Sonnyc wrote:

Don't get distracted by Rule 2!

Rumia- wrote:

this is so intense i cant even post hooooooooooooyl hi lovers

Oreemo wrote:

Best staff ever, who cares a lot about the community and stuff


dumb.

Rumia- wrote:

I NEED TO MAKE A QUALITY POST ! ! !
WARNING THIS IS A QUALITY POST

Blue Dragon wrote:

Hi!
I am going to make a quite long post here about my opinions as I feel it is interesting to share my opinion as a mapper with 7 years of experience in the community. I HAVEN'T READ THE WHOLE THREAD SO PLEASE EXCUSE ME IF I END UP IGNORING SOME THINGS THAT HAVEN'T BEEN SAID, there is too much going on and I need to make this post as soon as possible before the thread gets inevitably locked.
I'd really feel bad if the staff and the council members ignored this post in the swarm of insults this thread has - it makes up for a few interesting points other than "boohoo this map can't be ranked now" or "this sucks, fuck the staff' etc.
I'll be quoting the OP and going to argument over which points are the most hurtful for the playing community and especially the mapping community - tl;dr of my post: you're making things more practical to the players, but you are limiting a lot of creativity in some cases, and forcing unneeded creativity with barely doable practicity in other cases.

ztrot wrote:

Hello everyone, ztrot here with some exciting new news!

From today on, there will be a new format in which mapping beatmap sets will work. This falls in line with our goals to make as many of the maps here at osu accessible to all players of many skill types! This new rule might seem scary at first but, fear not as we don't want to forget our professional osu! players either!
The new restructure will not be retroactive as there a lot of maps with icons so far though the modding process. Therefore, if your map has any type of icon set - be it bubble pop, disqualification or bubble - it will not need to follow the new restructure. However, all new maps or maps without icons will be asked to make changes to their existing sets.

Hi ztrot, thanks for the news!~

I believe that making beatmaps *accessible* to the playerbase is not an issue anymore. It used to be an issue back in 2010-12 maybe, because we had a much lower skill curve than what we have today, and a much less significant amount of beatmaps. A new player has access to a database of 10,000+ ranked beatmaps (and as the current system doesn't have a huge problem related to this), and knowing there are several Easy difficulty beatmaps being ranked (and having contributed towards a good amount of ENH mapsets), I don't really see why these numbers wouldn't keep going.

There is a bigger problem with the retroactivity of this rule - beatmaps who have been submitted after the rule should be adapting to the rule changes. I understand that there is a good point where "if your map wasn't iconed yet, that means it still has to go through changes and this is a part of it", however there are, more often than not, cases where the beatmap has been waiting for months for a member of the BN, in a ready state, but with no availability. This becomes a big issue because you basically have to change a proper beatmap and make it more susceptible to having mistakes on it. The point of the rule is to make quality more appealing to players, but this will end up forcing changes that mappers don't agree with, and you know what makes up for half-assed changes and a great decline in quality of these maps. And yes, they will get ranked, because the quality control of the BN is not at a trustable level even after several conduct warnings by the staff.

Besides, another "exception" which is actually one of the most important cases: beatmaps which already have proper identities, such as Welcome to Tokyo, DeltaMAX and several others which can be much better examples than the ones I mentioned, will need to have several difficulties deleted. I will go into more detail about this later, but the retroactivity here is the biggest issue - as much as you can say "well, too bad, they can create new identities or something": A beatmap's identity is one of the most important things in osu!. Big Black is not exactly the hardest ranked map, but it has created an identity that has attracted several new players. A beatmap identity is caused by the song, or, in the case I am mentioning, the mapping of a certain difficulty. Again, I'll talk more about this later, but it causes a lot of trouble under current beatmap sets.

ztrot wrote:

We would recommend reading the reworked section in the Ranking Criteria, reflecting the changes we pushed through. To make every have an overview of what changes we have done, we created a few fancy pictures for you:

First of all, we reworded the current spread rule. All difficulties in each game mode have to align in a linear and progressive spread. You can add one Ultra difficulty past an Expert difficulty that does not have to increase linearly in difficulty with the rest of the spread. Keep in mind, that Ultra is a placeholder term, used to reflect a high end difficulty that has not been specified with a name yet. We put that name in place, so you guys know what we are talking about when we want to refer to the high end difficulties of a mapset.

