We've seen how biased community votes can be in the top-players votings. It's more of a popularity thing than a capability thing. Before pushing in that direction I'd like to give an automatic difficulty system my best, though. If it ends up working, then it saves an incredible amount of time and work - and there would be no need for funky multipliers on autoconverts and such.

Yes that's true about the voters being biased, I'm not sure on how to combat that.

About the automatic difficulty system, it will be very hard to appropriately put a difficulty on songs. I can complete some 11 star songs, but I can't even finish some 2-3 star maps because the patterns are so foreign to me (basic ln walls). Note density and speed are factors in a difficulty, but I think the pattern is what defines how difficult a map is, which makes it very hard for an automated program. This is why I think a team dedicated to judging the difficulty of songs is the best option, and no matter what, a real players judgement will trump almost any program
Edit: typos

At least let him try... Don't be negative about this attempt just because you've never seen it done well before. I don't expect it to be super accurate but I think it can be accurate enough to at least give the rankings some meaning. And while I think letting expert players determine the diffs of the mapsets is also a viable way to go, it also has its flaws.

Tom94 did a miracle with std pp, I feel safe trusting him to do mania pp too.

Alright let me try something (if I may)

Here's some maps where the current star system grades too low, meaning their much harder than they let on if you look at their star count.

https://osu.ppy.sh/s/133891
https://osu.ppy.sh/s/131228
https://osu.ppy.sh/s/92012

And here's some maps that are overrated.

https://osu.ppy.sh/b/235027&m=3 (lv 18)
https://osu.ppy.sh/s/104030 (lv21)
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/284854&m=3 (lv36) lololol
(I'm claiming this based on the performance I see of certain play vs their performance on lower star counts)


Seems the biggest (not only) problem with the current system is not giving enough points toward long notes and brackets, and too much points towards density

I don't really think it's fair to completely invalidate auto-converts. From what I can tell, osu! does a pretty bang up job on converting. But excluding that, the ranking system isn't meant to judge what songs are "valid" or not, that's what a song being approved/ranked does.

The ranking system is designed to determine the skill level of a player comparable to his/her fellow players. It simply wouldn't make since for a kick ass player to have all of their time thrown down the drain from playing auto-converts and have a rank far worse than some elitist that only plays !mania maps, but can only play at about the same skill level as a baboon sitting on the keyboard!

Scale them slightly? Sure, I can understand that. Invalidate them entirely? Perish the thought, it's asinine and rather unfair.

Chocobubba wrote:

From what I can tell, osu! does a pretty bang up job on converting.
No it does not. ACs served as temporary playable for when o!m first came out, like a preview or something like that.

But excluding that, the ranking system isn't meant to judge what songs are "valid" or not, that's what a song being approved/ranked does.
You wouldn't let football players play on an invalid field full of holes especially in a competitive environment now would you ?

The ranking system is designed to determine the skill level of a player comparable to his/her fellow players. It simply wouldn't make since for a kick ass player to have all of their time thrown down the drain from playing auto-converts and have a rank far worse than some elitist that only plays !mania maps, but can only play at about the same skill level as a baboon sitting on the keyboard!
Kick ass players who score very high scores on ACs usually plays mania-spec maps as well. Don't confuse elitist players with players who play the game mode how it is supposed to be played.

Scale them slightly? Sure, I can understand that. Invalidate them entirely? Perish the thought, it's asinine and rather unfair.
There are 1001 reasons for which we should totally eliminate them from the mania ranking system. Every counter-arguments I've read so far are half-assed.

The points every "pro-mania-spec players" wanted to show are all grouped into Drace's post (page 6).

Please don't talk about autoconverts vs. mania-spec maps if you don't know anything about the game-mode.

Good luck with the ranking system, Tom.

I'm thinking of something about determining maps' density. I might throw this idea into the Feature Requests sometime later : what about a toggle (similar to how Kiai is applied currently - from a point of time to another) to be applied on a certain part of the song which would eliminate this part from the density count ? That is, several songs have some calm parts which don't have many notes at the said part, and as such don't reflect the real density of the map. This would also fix the Star Rating to a certain extent. I believe this would facilitate your work with the algorithms and all. This would require some work from woc2006 but it shouldn't be too hard to implement.

Thoughts guys ?

Rating auto-converts "extremely low" seems abit drastic to me.
I agree that they shouldn't have the same value as normal osu!mania maps, but I wouldn't want the gap to be massive either.

Dunno if they should be completely ignored (playing the same density for a longer time can be more demanding on your stamina for example), and I don't it's too much of a problem for an algorithm to determine those 'chillax' parts, but this is definitely going in the right direction.

Also another thing I would like to say is you should maybe first try doing some simple pattern checks along with density. Then ask multiple advanced++ players to playtest your system on various maps with different styles and different difficulties. They should be able to pinpoint some of the flaws. Trying to do that all in one go is painful guesswork, imo you will need multiple 'feedback stops' like this.

Xcrypt wrote:

Dunno if they should be completely ignored (playing the same density for a longer time can be more demanding on your stamina for example), and I don't it's too much of a problem for an algorithm to determine those 'chillax' parts, but this is definitely going in the right direction.

