I'd really like to have a place where we as mappers can sort of have discussion about why things are done with mapping.

I think it's unfortunate that the only time we get to discuss our opinions about mapping is when manipulating the ranking criteria. Mapping should be something that is discussed not just to set rules, but to further the positive development of mapping as an art form.

So I'd like to start off by discussion this trend that I've been seeing over the past year or two. The trend of mapping a really slow song, with no real strong backing drum track.

The earliest example I can think of this is an old map by mtmcl.

The trend really sort of became notable, in my opinion, once mappers like Blue Dragon were overcompensating to try to adjust the notion that they "only mapped super insane things", particularly with this map.

Some more notable examples can include:
https://osu.ppy.sh/s/350495
https://osu.ppy.sh/s/361576
https://osu.ppy.sh/s/137514
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/644853
https://osu.ppy.sh/s/135412
https://osu.ppy.sh/s/178669

This sort of mapping I think is encompassed by a few official words, but the way I define it is someone mapping a song with no audible drum or rhythm elements (or very lacking drum/rhythm elements). When I define rhythm, I mean diverse rhythms that are not forcing the map to stay in a very 1/2 or 1/1 pattern. These songs tend to be low BPM, but are not confined to that area, nor are all low BPM maps placed in this category. This ideology is particularly attained to osu!standard maps, since osu!mania seems to be a little more accomidating for these maps (But I included osu!mania maps in the examples because it's still worthy to think about).

Here's my opinion about this. I think it's not effective at all.

In every rhythm game, there are easy songs. There's songs that are in there for the purpose of allowing a new player to be able to figure out things and make steps into achieving harder difficulties. However, there are many things that good songs in rhythm games have, even the easiest song in the game

1) Diverse rhythmic patterns. This is kind of problematic wording since a lot of music repeats patterns, so it technically isn't diverse (a truly diverse rhythmic piece would be a free jazz thing or something, lol.) But what I mean is that the entire song isn't a repetition of 1/2 or 1/1 rhythms, and there are multiple lines to derive rhythms from. The map is not acting as a metronome clicker, but rather pulling rhythms from multiple voices in the song and creating a fun to play product

2) Drums. When you hear any other rhythm game, or any popular song in osu, you'll generally hear that there's a pumping drum beat in the background, or something resembling drum patterns. The songs are not designed, inherently, to be something that you can have playing in the background. They are songs that you want to get up and move to, even if it's not explicitly dancing. You WANT to bob your head, you WANT to tap your foot, and you're also hearing these pieces as a rhythmic entity. You tap your foot on 2 and 4 because you're analyzing the music in a rhythmic way.

To explain this in an easier manner, I can bring up another subject, why classical music isn't mapped as much as some people want:



So take a look at this, for instance. This is somewhat similar to many of the softer songs mapped in the game (except the songs mapped have MUCH less rubato). As you listen to this piece, and as I'm listening to it for literally the first time, I'm listening more to the phrases rather than the quarter note. If I shoved this into a MIDI player, I still wouldn't be tapping my foot on 2 and 4, because the music isn't designed for that. It's designed to be heard on the phrase level, and designed for listeners to focus more on the melodic ideas presented by the composer, rather than the rhythmic setting presented by the composer.



Another piece. So ignoring the rubato again, we can immediately feel that the composer wants us to be focusing more on the rhythmic aspect of the work. While there are no drums, the accents in the left hand act as the main vice of allowing us to bob our head and allowing us to internalize rhythm, which act as an appropriate substitute. I could, in theory, go into the editor and map this with rhythmic hitsounds and have it work out nicely.