I love fancy images!

This rule makes sense and was pretty much already set, it just never clarified what was up with difficulties past Extras (which weren't really around at the time and are quite common nowadays). There's no issue with this whatsoever. The difficulty gap is a really good addition, because Ultra difficulties are quite often much harder than their Extra counterparts. Good addition to the ranking criteria, doesn't change much but sets up for a standard which was never clarified to the community and depended on each BN/QAT opinion.

ztrot wrote:

Secondly, we limited the amount of difficulties of the same level per game mode. Every mapset is limited to one of each difficulty level per game mode. While this appears very limiting at the beginning, the hybrid set rules stay intact. Don't forget that every keycount in osu!mania is considered as individual game mode, too! If you wish to get your mapsets with multiple difficulties of the same level ranked, we advise you to split it off into a new mapset.

Oh no!
This is a bad idea, sorry. It limits a spoken guideline that was set years ago: mapping styles are what makes osu! interesting, and we should encourage everyone to be creative in their own way.
I know this is a problem that you're trying to fix now but it is not the right way: the only way you can actually discern properly a mapping style is by the Insane/Extra difficulties of the mapset. There aren't any cases where there are several Easy or Normal difficulties in the same mapset, while there are 2, 3, 5, 10 Insanes or Extras. The problem about this is...

...there's nothing, you're trying to fix what's fine.
I can see that in a way, lots of difficulties of the same range may cause confusion for newer players, but... newer players aren't really supposed to play these difficulties (yes, I know everyone goes and tryhards for 6* maps nowadays, doesn't matter now). You're trying to make things more accessible to the players, but what you're actually doing is changing nothing for the players and limiting the availability of different mapping styles in the same mapset. As I mentioned, you can only properly discern mapping styles on higher difficulties, so you'll have only Insane, Extra (and rarely Ultra) to do this. Not to mention this makes the spread much more complicated to do - A mapper may have a more reading-intensive Extra, while the Insane mapper has a symmetric, cleaned up mapping style. This created a big gap that isn't even caused by the star rating (reading maps rarely have high star ratings) and confuses any player who is going from each difficulty to another in a mapset.

I have already talked about mapping identity so I believe my point is clear here. This is a hard point to talk about though - I know the staff doesn't really care about which maps are the more proeminent to the players as they are always trying to enforce quality over identity, but this is an important issue which you are ignoring for not-such-a-great-cause-as-I-should-say. Most of these posts in this thread are mindless complaining about this exact point, and while most people don't really explain why they are angry, it's because of this. Beatmap identity is something really important to the players, and even though most people can't explain why (neither can I, it just looks like I'm fooling around with words here, sorry), it has caused quite an impact over osu! and the internet overall. Maffalda's song wasn't even known before osu! gave it an identity, Brain Power, etc. While Maffalda has a good spread and wouldn't really be an issue, in the case of Brain Power, the mapset has lots of different Extra/Insane diffs, and now it cannot be ranked because of this rule. I know ranking does not change the identity of the map because Brain Power is already pretty known even though it was never ranked.. but it is just improvement that you are barring. I literally cannot see why you would do something like this, especially to pending maps which haven't been iconed yet. As many people have said, this is the biggest issue and limits creativity and beatmap identity in several mapsets.

ztrot wrote:

At last, we altered the requirements for Approval beatmaps. Approval mapsets must have 1 difficulty that is either an Easy, Normal, Hard or Insane. Your mapset must contain an Insane difficulty if an Expert or Ultra difficulty is present. This means that every Approval containing only an Expert or Ultra difficulty must receive a second difficulty. If you do not wish to map more than one difficulty for your Approval sets, we would advise you to keep the single difficulty at Insane level or below.




The difficulty is not dependent on the star rating. The mapping techniques used within the difficulty and the spread to the surrounding difficulties define the category each difficulty level falls into. Difficulties must be named to reflect that.

Hi, uhm... sorry but I don't really have words to explain about this. I can only use examples to explain that you should at least add a sub-section to this rule talking about maps that are over 10 minutes. It is almost impossible to rank 10+ minutes songs right now because no one wants to mod these due to their length. Adding new difficulties to these songs will not only make things harder for the mapper, it will completely stop these maps from being ranked because barely anyone will even bother to check these maps, and, you know, considering the fact that there's an obvious BN circlejerk in the community... mappers who don't have connections will never rank a marathon map ever again.

