Currently, the nomination mindset amid BNG is to "nominate less, fucked up less." While this is not a mindset to blame, I have found out such a mindset emerged from a ruleset that encourages BN to mod in a way strictly following an expected trait (https://bn.mappersguild.com/bnapps,) without considering the actual impact they may have on the mapset per se. Besides, lacking of the effective incentive to active BNs is also an important factor of it.

Since it is well-known that it is barely possible to require any dev-level changes, I would like to propose two suggestions that I believe can be done solely up to the agreement of NAT:

1) Rewrite part of the SEV handbook to assign different importance to "obvious" issues and "severe" ones, and
2) Give more incentive to active BNs.

To elaborate:
1) Rewrite part of the SEV handbook
In the current system used for BN evaluation (SEVerity, or SEV,) it evaluates every reset of nomination by using two metrics: obviousness and severity (obv/sev.) However, it takes obviousness and severity equally important in a reset nomination ("..., you’re in a safe zone if the obviousness + severity of your resets adds up to less than a quarter of your nominations...,") which I find unfair. It is not intuitive to punish one BN who have a reset nomination with missing gder in tags (2/0) and another who have a reset nomination over completely among timing (1/1,) giving that they both happened only for once.
Here, I would like to point out that the importance of BN modding should be always focusing more on the mapset per se, a.k.a. the skill of "being able to find the right metadata" should not be valued equally as "being able to correct bad hitsounds," and "being able to point out severe mapping problems." This will just let BNs to distribute their attention wrongly equally to "solely obvious but not severe" and "severe let it be obvious or not" problems. This not only will cause a more frequent overlooking on actual playability problems due to less than necessary amount of attention paid, but also create a high tension atmosphere among the whole BNG, resulting in a "nominate less, fucked up less" mindset. Considering most of us take BN work as a hobby, such atmosphere is definitely not good for the vitality of the whole BNG in long term, both for current members and future potential applicants.
Thus, I propose to rewrite part of the SEV handbook to make sure it put "severity" over "obviousness." To be more specific:


This could conveniently take into two independent scenarios that I believe are deterministic for a BN's activity, which is i) They really don't know how to mod (high severity,) and ii) they are really careless (when they miss like many times of too large bg or wrong mp3 bitrate.) This could also separate the obviousness and severity of a reset nomination, and make sure BNs could pay their attention more on the mapset playability instead of a random miss that have no negative influence on the map itself. By doing such, it can also somehow reduce the pressure among the whole BNG, thus creating a more vival and proactive modding experience.

2) Give more incentive to active BNs
The only visible incentive to active bns now is the "elite nominator" title. However, I believe we could definitely do something more constructive to encourage bns to be more active. Although I believe the solution of 1) can ease a portion of concern among bns about "nominating more," I think we can still be benefited from stuff like the listed below:
- Only choosing nats from active bns (for example, those who nominate more than 90 minutes of drain time per month)
- For the said monthly active bns (probably with relatively less SEV as well:)

1. Permit them to nominate a certain amount of their own maps monthly (1 or 2.) This is originally an approach from Nao Tomori to revitalize the QAH system, but I think it would be more effective to implement it as a strong incentive to active BNs, since the QAH system isn't really necessary in current ranking state.
2. Give them rewards outside from the osu! platform more frequently. For example, Amazon gift cards, Steam games, Discord Nitro (even Twitter Blue if anyone wants to...) By providing more variants of rewards outside from the osu! platform itself, it could definitely serve as a powerful catalyst to those who think the BN work has less return on investment (ROI.) (By the way, if this even get passed I am glad to fund it by myself, since I don't think I can get a single penny from peppy himself)

this list is subject to addition/change, of course.

I definitely think the punishment for wrong metadata being weighted the same as wrong timing is pretty bad, speeding up the nomination process is a must.

I don't think its feasible to convince anyone to add BN incentives, though I do think it will be required to keep the BN group sustainable. Perhaps allow very active and accurate BNs to be able to nominate a map with just one vote, like a more trusted role.

