Relatively simple but worth discussing I think.

The information of multiple mapset contributors must be provided in the mapset, if there is any guest mapper. This might be in the creator's words, via a storyboard or via naming the guest difficulties appropriately. You only need to provide information of guest mapper and corresponding guest part. Guest mappers must be added to the tags of a mapset. This helps others to know if the map uploader is the main contributor of the mapset and who else contributed to the given mapset.

When looking over November mapsets I noticed that a lot - and with a lot I'm actually talking about A LOT - guest mappers find it funny or entertaining or whatnot to give their guest difficulty a sort of "custom" difficulty name that relates to their nickname but doesn't allow the average player to identify the mapper of the guest difficulty without actually looking into the tags or into the beatmap-description.

Examples of mappers who did this in November:
Underflow -> Ufw's ...
luxoDeh -> Luxo's ...
sukiNathan -> Nathan's ...
kawaiwkyik -> wkyik's ...
appleeaterx -> apple's ...
HootOwlStar -> HOS' ...
Cerulean Veyron -> Veyron's ...
orza6006 -> 6006's ...
dream117er -> 117's ...
IamKwaN -> KwaN's ...
F D Flourite -> Flourite's ...
TT Mouse -> Tt's ...
smallboat -> S.B.'s ...(something similar, can't remember)
Haruto -> Haru's ...
Adol Christin -> Adol's ...
FlobuFlobs -> Flobu's ...
yf_bmp -> yf's ...
Del05 -> Del's ...
StarForYou -> Starfy's ...
walaowey -> Walao's ...
Minakami Yuki -> Yuki's ...
pishifat -> pishi's
384059043 -> 384's
ZZHBOY -> ZZH's ...
EvilElvis -> Elvis' ...
fanzhen0019 -> fanzhen's ...
23konG -> konG's ...
Kibbleru -> Kibboo's ...
Charles445 -> Another445
ZLOdeuka- -> ZLO's ...

These are not all but most of the ones I found.

In short: Difficulty names should serve the purpose of being informative and not of expressing the mapper's individualism. The examples provided above are clearly inappropriate guest difficulty names if you ask me.

And to be honest: If you think that you can do this and still be recognized because you got some prestige or you are fame or people might look you up, well, I got some unfriendly words for you but this is not the right place to say them.
If you don't like your username, change it. Shortening your nickname to some abbreviation or cutting numbers or in Kibbleru's case even forming some weird nickname is just stupid, ambiguous and useless. I don't see a single reason to tolerate this kind of guest difficulty naming as the only thing it promotes is the exhibition of the mapper in a non-user-friendly way.
Naming the difficulties in the way shown above while still providing information in the map description is also unacceptable in my opinion. If the mapper doesn't wish to give the information via the difficulty name the difficulty name should just be left with the part that indicates its difficulty:
"Another445" -> "Another" with Charles445 with proper creditting in the description.


Discuss!


/edit for clarification:
Can one call it appropriate guest difficulty naming if it's not obvious for anyone who mapped the difficulty?
If the answer to that question is "no" the additional prefix-element has to be considered a custom addition. Custom (appropriate) additions are only allowed for the highest difficulty of a mapset and only unrelated to usernames. Prefixes as shown in the example ARE related to a username and they appear at ANY difficulty and they are inappropriate due to being unrelated to the song which poses a huge contradiction to the Mapset-Rule about difficulty naming.

My personal goal for this thread: Clarifying the phrase and declaring only guest difficulty names as appropriate that clearly indicate the guest mapper without having to check the description for further information.

/Edit 2 for some results of the discussion:

A group of people agrees that the guest mapper should freely be able to choose what he calls his difficulty.
A different group of people thinks that guest mappers should be free to use sensible abbreviations of their nickname but no random difficulty names that have nothing to do with them:

Stefan wrote:

I dunno, I say as long it's not some random poop name like in these cases https://osu.ppy.sh/b/792525&m=0 https://osu.ppy.sh/b/829255&m=0 it's not causing big issues.

A mix of these people thinks that mappers should be consistent with their guest difficulty names and don't come up with a new weird altered nickname for every guestdiff. Kibbleru

The overall result is that people don't see the downsides named by me as a problem that should be adressed which is fine. To get further from this point on I came up with the following example:

So I would really like to come back to the example i posted before which is this map:
https://osu.ppy.sh/s/219951
Guest mappers are only indicated by tags here and as tags don't support spaces I feel like it's not 100% foolproof for every case.
If the guest difficulties aren't named definitely there should be additional information in the description or SB in my opinion as it's not really the coolest thing to play memory and find out which name belongs to the other. It's relatively obvious in the example but on other mapsets it might not be the case.
That would be an easy way to ensure that anyone can find out who mapped which difficulty.

