Following multiple discussions + internal vote among the NAT, Project Loved team, and the counsel of the osu! team, requesting beatmaps to be removed from Loved is no longer possible. Furthermore, ranking exact copies of Loved maps (either as re-uploaded sets or guest difficulties) is no longer allowed.

Here's a summary on how we reached said outcome, courtesy of RandomeLoL:


Below are the affected wiki citations:

Project Loved article wrote:

Creators of said maps cannot request them to be removed from the Loved category. Moreover, Loved difficulties cannot directly be reused in Ranked beatmaps.

Maps may still be removed from the category temporarily in the event gameplay-breaking issues are discovered right after being added to Loved. These problems can be reported by reaching out to a Project Loved Team member or by posting in #osu-loved channel of the osu! Discord server.

Ranking Criteria wrote:

Directly re-using your own Ranked or Loved difficulties in other Ranked beatmaps is discouraged. This is to avoid unnecessary bloating of Ranked content.

project loved patting themselves on the back after a hard day of achieving absolutely nothing

can we have an explanation for why this is happening beyond "not sustainable"

This is an anti-community decision from which almost no player gains, only looses. Before making such decision you should ask the community "do you want high quality loved maps to be ranked" first. By your actions you're just killing the game (considering how much movement loved maps in ranked have caused, and now you're banning it).

This is not good

Personally I never really understood the mindset of "Map already has a loved leaderboard but lets rank it", so the second point is kind of whatever to me. Although I am incredibly sure, a lot of people will see it different, so listen to these people too of course.

But on the first point I just do not understand why it is handled that way, maps like Ghost Rule had the same thing happening long ago. I do understand your reasoning of it is an annoyance for the Loved Team, but it happens quite rarely, maybe once every 3 months, so why would it be handled that way? Only reason I can see is that history is erased with the leaderboard scores gone, which definitely is a huge concern

So does that mean permission from mappers must be explicitly given now? This isn't explained anywhere.
Also, it seems counterintuitive to require changes to be made to the map when it may be perfect as is, and even forbid unloving maps altogether, this makes it impossible for a map that used to not be considered rankable to be ranked later on, or for mappers who were gone for longer periods of time to change the status of their map if it was put into loved without them knowing/agreeing.
I also think that not taking input from the wider community into account is yet another example that shows the team is disconnected from players and mappers.

Givy120 wrote:

This is an anti-community decision from which almost no player gains, only looses. Before making such decision you should ask the community "do you want high quality loved maps to be ranked" first. By your actions you're just killing the game (considering how much movement loved maps in ranked have caused, and now you're banning it).

Ahh, but see the answer to your question is "no", because something something politics.

For the option of Disallow Unloves Entirely, it says that a "vocal minority of players would not like this", is there any evidence (such as public polls?) to support that claim of them being the minority? because from what I observe a pretty overwhelming majority of the general community would not like that and I can't really find the source of that claim.

Moreover, what does undergo significant changes mean? Are there / will there be clear rules that determine if "significant changes" is made to a map, or would it be a case by case basis depending on modding and BNs/NATs votes under disagreements similar to how the current mapping discussion works?

I do like the idea of not having completely identical maps with different leaderboards so I am all for making changes to the map before ranking it but I would love to have some more clarification. Thank you

If the loved map must undergo significant change, it defeats the entire purpose of making the map ranked, since it will be a different map altogether by then.

Honestly, I'd say just own it and say "Fuck you, you wanted you map loved, now it is and if you want it ranked, you make a new one and that one can be ranked"

This is an absolutely stupid decision and completely against the will of 95% of your entire playerbase, who benefits from this? No one whatsoever. Not mappers who wants to rank their maps, not players who want to see maps they like in ranked, not anyone, there is no point.

Serizawa Haruki wrote:

So does that mean permission from mappers must be explicitly given now? This isn't explained anywhere.
Also, it seems counterintuitive to require changes to be made to the map when it may be perfect as is, this makes it impossible for a map that used to not be considered rankable to be ranked later on, or for mappers who were gone for longer periods of time to change the status of their map if it was put into loved without them knowing/agreeing.
I also think that not taking input from the wider community into account is yet another example that shows the team is disconnected from players and mappers.

Yes, I have the same concern that without an explicit permission, moving maps from unreachable mappers is basically nuking their maps from getting ranked when they come back to the game. Specifically, I don't think this is fair given that some maps are already loved without explicit permission.

I support this. Guaranteed permanent leaderboards are a good thing.

good change

Prohibiting unloving maps seems a bit extreme. Why not just allow the ranking of loved maps if the original gets unloved? I feel that unloving the original is a good enough tradeoff to have it ranked. You could always enact a queue or certain guidelines (e.g. the age of the loved map) if being swarmed with unlove requests is the issue.

Will try to answer everything as best as possible. I want to make it very, very clear that the reason why this wasn't ran through the wider community was because it was an executive decision from Up Above. It was not a matter of if it was going to change but rather how it was going to do so.

Please understand that this thread is to be used to discuss the changes, and obviously get a feel on how they're received or how they could potentially be improved. Also meant so we can gather up feedback and make any needed changes/clarifications accordingly. We are taking input from the community, this is the place for it. Please, speak up.