Maybe there is a way to have a community funding system setup for the BN group, like a Patreon or something that gets split between active BNs? I would be happy to contribute to that myself.

I don't think severity ratings are necessarily why people are inactive, I think the main reasons are just lack of time to commit to the game, lack of incentive to nominate maps and lack of motivation due to getting bored or burned out. Outside of timing, I don't think any BNs avoid nominating maps because they are worried about a DQ, plus I would say that if they are, they should just check the map a bit better.

Totally agree that incentives are lacking though. Gib self bubble

I don't think direct monetary rewards are a great idea though for a few reasons. If they are low, then it feels even stupider to be putting in several hours of work a week and getting a $10 Amazon gift card or something (esp for people in richer countries). If they are high, we will see either people trying to get BN with the sole intent of earning money (probably bad) or just nominating a fuck load of maps to get it with bad consequences for the quality of the system like lots of basic errors getting missed.

About SEV:

I've never been a NAT or understand exactly how NATs decide what SEV to put to a nomination reset outside the knowledge i could acquire from the SEV handbook, but I feel like SEV is just a number - yes it indicates how "severe/obvious" your resets are, but getting SEVs to an extent where you're in "danger zone" doesn't guarantee you to get yourself kicked from BNG or getting demoted to probation, and getting 0 SEV doesn't guarantee you to pass evaluation as well (could still fail due to "bad" nominations that don't have resets). The ratio of nomination quality & amount and the attitude towards BN work still prevail when evaluating.

Also if a BN managed to keep getting SEVs under current SEVing system, then no matter if the SEVs they receive are in the same category (obviousness/severity) or not, they probably do need to be warned to be more careful on checking maps.

I dont think SEV is the main factor that makes BNs less active, it's mostly still depends on how much time BNs could/would spend on checking maps. You can have a more lenient SEVing system, but that probably wont change much things

------
About incentive:

Giving more incentive/rewards should be the solution to the "people being scared of working more fucking up more" issue, as for now there's no difference between nominating 3 tv size maps with N-H-I spread per month and nominating 10 >3mins
maps with 7 diffs spread per month, which kinda sucks cuz apparently the latter puts more effort in BN work. Changing the activity thershold from nomination amount to nomination total drain time may be a good idea. Could come up with other incentives/rewards but things involved with money (except for supporter tags but everyone gets supporter alrdy so) may be a bad idea because that'll possibly make people consider BN work a tool to earn money.

Also I personally dont think nominating ur own maps would be a great idea because that feels a bit weird. Probably would work anyway.

so tl;dr IMO SEVs leniency doesn't necessarily have to be changed, but more incentive seems to be a good idea.

Nao Tomori wrote:

I don't think direct monetary rewards are a great idea though for a few reasons. ... If they are high, we will see either people trying to get BN with the sole intent of earning money (probably bad) or just nominating a fuck load of maps to get it with bad consequences for the quality of the system like lots of basic errors getting missed.

to be fair, if BNs got paid a nontrivial amount of money for their work, it would also be feasible to treat it like any other job and expect a certain level of quality and professionalism

of course, that wouldn't solve the ideological issue of people doing it just for the money with no passion, and since that's the main problem staff seem to have with money in osu! in general, it's not viable


as for the OP:

1. I have very little insight into anything related to SEV but 1) sounds sensible to me on the surface; regardless of whether it would actually help with activity, it just seems fair (would be nice to hear how other BNs feel about how SEV is handled)
2. basing activity on drain time is honestly something that could be expanded into its own point, although doing away with activity requirements entirely may also be worth considering
   
   some thoughts on no activity

   1. it could increase total BNG activity by allowing more BNs with lower individual activity to exist
   2. on the other hand, I could also see some BNs' activity lowering with lower expectations (no one specific just a general people thing)
   3. could be trialed with the option for the NAT to just cancel it if it goes poorly
   4. the trial might need to be kinda long to account for hype possibly skewing the results in the beginning
3. I wouldn't begrudge well-performing BNs a few self noms, that's fine by me
4. kinda agree with Nao about small monetary rewards, although I don't think the occasional mug or equivalent would be a bad thing (possibly only limited to special events like the original mug?)