Not to mention what has been already mentioned so many times, I can quite understand why 5-10 mapsets have to go through this rule with the constant abuse of 5:01 maps getting ranked with an Extra difficulty (and this is my fault as well, Worldwide Choppers falls under this rule). Just.. please be reasonable with longer beatmaps, I have a 60 minute song which has been divided into 3 parts and it's taking me 4 years to get these going, and finding mods is the biggest issue. I am quite tired and out of words at this moment, so I'm sorry if this doesn't really go across. I may edit the post later with more clarifications about this.

Remember: I know you guys are trying to keep lazy mapping and confused newbies from happening, but as it is now, you are creating more problems than what you are trying to eradicate. It is hard to keep a civilized conversation with the community but I'll be trying my best to present the points from people around the mapping community. Feel free to respond, add, or complain about anything in my post, I'll be glad about this.

Please don't ignore it. <3

Rumia- wrote:

I NEED TO MAKE A QUALITY POST ! ! !
WARNING THIS IS A QUALITY POST

Yauxo wrote:

Did anyone actually notice this?



This literally takes all the "community" out of the "community game". Why would you even want to do that.

Rizqy wrote:

is this milk rankable!!!!!!??????1????1?111122312?!???

Zerss wrote:

i hate pp wrote:

i hate pp wrote:

i hate pp wrote:

Blue Dragon wrote:

Hi!
I am going to make a quite long post here about my opinions as I feel it is interesting to share my opinion as a mapper with 7 years of experience in the community. I HAVEN'T READ THE WHOLE THREAD SO PLEASE EXCUSE ME IF I END UP IGNORING SOME THINGS THAT HAVE BEEN SAID, there is too much going on and I need to make this post as soon as possible before the thread gets inevitably locked.
I'd really feel bad if the staff and the council members ignored this post in the swarm of insults this thread has - it makes up for a few interesting points other than "boohoo this map can't be ranked now" or "this sucks, fuck the staff' etc.
I'll be quoting the OP and going to argument over which points are the most hurtful for the playing community and especially the mapping community - tl;dr of my post: you're making things more practical to the players, but you are limiting a lot of creativity in some cases, and forcing unneeded creativity with barely doable practicity in other cases.

ztrot wrote:

Hello everyone, ztrot here with some exciting new news!

From today on, there will be a new format in which mapping beatmap sets will work. This falls in line with our goals to make as many of the maps here at osu accessible to all players of many skill types! This new rule might seem scary at first but, fear not as we don't want to forget our professional osu! players either!
The new restructure will not be retroactive as there a lot of maps with icons so far though the modding process. Therefore, if your map has any type of icon set - be it bubble pop, disqualification or bubble - it will not need to follow the new restructure. However, all new maps or maps without icons will be asked to make changes to their existing sets.

Hi ztrot, thanks for the news!~

I believe that making beatmaps *accessible* to the playerbase is not an issue anymore. It used to be an issue back in 2010-12 maybe, because we had a much lower skill curve than what we have today, and a much less significant amount of beatmaps. A new player has access to a database of 10,000+ ranked beatmaps (and as the current system doesn't have a huge problem related to this), and knowing there are several Easy difficulty beatmaps being ranked (and having contributed towards a good amount of ENH mapsets), I don't really see why these numbers wouldn't keep going.

There is a bigger problem with the retroactivity of this rule - beatmaps who have been submitted after the rule should be adapting to the rule changes. I understand that there is a good point where "if your map wasn't iconed yet, that means it still has to go through changes and this is a part of it", however there are, more often than not, cases where the beatmap has been waiting for months for a member of the BN, in a ready state, but with no availability. This becomes a big issue because you basically have to change a proper beatmap and make it more susceptible to having mistakes on it. The point of the rule is to make quality more appealing to players, but this will end up forcing changes that mappers don't agree with, and you know what makes up for half-assed changes and a great decline in quality of these maps. And yes, they will get ranked, because the quality control of the BN is not at a trustable level even after several conduct warnings by the staff.