I'll try to respond to most comments, as well as potentially suggesting changes based on you guys' feedback.

KnuffKirby wrote:

...but it happens quite rarely, maybe once every 3 months, so why would it be handled that way?

Phx wrote:

can we have an explanation for why this is happening beyond "not sustainable"

Absolutely. It's explained a bit more in-depth in the gist linked above. The summary is that the time and effort overhead that was placed mainly on peppy's shoulders, handling all unlove requests, was not sustainable. Requests took a long time, and there were instances were unloving maps caused very, very wacky issues.

Additionally, this comes after repeated use (and abuse) of unlove requests. Unloves were meant to be an exception amongst exceptions, and despite that there was a period of time were multiple maps simultaneously were being requested to be taken down by people other than the mapper so they can be Ranked.

Givy120 wrote:

This is an anti-community decision from which almost no player gains, only looses.

How are players directly affected by the change? We'd like to know a bit more, because from the team's perspective players can still enjoy competing in both sections just as well, without the added benefit (or detriment, depending on who you ask) of pp in one of the two.

Serizawa Haruki wrote:

So does that mean permission from mappers must be explicitly given now? This isn't explained anywhere.

This is being handled by the Loved team on the following thread in the dev server. I'd implore keeping up with discussions there to suggest what needs to be changed from the process.

However, I agree. This is a valid concern, and the pipeline into Loved should account for this new change, let it be requiring explicit approval or setting a minimum time before asking for consent and receiving no response in order to gain implicit approval.

Serizawa Haruki wrote:

Also, it seems counterintuitive to require changes to be made to the map when it may be perfect as is...

Remyria wrote:

If the loved map must undergo significant change, it defeats the entire purpose of making the map ranked, since it will be a different map altogether by then.

In this case, I'd argue that the map should not be forced out of the section if it's fine as-is and players enjoy it for what it already is. No need to force anything. This is moreso meant for older sets or maps that can benefit from make-overs, allowing them to be Ranked instead.

Serizawa Haruki wrote:

... or for mappers who were gone for longer periods of time to change the status of their map if it was put into loved without them knowing/agreeing.

Another valid point. There was an option in the poll that would've covered this case. I'd argue this is not something common, but it is indeed a real possibility that has happened before. If this ever happens, best that can be done is contacting Support to see if something can be done about it. It is not meant to be the norm, however, hence it was not codified in the articles.

nnamqahc wrote:

For the option of Disallow Unloves Entirely, it says that a "vocal minority of players would not like this", is there any evidence (such as public polls?) to support that claim of them being the minority?

Mainly empirical evidence as seen in public discussions, both in and out of official platforms.

nnamqahc wrote:

Moreover, what does undergo significant changes mean?

Brought up by Sparhten. Will open a RC proposal where we discuss whether the "handling dupe maps" guideline needs to change. This is nothing new though, as the guideline already existed to avoid directly reusing ranked difficulties in Ranked. So that issue is technically out of scope of this discussion and encompasses the RC clause itself.

Things we're gonna do, as of me writing Le Response:

1. Make a RC proposal/discussion to discuss how to handle dupe content in Ranked (both Loved and Ranked difficulties)
2. Project Loved was advised to discuss in public (see thread in the dev server) how the Loved process should change

Hope this doesn't come as "corpo speech", that's really not the point we're trying to make here. All in all we understand this was not a change some people wanted to see. This, however, was an executive decision based on how inefficient unloves were for all teams involved. That said, we precisely wanted to hold this discussion to see how we could make this better for everyone involved, within the bounds of the original decision taken.

RandomeLoL wrote:

The summary is that the time and effort overhead that was placed mainly on peppy's shoulders, handling all unlove requests, was not sustainable. Requests took a long time, and there were instances were unloving maps caused very, very wacky issues.

I don't see how instead of making the most obvious solution (just moving the responsibility from peppy to someone else) - you've chosen the one that community doesn't like. And the duplicate option without unloving is still here, but this was also rejected.

RandomeLoL wrote:

Additionally, this comes after repeated use (and abuse) of unlove requests. Unloves were meant to be an exception amongst exceptions, and despite that there was a period of time were multiple maps simultaneously were being requested to be taken down by people other than the mapper so they can be Ranked.

Again, you could've made the standard pipeline for maps to go ranked. And considering that mappers who pushed for loved in the past were never informed that they would no longer own the map (quite the opposite it was said directly that they can unlove the map to push for ranked), and now you're doing this - against their will and against will of the players.

It looks for me that you have never even considered doing what community wants, and instead try to justify your own "vision". Because all "the problems" are resolvable by options that would not involve banning moving loved maps to ranked.

RandomeLoL wrote:

How are players directly affected by the change? We'd like to know a bit more, because from the team's perspective players can still enjoy competing in both sections just as well, without the added benefit (or detriment, depending on who you ask) of pp in one of the two.

The "added benefit" is very important for very big portion of community, the fact that it's not important for you or loved team doesn't justify you not taking into account importance of pp. Good map not having pp is objectively worse than this map having pp, so both players and mappers loose from this: players for not being able to get the map in top plays, and mappers for having lower playercount because players are discouraged from playing the map (because no pp). However it seems like you are more focused on preserving some personal "idea" of how it should be, instead of doing what players and mappers want.