Also another thing I would like to say is you should maybe first try doing some simple pattern checks along with density. Then ask multiple advanced++ players to playtest your system on various maps with different styles and different difficulties. They should be able to pinpoint some of the flaws. Trying to do that all in one go is painful guesswork, imo you will need multiple 'feedback stops' like this.

When I am ready to present some difficulty values I will post them in this thread. As mentioned multiple times I do want to have multiple testing iterations before incorporating the whole thing into a ranking system.

oh ok sorry

Auto converts definitely shouldn't be counted in mania PP. If they are then the PP will mean absolutely nothing. (unless you weight them so low that they are worth nothing in the first place)

Chocobubba wrote:

It simply wouldn't make since for a kick ass player to have all of their time thrown down the drain from playing auto-converts and have a rank far worse than some elitist that only plays !mania maps

There's no such thing as a "kick ass player" who only plays auto-converts, if your skill is anything other than extreme novice you can do any auto-convert in your sleep and would find them extremely boring.

Do people jump in here without reading the past few pages? PPv2 cannot be farmed, and mania maps will be worth a lot more by default - you'll have to play mania maps to get a decent rank. Anyway, this is outside the scope of Tom's work, so this is just clogging up the topic.

Some random thoughts on mania difficulty calc: Would a system similar to TP's aim/speed/acc work? Where 'aim' would be substituted for reading ability or something, which could increase with number of keys, difficult patterns and so on? Obviously not that generalised though.

Speed and accuracy could definitely be a thing. I don't know how you would go and calculate your reading ability, except maybe density you can handle of LN walls vs chord walls? But even so it really depends on the patterns I think.

PyaKura wrote:

Chocobubba wrote:

From what I can tell, osu! does a pretty bang up job on converting.
No it does not. ACs served as temporary playable for when o!m first came out, like a preview or something like that.

But excluding that, the ranking system isn't meant to judge what songs are "valid" or not, that's what a song being approved/ranked does.
You wouldn't let football players play on an invalid field full of holes especially in a competitive environment now would you ?
Why don't you go SS all the hard and insane converts if you think they're so easy then!

Please don't talk about autoconverts vs. mania-spec maps if you don't know anything about the game-mode.
Who said he doesn't know anything about the game mode?

Don't get me wrong, I agree the mania maps have a largely increased difficulty to the converted osu!standard maps... but to rule converts out all together is absurd. If there's such a big argument about it, why not just have two smaller ranking systems for mania? One for converts and one for genuine. Would solve the argument being provided here. Just have both ranks running on the same pp algorithm. As a side note, if this is not an option, why not make a poll to see how many people actually want auto converts to not count towards the new ranking system? There are obviously more people playing mania than there are on this forum.

I'm posting this for knowledge sake, as until just recently (24 hours ago or so) I was oblivious to the fact that there was a constant verbal battlefield amongst the forums about "Auto Converts" and "Mania" maps. I've always just played the game picking and choosing songs that peeked my interest song wise, and not difficulty wise. No, I didn't just play the easiest difficulty, but I also didn't beat myself up about not hitting 99%.

So my first question involves the quote below.

Tom94 wrote:

Beatmap difficulty:

This is were you all can help the most. My current concept is somewhere along the following: Similarly to how tp works with osu! standard maps I would like to instroduce strain values to measure how hard it is to play a certain map. This essentially means, that a higher note density will also be considered harder, while the algorithm is aware, that using a single hand or finger multiple times in a row is more demanding than simply alternating.
For mods the map will simply be transformed accordingly to what standard does in the moment. HR will increase OD, DT the speed at which the map plays back, etc.
I have not yet gone in-depth and it would be great if you could give me hints of what the hardest patterns are and how to rate difficulty. Any X-key feedback is welcome!

If this was implemented wouldn't this fix the whole "AC's are garbage and so are the players who play them" argument? It would assess songs and give PP according to their difficulty. Because of this, Mania songs which are made for Mania and thus, harder, would allocate more PP, and AC's that are extremely easy and slow would allocate less. If this is true, it's better than tossing AC's out the side completely due to the fact that you could find a much harder AC song vs a low level Mania song. There may be few among many, but they are there. This couples with the fact that Mania-specific songs do exist, but creating a whole scoring system solely off of the few that are out there (versus Osu! Standard) would limit the amount of songs available to the players (Ranked wise).

