Currently, we're trying for some changes within the RC that should potentially open up mapping to a wider audience and make it more interesting for mappers and players alike. Time has shown that many people have built up a decline of interest when it comes to ranking their maps, which is one of the big reasons we want to make the ranked section more interesting and make it fit into current trends. This is proposal 1/2 of our current plans to advance our system. This has also been brought up to the BNG, as we tried to gather more opinions until releasing a proposal.

Kantan and Futsuu difficulties bar pretty much any form of advanced challenge due to their strict guidelines, which leaves less room for creativity and also forbids a more advanced "official" challenge, within their snap boundaries. This means, that you really won't see a Futsuu going beyond 7 notes on 1/2 patterns and every Futsuu that does use 7 note patterns is pretty much guaranteed to have it pointed out in order to nerf them.

Kantan players won't get a breakdown from having longer patterns than 7 notes on a 1/1 snap and even for those, who would realy struggle with it, there are a ton of beginner difficulties nowadays that are suited to get the hang of the first few drums you hit. This shouldn't decline Kantan and Futsuu players (their difficulty equivalent) from a more realistic challenge fitting to their individual level.

Going from Futsuu to Muzu has always proven to be a tough step, going from way longer 1/2 possibilities while also introducing a completely new snap, being 1/4 patterns. There should still be a gap when it comes to pattern length, but there are always songs that would support longer patterning, which would also help with the jump, as you're getting used to slightly longer patterns, more dense mapping and are therefore not thrown into a pack of new challenges when jumping to the next difficulty.

Those players should also have their own challenge, right to their capabilities, without having to learn something completely new. This would also give mappers a bit more freedom for intense songs and make it easier to handle certain situations.

And now finally, the changes we have in mind:



Please leave your opinion down below and suggest any further changes you might have. Thanks!

endorse

I agree

I support this because, when used well, longer chains can support the music and make it easier to understand. Limiting the chains to 7 notes can result in weird simplifications if the song has a really strong chain of eighth (1/2) notes. As long as it’s not used excessively and supported by the music, which is implicit in this rule, it should make mapping lower difficulties more intuitive to map and representative of the music.

Also mania is over here using 1/4ths in normal lol

Agree

good change, however it should still be regulated as these changes can potentially introduce futsuus as "lite oni" in disguise on bpms that are ~240 which im personally against. i know that bpm scaling exists today but it has way less impact on high bpm maps imo. a good example of this is navi 98, personally i found the futsuu way too hard for your average futsuu player, and introducing/normalizing even longer patterns would be absurd.

agree

hard disagree, there’s no reason to have patterns these long in a kantan for 99% of all songs out there. a kantan is meant for people trying to get into taiko and from experience i hope many can also agree that most kantans are hard enough already!! especially on high bpm

Disagree current RC is fine

Disagree, current RC pushes Kantans and Futsuus to what their boundaries should be, any more and you just ruin the point of the difficulties in the first place, they are introductions to the gamemode.

Would be an uneven progression if you went from a 9plet 1/1 Kantan to a 9plet 1/2 Futsuu. Disagree with both of these, but the Kantan one is okay, absolutely not the Futsuu though. Too straining, especially for higher BPM's.

Agree, but make sure that this is not used on higher bpm

« Going from Futsuu to Muzu has always proven to be a tough step, going from way longer 1/2 possibilities while also introducing a completely new snap, being 1/4 patterns. »

So many memories

I think the biggest issue with the jump from futsuu to muzu is that, similar to standard, the inclusion of 1/4 is much harder than going from 1/1 to 1/2. If the goal is to bridge the gap between futsuu and muzu, I believe promoting 1/4 triples as a valid difficulty element in low BPM (140 or less) futsuu would be a better approach than just extending 1/2 pattern length.

Regardless - agree with the proposal.

don't think longer patterning would necessarily add any challenges tbh. if they can already hit 7 notes in succession, then they already likely mastered patterns at that point on any given length. doesn't mean i reject this proposal, but the change seems a bit negligible.

using 9 note long patterns is fine if the color changes arent too complicated. simple patterns like ddddkkkkd or ddkkddkkd etc. would be reasonable mapping choices if they fit with the music and are already rankable, changing the guideline would only lead to inexperienced mappers using unnecessarily complicated long patterns

ZTH wrote:

don't think longer patterning would necessarily add any challenges tbh. if they can already hit 7 notes in succession, then they already likely mastered patterns at that point on any given length. doesn't mean i reject this proposal, but the change seems a bit negligible.

