It's pretty obvious that pp is getting further and further away from showing skill. I know there's a lot of mixed opinions about pp. Some people honestly think that pp = skill while others believe that pp never really gave a true comparison of skill.

I won't make this post too long because I want to hear from you guys and what's your opinion of pp. - I lied.


Know that I don't think the pp system will change because of this post. Like i said, I just want to hear people's opinions and tell them how I feel or ways I think it "can" get better


MAPS
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So first of all, since players get better, harder maps needed to be made right? Well, are the maps harder at all that it gives a lot of pp or is it just because some mappers abuse the system. Most maps around extra level nowadays have tips toward OD9 and has clear jump patterns.

Some example would be

Sleeping With Sirens - If you can't hang (Bearizm's Extreme): The cross jumps that kind of makes an hour glass are very very easy to pull off

ARCIEN - Future Son (N A S Y A's OK DAD):The diff was obviously made for pp. You can't really argue here because even people who can't read AR10 much less AR10.3 like me can FC it.

Ni-Sokkusu - Blade Dance (Kneesocks): Again, like the first Bearizm map i placed earlier, for the most part, the map was easy and then it get's to the jumps at the end.

At the end of Ni-Sokkusu, it was pretty clear that the jumps were pretty straightforward and easy. If you were to remove the jumps, the star rating would be 5.5*. Im not a good mapper myself, but I went ahead and did another difficulty where the jumps were nerfed and each of them was 2.5x DSnap and the star rating turned out to be 5.6*.

That's a big difference between 6.01* to 5.61*. To top it off, the high OD basically just gives it a fuck ton of pp bonus. Here's my opinion, but I know a lot of people would disagree with me. I think jump maps should have lower OD than technical maps. Today, it's the other way around and it's really unfair because technical maps are already very under weighted. Also, it's not even hard to pull of jumps at higher ODs. It's just a bunch of single taps spreaded out apart. Why do u need to have high OD for those type of maps. Jumps are literally the easiest thing to acc.

Now, there's a lot of maps that are like these nowadays. And what's frustrating is that people criticize maps that don't give enough pp for their difficulty. For the most part, they even go as far as to calling veteran mappers people who "overmap". People like Blue Dragon and Skystar gets shit for it, when in all honesty, they make quality maps. People complain that they are either overmapped or too complex when all they are really saying is "we want simple maps that are easy to read, that includes lots of jumps, and no hard transitions".



Player skill to PP
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It's obvious that the ranks are a mess above 500. There's a lot of good players that just doesn't try to farm. That has nothing to do with how right sided the pp system is, but I guess they are just sick of trying to "farm" ahead. For instance, CptnX full comboed Freedom Dive back in 6.5k pp and stopped farming after getting to single digit.

But that's also why the pp system is flawed. I would rather have a system that rates each type of techniques. Something like osu!skill.tk, but more accurate. Why does pp tell me getting hich acc on aim maps > getting high acc on streamy maps. It doesn't make sense. PP tries to meld everything together when that just can't work out. You cannot compare a player like Doomsday and Kynan together. They can obviously play every mod. One is obviously better than streaming than the other. One is obviously better at DT than another. But why does pp have to say so and so is absolutely better than the other. Why can't it be rated by individual techniques, not one number that tries to combine everything. It's IMPOSSIBLE to say something is harder than another without bias. Also, some people are just genuinely good at speed and others are good at reading dense maps.

