While the purpose of nominators is to make sure maps have no issues before entering ranked, a resounding, recurring, whateverdescriptorwordconcern, I often hear is…
From the nominators, or the mapper,

When a map is disqualified they ask:

Will I/my nominators be punished for this?

And ehhh, 90% of the time the question is asked to me at least, the answer is an obvious “no they won’t be, it’s fine”

While, in some aspects it’s a good thing to be self-conscious about it if it instills the responsibility to check those issues that slip by, it seems like it’s just gotten too much. Why do you think that is? How do you think may be a good way to help lessen that kind of worry?

Really, I do what I can as a single person, but no matter how many times I connect with singular nominators to help out with that, times change and new people find the entirety of nat scary all over again, so really it’d need to be something that’d help make this kind of question more accessible in a longer term...

This is officially a feelings and feeling sharing space just to talk about it

Thank you

noffy's editor note: any post i make only represents my own personal thoughts, im not a spokesperson nor am i serving as one. Also if anything I wrote makes 0 sense please tell me, I’ll rewrite it

why is this only applied to std gamemode, thought it could be sth consistent for all gamemodes?

iRedi wrote:

why is this only applied to std gamemode, thought it could be sth consistent for all gamemodes?

Most times stuff comes up with standard on fire we ask other modes and they're like "we're fine"

If it's an issue there should be a different thread for other modes similar things affect since the causes could be different as well

I feel this is a very serious lack of communication kind of problem, especially in standard mode. While I believe the scale of standard BNG also plays a part in it, it's still not as dominant as lack of communication.

I have been in standard NAT for several months, and I notice that it is hard to persuade standard BNs to believe that disqualifications are not deadly. The biggest reason, in my opinion, is they simply have no way to know how disqualifications are treated, and in which ways they will be punished.
Besides, sometimes NATs punish BNs on maps that are already ranked, which is then contradicting: you say this map has a serious problem that requires punishment, but it gets ranked, so how serious can this problem really be? Yes, this may show the nominating BNs have problem on identifying issues & improving the map, but these can be easily taught if they have the ability to got into the BNG, and I believe warning is too overwhelming for this.

On this, my two ideas are: (both inspired by Taiko/Ctb/Mania modes)
1) As T/C/M modes all have their dedicated channels in BN server where everyone (BN/NAT) can discuss controversial picks, I think it would be nice to have such channels for standard mode to discuss these too. I believe this can clear up a lot of confusions;
2) Standard NATs should not punish BNs for nominating questionable maps post-ranked in any situation, as it seems to be the practice for T/C/M modes. Instead, try proactively reaching the BNs who have nominated the said maps, and discuss if anything can be avoided in their future nomination (or the BNs can justify their choice). This can obviously be done in evaluation too, like expressing concern properly in the feedback, but not giving warnings. This can avoid being inconsistent on judging map quality, and to be honest I think letting something standard NATs deemed bad to slip through the ranked section should be a collective responsibility among all the BNs and NATs, a.k.a. those who are able to rank maps. Putting us on the same page on this topic could also facilitate communication.

I believe that some of the anxiety coming from disqualifications is caused by the lack of transparency on how things are handled internally. Back when we had a SEV system we could understand whether some disqualification may or may not impact certain nominator’s performance, however now it has been replaced with a different system which doesn’t really have any visual cues on the BN card. While severity should be more or less obvious for experienced BNs, I believe bringing back these visual indicators, as well as automatically hiding negligible nomination resets may reduce the anxiety that some BNs may have.

Additionally, as Aika mentioned sometimes BNs are getting warnings over their nominations on beatmaps that already got ranked with no resets, but this rises the question maybe it wasn’t all that bad to begin with? Quality is a very opinionated factor, and while there is a borderline that we should maintain, it is really frustrating to receive warnings over beatmaps you believed were fine since nobody had problems with it in the qualified. Experience has shown that enforcing QA systems isn’t really helping either, as people get bored of doing QA or end up promoting their own mapping standards, so I do not really have a proposal on how we could handle quality concerns more efficiently, yet I do believe that something needs to be done in that direction.

First I'm glad this kind of discussion is opened, because it definitely was a concern for many people, including myself at some point cause I'm never really confident about my modding.

I always felt a kind of pressure over a nomination, afraid I missed something that would get me hardly punished and make me not able to continue what I'm doing since all this time. The removal of the SEV system played a bit more recently, but still you always had that fear of doing badly if it happened to miss a point over a map. Obviously when you did a lot of big mistakes, you knew what would happen in the end.

I'll also join Aika and Shmiklak about the warning for already ranked maps (which just happen in my case, and probably helped to lead this kind of discussion), where it's more confusing than anything. In everyone's mind, when a map is ranked without anything bad, it means that there's no issue. So when it ends being punished, it just create a fear of nominating more maps and being always scared of everything you could do or miss on them (kinda linked to the Nomination Anxiety).

I sadly do not have any solution in mind...but I wanted to share a bit the feeling I had since few months at least, if not for a longer time.

Instead of looking at individual cases you should more be looking for "trends"

Does this BN get many DQs for silly mistakes? or he tends to nominate controversial stuff? etc.

I think instead of punishment, you should try to give "guidance". Like talk to them about what can be improved, etc. Try to make it look more humane instead of just the results of a report card.

Also agree with Aika that a place to talk about controversial maps *before* they get nominated would be nice.

Am reminded of when I nominated a couple of maps with Aeril during their probation period.

One map had legitimate timing concerns, but the other maps were scrutinised for, to put simply, being a bit too "anime".

Some members of the NAT were on board with removing Aeril at the time, despite them still attempting to learn the ropes, and during the time we were testing "Trial BN" and putting more emphasis on using probation as a learning environment.

I'd say instead of just shooting the BN member, moving forward we can try to ask the BNs decision/their justification to understand more before making a decision. Directly punishing instead of nurturing generally isn't a great thing.

I agree with Kibb that trends should be looked at instead of just looking at the DQs themselves on a case-by-case basis. Case-by-case works but more often than not, it leads to stuff like Nozhomi's cases where the verdict is more often unjustified than anything else. Perhaps stretching the time to a longer basis/evaluating the severity over time will work as more likely than not the BN may hit a slump.

Also was updated a couple of days ago SEV is no longer a thing and it's evaluated in a different way- I've said this too, more documentation and more consistency in how DQs are evaluated would be cool. Still too early to judge this system, so let's see where this goes.

Granted, maybe my views are pretty idealistic but let's be hopeful.