I can't stress enough that I've only just started learning about the PP and PPv2 system today, so any or all of this could be complete off base.

people wanting auto-convert maps to be unranked need to get off their high horse. this isnt o2jam, or bms, or djmax. auto-convert maps, whether you like it or not, is a part of osu!mania. they are there for the lack of songs compared to standard and as a means to ease new players into the mode. making them unranked or intentionally penalizing their worth unnecessarily denies a portion of the player base a chance at a ranking.

i would argue that keeping them ranked would encourage more people to play mania-specific maps. if the new ranking system does a good job at defining difficulty, it would notice that auto-convert maps are much easier than mania-specific maps and assign a higher pp value to the mania-specific maps. this means people that only play auto-converted maps will have no chance of getting higher ranks than people that play mania-specific maps. and it would also mean that if the auto-convert player wants to advance higher in the leaderboard, they would eventually have to play mania-specific maps.

in addition to that, auto-converted maps lower the barrier of entry to the leaderboard. it lets new players experience ladder play and see growth without the frustration of endlessly failing a "beginner" mania-specific map. they can learn and get comfortable with the mode on auto-converts, see improvement through their rank (#20,000 -> 19,950 is improvement), and realize that they need to play mania-specific maps when they hit the auto-convert ranking wall.

it also helps deal with the crappy difficulty curve mania-specific maps have. many of the mania-specific map's easy modes are in fact difficult for new players. the mode feels restrictive because current maps do a horrible job at easing in new players. if i tell my sister to play an easy mode song on, say, dj max portable 3 she will most likely pass the song. if i give her an "easy" osu!mania-specific map she will, more often than not, fail spectacularly. it gets even worse when comparing between two difficulties. you can get a good score on say, a normal mania-mode map, but try the next difficulty and the difficulty is 100x harder than the previous. auto-converted songs help deal with the learning cliff when getting into osu!mania which in turn helps people deal with the learning cliff when moving on to higher difficulties.

i honestly do not understand why some people would vote to exclude or penalize a group from something that should be all-inclusive.

Tom94 wrote:

Regarding the big auto-convert discussion:
I'm fairly positive, that a good difficulty algorithm would rate auto-converts extremely low, because they (mostly) are so easy compared to mania charts, so you would naturally have them worth less, not artificially by excluding them. Keep in mind, that the ranking system is meant to work for everyone, even the people who just start with mania who can't just dive into the mania-specific maps, or want a big map diversity at their lower level of skill.

so glad you feel this way. reassures me that the system is left in good hands.

and as an unrelated issue, would the difficulty algorithm be able to assign difficulty names? right now, difficulty naming for mania-specific maps is arbitrary, seemingly based on what game the mapper (or song) came from. there are maps with Lv.XX as difficulty in addition to maps with things like HD or MX which really mean nothing unless the player has experience with the source. there should be standardized difficulty names for osu!mania as the arbitrary difficulty names are confusing.

For example:
https://osu.ppy.sh/s/116133
Easy, Normal, Hard, Maximum.
thats good and easy to follow.

https://osu.ppy.sh/s/123456
NOV, ADV, EXH, INF.
i can understand NOV and ADV, but what is EXH and INF? and why is this different than the other map?

https://osu.ppy.sh/s/124866
Beginner Lv.2, NOVICE Lv.6, ADVANCED Lv.8, ADVANCED Lv.12, EXH, EXHAUST Lv.15
i can kind of follow it, but what are the levels for? and why does the second-to-last difficulty not have a level?

https://osu.ppy.sh/s/85585
Level 9, Level 18, Level 36
again, what do the levels mean? is the easiest difficulty for this song harder than all but the 3 hardest difficulties from the previous song?

difficulty names are arbitrary. it should use standard osu names (easy, normal, hard, insane) because this is osu, not o2jam, beatmania, djmax, etc.


and apologies for the wall of text >_>

First of all, to every post against unranking ACs (except Tom, his arguments actually made sense though I don't believe 1 point outclasses the many that's been presented from the other side.). None of you are presenting anything that could even be considered a fragment of a decent argument. Throwing stuff around like it's "absurd", "unfair" and saying we should all "perish the thought" with no basis whatsoever, thinking that it's enough to prove a point. And the slight points raised that could probably make a clueless person nod to the cause are completely overwhelmed and showed to be irrelevant in my previous post. It makes me wounder if anyone bothered reading it. Was it too long? Too hard to understand? Or maybe is it purposely being ignored because there's nothing to be said against it?

If you got nothing productive to say then don't say anything. These posts full of meaningless words are making the thread run around in circles.

Also: there's mania specific songs that first timers can clear. The problem is the the extremely limited 5 star scale that scales o2jam lv1 and o2jam level 9 at the same 1 star making it harder to find them. Saying autoconverts helps people get introduced to the genre is completely superfluous, if needed we can change the ranking criteria for an easier diff, done.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As for the difficulty algorithm, I think the pattern repository could be of help for the first couple steps. Also looking at those six maps I posted to find the current system's shortcomings would be great too.

By monitoring single finger density you're covering the jack patterns while single hand isn't necessarily a difficulty indicator. It would depend what patterns are being featured. Changing say a one-handed reverting stairs to a series of brackets will easily double the difficulty without changing the note count or density. Changing said stairs to one handed stairs or some certain form of one handed chord streaming or bursts however will lower the difficulty. And here we got a whole range of difficulties, all on one hand, all the same density. Noticed how I italicized "certain form", some forms of chord streaming or bursts (at the same density) could be considered harder.

At the same density who knows what kind unique easy or hard patterns a mapper could feature, I'm interested in knowing how you plan to handle the "second dimension" of difficulty in mania maps when such cases are possible at any moment of any density.