Currently 7 note patterns are getting modded out fairly often, an increase to 9 would not mean spamming 9 note 1/2 becomes the norm, but would open up to a more accepted usage of 7 note patterns as well

Hard disagree

Capu wrote:

Kantan and Futsuu difficulties bar pretty much any form of advanced challenge due to their strict guidelines, which leaves less room for creativity and also forbids a more advanced "official" challenge, within their snap boundaries. This means, that you really won't see a Futsuu going beyond 7 notes on 1/2 patterns and every Futsuu that does use 7 note patterns is pretty much guaranteed to have it pointed out in order to nerf them.

This wasn't an issue at all for the most time, most patterns don't even goes over 5 notes of 1/1 or 1/2 and allowing potentially 9 notes patterns could really make the difficulties too dense especially if they are consecutive.

Capu wrote:

Going from Futsuu to Muzu has always proven to be a tough step, going from way longer 1/2 possibilities while also introducing a completely new snap, being 1/4 patterns.

The issue here more lies on the muzu->oni bridge issue, it's a more common wall for players at this difficulty audience due to players not being used to very frequent 1/4 multi-colour usage compared to their muzukashii counterparts.
The bridge between futsuu->muzu has always been somewhat thin mostly because muzukashii barely uses longer 1/2 patterns in general compared to the futsuu overall and this proposal would make the bridge even worse.

Nahh, but like 5plets. I'm sure people will start using 1/2 7plets more comfortably because of this change.

As someone that is stuck at between futsuu and muzu I have to agree

I don't think this change would be that good. Nowdays a mappers already use a lot of 5 1/1's in Kantan's or 5 1/2's in Futsuu's which make them already pretty hard for players which are getting into a new area of difficulty. I know some people who like using 7 notes of 1/2 or longer just because the rc allows it. I am pretty sure that it could be allowed if you leave this rule more strict, so it's not allowed to use that often in a map. It would make the map not that hard but also allows you to play with longer patterns.

If the rule would be more strict I am down to let this be a new rc change. For example: 1/1 patterns with a chain of 8 or 9 notes should be rarely used and should have a rest moment of at least 3/1 after that. Anything harder is to likely to be too straining for the beginners (just an example, probably not right as a rule tho, so need a bit of change)

Capu wrote:

Currently 7 note patterns are getting modded out fairly often, an increase to 9 would not mean spamming 9 note 1/2 becomes the norm, but would open up to a more accepted usage of 7 note patterns as well

I don’t understand why it has to increase to 9 notes for 7 note patterns to not get modded out? I’m reading this as a modding issue, not a RC issue.

Like others have mentioned, I don’t think the problem is the length of patterns. 1/1 to 1/2 is already a high increase in difficulty. I don’t think it would be much of a difference. 1/2 to 1/4 is where the problem is. I agree with Nao that 1/4 on low bpm (~120) could help with spread gaps much more than a longer pattern, or increasing the break leniency like in the second proposal.

arialle wrote:

Capu wrote:

Currently 7 note patterns are getting modded out fairly often, an increase to 9 would not mean spamming 9 note 1/2 becomes the norm, but would open up to a more accepted usage of 7 note patterns as well

I don’t understand why it has to increase to 9 notes for 7 note patterns to not get modded out? I’m reading this as a modding issue, not a RC issue.

Like others have mentioned, I don’t think the problem is the length of patterns. 1/1 to 1/2 is already a high increase in difficulty. I don’t think it would be much of a difference. 1/2 to 1/4 is where the problem is. I agree with Nao that 1/4 on low bpm (~120) could help with spread gaps much more than a longer pattern, or increasing the break leniency like in the second proposal.

The problem with saying something is a modding issue is that new mappers will assume that every modder knows better than they do. I agree modders should do better though. Not sure why but in my experience you don't see modders complaining about "too easy", so I somewhat agree with guidelines going for "make it hard, make modders nerf it later".

agreed

agree

As much as I agree with this change, I'd be a bit wary to pushing them to the RC as people would take it as a norm (see to what happened to the three 1/1 in a row for Muzukashii).

