Huhu.

Please read most of this post before asking questions!

After recent confusion and me personally melting down about some part of the General Ranking Criteria I think it's time we bring a unified cleanup effort back! Whatever the name of this is going to be (dear god please don't discuss the technicalities about calling it UBKRC or RC Council or whatever), the goal here is as follows:

1. re-evaluate the current Ranking Criteria along with the mode-specific criteria
2. the main goal is to make the wiki pages associated with it more concise and easier to read. The current state of some rules especially when you encounter them as a BN trying to make sense of some of them is horrendous

I don't expect a "full-on-rewrite" akin to the original effort to happen here, but I want to simplify the English used where possible and merge duplicates where applicable and in general just re-order it in a way that reading it makes more sense.

The first call-to-action went out internally in the osu!team to the GMT and NAT to find contributors interested in taking this on. It is relatively maddening and unfulfilling work and you do sign up for hours of discussions about language and other inane topics.

Right now we want to find interested community experts who wish to work alongside us on trying to simplify and rephrase the Ranking Criteria. Pending proposals that go through during the duration of this project will be incorporated in the rewrite and we hope to make the Ranking Criteria a set of pages that don't require you to have the most epic of English in order to parse.


We're aiming to keep the groups relatively small similar to the 2016 effort. The proposals will go up for general community discussion as soon as they exist!

If you have interest in the project feel free to reach out!
Even if you think the area you're interested or competent in isn't in dire need of a rewrite, we plan to still look at it and decide if we can make it better!

Depending on interest, we'll close admission to certain groups - if people end up going afk / not contributing during the project we'll keep this post and list updated

Update 2023-10-31:
Public Discord server:
https://discord.gg/zFZTTKCHF7

1. please follow the server's rules
2. the discussion channels for spectator will have 30 seconds slowmode, we aim to pick up frequent and useful contributors as members of the project
3. the drafts are going to be publicly accessible via the server. Once the drafts are done they'll go through the normal Ranking Criteria forum -> wiki change process

the rest of the project is going to happen there, I plan to drop status updates that seem meaningful over here. We'll have a kickoff at Sat. Nov 4th 17:00 UTC, following events will be announced in there

—Okoratu

Also FWIW for now I just put myself down to "organize" whatever area had no one internally explicitly asking to organize it, the whole list is pretty preliminary and intended to change as contributors come and go until we're done with the project

rant time

after someone's first competent-ish map, their first instinct (after they get told that) is to go look at the ranking criteria. From what I've observed, people don't look anywhere else on the wiki to look for more things, such as where to look for feedback (that can be given nearly instantly), or what tools are actively used. Oh, and I'm not talking about modding, I'm talking about feedback, which is more general than just haha pointing at things cuz blablabla you have to fix these or else. Is it within the scope to add a list of active mapping communities (mainly discord servers) that actively give feedback on maps to the top of the ranking criteria?

EDIT: This could also be too much work, but I'm also thinking of having every rule and guideline getting a separate article on the wiki, that describes the rule in detail (if needed), their purpose, origin story (maybe), examples that break the rule/guideline, and ways/tools/practices to fix them. Beginners who would be socially awkward or too afraid to ask questions could have a further read on this before pestering to get their (somewhat frequently) questions answered

sup

id be interested in discussion about normal diffs, spread rules and if possible even translation work to portuguese since theres a massive pool of mostly brazilian portuguese speakers who could benefit from it

this is not the place to suggest changes or rant about the current state of matters

that said we have considered splitting them up into more articles by area so we don't end up with one long-ass article for the RC, but depending on how people actually use the Ranking Criteria, any of these measures have pros and cons that we will need to discuss

Also my phrasing of "please reach out" seems to have been a blunder because I thought people would reach out here but instead i get dms in all channels people can find me in which is hilarious and could've been predicted

xD

h3oCharles wrote:

rant time

after someone's first competent-ish map, their first instinct (after they get told that) is to go look at the ranking criteria. From what I've observed, people don't look anywhere else on the wiki to look for more things, such as where to look for feedback (that can be given nearly instantly), or what tools are actively used. Oh, and I'm not talking about modding, I'm talking about feedback, which is more general than just haha pointing at things cuz blablabla you have to fix these or else. Is it within the scope to add a list of active mapping communities (mainly discord servers) that actively give feedback on maps to the top of the ranking criteria?

EDIT: This could also be too much work, but I'm also thinking of having every rule and guideline getting a separate article on the wiki, that describes the rule in detail (if needed), their purpose, origin story (maybe), examples that break the rule/guideline, and ways/tools/practices to fix them. Beginners who would be socially awkward or too afraid to ask questions could have a further read on this before pestering to get their (somewhat frequently) questions answered

feel like maybe a wiki page with this stuff would be better then rc discussion linking things like mentorship and the offical osu! discord maybe? but theres a lot of communities outside osu! i.e. discord servers that arn't exactly monitored the best and have issues with moderation ect. that might not be suitable for the osu! community, only real way to go about this would be have a volunteer group of people like bns that you can message for feedback but that just seems a bit redundant as my personal observation of mentoring and teaching new mappers is that they will naturally find other mappers to ask for feedback

I think the Ranking Criteria is not clear about where the feat. marker belongs when it becomes ambiguous. I'll edit the post once I have time to provide examples, basically it's not clear whether or not the feat. should belong to the title, or artist.

can help with (japanese) metadata and osu/catch if needed

Can help with mania if needed (and Spanish translation to an extent) o/

Idk if we want to make the translation effort part of the project - as far as i know, only the EN version of the RC is actually in effect at any point.