Drace wrote:

First of all, to every post against unranking ACs (except Tom, his arguments actually made sense though I don't believe 1 point outclasses the many that's been presented from the other side.). None of you are presenting anything that could even be considered a fragment of a decent argument. Throwing stuff around like it's "absurd", "unfair" and saying we should all "perish the thought" with no basis whatsoever, thinking that it's enough to prove a point.

Let me say upfront that I'm sorry my previous posts about why I support autoconverts apparently didn't even have a fragment of a decent argument. It's not like I wasn't giving my honest and truthful feelings about the mode or not trying my best explain why I feel that 99% of the maps have value (which you'll note I also stated were as a whole less difficult when compared to mania specific maps and should receive comparatively less, but still fairly calculated pp).

In case you missed it, some of my other invalid arguments included my genuinely enjoying the autoconverts and still wanting to participate in the fun of being ranked, without being forced to play the mania specific maps. I also stated that people are actually making an effort when playing the autoconverts (despite all the arguments that they are way too easy/no challenge). I don't find them all easy, in fact, I find many of them to be quite challenging and I'm sure I'm not alone in this. I also touched on how mania specific maps are very limiting in their playability (to me at least) due to their complex patterning and my lack of coordination, so I'm not yet at a point where I find them all that enjoyable.

Also - I mentioned how ranking should be open to everyone, regardless if they choose to play autoconverts or hand crafted maps. So long as the pp system set in place reflects the actual difficulty level for each map, then this shouldn't be a problem. The best players who can actually finish the mania specific maps will be at the top of the board where they belong, but the casual or beginner players who prefer autoconverts or are not yet ready for the difficulty of most mania specific maps can still enjoy being part of the overall rankings.

I hope you find at least a fraction of a "decent" argument in there.

Drace wrote:

Also: there's mania specific songs that first timers can clear. The problem is the the extremely limited 5 star scale that scales o2jam lv1 and o2jam level 9 at the same 1 star making it harder to find them.

Yes, there are a number of mania maps available, but don't forget, there's only a small portion of that already small selection of mania specific maps that beginners can actually play through. It doesn't offer up much variety. Luckily, there are also autoconverts that first timers can pass. Many, many, more of them in fact. But since they aren't considered to be "real" mania maps, they should be all removed from the pp system. Regardless of if anyone finds them enjoyable or considers them to contain a level of difficulty suited to their playing style. Forget trying to make a pp system that is reflective of their lesser level of difficulty and ranked accordingly - let's just simply not count them anymore, because certain people feel they don't fit their perceived notion about what mania is all about.

But, hey, what do I know? I only love this game more than every other game out there right now and a lot of that love is a direct result of having played the autoconverts which I genuinely do enjoy playing. It's a shame that what I find enjoyable is an abomination and should be eliminated and not allowed to be embraced by those who love it. It's also a shame that anyone who loves this aspect of the game and speaks out to support it is fair game for being insulted and portrayed as having little to no value in the mania community. (This isn't directed at anyone in particular, but just a general observation I've made while reading through the replies in this forum thread.)

----
And thank you Tom for working on this thankless task for us. I know you will never be able to please everyone, but from you're posts I have no worries as I know you will be trying your best to create a fair pp calculation system inclusive of everyone.

Drace wrote:

None of you are presenting anything that could even be considered a fragment of a decent argument. Throwing stuff around like it's "absurd", "unfair" and saying we should all "perish the thought" with no basis whatsoever, thinking that it's enough to prove a point.

like what? can you point out what argument has no basis instead of just saying it has no basis?

Drace wrote:

And the slight points raised that could probably make a clueless person nod to the cause are completely overwhelmed and showed to be irrelevant in my previous post. It makes me wounder if anyone bothered reading it. Was it too long? Too hard to understand? Or maybe is it purposely being ignored because there's nothing to be said against it?

ok. i'll type out my thoughts.

Drace wrote:

First of all, those autoconverts wouldn't pass the ranking process if they were submitted like mania maps. Many maps gots notes mapped to stuff that mania maps normally wouldn't. The long note's release are not correctly timed. And no matter the map, you'll never have something layering multiple tracks which is pretty much the essence of multi key games like this. These maps were converted from a 1k source and the patterns processed by a semi-controlled randomization.

to me, that comes off as "don't rank auto-convert songs because high-level players don't like them." auto-converting standard maps is a major, attractive feature of osu!mania. they don't need to go through the ranking process because they are an inherent feature of osu!mania. whether you like the quality of the maps or not is completely irrelevant. and whether those maps hold up at a high level is also completely irrelevant.