Regarding my understanding of RC information about who mapped which difficulty absolutely has to be provided in either difficulty name, storyboard or map description. Tags exist for the purpose of beatmap-filtering via search, they do not provide immediate information.

I think you're overthinking things here. Guest mappers are free to name their difficulties as they want, otherwise they don't opt to short their nicknames. I honestly don't see how can this be "inappropriate" for players. If you overlook the examples most of them make sense due to the way they use to short their username in the diff. Some examples:

1. IamKwan = Kwan
2. HootOwlStar = HOS
3. ZLOdeuka = ZLO

This concern is rather subjective and go over the guest mapper preference. You can't force them to change their usernames just because they name their username in a different way over GDs. As long as their long and real username is provided in the description is provided on beatmap's description and tags, what's the problem with it?

A difficulty's name must indicate its level of difficulty, with the exception of the hardest level of difficulty in a set. The mapset's hardest difficulty may use an appropriate custom difficulty name, unrelated to a username. Mapsets may also use a complete set of custom difficulty names that clearly indicate their level of difficulty to the player. Marathon maps with a single difficulty may use free naming.

Including usernames in a non-informative way is what I would interpret as "free naming" which is only allowed for the highest difficulty of a set unrelated to a username.
The way it is done in my examples we get free naming for any guest difficulties related to a username without information.
That's like wow, contradictory as fuck.
The next step would be to make a mapset all alone and name the difficulties "HR88's Easy", "HR88's Hard", "HR88's Insane". This would suddenly be against RC for some reason even though sufficient information about the mapper is provided in the metadata.

What you've posted now was totally different on what you stated in the thread. I guess that issues refers when the own mapper decides to name the hardest diff as his username, which is totally unrankable nowadays. That was to avoid such as obvious examples that didn't tell how hard the diff is. Some examples are:

1. https://osu.ppy.sh/b/257165
2. https://osu.ppy.sh/b/196747
3. https://osu.ppy.sh/b/70056

I honestly don't see any confussion with those rules unless you inspect the meaning of each word. XD

The problem though is that such guest difficulty names:

provides no immediate information about the guest mapper

therefore the additional "whatever prefix they used before the actual diffname"

has to be considered custom difficulty naming which is not allowed according to RC.

The entire point of this thread is to discuss what "naming the guest difficulties appropriately" means - that's why I tagged the thread with "rule clarification".
In my opinion it isn't appropriate difficulty naming as long as at least one healthy user can't tell from the difficulty name who mapped that difficulty.
Even if the information is provided in the description, the custom name is still a custom name technically not allowed and - as already mentioned - useless regarding the information aspect. There's no good reason to allow custom additions here and not on non-guest difficulty names.

/e: I edited the opening post a bit to clarify what I'm talking about.

You were mixing to different things, one is related to the diffname properly communicating the difficulty level (which is the free naming rule target) and crediting the creator of a diff. Particularly, as long as it's credited in the right way in any of the specified places it's ok, so if the full/true username is written in the creator words and an abbreviation or something else is used as a diffname is acceptable.

You might argue that it makes it more difficult (or not so straightforward) to find the actual user with this "custom naming". I think that by giving such a custom name, the mapper is aware and accepts everything he does is "less trackable".

LOL, man that's ok , since some names are so long (Hi DakeDekaane) or they contain unwanted characters (Hi Sekaii), If the diff name already contain their difficulty name ¨Easy, Normal, Hard, Insane¨ then is ok to abreviate your own Nickname, to be honest there should be info in tags or map description, Also take in mind that there are alot of collabs were this is used for the sake of short naming: https://osu.ppy.sh/s/310499
There are also alot of cases were the mapper prefer to don't add them: https://osu.ppy.sh/s/84014

gokugohan12468 ---> Goku's...
or
KittyAdventure ---> Kitty's...

I taken because that is simple and easy to remember :>
I don't taken like gokugohan12468's.... or KittyAdventure's.... because that too long lol Dx

GD'ers should be able to pick the nickname they want on their beatmap. They pick "custom" nicknames at their own peril. If people fail to identify Quib's Insane as belonging to Kibbleru, thats on the GD'er imo.

