Bobbias wrote:
Anyway, personally I feel like dumps are more or less an inevitable element to rhythm games where people are able to create their own charts. Dumps allow for extreme levels of creativity from the mapper (since they are no longer restricted to following the music in a note for note fashion). This freedom comes with it's own issues of course. A carefully constructed dump will usually have very interesting patterns that still follow the structure of the music and should also have a lot of emphasis on pattern playability, while a poorly constructed one may have little or no real structure at all, and patterns that may be essentially unplayable.
Because of this level of variability between good and bad, allowing dumps to be rankable would mean that any dumps being considered for ranking should definitely be looked at by someone who has a very strong understanding of structure and pattern playability. On the other hand, allowing dumps would allow for some very unique maps that have a very strong sense of personality due to the structure/patterns used, which is something I feel osu!mania is lacking. While there are certainly still several maps with a strong sense of personality, a large number of ranked mania maps right now feel very samey and uninteresting to me.
For reference, I would consider many of the extremely difficult o2jam and BMS charts as dumps, even though they aren't generally referred to as such by their respective communities.
Thanks for the response, although we've probably discussed this time and time again.
Honestly my reasoning for dumps not being rankable is simply because it's leaning far too much to what makes a chart enjoyable to play through. The end product (i.e. how much you enjoy a chart/how fun it is) is based on two factors, musical relevancy and playability (pattern choices, difficulty consistency and so on). The reason why we make dump charts/overmapped charts is because we want to make charts to music that we (probably) enjoy but the music as it is simply do not justify the difficulty of the chart that you want to make. Without speeding up music, a chart can be harder in two ways: either the chart will be overlayered, or the chart will have ghost notes. Both of these strongly decrease the musical relevancy of the chart. The latter is a given and everyone agrees that this would create a "dump" chart, but I don't understand why people don't see the same for the former. Just because there are sounds that could justify these chords does not mean that it is not a dump. While there is no universal form of charting, nonstop three to four note chords in a 4K chart would represent that the song is extremely cacophonous because it takes up 80%-100% of the playing field. In most cases, they do not represent the song you're charting.
So you have to draw a line as to how much musical relevancy is enough. I don't think adhering to your own set of rules for your dump chart is sufficient, because consistency is a very simple thing and it should be fundamental for any chart that is actually "good". So how dumpy is too dumpy? Do you stop with charts like
King For A Day, where it's almost completely based on the atmosphere of the song with a layering scheme that is far from representative from the song (a syllable is almost always a four-note 1/6 burst, etc.) itself, or do we stop at charts like
Ice Angel or
dreamless wanderer or AiAe, where sounds are actually present to somewhat justify them but they are far from what the music actually represents? Not to mention it's not really a clear-cut thing for some charts either.. there's just way too much subjectivity involved and even if you managed to put in some criteria as to how dumpy it is, there's still edge cases. It's just not worth the trouble because the ranking criteria is supposed to be a set of
rules.Can dumps be creative? Absolutely, I've seen a ton of creative dump charts and I do want to make creative dump charts some time in the future, but the thing is that are there many people who can be that creative just because they can create their own set of rules? It's not like the rules of mapping normally are restrictive, honestly. They're really not that restrictive; the only reason why it seems that way is because of how insanely limited the song choices are in this game. Most of these are extremely generic rhythm game music (SDVX comes to mind) or anime OPs which are also generic in structure. Music like breakcore, progressive rock/metal (though this is somewhat understandable, given how bad the osu editor is and time signature bullshit, that's a suggestion I'd like to see) and classical are all genres that are completely overlooked by the mania community. I don't see how allowing dumps in game would actually change the variety of maps that much, considering that the community is already creating artificial barriers as to what to chart to begin with. Of course, that doesn't apply to everyone - I know a ton of mappers who chart unique music (Agka and Billium come to mind), but these people don't really bother getting their charts ranked for a multitude of reasons that aren't exclusive to "dumps not being allowed". Allowing dumps won't change this at all.
I could honestly go on about about how allowing dump charts would be far more of a nuisance than it is to not and how there are some communities that have a "ranking criteria" system (FFR) and it works just fine, but they're not entirely comparable. The main points is that I feel that dumps just err far too much towards one factor (playability) that makes a chart enjoyable (and I'd argue that the other extreme (musical relevancy) is just as bad, but unfortunately due to how the ranking criteria works the mapper can reject any suggestions regarding playability as long as notes are consistent), and not trying to carry a finesse that creates memorable and replayable charts, and the fact that it just creates too much ambiguity and problems than it would have benefits (more maps).
Of course, this is just a subjective response from someone who has been raised in a community with stern standards. I know that there are people who play other rhythm games with charting principles that are far more lax and liberal and vehemently disagree with my viewpoint, and I'd like to see other reasons why they want dump charts to be ranked.
post count +1.