Drace wrote:

With autoconverts, speed is the ONLY difficulty factor. You will never find difficult patterns. "Difficult patterns" are patterns that would still be difficult when slowed down because of how the notes are placed. I would agree to a certain extent with the people that mentioned that the people that play autoconverts exclusively aren't true mania players. The whole difficulty ladder in all similar rhythm games is learning and recognizing different patterns after extended play, even the standard mode. But the maps converted from there are stripped from the clever patterns they once had and become a useless junk with single-dimension difficulty.

you need to recognize that difficulty is relative. speed is extremely difficult for new players. the patterns found in auto-converted maps, while easy to you, are also extremely difficult for new players. instead of seeing this from your current skill level, you need to see it from the perspective of a new player. osu!mania features gameplay requiring skills that are not typically used or trained. having a way for new players to practice the mode using familiar and enjoyable songs while at the same time allowing them a way to participate in ladder play is a great thing.

you also address this point later in your post.

Drace wrote:

To everyone who doesn't understand what I'm saying look at this. t/146615 and scroll down to the pattern repository. Now try and find autos that feature anything but beginner patterns. All those "omg so hard" autos are just fast beginner and maybe novice level patterns. Keep in mind that this is a just a fraction of "common" patterns. Harder maps all feature unique stuff to make them memorable.

this is the value of auto-convert maps and there is nothing wrong with that. lower difficulties help acclimate a new player to the controls, higher difficulties introduce simple beginner patterns, and the hardest difficulties get the new player used to playing at higher speeds. having them ranked allows a player to track their progress. and when their rank gains start to slow, they should be confident enough to do the easy mania-specific maps.

from what i've been seeing, you are making arguments only from the perspective of a high-level player. you need to also think about the low-level players. the osu!mania ladder should not be some exclusive club open only to the skilled and experienced.

Meh, it has been made clear that ACs are going to be counted anyways. By the way, most mania-spec players who have been posting in here are not all "high-level" players. I would say I am average at best considering the wide range of difficulties mania has to offer. I also don't understand this whole easy mania-spec are too hard. It's true that many mapsets, including unranked ones, have their easier diff being rather hard fir a beginner. But don't make it sound like there is no "real" easy maps for beginners. Heck, I know a bunch a bunch a bunch of people to whom I've introduced mania, and guess what, they kept failing at first like everyone does, and I told them to search for mania-spec maps first. They ended up with mapsets I don't even have and were soon able to clear these "hard-easy" diffs that you guys are complaining about, all within one or two weeks. Nobody said that mania is EZ mode.

MwarriorHiei wrote:

like what? can you point out what argument has no basis instead of just saying it has no basis?

Everything said is untrue or opinions blinded by ignorance.

MwarriorHiei wrote:

to me, that comes off as "don't rank auto-convert songs because high-level players don't like them." auto-converting standard maps is a major, attractive feature of osu!mania. they don't need to go through the ranking process because they are an inherent feature of osu!mania. whether you like the quality of the maps or not is completely irrelevant. and whether those maps hold up at a high level is also completely irrelevant.

So what? you conducted a survey and deduced that only high level players like mania specifics? You're pulling false statements out of fin air in hopes of making a valid argument. What my statement is saying is that the notes do not follow the music, they play along. Notes are randomized and with untimed occurrences. And they're not a "feature" of mania. Mania's feature is simulating playing songs, not tapping random notes to the song's BPM. It's also not a question of difficulty at this point.

Almost everyone I know in mania quit, new players I've introduced and old players I've met. This plague of sub par material was the biggest reason. I've had many new player literally laugh at how what they were playing doesn't match the song. I've offered converts from other songs that only pushed them to move to that game in question. The only people that actually like the auto converts from my own personal experiences are people coming from the standard mode. And I'm sorry, mania isn't standard. If things keep getting compared to it, mania will for ever be nothing mode than a side-mode and it will never flourish.

MwarriorHiei wrote:

you need to recognize that difficulty is relative. speed is extremely difficult for new players. the patterns found in auto-converted maps, while easy to you, are also extremely difficult for new players. instead of seeing this from your current skill level, you need to see it from the perspective of a new player. osu!mania features gameplay requiring skills that are not typically used or trained. having a way for new players to practice the mode using familiar and enjoyable songs while at the same time allowing them a way to participate in ladder play is a great thing.

Yeah, speed is ONLY ONE dimension to a maps difficulty. And easy maps can be found on mania specifics. What are you even trying to prove here?
We're talking about an accurate rating system here. You want this to be a question of who can play fast junk? Even if the difficulty rating rates difficulty accurately, the amount of autos out there outnumbers mania maps to the point that all other dimension's to a map's difficulty will be ignored anyways.

MwarriorHiei wrote:

from what i've been seeing, you are making arguments only from the perspective of a high-level player. you need to also think about the low-level players. the osu!mania ladder should not be some exclusive club open only to the skilled and experienced.

Nothing I said was opinions, it was flat facts about what creates difficulty on map. It was about why autos cannot determine skill accurately. And you're talking about new players as if they'd rather autos over mania-specifics when I seen the exact opposite. Also what's up with this lie about mania specifics being impossible for new players?

aka nothing relevant said

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

MandyJS wrote:

[...]

This whole post resolves around the assumption that mania-specifics are hard. When I'm saying a mania map has multiple dimensions to their difficulty, I'm not saying they are harder by default. In fact, because of this multi-dimensional difficulty it's actually much easier to make easier mania specific maps.