I would like to bring to light on peppy's original statement in regards to Custom difficulty naming from 2 years ago:

peppy wrote:

in other words, make sure the average human player can understand what difficulty the map is by reading the difficulty name. without knowing the mapper. without special knowledge of a niche topic.

Source: p/2725713

Emphasis on "without knowing the mapper, without special knowledge of a niche topic."

While the above quoted statement was never incorporated into the current criteria in regards to crediting guest mappers, I feel that (as frustrating as it is to see Kibbleru freely giving himself whatever name he wants) it is impossible to indicate the guest mapper "without having to check the description for further information" with alternate names.

The goal for the currently stated criteria is not intended to identify mappers without looking at the mapset description, but to properly credit those who have contributed to the mapset, regardless of the way the difficulty is named.

EDIT: Either no longer allow usernames at all on difficulties (Easy, Normal, Hard, Insane, Extra, or any appropriate difficulty name), or use the full username to represent recognition.

1. We choose our usernames as an online alias - something we wish to be called by. There's a reason why Kibbleru is spelled that way (and not with a small k, not with one b, etc.). Why choose to call yourself something that only refers to your alias and not something that directly calls it by using the correct spelling of it?

2. https://store.ppy.sh/store/product/32 exists. If for some reason your name is too long/doesn't look good to you/hard to remember/has unwanted characters/any other reason, you can request to change your username once for free with a supporter tag.

I suggest that those of you that want to map something for others and also want some recognition in the difficulty name to either use your full username OR change your username to something that you actually want to appear on the difficulty name. Simple, ain't it?

The guest mapper should be allowed to name themself however they want. I don't see any point on this. Up to them if they want to be recognized inmediately without needing to look at the tags/thread.

Endaris wrote:

Naming the difficulties in the way shown above while still providing information in the map description is also unacceptable in my opinion. If the mapper doesn't wish to give the information via the difficulty name the difficulty name should just be left with the part that indicates its difficulty:
"Another445" -> "Another" with Charles445 with proper creditting in the description.

So, beatmap description is a little useless ? uuuh
Let me tell you something, I ranked this map https://osu.ppy.sh/s/119438 with 2 GDs (if you exclude taiko diffs). The difficulties are not named " <x>'s Another" because they both told me to not name the diffs like this and just tell who mapped what in beatmap description, and as the mapset owner I was ok.
And there is a lot of mapset with GDs which are not named "<mapper name>'s <difficulty>" and just the difficulty name instead. And it is clearly allowed and rankable, as long as you add the GDer in tags and beatmap description.

I completely disagree with this
it's eases the life of many mappers to use an abbreviation of their name. Modders often know who maps it anyways, and most players usually don't care about whi made it. I highly doubt most of them know what a GD is, therefore It seems fine the way it is

I'd say that's a case-by-case problem. "fanzhen0019 -> fanzhen's ... " is definitely not a problem unlike "sukiNathan -> Nathan's ..." could be because it can imply Nathanael (a moderator) mapped this instead of sukiNathan. Weird abbreviations such as "StarForYou -> Starfy's ..." are as well meh and then again "HootOwlStar -> HOS' ..." is basically okay but I get the point of problem you're naming.

I dunno, I say as long it's not some random poop name like in these cases https://osu.ppy.sh/b/792525&m=0 https://osu.ppy.sh/b/829255&m=0 it's not causing big issues.

As much as I am strict about difficulty namings; for usernames I am not. Especially not when those names are abbreviation. I'm also talking for myself and found a solution for myself as well. To prevent having "OnosakiHito's <diff.>", which is for my taste very long, especially when making more than 2 GDs, I always use "Ono's <diff.>" or just <diff.>, also because people know me under this shortened nickname. For people to recognize "Ono" as "OnosakiHito" I simply put my full username into the BG, so people don't have to check it in the tags. Because of the latter, but also because I think it's up to the user whether they want to be recognize or not, I don't see the need of this as long as someone doesn't overtake it like for example bounding usernames together because of a collab.

Cherry Blossom wrote:

Endaris wrote:

Naming the difficulties in the way shown above while still providing information in the map description is also unacceptable in my opinion. If the mapper doesn't wish to give the information via the difficulty name the difficulty name should just be left with the part that indicates its difficulty:
"Another445" -> "Another" with Charles445 with proper creditting in the description.