Generally what tends to happen to these maps, because there is such a weak rhythmic vice, is that often times they just end up being incredibly boring and don't neccessarily advance the development of mapping in a positive way, it's just kind of like filler for people to get scores on and move on from. My question is, should we continue allowing maps like this to get approved? I'm not asking this as a "WE NEED TO MAKE A RULE ABOUT IT", because making a rule about song selection would completely destroy the entire creative process, and would be a slippery slope to the banning of a lot more things because they're "not conventional." what I am asking is if we as mappers should encourage people who are mapping these types of songs to focus their time in other maps, and if BNs and QATs should be more wary of approving these kinds of maps to uphold quality, rather than rankability.

inb4 people are like "wow cdfa you ranked a lot of maps like this when you were BN

Curious to see what you guys think. My plan is to have a multitude of discussions, and allow mappers to feel more free to express opinions and ideas about mapping, rather than just using the modding system as a place to try ideas with a hit or miss ideology. Because mapping is not something that we just sort of do, nor is it something that we can assume comes naturally. Mapping is an art just like drawing and music are. We don't just create a piece of music and throw it out there, we have a set of skills and understandings of various theoretical areas, and we apply them to the creative ideas appearing in our heads. I'd like to be able to employ that idea more to the mapping community.

Curious to see what people think.

Reditum wrote:

I'd really like to have a place where we as mappers can sort of have discussion about why things are done with mapping.

I think it's unfortunate that the only time we get to discuss our opinions about mapping is when manipulating the ranking criteria. Mapping should be something that is discussed not just to set rules, but to further the positive development of mapping as an art form.

Yeah, usually these discussions only happen privately.

Reditum wrote:

In every rhythm game, there are easy songs. There's songs that are in there for the purpose of allowing a new player to be able to figure out things and make steps into achieving harder difficulties. However, there are many things that good songs in rhythm games have, even the easiest song in the game

1) Diverse rhythmic patterns. This is kind of problematic wording since a lot of music repeats patterns, so it technically isn't diverse (a truly diverse rhythmic piece would be a free jazz thing or something, lol.) But what I mean is that the entire song isn't a repetition of 1/2 or 1/1 rhythms, and there are multiple lines to derive rhythms from. The map is not acting as a metronome clicker, but rather pulling rhythms from multiple voices in the song and creating a fun to play product.

That is true, the song needs to have diverse rhythmic patterns, but that is not really related to the existance of a drum track. A calm, melodic song without drums can have interesting rhythms played by one or more melody instruments. Then again, a song with a drum track can be extremely repetetive and boring.

Reditum wrote:

2) Drums. When you hear any other rhythm game, or any popular song in osu, you'll generally hear that there's a pumping drum beat in the background, or something resembling drum patterns. The songs are not designed, inherently, to be something that you can have playing in the background. They are songs that you want to get up and move to, even if it's not explicitly dancing. You WANT to bob your head, you WANT to tap your foot, and you're also hearing these pieces as a rhythmic entity. You tap your foot on 2 and 4 because you're analyzing the music in a rhythmic way.

I will just say, it is nice to relax once in a while. A game doesn't always have to make you 'dance'. I once showed osu! to my music teacher and they said, they wouldn't want to play this game because listening to music means relaxing to them, if they had to do this constant tapping and mouse-moving it would destroy the purpose of music to them. Well, I did say they didn't understand the purpose of a rhythm game in the first place, but I can't deny I have nothing against playing a calm map once in a while where I mostly follow long sliders instead of streaming and jumping all the time.

Reditum wrote:

Generally what tends to happen to these maps, because there is such a weak rhythmic vice, is that often times they just end up being incredibly boring and don't neccessarily advance the development of mapping in a positive way, it's just kind of like filler for people to get scores on and move on from.

Now here I entirely disagree with. There are many ranked maps that I would call boring. But for example https://osu.ppy.sh/s/92258 is a really interesting map to me. It's fun to play if I want to relax and the beautiful slidershapes are just gorgeous to look at. The whole map has an atmosphere to it that I really enjoy, a kind of atmosphere that is not possible to achieve with faster songs. The map is also memorable (I am currently at work, not having osu! opened, and I last played this map like a year ago, however I can still remember some of the patterns) and therefore not a filler to me.

Reditum wrote:

My question is, should we continue allowing maps like this to get approved? I'm not asking this as a "WE NEED TO MAKE A RULE ABOUT IT", because making a rule about song selection would completely destroy the entire creative process, and would be a slippery slope to the banning of a lot more things because they're "not conventional." what I am asking is if we as mappers should encourage people who are mapping these types of songs to focus their time in other maps, and if BNs and QATs should be more wary of approving these kinds of maps to uphold quality, rather than rankability.