New players can still participate in the rankings, there are maps clearable by complete first timers ranked right now and more to come. No the mania song library isn't too small, plus there's much more to come. And for an accurate ranking system, think about this with me.

Auto converts sole difficulty dimensions are speed and density. You won't be seeing tricky patterns, yet there's many fields of tricky patterns a player can specialize in. We got jackhammer pros, long note pros, chord streaming pros, burst pros, layering pros, accuracy pros, survival pros etc etc. And a pro most the time is not a pro in more than 2 or 3 fields. So since autoconvert on got speed and density to decide their difficulty, that means the speed-oriented pros, like chordstreamers and bursters, and accuracy pros, will have the upper hand. There's over 30'000 autoconvert difficulties. Unless autos aren't removed or rendered useless, how are pros specializing in other fields supposed to show their stuff?

If only mania maps count towards PP, every type of pros will have their chance, new players will have their chance, and the overall quality of the song library will be much better. I know what I said was harsh, but the proper counter arguments that should be made here is proving why the game is better off with ranked autos. And the only points I'm seeing about this resolves around stuff about beginner players that is completely wrong.

I was one of these beginners that mania-spec maps supposedly was too hard for. How come I never felt that it was too hard? I worked my way up by almost only playing mania-spec and o2jam converted charts and can now pass MX:s. And that's after half a years practice with one months break every second month (due to school etc.)

There are plenty of mania-spec maps for beginners and they are NOT too hard, both for 4k and 7k players.

Actually me, along with woc and some other people, have osu!mania "TP" project before.

But finally, woc decided to terminate this project (and switch the project into another feasible solution).

What we found is that, using a universal number to calculate for difficulty, is not feasible for osu!mania because people are having too diverse ability, which means the same pattern may be too easy for one player but too hard for another one, vice versa, despite of they having nearly the same skill level. In one word, to accurately calculate the difficulty of the map using only the patterns with one universal numbers is not fair at all, and to sum up multiple numbers doesn't make sense.

TBH our temporary solution include human work (a lot of them), and use player's past performance data other than patterns itself to determine the difficulty.

So far my suggestion is to make this as SIMPLE as possible. It doesn't need to be accurate at all, but being simple is OK. Even star difficulty along with some slight modifier on patterns is OK - because you may find it even harder than osu!tp to keep balance with these patterns.

xxbidiao wrote:

In one word, to accurately calculate the difficulty of the map using only the patterns with one universal numbers is not fair at all, and to sum up multiple numbers doesn't make sense.
TBH our temporary solution include human work (a lot of them), and use player's past performance data other than patterns itself to determine the difficulty.

Interesting. I know that it really depends on what the player spends his time on training, but we also use single diff levels for o2 and BMS right? Same problem there, but I do think the general difficulty is reflected by the level. Also for a ranking system, the difficulty shouldn't be relative to the player, but relative to all players (or one could say objective).

I do still not get why people are debating so much about AC. In my humble opinion, if Tom is doing it right, and i am sure he will, even if the AC will be counted into the ranking, it won't change much because of the simple reasons Drace stated in page 6, even if for the other side. You guys are assuming stuff that has yet to happen. It will not harm anyone, anytime. Letting people that are new to all of this stuff play autoconverts will them provide some sort of nice first steps into the world of mania. It will not hurt the mania community. People being serious about Mania will automatically switch to real Maniadiffs after some time (+ they will see they won't get any pp anymore from AC.)

Please give me one, proper reason why AC shouldnt be included into ranking. They won't do any harm at higher levels. I would understand why they are bad in the old PP system, but the new one will literally crush those trying to get highrank with autoconverts. So where is the real problem?

Just let Tom do his thing before we talk about anything. I bet your worries won't get confirmed in the first place.

Or atleast thats my opinion. If i may be wrong, please tell me.

One reason is that ACs are very different from mania spec maps so it might lead to newer players thinking that the game isn't as fun since more seem to enjoy these mania spec first timer diffs? I do not know if this is true, but if it is it might be something we want to talk about because the instream of new, fresh casual players is quite important for the health of a game, and I feel like the mania scene really needs it atm. Other than that I pretty much agree with what you said.

There are several kind of players, some of which try to play the Maniadiffs right away, and some of which are trying to get into mania playing AC. In my opinion, the only thing to do is to have a FAQ for mania or something in which simple stuff like this is explained, and why AC are not as good as real Maniamaps. But still, its their choice, not ours.

Yeah, FAQ would be good.
I just hope mania mode will grow with a fresh instream of newer players.
The previous game I played, Bloodline Champions, died because of this (or one could said it had just never seen any growth). It was the most fun pvp experience I ever had in my life and I tried a lot of pvp games. But casual players just didn't think the game was fun, they didn't understand the game and they were just cannonfodder once they were matched up with players that sort of knew what they were doing. I think hope is lost for BLC now, but mania can still grow

(About BLC, i never understood how people couldnt understand the game, it really is fun oo) Yes indeed, that is also the one thing i am really concerned about. Mania shall and hopefully will get plenty of new players.