RandomeLoL wrote:

Hope this doesn't come as "corpo speech", that's really not the point we're trying to make here. All in all we understand this was not a change some people wanted to see. This, however, was an executive decision based on how inefficient unloves were for all teams involved.

This looks exactly like "corpo speech". You just don't want to see loved maps being ranked, you've already made the decision and you don't care what people, which interests you supposed to represent, think. And now you're just trying to lower the damage from unpopular decision, while not planning to revert it.

Perhaps the loved category shouldn't really exist anymore and should only be used for things like 2B maps. Because whether intentional or not, with this change, it works more as a "maps BN don't like" category. Who even knows if five years from now, ranking standards will change yet again? Mappers often push for loved if they believe their map is unrankable, so it makes the category itself pretty unfair if it works like this despite changes in community taste and standards. I think if players like to play a map, and there are no serious issues, then if it is good enough for loved, it is good enough for ranked.

This is being handled by the Loved team on the following thread in the dev server. I'd implore keeping up with discussions there to suggest what needs to be changed from the process.

Should we really really try to redirect users to a developmental Discord server out of all things to discuss game changes? Not sure if I'm the only one but I wouldn't want to use Discord, is it weird to ask for the conversation to be done on osu! ?

We're not devs, and I don't want to rely on a dev Discord server.

And I'd have agreed on the changes if loved actually granted pp. I don't think it would be hard to filter all loved beatmaps, see which aspire-like beatmaps break the game and disable PP for them. Why does loved still not grant PP?

Givy120 wrote:

I don't see how instead of making the most obvious solution (just moving the responsibility from peppy to someone else)

Not possible. Unloves must be handled by peppy. They can cause issues in the backend, so they have to be checked by someone with the permission (and knowledge) to fix anything that goes awry.

Whether setting up a pipeline is feasible or not is not up to me, us, the NAT, or Project Loved. That's time that would need to be taken off the developers' hands. Peppy has genuinely tried doing this by simply migrating leaderboards. It was not possible. We already tried different options as to minimize score losses.

Please understand this goes far beyond what it is being assumed. All of these discussions of previous problems, hiccups, unloves, etc... were held in the public #osu-loved channel in the dev server.

All in all I am sorely disappointed this is being spun out as we (or me, as an individual) are completely for the changes and have pushed for our personal agenda. It's really difficult to have a constructive conversation with these pre-conceived biases in mind. So please do keep that in mind. Nobody here was "against the community". This is not the point of this discussion. If we did not care about what people thought of, this thread would not exist to begin with.

Happy Satoko wrote:

I think if players like to play a map, and there are no serious issues, then if it is good enough for loved, it is good enough for ranked.

I personally believe something similar. Over the years, the line has been thinning out quite rapidly. Whether to go for one section or the other it's becoming more of a "choice" rather than something that's decided by the map itself. I do think there's an issue with that. The overlap makes both sections lose what made them unique.

ziv_vy wrote:

Should we really really try to redirect users to a developmental Discord server out of all things to discuss game changes? Not sure if I'm the only one but I wouldn't want to use Discord, is it weird to ask for the conversation to be done on osu! ?

No issue whatsoever! This is why this thread exists. However, the project's main line of communication is in the server. Whatever is said here will be read by those responsible though.

Despite the server being formally (and now colloquially) called as "dev", it hosts several different community projects as well (spotlights, mappers guild, loved, tournaments/contests channel just to put some examples). It's the only official osu! server after all.

RandomeLoL wrote:

All in all I am sorely disappointed this is being spun out as we (or me, as an individual) are completely for the changes and have pushed for our personal agenda.

Looking on the poll results - it looks like you as a team are completely for the changes. And considering that you've wrote the arguments in the defense of this decision - I assume that you're for the changes as well. Considering that this ban was already de-facto implemented in the one-sided manner by vetoing loved maps - it looks like you've just made the decision that it's "not right" and then prepared to implement this as the official rule now. I haven't saw the proper addressing of community needs then (it was just "loved team doesn't like this" so we veto them) and I don't see it now. So I can't see how it's not a personal decision of small group of people who prioritize their vision over the options that favor players, even when options like "duplicate the maps" don't have a problems involved with unloving the maps.

RandomeLoL wrote:

If we did not care about what people thought of, this thread would not exist to begin with.

If you care about what people think - then why this was rolled out without asking the large portion of community?

I personally agree with this proposal, as it massively resolves the most important issue, where the current system is pretty easy to abuse. In addition, I don’t think retaining the current state of things is healthy -- apart from increasing the workload for Peppy and the dev team (current workflow is basically unimprovable, as RandomeLOL said), it also blurs the line between Loved and Ranked, but this part is just my opinion.

Givy120 wrote:

And considering that mappers who pushed for loved in the past were never informed that they would no longer own the map (quite the opposite it was said directly that they can unlove the map to push for ranked), and now you're doing this

I actually do think this kind of concern is also fair, as at that time, under the context of how things worked, the mapper still had full ownership of the map and had freedom to choose whether to unlove it. Considering their decided to love their maps without a blatant warning that it is no longer rankable in the future, I think it's also fair if this proposal does not apply retroactively.