Yeah, sure we should allow maps like these to get ranked. There are few 'experienced' players who enjoy playing lower diffs, but if you don't enjoy playing these maps, you probably don't enjoy playing other 2* maps either, or do you? Newbie players won't enjoy these maps less than other similarly difficult maps (I am talking about lower diffs on 'generic' songs). Also, there are players like me who like to play these once in a while for relaxing purposes as I already explained.
I hear a lot of people, especially people who have been involved in the mapping community for a long time, complaining that less attention is paid to lower diffs in modern times than in past times, like 2011-12. I can only agree to that. I might be getting a bit off-topic here, but lower diffs back then were often structured better, they had more neat patterns instead of just chains of distance-snapped objects. They also had more varied rhythms, to follow the song better. There is much more attention paid to lower diffs if ... well, if they are the highest diffs, so it's actually great to see something like those mapsets once in a while.



Alright I didn't reply to everything there. Interesting topic nonetheless, although I fear people might not be interested in discussing things here, especially if it involves reading and writing walls of text.

Rhythmical consistency is imo a much more defining criteria for song selection than just a tempo and lack of drums.
If it wasn't for the free timing used in your video link which makes everyone run away very fast when it comes to timing and mapping Easy-Difficulties for it the song wouldn't be bad for a map.

I'm listening more to the phrases rather than the quarter note

Isn't that a great thing? Imo many people are not paying enough attention to the phrasing of the song in many cases(and let's face it, EVERY song has phrasing or some other internal structure within a part). Personally I was overall dissatisfied with the state of Easy/Normal-difficulties when I selected maps for the November Charts, mostly due to people being inconsistent in the usage of gameplayelements and because most of them ignored the phrasing of the song in one or another way.
Having individual notes integrated into a phrase with only 1 or 2 accentuation points is normal or even preferred in my opinion as there's something you can carve out while mapping and give the map a more individual touch. Such songs are more difficult to map in many cases but just as suited for a good beatmap as everyone's favorite generic 4/4 160bpm anime opening that just gets mapped with maximum flow and random 1/2 spacings because there's no complexity you can use for sensible spacing variation, we just get a 1/1 slider on every (2nd) downbeat and the rest just spams 1/2, doesn't even matter. That's very boring if you ask me. Easy to play certainly - also the main reason why anime TV sizes often end up as pp-maps, even if unintended - but not interesting.

Personally I already got discouraged tons of times regarding my song choices by a range of people including a QAT-member and if you ask me then

BNs and QATs should be more wary of approving these kinds of maps to uphold quality

this should generally be paid attention towards. For all easier difficulties, not just slow songs. From the Easy-Diffs I played for November-Charts I can count the amount of top quality Easy-diffs with one hand and I played a lot of Easy/Normal difficulties because I noticed after a few full sets played that people tend to do more grave mistakes on them(and also because I thought that charts should be attractive for the average player). Like putting a sliderend on a strong downbeat, lacking even the most basic idea of patterning, suddenly starting to use 1/2 at some random spot in the Kiai after having a map with exclusively 1/1, being very inconsistent with slidershapes or even using fucking 3/4 spacings outside of repeatsliders. What are people thinking?!
In some of the worse cases I seriously wondered how the sets got past QAT.

I know that many people who play this game are unable to cherish slow songs/easy difficulties for some unknown reason but I certainly do and I'm thankful for every calm song that gets a good map. And yes, BD/Luanny Enya sets are actually really really cool(the china roses normal is not the best tho). A beatmap is supposed to transmit the feeling of the song and most difficulties of Enya-maps just do that. I certainly prefer them over full symmetry 6-7* material that always ignores smaller accentuations in phrasing for the sake of symmetry and having some trollfun-factor.

I do cherish wall of texts as well so count me in for any kind of discussion on such topics

A bit late (sadly i visit never this section :<)

Most of my maps are slow music (around 120, that's not super slow but compare to what we can have) and i tend to have easier diff than the middle, maybe i like to focus on easy set for new players (the higher can use mods so...).