Hmm just wanting to list all the points stated by the "sides" in this thread and the reasoning for these points.
I want this post to be as neutral as possible, and to make it a tl;dr for the entire debate. It'll be easier to see the points brought
up in a single post. If I interpreted some of the points brought up wrong, feel free to tell me and i'll edit it ASAP.

What the debate is about: The judging of the difficulty of beatmaps.

There are two "sides",
1.Eliminating/reducing autoconverts worth to pp and rank, only mania specifics should contribute to rankings. NOT to unrank autos.
2.Letting autoconverts contribute to pp

These are the reasons (that i've heard) to which why players want AC's (autoconverts) to not contribute or barely contribute to pp.

- The quality of AC's
-AC's throws patterns at the player that don't make much sense, and are badly timed. Randomised, untimed patterns.
-The nature of multi-keyed rhythm games is to play multiple sounds at once, AC's only focus on one thing at a time.
-Many other points, but these are the main ones.


-AC's are heavily oriented towards accuracy/speed heavy players.


-Judging skill level is clearer with mania maps.
-Specific maps use patterns specifically tailored for o!m, whereas AC's are just randomly generated.

Here are the reasons in this thread to which why AC's should still count towards rank


- There aren't enough mania specific beatmaps.
-There are 80ish o!m maps, as opposed to 30k+ AC's.
Counter argument from the other side - 80 is enough, and there will be more coming in the future.

- It gives new players a chance to get ranked.
-New players can't even finish the easy o!m difficulties, AC's can at least give them a rank.
Counter argument - Why would new players care about their ranks if they know they're not good enough? They can also earn rank from easy mania specifics, too.

-The mania community has bad standards when it comes to mapping easy difficulties.
-People have started to find AC's more approachable and are more fun, because easy difficulties "suck".


Here is another other point I'd like to bring up
-The use of "slider leniency" in many standard maps aren't just fit for mania.
-The releases for notes are too early, or notes are too late in many AC's.

Let's have an actual proper post on how to measure difficulty.
This exact numerical system is obviously slightly off (a chord of two notes worth more than 2 parallel LNs), but that's a matter of scaling note diff vs LN diff. My goal was not to give an algorithm, but try to explain how mania players read patterns. The lists of base patterns and LN examples obviously aren't exhaustive.
And one other thing, it might be a good idea to count left and right hand strain separately. A section where objects are spread out evenly between all columns is easier than a section with the same amount of objects where they're all played by the same hand (columns 123 / 567).
This post's examples use 7K but most of this should be applicable to other keymodes.
I hope this post will be useful .-.

Xcrypt wrote:

xxbidiao wrote:

In one word, to accurately calculate the difficulty of the map using only the patterns with one universal numbers is not fair at all, and to sum up multiple numbers doesn't make sense.
TBH our temporary solution include human work (a lot of them), and use player's past performance data other than patterns itself to determine the difficulty.

Interesting. I know that it really depends on what the player spends his time on training, but we also use single diff levels for o2 and BMS right? Same problem there, but I do think the general difficulty is reflected by the level. Also for a ranking system, the difficulty shouldn't be relative to the player, but relative to all players (or one could say objective).

O2 official use nearly the same algorithm as current star difficulty (density based).
And BMS doesn't have an universal difficulty measurement at all!

And yeah, what exactly I was said, is what you have commented: The subjective trap. Which led to the termination of my project.

Answer these simple question, and you will find what subjective trap is.

1. 4K or 7K, which one is harder? (How do you weight 4k/7k?)
2. Maps which is full of hits or maps which is full of holds, which one is harder? (How do you weight holds?)
3. Stairs or random hits, which is harder?
4. What is the definition of "Hard", anyway?

These question actually fires out a war when my project was announced for feedback in Chinese community.

Just take the third as example (which is mentioned in Tear's post).
When osu!mania was on beta, woc ask me this question. I answered random hits, just like what Tear said without any consideration. And this, along with many other feedbacks, are why stairs are so common in ACs "to prevent the map becoming too hard". But after thousands of PC I found myself wrong - I am far better at random hits than stairs. When I discuss this with many players, I found not everyone is like me - some of them is better at stairs, some of them is not. So how do you determine which one is harder? By polling? With a determined factor on this pattern, there would always be some players that benefits most and some players cry out loud, making it unreliable.

And yeah, too many things are just like stairs and random hits. To "balancing" them is pointless.

This is why I say things should be Simple.

We are playing osu!mania for fun, yeah? So why don't we make the calculation fun?
Instead of making tens of patterns having different weight making things hard to understand and isn't reliable at all, why don't we try to point out a way to calculate difficulty easily, like osu!tp, which can be described in 1~2 pages of paper? Actually fairness is not a must, even with TP every one of us have something like "weight" map which is relative easier to just oneself.

xxbidiao wrote:

1. 4K or 7K, which one is harder? (How do you weight 4k/7k?)
2. Maps which is full of hits or maps which is full of holds, which one is harder? (How do you weight holds?)
3. Stairs or random hits, which is harder?
4. What is the definition of "Hard", anyway?