Pretty understand it makes things harder, I just want to check if it is possible to provide exceptions for old loved maps, considering that Loved maps are added continuously and on a recurring basis.

Idk if either someone is delusional or clueless, but Loved and Ranked was never an equal categories of maps. Loved was added to allow leaderboard for maps that "are not allowed by the CURRENT ranked criteria" (source is initial post from 2015), so going from loved to ranked is an improvement, not just a category change. If maps that was Loved before ranked criteria changes are now rankable, this decision basically denies any chance to improve map status.

This might be acceptable to apply such rules for the maps that would be loved after (with mapper permission before moving into Loved, so they aware of them not being able to rank this map after), but retroactively using it for everything that was loved before is far from a fair decision.

Personally I do not like maps being unloved. I hate grinding for a score just for it to be unloved after a mapper decided after 10 years to finally redo and rank the map.

I thought loved was for maps that couldnt be ranked but was loved by the community and deserved a leaderboard.

Not a fan of this simply because trapping a perfectly rankable map in loved status seems very unnecessary. There's been some old maps that got moved from loved->ranked like beatmapsets/234646#osu/544136 which this would prevent for no good reason imo. If there's been some abusing the current system this feels like an overstep of a solution.

Loved is a weird category of maps at this point but that's another discussion. What's considered unrankable has changed over time so with this change I could see mappers actively fighting their map getting the loved status if it's not clearly unrankable TAG4/Aspire mapping or whatnot.

I don't understand why the committee was so quick to jump from "this recent trend of ranking maps that are already loved is dumb" to "unloving maps should be banned entirely" ??

I've never seen people have any issue at all with loved maps transitioning to ranked prior to this recent trend of ranking existing loved difficulties. See this spreadsheet for examples -- prior to December 2024, all those innocent instances of mappers wanting to give ranking their loved map another shot were generally received very well.

Plus, undergoing such a process prior to this year was both uncommon and a fair compromise, specifically because it required the mapper to go through the consequence of losing their existing leaderboard along with the potential risk of an unsuccessful ranking attempt. I feel that holding a vote on this topic when the "status quo" has been affected so much by recency bias (the recent influx of loved maps being simultaneously ranked with no risk/consequence) was not only against community interest but also inherently misleading.

The rationale behind condition 2, to prevent duplicated original content, makes sense. But condition 1 comes with exclusively negative effects and I see no meaningful positive ones, not to mention it goes against what beatmap creators were initially promised when having their maps Loved. ("Leaderboards may be reset by the beatmap creator at their request.")

want to give my thoughts on what was changed here

Maps cannot be unloved. While this does not exclude potential temporary unloves in case some gameplay breaking issues need to be solved, creators will not be able to unlove beatmaps at their discretion.

this is dumb. the whole point of loved as it was originally was meant as a place for either unrankable maps (still very much a solid 80-90% of the loved section currently, and those maps will not be impacted by any change of "rankability" whatsoever and will stay loved forever) or maps in which the creator was too lazy or unable to rank the set which have popular backing from the community to at least have something.

this is a nuclear option that frankly just doesn't make sense to implement to me. while i get that it's a very small minority of mappers in loved that end up deciding to want to rank a loved map, i see zero reason to remove that option outside of it being too much work on the back-end for peppy to bother with as mentioned here (which, if that's the case, why can't it be more streamlined then? i guess i'm just naive but i don't really get why this can't be done by a separate team or something, peppy doesn't have to solve everything in these cases). you're taking away the option for actual sets which genuinely could have been ranked even back then for what i can imagine is mostly "preservation of leaderboard scores" and nothing else, despite the fact that there was an already established procedure where there would be a site-wide message stating that the map would be unloved and to save leaderboard scores in any way players saw fit. that's what happened with this set and i felt like that was a pretty decent measure to ensure that everyone from both sides would be happy in some regard.

the only ethical question i see that remains would be "what about the inactive players?", i.e. on this set what would we do about a12456's play from 5 years ago if the map gets unloved? it's very unlikely that they would get a site-wide message since they haven't logged in for a long time, so that score would essentially be lost to time when the map gets removed from loved. personally, i don't think this is too problematic -- if players have moved on from the game, that's their choice, and in any case they were already warned prior to playing the map with this message



it sucks that history is being lost, but if that's how it has to be in order for these maps to be ranked to keep everyone happy, then so be it imo. the warning that displays before playing loved maps does a lot of heavy lifting to make this type of thing more justifiable.

