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[Discussion/Proposal] Map Genre Labelling

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Topic Starter
Noffy
It’s probably about time to try this again.


Context:


Over the years, what can and can’t be ranked has overall, become much more accepting to a wide variety of styles than ever before.

However: this has a huge drawback. It becomes hard to find exactly what you want. Any map you download of a song you like, it’s a total crapshoot whether it’ll be in a style you enjoy playing or not.

I imagine some people may argue it’s healthy to branch out and play many different maps, and while that’s what I and others would personally find fun, I don’t think that’s a reason to make the game un-fun for anyone that wants to play something specific.

There are many times where a reddit thread or so is opened, the claim is made somewhere, comfy maps aren’t ranked anymore, a kind samaritan links like 20 or 30 from the past few months. But how is the average person supposed to find the 20 or 30 if there’s like 100 other maps in a variety of other styles in ranked, too?

Not only that, the definition of that is so different from person to person that what the samaritan thinks fits that descriptor may not to the others with this issue.

With the scale of ranked increasing every day, and a constant influx of ranked maps, this becomes nigh-impossible to search through and find what you want.

Who is going to play a game that is 70% playing levels you hate? I think it speaks a lot to player passion to somehow push through that deluge anyways and find literally anything these days.


Probably not doable (but it’d be nice if it was):

It’s been proposed in the past to have web-based crowd-sourced tags where any player can submit a map genre label onto ranked maps. Since it involves development time, this is harder to push for.

Something that may be doable (my proposal):

Ok it’s a little complicated but hopefully fun in practice, since most of it is just tick the box when actually happening, and can be summarized as “osu periodically votes on style names”:

Once a month:
- A newspost is made: propose map genre names!
- The conditions: Must not be a 1:1 mapper name. Otherwise just look for their maps ?_?
- Comment 3 example maps and your name for their shared genre, the most upvoted ones are then taken to a discussion to make sure they don’t overlap too much or the maps really do have a similar enough vibe to be labelled.
- The surviving labels are then added to a dedicated wiki list that lists the map genres, example maps.
- Genres are then encouraged to be added to applicable maps in qualified. If they’re not added, we’d need an accessible way to contact mods to add them to online tags at least. Especially as this is a huge retroactive thing.

Hybrid of website and reddit engagement for these would be cool as well imo

If you have another way to get this kind of idea rolling that’d be cool to hear too.

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
Stompy_
More different types of newsposts is always good.
OMDB iirc already has like a map labling system (here) so I think it could be a nice way for people to find maps they want to play more easily so something like what's used on OMDB could be nice?

Though if we would add them to tags then it would require people to go through many many maps that were ranked before so it really depends on who can access changing tags and if people would be willing to go through so many maps.

We would also have to define each label to ensure they are used properly.
Aeril
More map labelling would be good. Might also be worth putting a sort of thing at the bottom of the osu client like for tournaments that redirect there since not alot of people look through news posts and are more likely to see that or Reddit.
-Hitomi
Firstly, In my opinion this feature would impact positively with how current ranked section is versatile. Imagine a player listening to a cute anime song and there he gets a "challenging" tech map. Hence, it would be easier for the players to search for not only the songs but also for the maps of their liking.
Secondly, here comes a controversial thing right out of the feature. Some specific types of maps might reduce in playcount dramatically, which is both on positive and negative side. Quite a large amount of the playerbase has been complaining abt how some "mapping styles" dont represent/unexpected to see for certain songs. Hence, on positive side, we will get less ppl complaining about ranked section, on the negative side is the playcount (but does it really matter if players dont want it anyway?)
As for a suggestion, the easiest thing is implementing labelings in tags (look at mania for example, where they have chords, mini jacks etc), dont think having map attached labels is really necessary
apollodw
As mentioned above, OMDB has made some significant ground on this -- a user-based descriptor voting system seems to be working well. A full list of desciptors with names and descriptions can be seen here: http://omdb.nyahh.net/descriptors/
Topic Starter
Noffy

moonpoint wrote:

As mentioned above, OMDB has made some significant ground on this -- a user-based descriptor voting system seems to be working well. A full list of desciptors with names and descriptions can be seen here: http://omdb.nyahh.net/descriptors/
omdb is so cool i love you guys
Drum-Hitnormal
how about train an AI model that analyze the map structure and label them, can be corrected via human labeling and improve the model.