1. That's not a big concern of the ranking system. The default mode of a particular map is to be weighted the most. If the amount of hitobjects (and also type, holds and normals that is) stays the same, then they might even be able to get equal treatment.
2. I plan on using per-hand strain values with per-finger strainvalues on top of those. Anyone not familiar with the concept of strain values can check out how tp does it for standard currently. While holds are active other button presses with the same hand give more strain, fingers directly next to the hold even more.
3. I'd say random hits are harder to read while stairs are harder to execute due to the used fingers often being near to each other. But since I'm not a very good mania player that's probably not a very valid opinion.
4. Subjective as fuck, but there is always a way to satisfy most people. If it comes to which maps are the hardest you all pretty much agree, don't you? An algorithm simply needs to find the same maps in about the same order.

These plans don't involve any patterns (yet).

I'm aware, that what I'm proposing might not work out very well (or at all), but as soon as I have something done I'll present you with results. You can then proceed to tell me how good / bad the whole thing is.

Stairs are naturally easier, there's reasoning behind it. If you're worse at stairs, you practiced them much less than everything else.

Yeah I agree xxbidiao, to some extent.
With the example of stairs vs random hits. It really depends on the player, I am mainly a RD user so patterns like stairs are not my best thing.
But if we calculate it according to the average of all players, I think this is the best we can do. Ofcourse, we'll have to guess a bit here and there, but let's say stairs vs random hits, they weigh exactly the same? For example.
Maybe only weigh things that are clearly harder for the majority of the playerbase, like density, LN, jacks etc.

In all honesty this is painful guesswork right now. We'll just have to see at the first release of the new scoring system and then we will be able to pinpoint some flaws I think.

Stairs are easy to execute, but hard to accurately play.
Random hits are easy to accurately play, but hard to execute. (depending on pattern)

At least from my experience.

Xcrypt wrote:

Yeah I agree xxbidiao, to some extent.
With the example of stairs vs random hits. It really depends on the player, I am mainly a RD user so patterns like stairs are not my best thing.
But if we calculate it according to the average of all players, I think this is the best we can do. Ofcourse, we'll have to guess a bit here and there, but let's say stairs vs random hits, they weigh exactly the same? For example.
Maybe only weigh things that are clearly harder for the majority of the playerbase, like density, LN, jacks etc.

In all honesty this is painful guesswork right now. We'll just have to see at the first release of the new scoring system and then we will be able to pinpoint some flaws I think.

Yes, exactly. We would have a hard time upon initial release... Maybe on many other issues

And all players average? That doesn't work either, because players of osu!mania is not all the humankind.

Just use 4key vs 7key as example.
We all know that 4key and 7key are difficult to play in different ways. 4K players play 4K insane maps and say 4key is hard; 7K players play 7k insane maps and say 7key is hard. (Please reference to earlier posts on 4key and 7key discussions.)
If you try to average all players, you will most probably get the answer that 7key is harder, because there are more 7key players than 4key ones (Edit: on osu!mania, who can play at least 4k/7k expert maps). But is that the truth?

My point is that don't hope that the ranking system would be 100% accurate (or to say, reliable) - even 10% accurate is nearly impossible to guarantee.
(Edit: Instead of making a complex system that is hard to understand), It would be a good idea to make the algorithm simple and quick enough, even possible to completely substitute star difficulty, regardless of its reliability. Everyone just want to know that 10 star map is harder than 7 star map, doesn't it?
(Actually, woc had considered improvements on star difficulty, but he gave up when finding osu! just lost its response for tens of seconds just calculating every map's SD)

What can I say, I suck at stairs, but they're fun when you can accidentally pass them. I personally get secretly excited and jump with happiness.

Oh, right, on-topic and all: I can't (or shouldn't) complain much since 99,9999% of the maps I played were auto-converts (and hell did they give me pp!) but are there that many mania-specific maps to "cover" all the auto-converted ones? 'Was just wondering that.

how about rank of osu!mania separate become 4 (4k player only,5k,6k and 7k) ?
and every player can only choose 1 or 2 of them

Karuta-Roromiya wrote:

how about rank of osu!mania separate become 4 (4k player only,5k,6k and 7k) ?
and every player can only choose 1 or 2 of them

Already been suggested and heavily denied. But I cant help but ask, why one or two? If a player is good enough to rank high in all keymodes I don't see why he shouldn't be allowed to :/

And like xxbidiao is saying, since difficulty is so subjectional, its impossible to make a completely accurate scale. But that doesn't stop us for making a basic scale to give players an idea about what theyre about to play. So the difference between stair and random should probably nonexistent. The algorithm might be better off focusing more on the bigger factors.

Also @tom, checking for single finger strain simply covers for jacks and hand strain is pretty much irrelevant. I mean there's so many different playstyles out there. I personally play 4k with one hand. In 7k some people use left thumb, some right, some both and some none. I don't think a variable that depends on playstyle would be a smart thing to do. And it all depends on the patterns anyways, the value would be pretty irrelevant anyways.