Looking through the thread I have to agree with Nao’s point that the main problem isn’t really about SEV but rather lack of motivation to nominate stuff among most people. Reducing the value of obviousness over severity might indeed improve the overall atmosphere within the BNG to make people less worried about random disqualifications that have nothing to do with the map itself (e.g. bloated mp3 files)

Talking about the rewards, I feel like we should come up with something less abusable. What I mean is, it shouldn’t rely on nomination count/drain only but rather some quality measure which leads into a problem where quality itself is a subjective thing. For that matter I guess an algorithm similar to the one bnstats website uses to determine the ranking among nominators could be used to reward members who have been actually active and performed well within the last month.

Also giving BNs ability to either nom their maps or one-bn-nomination doesn’t feel quite right for me as it breaks the way maps get ranked.

I think there should be more ways of educating BNs into the group rather than filtering BNs into the group. There should be a broader platform for people to learn how to become a BN. The current way is to apply for BN and receive feedbacks from the evaluators (either through results or some unlikely follow-ups) which does not seem adequate for people to improve. Given they have to wait for a considerably long period to apply and obtain feedbacks again, it becomes very inefficient and sometimes they can even go into the opposite way of improving. Probably the NAT/BNG can host similar platforms like modding mentorship but with the clear objective to educate declined (but with potential to join BNG) applicants to facilitate their matriculation into the BNG. Therefore you can create a flow for people to learn modding and eventually enter the BNG if they want (General modding mentorship for beginners to pick up and once they show potential they could be educated to join BNG if willing to.) I think this could contribute to a more sustainable source of newly additions to the team.

For SEV personally I think I don't have much comments on punishing "hard" objective issues such as unsnaps or missing tags as those can be simply resolved by checking the map more carefully. But one thing I would agree on is that the current SEV is based on individual map and has nothing to do with draining time because getting one unsnap from an NHI TV Size is different from a mapset with a huge spread. I think considering the mapset scale rather than setting flat SEVs could be more "humane": if you mess up frequently on small sets then you have more problems or vice versa. (You could argue that when you accept a huge mapset you take the risk anyways but personally I think it's good to "balance" this risk) If activity is going to be related to draining time then this scheme could be applied potentially as well.

Additionally, I hope there could be more leniency on SEV over relatively subjective issues so that it could encourage BN to go out from the safe zone and nominate maps with more diversity. (It could also be mentioned here about another loosely related topic of raising the veto upheld ratio at community/forums/topics/1612055 )

As mentioned by other people, I don't think changing the way the severity system works will make the BNs more active, however, I still agree with the suggestion because I don't agree with how the severity system works.

Being judged by just a number doesn't feel right, especially when those set severities are manually set by the NATs themselves with their standards with no discussion made beforehand (I've seen so many 1/0 countless severities that felt extremely subjective and were not even issues to begin with, no one should be punished like this just for something that could've been slightly improved in someone's eyes).

Making the severity handbook less strict will make applying mods in qualified a lot easier, most of the time BNs avoid getting a disqualification just for the sake of having a number go up on their profile, which also makes the hosts of the maps go against suggestions that would've been instantly applied when the map was pending.

As for the second point, I think giving the BNs the ability to self-nominate a few maps per month(s) with very high activity would make a considerable portion of the team active again, nowadays any BN can get their map ranked so this shouldn't cause trouble. Getting other perks like Discord Nitro and similar also sounds good but I don't think we can create a sustainable money source without the owner of the game supporting the idea therefore this wouldn't work in the end.

I've concluded this a long time ago already, so, to answer the title of the post, how do we make the BNG more active?