(speaking of this message -- this new rule completely voids having it in the first place, so if it stays this should at the very least be removed since it'd be pointless to have and just delays gameplay slightly for no reason lol)

Loved difficulties may still be ranked, but they must undergo significant changes. This would basically be handled like we currently handle duplicate Ranked difficulties, wherein we may allow them to be reused if significant changes are made.

this point i agree with and think is fine, i'm assuming this is strictly in place to prevent single-difficulty loved sets to join a for-ranked set i.e. what has been happening recently, and that's fair. i honestly felt like that was dumb as hell to be doing in the first place, and having that expand to mappers who don't even log into the game anymore cough was equally stupid.

some other thoughts i had while scrolling through here:

Givy120 wrote:

Before making such decision you should ask the community "do you want high quality loved maps to be ranked" first. By your actions you're just killing the game

with all due respect, people have been saying "[blank] is killing the game" since before i even started playing. people thought this game would die as soon as cookiezi got banned for the first time in 2013. this isn't a good argument.

in addition, this was also discussed in the osu! discord server (which is public) under #osu-loved pretty extensively for months now, and aspects of the discussion have leaked outside to social media (reddit and twitter in particular), so it's not like this hasn't been public knowledge for a while.

RandomeLoL wrote:

Additionally, this comes after repeated use (and abuse) of unlove requests. Unloves were meant to be an exception amongst exceptions, and despite that there was a period of time were multiple maps simultaneously were being requested to be taken down by people other than the mapper so they can be Ranked.

i mean, i get why this would be written in response to that, but a valid alternative option imo is to just tell the person doing that to piss off (politely, of course) and if need be restrict them from doing requests. this entire waterfall of maps requesting to be unloved essentially originated solely from one person who took heavy advantage of goodwill and the volatility of the ranked section's (lack of) quality enforcement (which led to others joining in, granted), so why does this have to impact everyone else?

RandomeLoL wrote:

How are players directly affected by the change? We'd like to know a bit more, because from the team's perspective players can still enjoy competing in both sections just as well, without the added benefit (or detriment, depending on who you ask) of pp in one of the two.

this is not a good statement to be writing here, i'm gonna be honest; this comes across as super tone-deaf from the team as a whole (i'm not saying you're trying to represent the team in this case but it's very easy for it to come across that way imo)

whether people like it or not, pp is a massive reason people play this game. if it wasn't, then pp mapping wouldn't be a thing that exists and we wouldn't be having these discussions about quality enforcement or other "ranking criteria" related topics in the first place. leaderboards are a nice supplement to pp and give players another reason to play (to gain more leaderboard positions on a map that they might really like and to farm replays (though it's not like that actually happens anymore)), but if you asked a sizable portion of the playerbase, they would likely state their main reason to come back to the game is a) to improve, which pp showcases in some fashion (whether it does a good job at that is subjective) and/or b) to have fun, play and compete with friends, etc.

yes, you can enjoy playing a loved map, i don't think anyone is realistically going to deny that, but if it can be ranked and the mapper explicitly stated intentions wanting to rank it, then...why prevent them from doing that? it's their mapset. having these sets be locked away forever behind a category which is inherently inferior to the ranked section despite it being able to be ranked (with or without modifications) seems incredibly silly.

ziv_vy wrote:

We're not devs, and I don't want to rely on a dev Discord server.

my brother in christ 99% of the game's development is solely done through github which is infinitely less user-friendly than a discord server, i don't think this is too much to ask of people honestly

addendum
i want to bring attention to what mismagius/blue dragon/froslass/The guy who made The Big Black said in this post (yes i use old reddit still)

if we're going to be doing something like this which completely changes the definition of what the loved category is to begin with, then i think the question raised at the end is pretty valid: what's the point of keeping a category which has very little point to existing anymore with how everything's changed?

obviously putting the category as a "legacy category" destroys a sizable amount of years upon years of work that multiple different Project Loved members have contributed towards, but if we genuinely are removing one of the core reasons for why this category was made, i feel like it's time to reflect about why we have the category in the first place

fieryrage wrote:

with all due respect, people have been saying "[blank] is killing the game" since before i even started playing. people thought this game would die as soon as cookiezi got banned for the first time in 2013. this isn't a good argument.

I've said this not in the meaning "they do this, boom, and the game is dead". Every movement in the community contributes to game's popularity and online (such as lazer updates, pp updates, community events AND stuff like famous loved map being ranked). So directly taking one of these out is a direct contribution into "nothing ever happens" and the online decline, so it can be called "killing the game" IMO (usually games don't die because of one thing, but because of the accumulated issues that lead to players leaving the game).

fieryrage wrote:

in addition, this was also discussed in the osu! discord server (which is public) under #osu-loved pretty extensively for months now, and aspects of the discussion have leaked outside to social media (reddit and twitter in particular), so it's not like this hasn't been public knowledge for a while.

I can't allow myself checking every channel in the dev server when I'm not a part of it. Those kind of changes should be brought up to be public long before it's confirmed. As the part of pp developers - we always try to announce and explain every big and important change because I understand that not many people can sit in the pp-related channels and server to understand what's happening.

This will probably hold 0 weight in the eyes of the relevant decision-makers, but here are my two cents anyways, as both a player and a mapper:

Having read the thread, I think Project Loved's idea of what should go in Loved is SEVERELY warped.

The entire premise of the Loved category was to be to push maps that players loved, but for one reason or another couldn't get ranked at the time of their creation. However, given the current environment and looking at playcount numbers on farm maps (and the recent poll results from the NAT's survey), it is clear that a huge amount of players only care about one thing - PP (the only thing that Loved DOESN'T give). You hate it, I hate it, but it's clearly there to stay, and that was obvious the second that peppy implemented PP in Lazer. So why are we putting so much effort to preserve a category whose initial purpose is obsolete, and has been redefined?