Besides, another "exception" which is actually one of the most important cases: beatmaps which already have proper identities, such as Welcome to Tokyo, DeltaMAX and several others which can be much better examples than the ones I mentioned, will need to have several difficulties deleted. I will go into more detail about this later, but the retroactivity here is the biggest issue - as much as you can say "well, too bad, they can create new identities or something": A beatmap's identity is one of the most important things in osu!. Big Black is not exactly the hardest ranked map, but it has created an identity that has attracted several new players. A beatmap identity is caused by the song, or, in the case I am mentioning, the mapping of a certain difficulty. Again, I'll talk more about this later, but it causes a lot of trouble under current beatmap sets.

ztrot wrote:

We would recommend reading the reworked section in the Ranking Criteria, reflecting the changes we pushed through. To make every have an overview of what changes we have done, we created a few fancy pictures for you:

First of all, we reworded the current spread rule. All difficulties in each game mode have to align in a linear and progressive spread. You can add one Ultra difficulty past an Expert difficulty that does not have to increase linearly in difficulty with the rest of the spread. Keep in mind, that Ultra is a placeholder term, used to reflect a high end difficulty that has not been specified with a name yet. We put that name in place, so you guys know what we are talking about when we want to refer to the high end difficulties of a mapset.

I love fancy images!

This rule makes sense and was pretty much already set, it just never clarified what was up with difficulties past Extras (which weren't really around at the time and are quite common nowadays). There's no issue with this whatsoever. The difficulty gap is a really good addition, because Ultra difficulties are quite often much harder than their Extra counterparts. Good addition to the ranking criteria, doesn't change much but sets up for a standard which was never clarified to the community and depended on each BN/QAT opinion.

ztrot wrote:

Secondly, we limited the amount of difficulties of the same level per game mode. Every mapset is limited to one of each difficulty level per game mode. While this appears very limiting at the beginning, the hybrid set rules stay intact. Don't forget that every keycount in osu!mania is considered as individual game mode, too! If you wish to get your mapsets with multiple difficulties of the same level ranked, we advise you to split it off into a new mapset.

Oh no!
This is a bad idea, sorry. It limits a spoken guideline that was set years ago: mapping styles are what makes osu! interesting, and we should encourage everyone to be creative in their own way.
I know this is a problem that you're trying to fix now but it is not the right way: the only way you can actually discern properly a mapping style is by the Insane/Extra difficulties of the mapset. There aren't any cases where there are several Easy or Normal difficulties in the same mapset, while there are 2, 3, 5, 10 Insanes or Extras. The problem about this is...

...there's nothing, you're trying to fix what's fine.
I can see that in a way, lots of difficulties of the same range may cause confusion for newer players, but... newer players aren't really supposed to play these difficulties (yes, I know everyone goes and tryhards for 6* maps nowadays, doesn't matter now). You're trying to make things more accessible to the players, but what you're actually doing is changing nothing for the players and limiting the availability of different mapping styles in the same mapset. As I mentioned, you can only properly discern mapping styles on higher difficulties, so you'll have only Insane, Extra (and rarely Ultra) to do this. Not to mention this makes the spread much more complicated to do - A mapper may have a more reading-intensive Extra, while the Insane mapper has a symmetric, cleaned up mapping style. This created a big gap that isn't even caused by the star rating (reading maps rarely have high star ratings) and confuses any player who is going from each difficulty to another in a mapset.

I have already talked about mapping identity so I believe my point is clear here. This is a hard point to talk about though - I know the staff doesn't really care about which maps are the more proeminent to the players as they are always trying to enforce quality over identity, but this is an important issue which you are ignoring for not-such-a-great-cause-as-I-should-say. Most of these posts in this thread are mindless complaining about this exact point, and while most people don't really explain why they are angry, it's because of this. Beatmap identity is something really important to the players, and even though most people can't explain why (neither can I, it just looks like I'm fooling around with words here, sorry), it has caused quite an impact over osu! and the internet overall. Maffalda's song wasn't even known before osu! gave it an identity, Brain Power, etc. While Maffalda has a good spread and wouldn't really be an issue, in the case of Brain Power, the mapset has lots of different Extra/Insane diffs, and now it cannot be ranked because of this rule. I know ranking does not change the identity of the map because Brain Power is already pretty known even though it was never ranked.. but it is just improvement that you are barring. I literally cannot see why you would do something like this, especially to pending maps which haven't been iconed yet. As many people have said, this is the biggest issue and limits creativity and beatmap identity in several mapsets.

ztrot wrote:

At last, we altered the requirements for Approval beatmaps. Approval mapsets must have 1 difficulty that is either an Easy, Normal, Hard or Insane. Your mapset must contain an Insane difficulty if an Expert or Ultra difficulty is present. This means that every Approval containing only an Expert or Ultra difficulty must receive a second difficulty. If you do not wish to map more than one difficulty for your Approval sets, we would advise you to keep the single difficulty at Insane level or below.