The answer is pretty simple, because raising the activity of the current members is hard to do even with all the suggestions mentioned in this thread, the best way to go is to add more members to the team. To give an example, there is an incredibly high amount of mappers in the game whose maps reach the quality standards however we only have 50 BNs in osu! standard with an average of 10 to 15 people being open, it is clear that we don't have enough nominators in the team.

How do we get more BNs into the team? I have to agree with everything that Mafumafu has said above since it is also something that I've been wishing for it to happen for a long time. Organize a mentorship made for modders who are interested in contributing to the game by joining the BNG and allow any current BN to become a mentor. Reward the mentors with exclusively made badges and titles on their profiles, and consider giving the mentees a chance to enter the team given that they are assisted by fellow BNs and that they will learn even more when they get the chance to experience how nominating maps is during probation. I'll be glad to help to organize this if we can get the mentor rewards and more people agrees with the idea.

aside from the theoretical ideas that have been already mentioned here, theres an easier more practical solution that wouldnt require much change at all:

-> ease strictness of application itself and increase initial probation time from 1 month to something like 3

i feel this would quite quickly increase the amount of people who are passionate about being bns to actually join the bng, and if it turns out in those 3 months of probation they demonstrated that they actually arent competent enough to hold the position, then you can go about removing them and giving them a long application cooldown

i say this bcs there is a constant cycle of people who: want to join bng > barely dont get in despite being decent modders > get subpar feedback on their modding > lose motivation > never try to apply again

suddenly most ppl who would actually go on to become active and good bns never get into the position and there is a drought of bn quantity and quality

i also find the strictness of bn apps incredibly ridiculous when actual bn modding will barely ever involve anything as complex as you are expected to do for an application at the moment

@Basensorex I agree with how the application standards should be slightly lowered, but I also want to say that during the past months based on my mock evaluator experience, there hasn't been a single application that is worth giving a passing vote. Most of the time the applications are very bad and do not even cover the necessary skillsets mentioned in the bn application page (I believe this is a combination of a low amount of people submitting applications + the content of the applications not being adequate, e.g. not providing lower difficulty overarching issues).

This is caused because no one knows how to make a proper application, it's extremely hard or even impossible to get into the team without having someone to guide you. I've been thinking for the past few months to create a public guide on how to format a good BN application so that it contains what the NATs want to see, stuff like this would be very useful for previously failed applicants that have a good amount of modding knowledge but still don't know what they're doing wrong.

I also believe that the application should be a lot more lenient towards ex-members of the team, being a BN in the end is just about picking decently-made maps that reach the standards and making sure they meet the ranking criteria. If someone in the past has been able to successfully push maps during 1~ year without getting major disqualifications, their performance as a returning BN will most likely be the same unless we are talking about very edge cases.

@didah im aware that the majority of bn apps are pretty garbo but my point was mostly referring to those who have a decent enough idea of what theyre doing

there are like 4 apps that ive seen from different people where i feel a flat out rejection was wholely unfair and all of them couldve probably been given the position and done just fine

i also forgot to mention one of the reasons i feel its way too strict is bcs there are a number of bns who got in at way different times where apps were more lax, to the point i feel a lot of them could not realistically pass a bn application nowadays; which sorta begs the question of why theyre allowed to stay but new modders of similar levels of competency cant

i do agree however that there should be publically available learning sources that are straightforward and easy to find, currently id say the closest thing we have to that is electozs modding guide but its relatively ineffective to learn from reading than it is with being actively taught through a mentor

ease strictness of application itself and increase initial probation time from 1 month to something like 3

Didn't Seto do this with like 4 people as an experiment? Fast-tracked into probation BNs. I believe that was scrapped/the other NAT never supported it, plus Seto left shortly after so I don't think anything ever came of it.

@sylvarus ye dont remember the details of that ordeal but it was pretty epic tbh at the time, and aside from it being bad optics back then bcs it was so sudden, itd be cool to see more of those kind of bn trials done without the people involved deadging immediately after

it may just be my own observation, but all it takes is a single 2/* or */2 DQ to knock a BN down to extra probation... isn't that too harsh? is that perhaps the cause of lost motivation?