So, beatmap description is a little useless ? uuuh
Let me tell you something, I ranked this map https://osu.ppy.sh/s/119438 with 2 GDs (if you exclude taiko diffs). The difficulties are not named " <x>'s Another" because they both told me to not name the diffs like this and just tell who mapped what in beatmap description, and as the mapset owner I was ok.
And there is a lot of mapset with GDs which are not named "<mapper name>'s <difficulty>" and just the difficulty name instead. And it is clearly allowed and rankable, as long as you add the GDer in tags and beatmap description.

I'm perfectly fine with the mapset you linked. Maybe my description is lacking but this is what I prefer if people are unwilling to provide their nickname within the difficulty name and it's also perfectly fine with RC as it is stated with "or" there.

And especially for the short versions it stays ambiguous. This is obviously more problematic in some cases compared to others:
Gonna have Yuki's ... by Minakami Yuki, by Yumeko Yuki, by Komeiji Yuki, that's great. There are probably hundreds of people with a Yuki-nickname that might start mapping and use it as their GD-abbreviation.

Add cases like https://osu.ppy.sh/s/219951 where you even have to dig through tags to see who mapped that difficulty and everything is perfect. Actually I don't think this set suffices the Metadata-part of RC as mentioning people in tags is only an additional must on top of

The information of multiple mapset contributors must be provided in the mapset, if there is any guest mapper. This might be in the creator's words, via a storyboard or via naming the guest difficulties appropriately.

There's no proper crediting in creator's words, SB or difficulty name. Oh well.

I see how short versions of rare names like fanzhen that you won't encounter on a regular basis are not really problematic but any kind of acronym or more common name fragments like "Nathan", "Yuki", "Elvis" will always be a subject of ambiguousity and a cause of confusion.
This shouldn't only become a problem when there are multiple popular community members with a similar nick but any case of ambiguousity could be prevented by forbidding the ambiguous difficulty names.

Stefan wrote:

as long it's not some random poop name [...] it's not causing big issues.

Small issues though.

On the other hand I have to repeat the question:
What is gained by giving a guest difficulty a non-informative or ambiguous title?


For me this looks like some pointless elitism. People are trying to develop trademark-difficulty names. You may say that people don't know what GDs are but personally I actively searched for maps by mappers I recognized in guest difficulties when I started playing. For example I specifically searched for maps by Nyquill who thankfully didn't decide to use "1\1y9u111's ..." as his standard guest difficulty name.

The RC isn't verbalized as
"The information of multiple mapset contributors must be provided in the mapset, if there is any guest mapper. This might be in the creator's words, via a storyboard or via naming the guest difficulties appropriately. If the information is properly provided in one of these you can add whatever you want to the others."

I don't see the issue with people using an artistic alias for guest difficulties which isn't their full username. as Ono previously explained using a full username in combination with a full diffname can give you very long strings of characters which just look MEH.

Some people like me are commonly referred to by an abbeviation of their username and started using that for guest difficulties (also "oko" is occupied until like January 2017 so lel). Sure it can be ambigious but i don't consider the username to be part of the actual difficulty name. For me this goes somewhat like
<creator>'s <diffname>
where the creator is supposed to be related to a username, anything else wouldn't make sense and the <diffname> can be anything unrelated to a Username because that wouldn't make sense either.

It's somewhat like not signing something with your full name but providing it in a descriptive text somewhere (tags, description, you name it). I do see the issue with just switching the shortened alias you use for no reason because e.g. Kibbleru signed his diffs with
Kibbleru
Quib
Kibboo
Moe Kibb
Son (XD)
And it's actually getting kinda confusing

Renaming to the shortened alias you like is not always an option and seems kinda dumb to begin with. If anything we should try to come up with something that prevents switching the name a lot, but even that can happen more often due to renaming so I don't really think we can find any wording that prevents that without annoying a ton of mappers.

Also i consider the current naming trend as appropriate because sufficient information will have to be provided in any case so this doesn't really matter imo

Apart from Kibbleru, whose naming is pretty ridiculous imo (sorry kibb
I don't see a problem.

The tags, website and forum exist for a reason, you know. If people really wanted to know the mapper of a guest difficulty of a nickname, they would have looked it up of their own effort instead of complaining. Its not hard to Google.
Not to mention some of the examples, like pishi and KwaN, are not the most common kind of name you'll find on osu.
Also, the community exists for a reason. If someone is known for their nickname, then why not? For example, Skystar before he changed back from Amamiya Yuko - it's passed on through word.

