're doing it wrong, or you are too perfectionist and I wonder how you get any more difficult maps done at all.

And yes, beginner/easy maps should still follow the actual music track that the map is made to, but you since you can basically just follow the main beat, it's fast to do. Following any weird rhythms just makes the map too hard for players new to rhythm games.


Let's use my "beginner" map for Rainspark as a reference point, since that is a map that I recall well. I actually think that this map would be more of an "easy" map and not a "beginner" one since it isn't so easy afterall.

* The time between notes could be doubled, effectively removing every other note.
* In the middle there is a part where the notes are actually middle beat, which is too hard for rhythm game noobs.
* There are no spinners, which is a good thing.
* There are sliders which are pretty slow, but long enough so that the player has time to notice that he needs to keep the mouse button pressed during the hold. This is good. A slower bpm song would be better in this case since it's easier to do longer but slower sliders.




Anyway, we agree on the major parts and I think that the easy difficulties should definitely get some love and attention starting from now. We all want osu! to grow, right?

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This map has been deleted on the request of its creator. It is no longer available.

DaRRi MIx wrote:

strager wrote:

I generally disagree with the idea that beginners have to play easier maps.

When I was a beginner, I went to Scatman, Cross Time (FFFanatic's), and others because they was fun to play.

Also, easier maps are not easily made for some songs, just as harder maps are not easily made for some songs.

i agree with that maps like cross time is definitely playable for new players
cross time is one of the earliest map i've played.
it can't be called easy, but i say it's playable for new player because FFFanatic made it awesome
i fc'd it when my osu! playcount didn't even reach 50, the every single beat he put is on just where i want to click.

Different players have different tastes for learning, and different players learn with different speeds. Yes, some players can learn better with harder maps and some players learn quick no matter what. But a lot of players learn through very easy maps, and I've seen a lot of players like that turn away from osu, which makes the game community smaller than it could be.

Maybe we should make a survey about it.

That doesn't sound necessary; a beatmap should contain difficulties to cover a broad range of player skills. The lowest difficulty needs to be easy enough for inexperienced/poor players to play.

That's not always possible with some songs, awp, as I have said.

I've yet to hear a song where an Easy difficulty isn't possible

except perhaps in the case of Jazz but that's not suitable for osu!, full stop

It's not always possible to make a map that is both accessible to beginners, and interesting as a map. However, for beginner maps, you don't really have to make it that interesting, since when you're a beginner, the act of playing the game is new and interesting. It's just important that the Easy map follows the beat

Real1 is proud that ALL of his maps comes with an easy Easy.

Don't forget that all songs have their own difficulty - in the DS games, Sekai wa Sore wo Ai to Yobundaze on Easy is considerably harder than, for example, Walkie Talkie Man on Easy.
Deciding whether a map should be a "boss battle" or not should be the first thing a mapper should do, in my opinion.

nomedeusuarionaodisp wrote:

Don't forget that all songs have their own difficulty - in the DS games, Sekai wa Sore wo Ai to Yobundaze on Easy is considerably harder than, for example, Walkie Talkie Man on Easy.
Deciding whether a map should be a "boss battle" or not should be the first thing a mapper should do, in my opinion.

I agree that difficulties and difficulty names are basically relative to the map's overall difficulty.

The problem lately is that pretty much everybody is making upper-tier-difficulty maps, and in most cases, only making 2 difficulties instead of 4. So osu barely has any "Walkie Talkie Man" easies, and a ton of maps with "Sekai wa Sore wo Ai to Yobundaze" Normals as their easiest difficulty. We don't really have the luxury of seeing the maps spread across 7 or so tiers, but I'd imagine that right now it'd look pretty top-heavy if we did. If there was a way of smoothing that gradient it'd be amazing, but there's really no way to enforce that beyond encouraging people to make easy maps, and hoping that some of them do.

nomedeusuarionaodisp wrote:

Don't forget that all songs have their own difficulty - in the DS games, Sekai wa Sore wo Ai to Yobundaze on Easy is considerably harder than, for example, Walkie Talkie Man on Easy.
Deciding whether a map should be a "boss battle" or not should be the first thing a mapper should do, in my opinion.