@h3ocharles that is not exactly how it works but yes fear of dqs does make a lot of bns less active than they otherwise could be

The incentive part:

The first thing that should change is that someone shouldn't want to be a member of the team just to work on their own maps and predominantly on other BN's maps. On the other hand, if the modding system still existed, modders/BN members would be much more experienced. To tell you the truth, my opinion is that 5/or/7 years earlier the community was much more supportive , cohesive and took better care of things. but then came these "innovations" and "no more "required" modding" because it's so outdated. There you go, that's the result! The first issue to be addressed is how to facilitate the work of BN members and then to encourage them to be more active and not just look for what's popular. The most important thing is to actually put people in the team who actually have some experience and not just put them in the system based on how many kudos they have. This is what the BN mentor programme would be good for, but it obviously needs people, time, etc. An experienced/veteran BN is anyway afraid of someone who is new, has little experience and is less qualified. First and foremost, the solution should be to minimise the number of problems in the qualify process. If BNs, modders, and mappers would pay attention to their work, maybe if real modding would exist, there would be less maps that bleed from multiple wounds.

That's it for me.

I hope, this is really understandable, i'm bad in english. If something is ambiguous, please indicate for me.

@kazuya ?????

The first thing that should change is that someone shouldn't want to be a member of the team just to work on their own maps and predominantly on other BN's maps.

ok fair enough

On the other hand, if the modding system still existed, modders/BN members would be much more experienced.

what? you know modding still exists right? sure, ranked maps on average get less mods nowadays but thats more because bns prefer to pick higher quality maps from the start rather than pick maps u need to mod for hours in order to make rankable

but then came these "innovations" and "no more "required" modding" because it's so outdated

no lol, what happened is people realized needing 50 mods on a map that was perfectly fine just to get it ranked was a complete and utter waste of time, it is a far better use of ur time to just nom it as is and go on to check more maps

first issue to be addressed is how to facilitate the work of BN members and then to encourage them to be more active and not just look for what's popular.

thats absolutely not the issue here, if bns were only looking to push whats "popular" then u wouldnt see the same stigmatization around nomming simple anime maps which tend to be by far the most "popular" genre of maps

The most important thing is to actually put people in the team who actually have some experience and not just put them in the system based on how many kudos they have.

honest question when was the last time you were truly active in terms of the modding scene? thats not how getting into bng works at all; although i can agree that the current selection system is flawed, you displayed that u have no clue how the current system functions in the slightest

If BNs, modders, and mappers would pay attention to their work, maybe if real modding would exist, there would be less maps that bleed from multiple wounds.

i think everyone can agree that being cautious around what youre nominating is GOOD but ur implying here that the overall problem is a lack of modding done by bns which is completely untrue. bns do generally check the maps they accept well enough, the problem is moreso the fact that they are far less active in terms of *how many* maps they have the motivation to accept especially since the punishment for minor dqs is so overdone

Basensorex wrote:

aside from the theoretical ideas that have been already mentioned here, theres an easier more practical solution that wouldnt require much change at all:

-> ease strictness of application itself and increase initial probation time from 1 month to something like 3

i feel this would quite quickly increase the amount of people who are passionate about being bns to actually join the bng, and if it turns out in those 3 months of probation they demonstrated that they actually arent competent enough to hold the position, then you can go about removing them and giving them a long application cooldown

i say this bcs there is a constant cycle of people who: want to join bng > barely dont get in despite being decent modders > get subpar feedback on their modding > lose motivation > never try to apply again

suddenly most ppl who would actually go on to become active and good bns never get into the position and there is a drought of bn quantity and quality

i also find the strictness of bn apps incredibly ridiculous when actual bn modding will barely ever involve anything as complex as you are expected to do for an application at the moment

