Hello! This is the second proposal in my set of catch proposals. Each of these proposals are independent of each other for implementation, but some wordings may be interchangeable depending on whether finalized or not.
As it stands right now, there is currently a huge drought of maps entering the ranked section. Anyone who has been even slightly active in the scene can tell that there is drastically less maps being ranked now than there was even a few months ago. This is due to several reasons (waning bn numbers, less mappers, lower quality maps) but I want to try to solve atleast one of these things for now which may have a ripple effect on the others.
The first thing required to make this proposal work is to add a new difficulty to the Ranking Criteria: Deluge. You can read more about this separate proposal here.
The idea is to adopt the time changes from mania's recent change but adding little more restriction to prevent X/XX/XXX spreads. community/forums/topics/1440933?n=1 The proposal is as follows:
If the drain time of each osu!catch difficulty is...
...lower than 2:30, the lowest difficulty cannot be harder than a Salad,
IF the highest difficulty is a Deluge, a singular Platter, Rain and Overdose are required
...between 2:30 and 3:15, the lowest difficulty cannot be harder than a Platter,
IF the highest difficulty is a Deluge, a singular Rain and Overdose are required/
...between 3:15 and 4:00, the lowest difficulty cannot be harder than a Rain,
IF the highest difficulty is a Deluge, a singular Overdose is required.
The reasoning behind adding Deluge into the ranking criteria will be that spreads of excessive difficulties will no longer be required when mapping an extremely high star map (which would now be defined as Deluge). The prior rule "there cannot be any drastically large difficulty gaps between any two difficulties." will ensure that spreads consisting of a Rain, an easier overdose and a harder deluge will not be a thing. This will also allow Deluge's to be mapped as a singular difficulty starting at 4:00, same as Overdoses.
While mania had their own reasonings for these changes (which can be seen in their own proposal), I will go through my own personal thoughts and reasons as why I view this change necessary for catch:
part 1
part 2
part 3
part 4
part 5
As it stands right now, there is currently a huge drought of maps entering the ranked section. Anyone who has been even slightly active in the scene can tell that there is drastically less maps being ranked now than there was even a few months ago. This is due to several reasons (waning bn numbers, less mappers, lower quality maps) but I want to try to solve atleast one of these things for now which may have a ripple effect on the others.
The first thing required to make this proposal work is to add a new difficulty to the Ranking Criteria: Deluge. You can read more about this separate proposal here.
The idea is to adopt the time changes from mania's recent change but adding little more restriction to prevent X/XX/XXX spreads. community/forums/topics/1440933?n=1 The proposal is as follows:
If the drain time of each osu!catch difficulty is...
...lower than 2:30, the lowest difficulty cannot be harder than a Salad,
IF the highest difficulty is a Deluge, a singular Platter, Rain and Overdose are required
...between 2:30 and 3:15, the lowest difficulty cannot be harder than a Platter,
IF the highest difficulty is a Deluge, a singular Rain and Overdose are required/
...between 3:15 and 4:00, the lowest difficulty cannot be harder than a Rain,
IF the highest difficulty is a Deluge, a singular Overdose is required.
The reasoning behind adding Deluge into the ranking criteria will be that spreads of excessive difficulties will no longer be required when mapping an extremely high star map (which would now be defined as Deluge). The prior rule "there cannot be any drastically large difficulty gaps between any two difficulties." will ensure that spreads consisting of a Rain, an easier overdose and a harder deluge will not be a thing. This will also allow Deluge's to be mapped as a singular difficulty starting at 4:00, same as Overdoses.
While mania had their own reasonings for these changes (which can be seen in their own proposal), I will go through my own personal thoughts and reasons as why I view this change necessary for catch:
- The amount of high-end maps being ranked between the 2:30-4:30 range is staggeringly low. Based off drain time using site search metrics beatmapsets?m=2&q=length%3E150%20length%3C270%20stars%3E7&s=ranked you can see that there are only EIGHT ranked maps that are above 7 stars, with NONE happening in the past 6 months. This is a major problem as you start to have a drought of maps for the players in the highest echelons of the game, leading to burnout from playing either only 2 minute maps where spreads are readily available or 5 minute maps where spreads are not needed. Top player retention is at an all-time low. Having more of these maps will alow more players to break into these higher echelons instead of getting stuck at a wall due to not having any ranked maps within their range to play.
- More high end maps. With relaxed spread requirements DOZENS of maps can be ranked WITH EASE if this change were to be pushed, namely some very popular maps including Bunnrei's Hope's and dreams from CWC, Ascendance and Bunnrei's ENDYMION, or even Rocma's {albus} ("Silver" Long ver.). You may be also thinking to yourself, "there's not too many maps that would get ranked with this change!!". That's where I would like to transition into point 3.
- MAP/SONG VARIETY - This is the real big selling point. I'm sure that nearly every single mapper in this gamemode has looked at a song, see that its juuuust short of being 5 minutes long, only being 4:54 in drain time then saying "nah I don't want to have to make a spread for that". What about that time when you saw a song that was 3:35 that would make a really cool deluge but you would need to make a platter, rain AND a potential extra overdose if the deluge was too hard? Or maybe that time when you found a really sick jazz song with super complex timings and snaps but making a lower diff would just be immensely tedious at a length of 3-4 minutes? That's where this proposal really shines. By changing the spread rules you are opening up such a wide variety of songs that haven't been explored to their full potential. This will create more interesting maps than we have currently, enticing more people to either join or rejoin the Beatmap Nominators, creating a cycle of increased map flow to ranked.
part 1
part 2
part 3
part 4
part 5