Therefore I dont really see a problem with the current system; apart from people changing their guest difficulty naming too often lol.

I dont see there are any problems.
Simply, there are many ways of finding out the Gder exactly, including the tags.

Okay, so the overall opinions seem to be either

a) Name the diff whatever the hell you want
b) The GD-Name should directly relate to the name of the mapper as a sensible abbreviation (split opinions on acronyms?)
and as an extra-option, Kibbleru mappers should be consistent with the guest difficulty prefix they are using.

So I would really like to come back to the example i posted before which is this map:
https://osu.ppy.sh/s/219951
Guest mappers are only indicated by tags here and as tags don't support spaces I feel like it's not 100% foolproof for every case.
If the guest difficulties aren't named definitely there should be additional information in the description or SB in my opinion as it's not really the coolest thing to play memory and find out which name belongs to the other. It's relatively obvious in the example but on other mapsets it might not be the case.
That would be an easy way to ensure that anyone can find out who mapped which difficulty.

To be honest I still didn't find out who mapped this diff: https://osu.ppy.sh/b/792525&m=0

I've been seeing bbHard

If I were supposed to type my full nickname everytime I GD on one's mapset, you would die in 5 seconds whilst reading what the hell I would have written there. Are you sure you'd love to see name Blady Krfawy Kamyczek's Easy?

An obvious "no" from me for this rule clarification.

Krfawy wrote:

If I were supposed to type my full nickname everytime I GD on one's mapset, you would die in 5 seconds whilst reading what the hell I would have written there. Are you sure you'd love to see name Blady Krfawy Kamyczek's Easy?

An obvious "no" from me for this rule clarification.

http://puu.sh/mkPhw.jpg I see your name as "Krfawy", not "Blady Krfawy Kamyczek".

Those he meant his real name, though.

HappyRocket88 wrote:

Those he meant his real name, though.

The hell does his real name have to do with this

I don't know. I was just clarifying those why Krfawy said that.

Yes for acronyms/shortened versions/other fairly popular aliases a lot of people are aware of.
No for non-sensical names (supermarket u wot m9)

Idk, maybe Krfawy only read the opening post not the whole discussion.
I'll edit some kind of sum up into the starting post tomorrow, too sleepy for it right now zzzzzzzzz

Your example is a good example of what should not happen. I'll just post that to say I agree.

Even if I did call my difficulties "Magic Bomb's" (Which I don't because I feel that is too long as well), would I get in trouble for not using "- Magic Bomb -'s"? This question is intentionally stupid, but points out the issues of what you're saying. Giving a full username is stupid in a lot of cases. If someone's interested, they can check the beatmap description of who mapped the difficulty (Or just search "MBomb" (as my diffs are called) in the beatmap section and find my maps as I tag them with that myself). But as someone mentioned earlier, most people wouldn't be interested, if they even knew what a gd was.

Plus, this would cause an issue of people now having inconsistent diff names in gds (For example, me changing MBomb's to Magic Bomb's, people would probably come to the conclusion MBomb was a different person if they didn't read the description of beatmaps).

Tags/description has GD mappers name in it. It's not a problem IMO

While "supermarket" is stretching it, I agree, the tags and description of a beatmap should in all honesty be more than enough for someone to figure out who mapped something, if they care enough to know.

It's a no from me, I think it's fine as is.

i dont think the guest diff is requred to have a proper name. as long as the gders name is stated in the map description or tags then its good enough.
naming it proplerly if anything ONLY benefits the gder themselves so i dont see whats wrong if they prefer some othervsort of identification...

TRUTH is: most of the people don't even care about who mapped the diff. they will think those diff are mapped by the map owner if you don't add a <XXX's> on diff name.
Only those who really care about the map will dig the real mappers' name behind those diffs.

Personally i think make it free on naming gds are fine, like sometimes you can modify those names and make them fit the story behind the map (if the map does have a background story or sth)
people can just search for the mappers' name by tags or descriptions.

...AND in fact, "Supermarket" (yes it's that diff name you're keep talking about) does related to the mapper called Chaoslitz
Chaoslitz has a nickname in Chinese which is called "supermarket".
yeah that sounds weird but it's the truth.

With the change of how the Ranking Criteria Subforum works from now on, topics like these are obsolete.