But then everyone will start justifying their maps with "but it's a boss battle!"

Some maps will always be easier than others, because they just turn out that way, but we can't let mappers ignore the newcomers just because they want to focus on creating a challenge. I'm not going to say every map should have an Easy, but we need to meet the beginners' needs better than we have been and I don't want to have to enforce it. It should happen out of the mappers' free will.

And an Easy map doesn't have to be boring, or stay on white ticks all the time. Just follow what a new player would find most intuitive. Go with the strong beats of the song, give them plenty of time between beats, and keep the patterns very clean.

Personally I prefer 3 difficulties per map, any more and it puts me off modding a bit :/

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Déjà vu...

So I was watching one of my friends starting osu! today and he had some comments on what helps a complete and utter noob find their way around an Easy map. Most of them were things already in our ranking standards (don't go too fast, mostly consistent spacing, consistent bpm on sliders, etc) but one of them I really both found interesting and wish I had known when I was making my earlier maps.

He said basically that he expects the same pattern to appear during one verse as appeared in the previous verse, and for the choruses to all look identical. I think nowadays people kind of stress ctrl-v as a lazy uncreative shortcut, but apparently it really does help the new players quite a bit.

Actually, that's basically what I did here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?d5vaizzazm1

Try mapping like that for yourself. It makes the map quite a bit easier.

That's also what EBA does. No, seriously, it is.

Saturos-fangirl wrote:

He said basically that he expects the same pattern to appear during one verse as appeared in the previous verse, and for the choruses to all look identical. I think nowadays people kind of stress ctrl-v as a lazy uncreative shortcut, but apparently it really does help the new players quite a bit.

Yes, repetition makes the map easier for the player. Also, another good thing is that if the player has difficulties with a certain part of the map, if that part is repeated, he can train it over and over again without actually going to the editor or replaying the map often. Repetition is a good thing in easier maps and should not be shunned.

Of course, too much repetition gets boring for anyone. Hitting the same pattern through the whole song is just irritating. The best repetition is to have an identical pattern in an identical part of the song, if that part appears a couple of times.

top-heavy, anyone?



EDIT: captured this in chat earlier, seems relevant

<FerreTrip> Hey, Peppy, just wanted to say that osu! rocks hard, but it's all too-often TOO hard...but that's because it's a rhythm game with custom maps; that's bound to happen. But thanks for helping it come into being!

Yeah I'd say it's more than just a little bit top-heavy.



I think there are still plenty of songs for newbies to work with but there are some pretty difficult "normals" being ranked nowadays even in maps with only two difficulties (I might be guilty of this slightly :<). I mean I don't have a problem with that since I don't play the normals usually but if I was still rank #20598234827394832 I'd definitely be a bit disheartened.

It's tricky because people who are good at the game might have a different sense of what an easier difficulty might look like and so they'll map their normals to be too hard. I've played multiplayer with some rank 2k+ guys that can keep up with faster and slightly harder maps even if they can't FC, and I've played with other guys in the same range that can't keep a combo going on 2-3 star maps to save their lives. Maps should be accessible to all players no matter what their skill level.

And on the other hand, it's not really a good idea imo to have a crazy hard difficulty and then a piss easy difficulty. Find some middle ground or else make a third difficulty for middle-level players to rank on.

i haven't read all (or almost any) posts but as far as i understand theres something about people making maps too hard?

<FerreTrip> Hey, Peppy, just wanted to say that osu! rocks hard, but it's all too-often TOO hard...but that's because it's a rhythm game with custom maps; that's bound to happen. But thanks for helping it come into being!

there will never be too many maps that are too hard. when i started this game there was as many easy maps as there is now. also just because a map has 4-5 stars doesn't mean it is impossible to pass. when i started osu, (and this is still how i think) diffs called insane should hardly be FCable by anyone except the real pros. take "Lucky Star Cast - Hamatte sabotte oh my ga" for example, now that was/is an insane map the real way. Also with every insane map comes an Easy/Normal.

ofcourse i might just be speaking of something completley offtopic seeing as i have hardly read the replys or OP's post in this topic xD. but its late and i'll make a better post tomorrow :3