Now that osu!lazer provides standardised scores to the leaderboards, this general guideline has become obsolete:
I'd propose removing the 2nd point completely, and change the last sentence of the 1st one to something like this:
- Overall Difficulty should have the same value as the Approach Rate. This is just a standardised value, as Overall Difficulty does not affect gameplay nor the number of fruits a spinner has. Overall Difficulty only affects the maximum score of a difficulty.
- If a difficulty uses a lower Approach Rate than one or more difficulties in the difficulty level below it, then the Overall Difficulty should be equal to that of the highest Overall Difficulty value in the previous difficulty level.
I'd propose removing the 2nd point completely, and change the last sentence of the 1st one to something like this:
Overall Difficulty only used to affect the maximum score of a difficulty, and has no further usage nowadays.It could even be moved back as a rule, since the 2nd point would no longer be used and therefore both AR/OD values would stay the same regardless of the settings of the beatmap.