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/116133Easy, Normal, Hard, Maximum.
thats good and easy to follow.
https://osu.ppy.sh/s/123456NOV, 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/124866Beginner 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/85585Level 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 >_>