pls avoid putting pressure on mapper/BN to label them in tags, there might be subjective difference in what belongs to what genre, and just extra arguments over what labels are appropriate.

but this would be 3rd party development, i dont see osu dev team ever make this happen.
at same time we can also improve the overall web search

this also means player need start using a new website for searching maps... which takes traffic way from main osu website which loses ads revenue. could be possible to use chrome plugin that calls the new API for search and overwrite the results in main website through html editing, like how we deal with osu direct button added on map page causing misclick when intended to click discussions

edit: just saw omdb -> we can create chrome plugin that redirect search there for main osu website if people dont like using that site.
-kevincela-

Noffy wrote:

- Genres are then encouraged to be added to applicable maps in qualified. If they’re not added, we’d need an accessible way to contact mods to add them to online tags at least. Especially as this is a huge retroactive thing.
Question: would these genres be included in the sets' tags? Or would it be a new kind of field altogether? Because I've got the feeling that as nice as the idea could be simply adding tags wouldn't necessarily work all that well, especially considering potential overlaps with existing tags which are determined by other factors which aren't necessarily related to the map's nature (for example, would "tech" count as a tech map? or is it related to the song?)

In general I really feel map descriptors should be added as a core element in osu if possible, since I honestly think the current ranked maps throughput is way too high when considering how searchability works at the moment, heavily hindering discoverability of maps deemed "interesting" by the player. I honestly think that out of all the issues the current ranking system has, this is the one that needs the most attention because it also affects how the ranked section is seen by the playerbase (even more than the "BNs don't want to nominate jump maps" thing).

If a first-party solution is not feasible then I'd agree we could think up of some integrations/third-party solutions as well, like the current map descriptors in OMDB (thx moonpoint for this website btw, love u), but the issue here is getting the players to actually use these tools, because if they don't it'll all be kinda pointless.
clayton
for "osu periodically votes on style names" -- it's not a bad idea to avoid explicit web dev effort, but I feel like this isn't a good workflow to create and apply tags. for the community voting part, it's not easy to get a good sense of what a good tag is without lots of experience trying to classify maps, so I would just not trust it really. for the application part, I also have little trust in an uncoordinated effort to set these tags in a way that would benefit most searches. I can see this whole thing working for maybe the simplest of gameplay tags but nothing more.

I agree that the best solution would be a dedicated new feature for this on osu-web but also agree that it's not worth depending on dev time that is notoriously lacking

here's my least-effort proposal: OMDB already did the hard work of building features to work with these types of tags and attracting a (somewhat) coordinated userbase to apply them, so have osu-web rip whatever tags the map has on OMDB and store them alongside existing tags. depends on permission from OMDB author of course. I think that would be a significant improvement in the meantime without being too ambitious about dev investment
Vulkin
I'm concerned for those that have multiple genres in one, because if there's multiple genres, what should you do?

You could add a "main" genre, but then it can just disregard the rest of the map, such as those that are ambient for 90% of the map, and then suddenly it's speedcore for 30 seconds.

You could add them all, but then it can mix results unintentionally under the same scenario.

Perhaps you could add a percentage by length on where each style goes, but it could potentially conflict between difficulties, and it could be pretty cumbersome to set up.

Just setting "multi-genre" is kinda pretty ambiguous in my opinion, like how many genres do you need for it to be considered multi-genre?

I'm not sure what else could be done to set this up, and sure osu! could copy OMDB's system, but that could probably cause potential legal issues?
clayton
it's unfortunate naming but this thread is not related to "Genre" as it currently appears on beatmap pages. it's about tagging the style of the map itself, not the song (of course these may be related though)

Vulkin wrote:

I'm concerned for those that have multiple genres in one, because if there's multiple genres, what should you do?
whatever results from this will likely supplement the "Tags" field and so you can add more than one with no issue. how I understand it, practically every map should have more than one style.