One of the reasons behind this ban is to "preserve loved leaderboards" - ironic, considering that when you open a Loved map, a banner literally says that leaderboards can be reset, as Fiery mentioned. As such, imo resetting a Loved map's leaderboard should not be considered with the same weight as resetting a Ranked map's leaderboard, which should only happen in incredibly rare cases.

On a personal note, I love the idea of leaderboards not being permanent, because fluctuating leaderboards mean that people will compete for them again. It would further highlight the idea that skill should be expressed as a constant metric rather than a one-off pop off moment that you can't replicate anymore. Maybe even newer top players, who have never heard of the Loved map from a decade ago, could rise to the top if they knew the map existed. This brings me to my next point about exposure.

As someone who has had major concerns about the mapping quality level of Freedom Dive Arles, I cannot deny the considerable positive impact it had for a few weeks on the osu content creation scene (notably with mrekk and BTMC's competition on the map). Bringing popular maps to the ranked section is a good thing, despite the quality, in cases like this one, being low.

Speaking of quality, it's no secret to anyone, ESPECIALLY TO THE NAT, that the standards towards what is considered an acceptable "Ranked" map have fallen. While Freedom Dive is an exception imo, most old Loved maps mog the average Ranked map nowadays. If anything, bringing more goods map into ranked would be a breath of fresh air. I find it funny that we draw the line at unloving maps when projects like sd_revival encourage doing pretty much the same thing for old graveyarded maps.


TLDR: ridiculous change, I agree with everything that Happy Satoko and Givy120 wrote, and I hope that this gets reverted. Keep Loved for unrankable maps with no spreads (which could be moved further into ranked if the mapper wishes) or for gamebreaking maps - which by the way the community actually loves, if the popularity generated by Voltaeyx's 2B Mayday is anything to go by.

I like the change personally, puts the section in line with Ranked in terms of permanence. Cool to see how far it's gotten.

Loved still has a very distinct purpose imo: it gives players a way to engage in pushing maps. It removes the hurdle of interaction that is learning modding and becoming BN, which has been complained about plenty in the past. You can just vote lol, and even suggest maps.
Realistically the original implementation was never going to last. One nostalgia rush until you're up to speed with current map releases .. then what? All we're left with is nostalgia for the nostalgia machine.

In terms of PP I'm just like .. just as the argument that "this one map won't break the ranked section" gets made from time to time, I think that the lack of these few maps also won't break it. This persistent greed for exposure and inability to celebrate things without it delivering ranks is what really kills the game, from my pov.
So personally can't relate to the perspective of "this loved map could be ranked, so it has to be ranked".

--

fieryrage wrote:

one person who took heavy advantage of goodwill and the volatility of the ranked section's (lack of) quality enforcement (which led to others joining in, granted), so why does this have to impact everyone else?

Many such cases. Might be worth looking in the X shaped mirror and then at your peers? All this stuff impacts everyone else when pushed too far and it's all for the same reason.

yaspo wrote:

In terms of PP I'm just like .. just as the argument that "this one map won't break the ranked section" gets made from time to time, I think that the lack of these few maps also won't break it. This persistent greed for exposure and inability to celebrate things without it delivering ranks is what really kills the game, from my pov.
So personally can't relate to the perspective of "this loved map could be ranked, so it has to be ranked".

The core issue with your opinion and almost all of the people who support this decision - is absolute lack of awareness how important is pp for this game. Just because you don't need it - doesn't mean that other people don't need it. And supporting ban from which you have almost 0 gains, and very big amount of playerbase is loosing, is very selfish in my opinion.

Is it not also selfish to argue that the projects of others should always follow the need for PP? That the teams cannot cull exploits in their design because they happen to play in your favor? That the opinion of people who sank countless hours into enabling these systems in the first place is invalid because you keep wanting more, more, more?

I called it greed for a reason; there's never an end to how demanding it is at the cost of others.


PP is very important but maps keep getting ranked literally every day. Loved can fill its own niche and that should be fine.

yaspo wrote:

Is it not also selfish to argue that the projects of others should always follow the need for PP? That the teams cannot cull exploits in their design because they happen to play in your favor? That the opinion of people who sank countless hours into enabling these systems in the first place is invalid because you keep wanting more, more, more?

You use the wording that make it look like loved maps is some safe space for those who hate pp and we're trying to ruin it.
Loved maps are literally meant to be maps that can't be ranked by today's standards but still deserve a leaderboard. Because if they can be ranked - then why no. Ranked maps are objectively better because in addition to what loved maps do they also award pp.

Calling ranking the maps that have 0 reasons not to be ranked "an exploit" that "should be culled" and using phrases like "the opinion of people who sank countless hours into enabling these systems in the first place is invalid" (what??) shows that you have a very strong bias (preferring emotion of very small group of people over actual players interest) towards this topic, perceiving loved category as a completely separate entity that's "loosing" the maps that moved to ranked (and people who nominated them for voting are loosing too). But in reality - those maps are just getting increase in status that allows them to be more appealing to players.