The difficulty is not dependent on the star rating. The mapping techniques used within the difficulty and the spread to the surrounding difficulties define the category each difficulty level falls into. Difficulties must be named to reflect that.

Hi, uhm... sorry but I don't really have words to explain about this. I can only use examples to explain that you should at least add a sub-section to this rule talking about maps that are over 10 minutes. It is almost impossible to rank 10+ minutes songs right now because no one wants to mod these due to their length. Adding new difficulties to these songs will not only make things harder for the mapper, it will completely stop these maps from being ranked because barely anyone will even bother to check these maps, and, you know, considering the fact that there's an obvious BN circlejerk in the community... mappers who don't have connections will never rank a marathon map ever again.

Not to mention what has been already mentioned so many times, I can quite understand why 5-10 mapsets have to go through this rule with the constant abuse of 5:01 maps getting ranked with an Extra difficulty (and this is my fault as well, Worldwide Choppers falls under this rule). Just.. please be reasonable with longer beatmaps, I have a 60 minute song which has been divided into 3 parts and it's taking me 4 years to get these going, and finding mods is the biggest issue. I am quite tired and out of words at this moment, so I'm sorry if this doesn't really go across. I may edit the post later with more clarifications about this.

Remember: I know you guys are trying to keep lazy mapping and confused newbies from happening, but as it is now, you are creating more problems than what you are trying to eradicate. It is hard to keep a civilized conversation with the community but I'll be trying my best to present the points from people around the mapping community. Feel free to respond, add, or complain about anything in my post, I'll be glad about this.

Please don't ignore it. <3

Wojowu wrote:

Whoever made the fancy pictures, congratulations on using white font on white background.

Rizqy wrote:

is this milk rankable!!!!!!??????1????1?111122312?!???

i hate pp wrote:

NinjaSM wrote:

I actually think this is a good idea
I will quote some things and comment on them

"First of all, we reworded the current spread rule. All difficulties in each game mode have to align in a linear and progressive spread."
Yes, Finally, some sense of progression.
" You can add one Ultra difficulty past an Expert difficulty that does not have to increase linearly in difficulty with the rest of the spread."
Well, that kind of destroys your first point. But, Let's look at AiAe, The difference between Waffles SHD and SC is insane it's not even funny. But, both are good maps, maybe, with this rule, we should have "If it's playable, then we can rank it"

"Secondly, we limited the amount of difficulties of the same level per game mode. Every mapset is limited to one of each difficulty level per game mode.""
Well F*** you this limits us
"While this appears very limiting at the beginning, the hybrid set rules stay intact."
What about mani-
"Don't forget that every keycount in osu!mania is considered as individual game mode, too!"
Oh, okay.

"At last, we altered the requirements for Approval beatmaps. Approval mapsets must have 1 difficulty that is either an Easy, Normal, Hard or Insane."
... This can't be good

"Your mapset must contain an Insane difficulty if an Expert or Ultra difficulty is present."
There goes the one difficulty rule for Marathons. Nice job

"This means that every Approval containing only an Expert or Ultra difficulty must receive a second difficulty. If you do not wish to map more than one difficulty for your Approval sets, we would advise you to keep the single difficulty at Insane level or below."

Ignore my last comment

"The difficulty is not dependent on the star rating. The mapping techniques used within the difficulty and the spread to the surrounding difficulties define the category each difficulty level falls into. Difficulties must be named to reflect that."

Yura Yura Sweet Genocide will now never be ranked. And any uprising Image Material not even near FC'able maps will be f***'ed with a *****

I can agree with rule 1, I'm okay with rule 1. But Rule 2 is not okay. and Rule 3 is even worse! And limits the possibility of a rank even happening. You want the limit of ranked maps to be higher, to make osu more progressive. Then remove rule 2 and 3

i hate pp wrote:

[ A v a l o n ] wrote:

Rizqy wrote:

is this milk rankable!!!!!!??????1????1?111122312?!???

THIS IS SPARTA ULTRAAAAAAAA !!!