Vulkin wrote:

and sure osu! could copy OMDB's system, but that could probably cause potential legal issues?
it's not a legal issue and similar proposals have been made long before OMDB was around

if data from OMDB were used verbatim as in my suggestion, that would be done with permission

Drum-Hitnormal wrote:

this also means player need start using a new website for searching maps... which takes traffic way from main osu website which loses ads revenue.
osu doesn't have ads... or maybe I didn't understand a joke
apollodw
I'll state right now that I would love to integrate or otherwise help with some osu!web <=> OMDB crossplay. Happy for the data to be used as well
UberFazz
please please please push this to devs as hard as possible. not only do i think it'll solve the neverending issue of people complaining about ranked, it'll overall improve the player experience for obvious reasons
momoyo
I vouch for this.

Considering we get 70 maps map ranked a week each game mode which is a lot to be honest, I feel like making labels for the map would help research of maps players might enjoy more.

How will this apply/work for other game modes though? Like this is good for std but does the other game mode benefit from it? Not sure since I'm clueless about anything non-standard related.
Yumenexa
@momoyo Mania would benefit from it, there are quite a few different types of maps. Some of the descriptors I can think of would be: SV, Rice, LN, Dump, etc.

Would also be nice for all gamemodes if we can select many descriptors concurrently (assuming that some kind of web-based change is made), for example you could select both "circle-only" and "simple".
Monoseul

momoyo wrote:

I vouch for this.

Considering we get 70 maps map ranked a week each game mode which is a lot to be honest, I feel like making labels for the map would help research of maps players might enjoy more.

How will this apply/work for other game modes though? Like this is good for std but does the other game mode benefit from it? Not sure since I'm clueless about anything non-standard related.
I don't know how it might work for taiko and catch (if it does) but I can definitely say this would be pretty good for mania as well as we do also have different styles of maps.

Tech, dump, rice, LN, inverse, stamina, chordjack, SV, etc.. just like yumenexa mentioned. We already have maps with tags like these at times, I think it's been encouraged a lot more for some time now. So something like this would also be nice to see in mania as well since we also get quite a bunch of maps ranked per week!
Scotty
i was kind of thinking of making it like song genre/language is currently. each map would have an additional drop down menu (same as the ones that let you pick song genre and language) that you can pick the map type from, and the osu search function in beatmap listing would let you search by map types as well.

there'd be an initial list of map types to pick, and if more types are needed they can be added if there is popular demand for it
lewski

Scotty wrote:

i was kind of thinking of making it like song genre/language is currently. each map would have an additional drop down menu (same as the ones that let you pick song genre and language) that you can pick the map type from, and the osu search function in beatmap listing would let you search by map types as well.

there'd be an initial list of map types to pick, and if more types are needed they can be added if there is popular demand for it
not sure whether u actually mean what this sounds like to me but unlike genre and language I think it'd kinda suck to have one type per mapset because you can have completely different diffs and as said before u will probably want more than one tag on most maps in order to describe them properly
Melons

lewski wrote:

Scotty wrote:

i was kind of thinking of making it like song genre/language is currently. each map would have an additional drop down menu (same as the ones that let you pick song genre and language) that you can pick the map type from, and the osu search function in beatmap listing would let you search by map types as well.

there'd be an initial list of map types to pick, and if more types are needed they can be added if there is popular demand for it
not sure whether u actually mean what this sounds like to me but unlike genre and language I think it'd kinda suck to have one type per mapset because you can have completely different diffs and as said before u will probably want more than one tag on most maps in order to describe them properly
Maybe it could be a drop down with check boxes, which would let you pick more than one. And if theres a lot it will just let you scroll, sort of how it does when theres a large amount of tags.
powerplayer75

Drum-Hitnormal wrote:

how about train an AI model that analyze the map structure and label them, can be corrected via human labeling and improve the model.

pls avoid putting pressure on mapper/BN to label them in tags, there might be subjective difference in what belongs to what genre, and just extra arguments over what labels are appropriate.

but this would be 3rd party development, i dont see osu dev team ever make this happen.
at same time we can also improve the overall web search

this also means player need start using a new website for searching maps... which takes traffic way from main osu website which loses ads revenue. could be possible to use chrome plugin that calls the new API for search and overwrite the results in main website through html editing, like how we deal with osu direct button added on map page causing misclick when intended to click discussions

edit: just saw omdb -> we can create chrome plugin that redirect search there for main osu website if people dont like using that site.
https://github.com/token03/osu_oracle
Topic Starter
Noffy
Hey guys I'm gonna be making two posts here