I mean multiple people have suggested they can help with translating, so we'll discuss that part as well and maybe make another team for it or something dunno depending on whether or not we think the additional overhead is worth it

rest has been forwarded internally (I'll continue reading / reacting to this thread whenever i wake up tomorrow )

hello, can (try to) help with metadata if you need more people on that

I'm up for HS related stuff as I already told you.
Plus I am very grateful that you actually went the extra mile trying to make a change.
Love ya

OK I get it metadata is a contentious topic, but what can i do to convince people to want to help with timing xD

@animestyle: hitsounds are vastly different between gamemodes (the only ones close in usage right now are catch and osu), so i assume you actually want to help with the osu specific part?

I can offer help both with timing and rewriting/shrinking text in the rules 😇

Would be more than happy to help out with the mania RC rework - I'd already begun a lot of work on it with Maxus at the start of this year when I was still GMT and would love to help pick it up again.

I might be able to help with some things related Audio/Video and Metadata. Could also help translating things to Dutch if needed =)

Could help with o!catch hitsound stuff + RC rewrite and translation to korean (if the project does span out towards translations)

Would love to contribute to osu!std hitsounding stuff!

There's some redundance within the guidelines, and as someone who ranked awful hitsounds on (at least) one occasion, I think it's due time to put a few new guidelines in place while we're at it.

I'd be interested to help with Taiko

@Okoratu yeah CTB and STD. Was so excited about the post that i forgot to mention that

nice to see interest for this but I also can't help but think there is no difference between setting up some new project rather than just using this forum more actively 🤔

clayton wrote:

nice to see interest for this but I also can't help but think there is no difference between setting up some new project rather than just using this forum more actively 🤔

well, the forum is focused on rather single improvements, while the projects aims a concentrated effort on reworking entire thing in a much more effective way i'd say so wouldn't go as far as that

I could help with osu! standard and metadata. Is the goal to just clarify and reword the rules/guidelines or also to assess whether some of them need to be updated/changed/removed or new ones added?

I would like to help out with Storyboard, Timing and Metadata. I am more so able to help out more on the technicallities of Storyboards in general as well as any nitpicks that need re-doing.

hi, after a bit of back and forth internally (we werent sure where to run it - osu!internal, osu!dev or its own thing) we decided to make it its own public discord server; free to join for anyone who wishes to contribute

https://discord.gg/zFZTTKCHF7

1. please follow the server's rules
2. the discussion channels for spectator will have 30 seconds slowmode, we aim to pick up frequent and useful contributors as members of the project
3. the drafts are going to be publicly accessible via the server. Once the drafts are done they'll go through the normal Ranking Criteria forum -> wiki change process

short update:

1. Meeting Notes (2023-11-04)
2. General RC, Storyboarding, Metadata have started more-or-less active discussions
3. Storyboard draft is taking shape, metadata draft has been started

also to the guy who joined and threw a hissy fit by renaming to "fix ranked section" when asked to rename to their osu! username, if you want to rejoin and behave civilly, reach out to me in osu! for another invite

Two things come to mind for me:

1. Lower the requirement of hitsounds.
It's not that I don't appreciate them. Rather, it's something I don't think is "necessary" as the criteria puts it in order for a map to be playable. At a minimum, hitnormal / soft, etc should be on every active note so as to provide feedback without expeccting much of the mapper. When mappers are forced to hitsound their map just to rank it, we end up just getting a bare-bones hitsounding anyways that doesn't actually help the map too much, it just makes it "acceptable."

2. Revert the definition of Guidelines back. I don't think an explanation is necessary if any mapper for any reason breaks them.
This idea that guidelines should be broken only when they can be explained exhaustively flies against the idea that a mapper has an inherit, valid reason to why they put down what they do. If we respect the work of mappers, we're not gonna expect an "exhaustive explanation" every time they do something we don't like. If we want to enforce guidelines like rules, then they should be noted as such: rules. This current system of rules vs guidelines is not only confusing, it's disrespectful to the community

Hollow Delta wrote:

2. Revert the definition of Guidelines back. I don't think an explanation is necessary if any mapper for any reason breaks them.
This idea that guidelines should be broken only when they can be explained exhaustively flies against the idea that a mapper has an inherit, valid reason to why they put down what they do. If we respect the work of mappers, we're not gonna expect an "exhaustive explanation" every time they do something we don't like. If we want to enforce guidelines like rules, then they should be noted as such: rules. This current system of rules vs guidelines is not only confusing, it's disrespectful to the community

what exactly would be the point of having unenforceable clauses in the rc?