I have to agree with this and I think it's obvious that the current recruitment process is flawed when the number of BNs has actually decreased in the recent past (referring to standard). In fact, I'd even go further and say the entire BN application system needs to be reworked. Besides being difficult and time consuming, I feel like this selection method isn't the best at determining whether someone is up to the task. Applicants have to fabricate 3 perfect mods that encompass all possible scenarios. Finding maps that meet this requirement is already a pretty big obstacle, and getting everything right specifically in these 3 mods makes it very challenging. These expectations don't reflect the actual circumstances of being a BN, where you can freely choose what maps to mod/nominate, regardless of how many and which type of issues they might have. The activity requirement for standard is another obstacle that unnecessarily restricts people from joining the BN (as far as I can tell the other game modes are doing fine/better without it, e.g. mania has grown a lot).
I'll try to keep this as short as possible but my suggestion is a different approach where applicants wouldn't have to submit any example mods. Instead, after passing the RC test, the evaluators would look at the most recent mods but less strictly (just to see if they're constructive, reasonable and explanatory, but without having to fulfill all the criteria as before). If no major issues are noted, the probation period would begin, which would work very differently than right now. BNs on probation wouldn't actually nominate maps, they would only be able to place hypothetical nominations that serve the purpose of allowing the NAT to evaluate the person in a more practical manner (for comparison, the current system doesn't take into account whether the modded maps would be ready/good enough for ranked or not, at least not as much). The idea behind not letting probationary BNs place real nominations is to compensate for the less strict checks of past mods, in order to prevent low quality maps from getting ranked. A hypothetical nomination would work like this: The modder would complete their mod/check of the map and after all changes have been applied, they would notify the NAT via the BN website that they intend to nominate it by uploading the respective .osz file at that time (to account for unwanted subsequent changes). After a certain period of time, the NAT would evaluate the mods and nominations and if they are deemed good enough the applicant would become an actual BN.

@Basensorex

When was the last time I modded maps? When many other people were looking for modders (5-6 yrs ago) in the same way, but nowadays most people approach the whole ranking process as just 5 pieces of hype and it's off to BN. 75% of people think it's enough to get as many hype nominations as possible. This has drastically reduced the number of people willing to write mods and improve themselves in this area. When it comes to getting in, even if there are tests, exams, most of the people who get in are absolutely looking for the easiest way to keep their position, to get the number of mods they need per month (if there are any) In fact, most people's attitude to this BN membership is that it's the only way they can get their maps ranked and the whole status has basically become a currency that you can trade with another BN to get ranked. (nom 4 nom). I can imagine how many people apply for the position and more than half of them fail. Part of the reason why the number of members can't grow any faster is because it's mostly people trying to get in who want to rank their own map, maybe some friends' work, and then become inactive. Artificial intelligence could obviously end the whole problem, but I doubt it will. It takes too much time to develop such a system. As time goes on and the community changes, things will become more and more like BN status is good for trading in order to get your map ranked. It is because of this attitude, and the quick rankings, that tougher sanctions have had to be created which have not been fully thought through as to what level they should be.

I think something has been very wrong in the past.

@kazuya excuse me?

nowadays most people approach the whole ranking process as just 5 pieces of hype and it's off to BN

basen pretty much explained why it is like this already? why would people ask for mods when they don't need one?

When it comes to getting in, even if there are tests, exams, most of the people who get in are absolutely looking for the easiest way to keep their position, to get the number of mods they need per month (if there are any) In fact, most people's attitude to this BN membership is that it's the only way they can get their maps ranked and the whole status has basically become a currency that you can trade with another BN to get ranked

ok sure there are certain people who only mod their friends' map but seriously, what's wrong with b4b? bns are also mappers, they want to rank maps, they don't want their maps to go to utter waste just like many mappers out there? this is when a lot of bns are active in modding other non-bn or non-friends, they're just slow. also do i need to point out that bn isn't a chore? some bns were active when they first joined but then went inactive since they have irl stuffs to do. of course they can't be as efficiency as they used to be. as long as they can do their job well, i see no problem with it.