Have in mind current RC doesn't disallow people to go further than 7 notes. Whether this gets pushed or not, people should still have to justify long patterns (6+) in a Kantan, so it'd be the same if it was there or not. But I'd go with the idea of not due the reason I stated first.

Edit:

Also, these changes won't do anything to fix the difficulty gap between Futsuu and Muzukashii: no point in encouraging longer 1/2 chains if mappers aren't encouraged to make maps that introduce 1/4 to players (and similar with Muzukashii -> Oni) here and there. Already having old maps that kind of does that doesn't help as players lean more (and may be more exposed) to play recent stuff.

Agree

I support. With the recent adjustment if break times (32/1 for rest moment now) I think extending pattern lengths would help balance this (Simple patterns + long drain = bad, Long patterns + long drain = good)

agree, allows more advanced lowdiffs to help players on the cusp of bridging over to the next difficulty get over that gap

I feel like I have some concerns before I have an opinion on this proposal.

The current guideline doesn't prohibit the usage of the pattern that is longer than 7 notes for Kantan and Futsuu. Some of the scenario cases that break this guideline I've seen before is that the music's BPM is significantly lower than the base BPM on RC, like 128 BPM, and thus using 9 notes on Kantan as a result.

If this proposal is meant to be a guideline, which scenario do you think is appropriate to break this guideline and make the pattern go beyond 9 notes on Kantan and Futsuu difficulty? Even if the BPM of the music is low, I still believe that 11 notes 1/2 pattern in Futsuu difficulty are way a bit too much for a normal player to handle as the complexity is multiplied by the length of the pattern.

At least, I want to see a case scenario that the proposal guideline should be broken before. Leaving this in a guideline section means that there is always room for negotiation to go beyond and break it during modding discussion.

okay agree

I think it's ok to increase to 9 the cap of 1/1 on kantan and 1/2 on futsuu. From mapper perspective, modding has nothing to do with it, at least that's my opinion. Guidelines can be broken, yes, but can be followed easily too. It's not like you need to use 9plets or more in every kantan or futsuu you do. If you only need a 7plets, you will use a 7plets.

When modders will mod the map they can suggest different other things if they are unsatisfied of that 9plets.

It does not change anything if not giving more free space and creativity to kantan and futsuu's structure.
It's mapper responsability to use this guideline and don't abuse it. General difficulty of the map, bpm and song complexity should be taken into consideration when using 9plets or more.
It's like the use of color changes on 1/4 triplets or doublets on muzukashii. It's allowed to do so but not many people do that because it can be risky. Nevertheless there are many muzukashii with that characteristic that are very good and fun to play.

Talking about the fact it could be too difficult for kantan and futsuu players, we need to consider that many players in taiko stop their growth as a player playing only muzukashii most of the time. That's because people think the level of difficulty between muzukashii and oni is not the same as futsuu/muzukashii or kantan/futsuu and they feel a little surprised when they try their first oni.
In this case why should we not increase the difficulty and push them to have a better learning curve instead of stopping mappers to use harder patterns on kantan and futsuu? By increasing difficulty we gave kantan and futsuu players another step to go through and learn longer and difficult patterns that are normal in muzukashii and oni. The more you get used to longer and difficult patterns the better and faster it is to be accustomed to new difficulties

Thinking about what is hard and what is easy on a lower diff should be the real challenge of this change. Surely taiko has changed a lot in these years. Maps became more difficult and different than the first old ones. I think we shouldn't be afraid of this change.
If a player wants to improve, they want to play harder maps. If a player does not want to improve, this change could give a little bit of challenge and maybe change their opinion on improving...or it could do nothing if not giving a challenging kantan/futsuu.

Only change if the new system is implemented with simpler patterns

I agree that there should be pattern restrictions on longer streams of consecutive notes. kdkddkkkd would probably be too hard for a futsuu player, especially if its the lowest diff on a mapset. Also I don't agree with the ideology that there are "already enough beginner oriented maps out there". People will tend to play what is newly ranked because it is at the top of the beatmap listings. Therefore there should always be a steady stream of beatmaps that are accessible to new players to not alienate them. Thats the entire reason why spreads are required.

Overall not a fan of the proposal in its current state.

topic is kinda inconclusive, made a note to pick something about this back up in rc rewrite; archiving this for now