And so-called "at the cost of others" is literally 5 people thinking "oh, map we've nominated on voting got ranked, what a boomer". And you're not only seriously compare it with tens of thousands of people who will play this map because of pp, but also thinking that it's somehow MORE important than players, for whom this all category and votings exists in the first place.

yaspo wrote:

Many such cases. Might be worth looking in the X shaped mirror and then at your peers? All this stuff impacts everyone else when pushed too far and it's all for the same reason.

ok yea fair enough i get how hypocritical this sounds coming from me of all people; the overall point that i'm trying to make still stands though, you can cut off the problem at its source and that problem becomes drastically reduced in severity. hell, that's what was done in 2020 up until the pika girl poll, essentially, alongside i guess "filtering out" whatever remained

imo going full-stop "we are removing this functionality" from something because a single dude was misusing/misunderstanding it which led to a domino effect of other people trying to do the same thing (most of which was under guidance from the one person!) is still dumb

to make my stance more clear, since i feel like you got the complete opposite impression of what i'm trying to fight for here: i am not against removing the loophole which allows single difficulties in loved sets to be ranked under a completely new set, i do have problems with giving mappers less options for their own creations via removing the ability to move their set out of loved. removing mappers' freedom of choice because of technical limitations or simply because "meh we don't want to do this anymore" is stupid.

in terms of other stuff that you mentioned

yaspo wrote:

This persistent greed for exposure and inability to celebrate things without it delivering ranks is what really kills the game, from my pov.

hypocrite warning: this has been a thing in this community for a while now, granted it never really started until people marketed themselves as "pp mappers" -- i'd say around the monstrata/fycho era, i guess

even with that knowledge, i don't think people are incapable of celebrating things without it rewarding pp, the core problem for most people against this change comes down to the fact that, using maps as examples, this can be ranked, so why can't this ever have even the possibility of being ranked? i don't really think it's "greedy" to want the map to reach a broader audience if it can easily do so

yes, it has a leaderboard, and you can appreciate that for what it is, but when the map itself is more or less fine and damn near indistinguishable from other ranked maps, why should it be held back from the ranked section especially from the host of the set itself? again, i don't think that's greedy, i feel like that's a pretty sensible option for mappers to utilize if they wish to go down that route -- loved shouldn't be a jail cell preventing any map from being ranked at all as soon as they enter it (and no, the "undergo significant changes" clause does not fix this issue). instead of reworking stuff to prevent the abuse of ranking the same map that's loved from happening again (which is what the second point does), we're removing the entire option altogether (which the first point does)...? what's the point? you might as well just eliminate the category if the route it's going down is going to result in "graveyard but with a leaderboard and no further updates", it just seems totally pointless to me and only serves to stifle mappers and make people actively not want their maps loved

Givy120 wrote:

Every movement in the community contributes to game's popularity and online (such as lazer updates, pp updates, community events AND stuff like famous loved map being ranked).

i'm gonna be real with you i don't see how stuff like temptation getting ranked "invigorated" the community to such an extent that it revived the playerbase's will to play / popularity of the game or whatever, this feels like a bit of an overexaggeration lol

if people genuinely think "nothing ever happens" when single-diff loved maps can't go for rank on other sets then that's frankly their problem for not realizing 95% of the other stuff happening around them

fieryrage wrote:

i'm gonna be real with you i don't see how stuff like temptation getting ranked "invigorated" the community to such an extent that it revived the playerbase's will to play / popularity of the game or whatever, this feels like a bit of an overexaggeration lol

This was more about Arles Freedom Dive, but Temptation is still one of the most popular maps of the 2025 (despite being much less accessible than many easier maps above in popularity), and it definitely have caused some movement with "omg Temptation ranked with loved top diff included". Especially considering this is one of the "mrekk billion stars 1400pp" maps.

@Givy120

I used that wording mostly in the sense of "look at yourself". People responding to this change by digging in to loved as a project and the people who run it is hugely disrespectful to me. There are in fact people on the other side of this yes. If that's too emotional then so be it, though your takeaways feel pretty twisted too fwiw.

In essence I just like people doing cool things and want them to continue enjoying that, project loved is one of those. So I stand to defend that and would prefer if people could chill. What loved provides to the community is awesome and I would love for them to continue building on it. For that to happen it might be better of being seen as a separate entity by the wider community at this point.

The claim that it must abide by the mob mentality feels just as selfish.

@fiery

You think it's unfair to make loved a "jail cell", I personally think it's unfair to essentially treat loved as a "waiting room for ranked". I've always seen the option to unlove and rank as a courtesy for changes of heart, rather than a part of a step by step process.

If you take a moment to read their newsposts then it's pretty obvious that loved is treated as something more. Perhaps a viable alternative to ranked with a different way of approaching highlighting the content players would engage with regardless of pp being available.
It's crazy to me to see all this and go "yeah but this is just a transitional period" -- loved doesn't acknowledge itself as "pre-ranked" at all so maybe it's time to get along with the program.