The first one, a really cool and in-depth proposal that was sent in to me through direct messaging:

I agree with the overall sentiment that osu! lacks proper map filtering and tagging. There's a big variety of map styles and gameplay experiences in the game. But I highly disagree with using lingo that belongs in the hardcore user base to help solve that. While OMDB is an interesting solution, it comes from a place of users who are highly invested in the game and uses lingo that won't help your average player. Also, the fact that we're using human bias to try and define genres of maps, like people try to do to with genres of music, is also a problem in itself because there will be dispute on what something is, and again, gate keeps the filtering more than opens it for the public. While I'm not against it, I don't think it tackles the main issue as presented.
-
Instead, there's a much more objective solution to that problem, which is describing the content of the map based in what skill it requires most. Fair warning, there's a lot of lingo hell as well when the subject is skill in terms of playing the game. But if we consider the osu! standard gameplay itself, I think we can all agree that there are 3 main components that define the gameplay of osu!. The ability to click objects, the ability to move your cursor on the screen, and the ability to look at the screen and understand what you're supposed to do. There's nothing else to do while playing the game beyond tapping, aiming and reading. All the other stuff that floats around in forums, discord, reddit, anywhere that tries to discuss this, can't really find anything that is not one of these 3 basic core mechanics of the game, because those are all the inputs players have with the game itself.
-
The reason I'm bringing up this is that they're basic enough. Most players can make sense of Aim, Tapping and Reading, but not everyone will read "Finger Control Flow Aim" and understand what a map with these tags even means (again, assuming the goal is the general audience and not the hardcore player base/mapping community). They also relate to the oldest descriptive terms ever used to define maps in the game; jump and stream maps. Adding to that, with the current star rating calculations, it is possible to actually use an automated system to showcase the contents of the map instead of waiting for human input to tag and filter the maps.
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In conclusion, using the star rating system and its future iterations to showcase the contents of the map based on skill requirements seems like a better solution than creating another gatekeeping situation of having to read a huge wall of wiki text to understand all the 100+ mapping styles, spending hours and hours on that. I'm not saying they're exclusive. I believe that OMDB and the mapping community in general already have their ways of knowing how to filter maps, with no further implementations needed in the actual game itself. The people who are lost the most right now are the average Joe's out there who can't find their comfy jump/stream map.
-
I asked a Designer friend of mine to create a prototype of how that implementation might look like, and I'll show you a graph example. Again, this is subjective to suggestions, changes and discussion, but do keep in mind that this was done and thought out for the general audience of the game. We tried using only an info graph of the 3 skills only, but from a design perspective, we added a pentagon to look better on the website and added jumps and streams since those were the terms with the least amount of possible disagreements on what they mean.
Topic Starter
Noffy
The second one as a general update:

Along with discussing all the other recent changes, we brought this up to peppy last week. The reason being that no matter how many changes we make to bn and ranking systems, it's not as useful as it could be if people still can't easily find the maps they want among many others they don't want to play, which is a huge core issue with how big and varied ranked has gotten over time.

After sharing everyone's thoughts, this thread, and various proposals, it's now pretty high up on the development radar to get some kind of map-tagging system that we've been discussing in place! Just keep in mind it's not literally the current priority, but likely the next once some significant dev time is available.

They'll try to implement it with their own ideas first and we will see how it goes. Ideally, the vision is to have something any player can help determine. The final form isn't set until it's in place, but it's still pretty exciting. I'm sure we'll see more news later down the road about it, thank you everyone for your contributions and support on this topic 🙏
clayton

Noffy wrote:

The first one, a really cool and in-depth proposal that was sent in to me through direct messaging: [...]
this seems cool -- and i think something along the same lines has been brought up on osu-web or lazer discussions but I couldn't find it ;-; -- but seems more tangential to me than they're suggesting? I guess it depends how you look at this issue. personally it would not help me filter out or decide what maps to play because idrc what skillset the map is testing, I just want to exclude some styles of mapping that I seem to never enjoy. I'm not sure that even their example of "the average Joe's out there who can't find their comfy jump/stream map" would be helped this way, because while it obviously does indicate "jump" or "stream", it doesn't indicate if a map is "comfy" or not and many varying styles of mapping could share similar skillset charts
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