Anyway, the problem of slow songs is they are not such attractive for many mappers, they want challenging music for extra. Of course i quite disagree (and you'll) too with this arguement because you do map some slows songs, but i still think that most mappers and players tends to search for challenging songs and not relaxing ones (ayy ayy pp maps).

Somehow with classical musics because if pointed some examples, i've never thought about mapping this kind of music (however i enjoy the most mapping instrumental musics tho). But only a few people will listen regulary classical music, plus most of the mappers want their maps to get ranked, i just imagine the number of thread in modding queue who says only animu plz.

Also classical music is i consider as a special genre for rythmic game. Most of the rencent musics (when i mean recent just say pop/electro songs or any kind of) are kinda repetitive on beats, melody etc..., this is well designed for rythmic game, on std and taiko you are on 2~4 keys, that seems repetive action, still less on mania since we can go on 7 (yes 10 but noone do that except for fun or challenge), so it opens more possibility for this genre. However if you want to map this kind of genre, i'm up for (just depending on how i've the feel/imagination with the music, without i cannot make something i consider fun and good).

More txt wall for this subject plz

Nobody maps classical music because it takes over 200 timing sections just to pin most classical songs to a timeline. I don't think Charles would even undertake a timing project like that again. On top of that, the editor has shit support for tuples.

more rachmaninoff g minor prelude pls

TV Size ver. confirmed!
Rachmaninoff hype train incomming boys!

This was just sad to read. Sorry that I came so late to see this, haven't ever been notified about this thread and I wish there was more discussion happening in here. Also, I'll be drifting away a bit from the whole "has no drums / has drums" discussion because while your points are okay to be discussed, most of the community has a big pre-judgement on calm maps and disconsider the whole drum thing, putting all calm maps into the same category of "boring and slow".

As much as it's something like "well, face the truth", it's at least disheartening to hear things such as "it doesn't belong in a rhythm game where the point is to be fast-paced and intense".Mapping can be seen as an art from some points of view, and not every piece of it should be preached like "it is just a game, so do what you're supposed to do and be fast and intense". However, I agree that mapping slow songs and making them actually enjoyable to play IS possible. As the mapping meta shifts from a style to another, and difficulty itself seems to be rising every year, there are many ways in which you can map slower songs in harder ways without overmapping AND without taking away the slow-paced feel of the song itself. I haven't been keeping up with mapping too much other than my own, but I can present you Ekoro's several Relaxing Compilations (here's the latest one) which, while extremely slow and, well, it may be boring to players who are always striving for fast stuff and for self-improvement, it is still a good quality map and can have its own pace that doesn't really make the player fall asleep.

As for myself, I'm always looking for improvement for these maps. In fact, it's almost the only thing I've been mapping for the past 2 years or so. It started out with maps such as the previously mentioned China Roses and this difficulty of only Time, mapped in 2011, mimicking Card N' Force's 2008 Enya map and his style that followed throughout the years, always keeping it symmetrical, with simple shapes and barely never a change in spacing. At first, these maps proved themselves to be a bit enjoyable, but they completely felt boring after some time - it was like you just were, in fact, playing a Normal difficulty. Even with these songs, it's known that you should be relaxing, but pushing the songs to their limits, while not overmapping, is not necessarily a bad thing. Things started evolving after maps such as Anywhere Is and Coming Home (which, in a self-proud way, is the best map I've ever made), but there was still something lacking, which would only come after the latest shift in the mapping meta: spacing becomes almost completely neglected, and song intensity is completely taken into account when making a difficulty.

While this is a change that, normally, only affects higher difficulties (in any ranked map you see nowadays, you can notice that, up to Hard difficulties, the spacing is completely consistent and the CS value is never lower than 4), it can be certainly applied in more interesting ways for easier, calmer beatmapping. Irreversible's mapping also changed something that was really important towards what I managed: the acceptance of small Circle Sizes. Irre's CS7 Insane/Extra mapping made it plausible for Hard difficulties to be enjoyable in Circle Sizes such as 5 or 6 (and now, with the decimal settings, anywhere in between or around these).