Stifling mappers from wanting to get their maps loved .. is a pretty fair point. Would have to see how that one pans out, inactive and 'lazy' mappers will always exist. Currently active mappers will have to actively weigh their options and not just yolo their map into the loved bin until they feel like taking it out again. Just maybe that is better too!

--

To both: I do realize my perspective on this is pretty different than your own. The potential you guys see in loved maps getting ranked is what I see in the continued development of loved. They've been making active changes across the years to make things more engaging, interesting, accessible and with this change just might keep making it better within the comfort that leaderboards are there to stay.

sidenote: someone's gotta put uncanny long arms into this gif some day

yaspo wrote:

You think it's unfair to make loved a "jail cell", I personally think it's unfair to essentially treat loved as a "waiting room for ranked". I've always seen the option to unlove and rank as a courtesy for changes of heart, rather than a part of a step by step process.

Banning unloves entirely does make it a "jail cell". But not doing so does not immediately make it a "waiting room for ranked" -- we can have neither of these things. A mapper inherently takes a risk unloving their mapset to push it for rank, knowing full well they could fail and never see a leaderboard on their map again.

I don't see what positives there are for banning unloves entirely compared to simply banning the same map from being in loved and ranked simultaneously. The recent epidemic of ranking loved maps has come entirely from maps being simultaneously in loved/ranked, not being unloved and then ranked. The latter being a common courtesy as you described, went just fine for the first 7 years of loved's existence. If simply allowing it as an option made loved into a "waiting room for ranked", we would have seen these unloves/ranks much more commonly than like once or twice a year.

That is purely me paraphrasing how others here seem to describe loved fwiw. Especially with the whole "loved only exists for maps that weren't rankable at the time" logic being used, comes across as reductive to exactly that degree.

Calling it a "jail cell" at all kindof reflects that, as it implies we rather always have an out, not being able to be content with a map just being loved.

This all boils back down to me treating loved as separate from ranked and as doing things its own way. I wish other people would start seeing it that way instead of seeming stuck in the past.

Congratulations on making mappers not want their maps to enter jail

yaspo wrote:

That is purely me paraphrasing how others here seem to describe loved fwiw. Especially with the whole "loved only exists for maps that weren't rankable at the time" logic being used, comes across as reductive to exactly that degree.

Calling it a "jail cell" at all kindof reflects that, as it implies we rather always have an out, not being able to be content with a map just being loved.

This all boils back down to me treating loved as separate from ranked and as doing things its own way. I wish other people would start seeing it that way instead of seeming stuck in the past.

My issue with this update is really just it being an all-or-nothing decision, where no exceptions from hereon will be allowed to be unloved. I can understand not wanting duplicate loved/ranked diffs like with Arles Freedom Dive or apoq Ao to Natsu, which are essentially just ranked for the hype factor, but I wouldn't put that against older sets that the mappers wanted to rank but couldn't. I think it's fair to allow the possibility of letting the set hosts unlove their sets to push them for ranked. Of course, this is less relevant for more recent loved sets, given how pushing such sets for ranked is more realistic.

Personally, I think that a loved status is much more impressive than ranked status, but I'm not gonna say I can't understand why someone would want to unlove their set to push it for ranked. If we're sticking with the new rules, at least mappers of upcoming loved sets know that they can't unlove their sets, but it's a bit strange imo to retroactively apply this rule to much older loved sets with no leniency (where the understanding was that unloving was possible and that "leaderboards may be reset").

Personally, I question the voting since it is partly skewed. You cannot ask the person who sits on the branch to saw it off. That would be against their interest. If "ploved" really is the Loved team in this voting.

This also feels like the Loved-System tries to outplay the BN-/Ranking-System further. In ancient history the "Loved" category was for maps that usually would be unrankable - broken maps, that the community however loved (reason for the project's name) to see having scores on. Meanwhile, at least in osu!taiko, maps that are perfectly rankable get Loved, which is diametrical to the whole ranking-process.

I totally understand ppy's opinion here. But the whole "loved is to be a very special place to have a beatmap" and "being able to rank Loved maps only when siginificant changes are made", only really works if you operate under the initial premise of having wacky unrankable beatmaps in Loved where you can actually change a lot. With beatmaps I just posted that is not possible. So with your proposal these can never be ranked ever again. And I also rather not open the can of worms with beatmaps that got loved in the past without consensus within a hybrid-set.

Only reason I voice up in here is because Love category seems to slowly -but probably unintentional- jeopardize the Ranking-System. What do BNs take the test for and what did the community make all the RC for if some people can by-pass it after they met a certain treshold that is stated on the Loved wiki article? And not involving the BNs in such a voting, who's rights together with the mapper are potentially restricted, is something I do question quite a lot.

I'll go against the grain and say that this is very good actually. We are one step closer to PP in loved. And preserving leaderboard integrity in a game so focused about its history is also huge.

ziv_vy wrote:

I'll go against the grain and say that this is very good actually. We are one step closer to PP in loved. And preserving leaderboard integrity in a game so focused about its history is also huge.

I would had no issue with this if pp in loved was actually possible. Even ignoring Aspire maps giving millions - the probability of this happening is near-0. So you're just contributing into keeping maps in "pp-less cage".