Part of the reason why the number of members can't grow any faster is because it's mostly people trying to get in who want to rank their own map, maybe some friends' work, and then become inactive

this is downright nonsense i don't think i need to talk about this

idk it seems to me that you're just :copium: when writing this. like what basen said: when was the last time you were active in the modding scene?

My two cents on the whole ordeal, as someone who got their modscore together for an app multiple times and still didn't apply:
I have seen about ~15 NAT Feedbacks to applications in the last year and every single one didn't feel like proper feedback at all - or at least I wouldn't have been able to improve from that. Picking out like ~3 things and calling it a day doesn't really cut it.
Knowing that your mods need to be (almost) perfect + sets need to cover a long ass list of things (that no, isn't obvious without a NAT or BN telling you), while also ideally being recent, doesnt't help either. Plus as it has already been stated - this doesn't represent actual BN work at all.
To me it always felt like pushing a boulder up a mountain.

With that: The whole mentorship idea would be great, but also less gatekeeping by actually writing down the expectations and requirements properly. Small quality of life changes like ONLY being able to submit 3 modded sets and forcing you to submit pre-mod oszs would go a looooong way.

writing down the expectations and requirements properly

i also support creating an enumerated criteria for acceptance. applications/mods which meet all the criteria should guarantee acceptance. this would enable many more individuals who would be competent bns to join, in my opinion.

There is actually a list of criteria on the wiki: wiki/en/People/The_Team/Beatmap_Nominators/Becoming_a_Beatmap_Nominator

But the problem is the criteria itself as mentioned before, and the fact that applicants can be rejected for subjective reasons (different opinions/points of view) despite fulfilling all the requirements.

Serizawa Haruki wrote:

There is actually a list of criteria on the wiki: wiki/en/People/The_Team/Beatmap_Nominators/Becoming_a_Beatmap_Nominator

But the problem is the criteria itself as mentioned before, and the fact that applicants can be rejected for subjective reasons despite fulfilling all the requirements.

Yeah I know that page all too well, but this is basically just a vague summary. Going by what either BNs or other sources like ele's modding guide have said - this list doesn't really go into any detail on anything. Just trying to adhere to that will result in a fail in like, what, 99% of cases? There just aren't enough proper resources on how to properly create an application that has an actual shot at passing.

id like to revive this thread as ive noticed a couple changes that have begun the process of making BNG less shitty to join which is kinda related to BNG being more active since more BNs = more noms

-> BN app evals have finally started being standardized and not completely dependant on the NAT who writes them
holy fuck dude why did it take years for this to happen but finally there is a set template to BN app evals that the NAT uses, meaning feedback is actually standardized and easy to understand for anyone, as well as denial reasons being far easier to understand and work on

-> NAT seems to be open to the idea of allowing "deniable" applicants in on a stricter probation in order to actually test run them as BNs
i wont post it here in case he doesnt want to share it, but in a recently joined BN application eval feedback, it is clearly stated in the notes sections that his application was very close to being denied and he was allowed in solely on the condition that he would show improvements in modding and competent BN'ing from his side during probation, which i think is a far better system than just denying anyone who just barely "doesnt make it"

ive also seen somebody else's BN app denial eval and they happened to receive a cooldown reduction which i legitimately have not seen in years, so i think thats nice but idk if its just a coincidence or if NAT is actually trying to be even a bit more lenient

i believe both of these things are 2 great steps in minimizing how bad the state of the BNG is at the moment.
for the future i'd like to see the application/probation system be reworked to what i originally stated on this thread, but this is progress and im not gonna complain about it, and i will commend the NAT for actually following through with changes to the system after receiving backlash rather than just completely donowalling the community

1) has since happened independently at discretion of the NAT
2) is the sort of thing that should be re-discussed, woudl require web changes and im not sure we can get the developers on board w/ the idea of someone ranking their own shit lols but yea idea should stay floating around