So, I've only explained theoretically why they are "good changes", but I haven't really presented examples or how they actually work. The first prime example of the mapping style I mentioned was [Luanny]'s Insane difficulty in Caribbean Blue, where she put CS6 and a few jumps, with a somewhat fast-paced, non-stop mapping style in a song supposed to be extremely calm, which was the complete opposite to my symmetry-focused, slow-paced Hard difficulty. This initially caused a pretty negative reaction towards players (and myself included. I compeltely hated the difficulty at first), since it was extremely awkward to play at such high CS and the song seemed to ask for a much slower map.

However, as the time passed by, and as I said, Irre's beatmapping and intensity-based mapping became more popular, the mapping style presented there proved itself to be much more acceptable and interesting to play, even getting some HDHR plays or DT ones instead of the pure nomod/HD that took the leaderboards. This train of thought allowed me to expand on how higher circle sizes and intensity-based mapping could affect easier maps, and made me able to map much more interesting calm maps than I've ever made while still not making them overmapped or anything like that. It started with Trains and Winter Rains, which is a CS5.7, 3.11* Hard difficulty with some interesting jumps and spacing. Later, I could make similar maps such as Obstacles and Echoes in Rain. Note that, looking at some of the comments and reception itself, the presented mapping style is still not 100% accepted (wtf?? cs5.7 in a hard diff??? how is this ranked??) but it was a huge step into making these maps actually playable for more people. It also proves the point that yes, calm songs belong in a rhythm game, and can be relaxing and not put you to sleep at the same time.

As I said, since I don't look too often at specific maps to know how mapping is evolving, this is only my experience on how these things work, and only feature my beatmapping in a pretty egotistical point of view, but I'd really like to see some more points in this discussion! This thread certainly has potential, so if anyone sees this it would be nice if they contributed to it.

It's designed to be heard on the phrase level, and designed for listeners to focus more on the melodic ideas presented by the composer, rather than the rhythmic setting presented by the composer.

Its the difficulty of mapping to find the small details in the music to base your maps play style on, the tapping must make sense, I can see your point for easier difficulties, but for extras the player has learned to hear deeper than the foreground.

People say "map to the foreground", but what they mean is "map the strong foreground pattern, and use the background to fill the other taps", extras would not EXIST if not for this.

Anyways, about the question at hand, I am not a mapper, nor do I want to be one, I made a few maps for fun and that's all, but from a holistic perspective I have a ton of slow songs in my favorites collection, both because I like the song, and because it has a sentimental value to me (for real now), I can tell you for sure slow songs that are mapped well leave a strong impression.

Also, we have all kinds of shit maps and shit mapping patterns and choices ranked in the history of osu so far, don't complain about the 2% which is slow songs.
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SOMEONE RANK THIS!!

so BD's tldr on #modhelp is basically
"some slow songs shouldnt be mapped coz its too boring"

well, if a song is nice in your opinion, then just map it lol. some people (such as myself) like slow songs lol. theyre very relaxing to play :l especially after youre doing some heavy grinding (aka spamming blue zenith for that double s)

unless im completely misunderstanding the topic someone pls make a tldr coz im really bad at reading shit :l

This seems like a very unwieldy way to say "I don't like calm songs".

I respect that you actually put a lot of effort into explaining this and that you obviously do care about the topic, but this is just extremely subjective. A lot of people (myself included) do enjoy calm maps, even if they might be "boring", and as long as the actual quality of the mapping of any given song is okay, I don't think the actual song itself should be judged - not ranking a song because some people don't like the genre/style just seems like a really bad slippery slope.

I think that slow songs are ideal for making easy diffs as opposed to intense songs where it feels like most important beats are being ignored. I really can't see anything wrong with them, if you find these maps boring jus don't play them. I enjoyed slow maps when I was a new player and I still do.

Could you do the exact "why this isn't good for a rythm game" explanation but for anime TV size please?
Thanks in advance :V

del