My opinion on OD and a separate modifier for it
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The other reason why pp is probably in a shithole right now is because of how much advantage mods have over No Mod. On paper, that makes a lot of sense right? Harder difficulty = more rewards. In reality, there's one stat that really should NOT be changed. In my opinion, that would have to be OD. An easy fix for this would be to give No Mod players that freedom to change OD as we please, but people would argue that it would take away the meaning of Hard Rock so that obviously can't happen. I have talked with many players both new and veteran, and amazing and average. When we get in a conversation about ranks, it usually ends with "Oh yeah, I wish you can be given the choice to change OD of a song". I guess the only reason why they didn't come out with a mod like that is because

1) It would make HR less appealing towards No Mod players like me who still really needs to learn it

2) There might be drama about mappers not getting the option to choose what OD they want their maps to be played on. Kind of like the drama where Chewin's [url=Dragonforce - My Spirit Will Go On]https://osu.ppy.sh/s/348808[/url] map got hated on because he tried making the map AR8 in tribute to older Dragonforce maps. People then started saying stuff like "it's out of meta (when you are free to do whatever when YOU are mapping) and it won't play well (for them at the very least)".

That's another case of people just wanting an easier map. On the top half of this post, i made a remark about how players would say that BD and Skystar maps should be simpler. Now im telling you guys that people are saying stuff like Chewin's map is "too simple". People want the easy way of getting pp.

People complained so bad (complaints, not constructive criticism) that even Jenny had to make a youtube short Reimu-style to tell people what type of freedom mappers should have and that how players obstruct their farms from getting ranked because players don't "agree" with sometime a mapper should have total control over.

It's not about mappers getting freedom to do whatever they like. It's not about being able to play a wide variety of map. It's about playing maps that are easy to FC nowadays. That's why TAG-4 maps are barely made anymore. It's not about having fun at multi or challenging yourself. It's about the pp!

3) How will the mod be implemented? Will it be like the 1-9k options on osu! mania where the mod can be changed at fixed amounts or would it be like DT and/or HT where it would be modified by percentages.

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Anon opinions (Note that each of the screenshot are from different people. I won't add a person more than twice. The rank range I asked players from are #2000 - #100) and I also asked mappers as well

PP is the dual to skill. That is, PP lower bounds skill and skill upper bounds pp. Not much more to say about it. Strong duality in this case is basically nonexistent.

You're making a points system based on combo.

There's your first mistake.

EtienneXC wrote:

You're making a points system based on combo.

There's your first mistake.

I just wrote this up quickly so I don't remember writing that. I have a habit of just writing what's on my mind haha.

And I want a system to be like this. Here's what i said during a conversation with my friend on how I wished the ranking system was like. Again, i highly doubt anything like this would be implemented anyways

I don't even know if it is possible, but a person can dream

EtienneXC wrote:

You're making a points system based on combo.

There's your first mistake.

This.

Dance Dance Revolution learned this the hard way early on when a 1x Miss play secured much less points than a Full Combo of mostly Greats and Goods. They changed the scoring system by the time DDR Supernova rolled out after an overwhelming number of complaints by top DDR players.

I mean you could apply machine learning to identify things like jump sections etc. but if you want to guarantee that sort of identification out of it you are probably going to need a sufficiently large training set which would require people systematically going through and identifying which circles belong to jump sections etc. A supervised approach would likely just apply a filter (look at a +/- so many circles) to identify if a single circle belongs to a specified category.

With an unsupervised approach you really don't know what the exact categories you end up with are going to be. What the computer comes up with for categories in the end might be so abstract as to not really make sense at a glance. To give some insight, when running neural networks on image data you often end up with identifiers for random things. Say you gave it a bunch of pictures of horses. You might end up with a few identifiers for clouds mixed in. Of course this is fine because you can take these random identifiers you get out of it and use them later on when you actually want identifiers for clouds.

Osu!skill takes a non-learning based approach and as such is unable to determine with much accuracy difficult to read patterns. The difficulty of reading is something that can be identified in a similar way as difficulty to aim etc. we just don't know how to properly extract these features from the raw positional data. This is where a learning-based approach would provide a lot of benefit.

As humans we can do a good job of saying if something is difficult to read and perhaps even ranking how difficult something is to read but we are shit when it comes to determining exactly why it is difficult to read. AFAIK this is what the makers of Osu!skill are struggling with the most and I'd honestly be surprised if any of them have the type of background to implement a more sophisticated approach such as machine learning.

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Unrelated tidbit: Kneesocks was 5.7* and only got buffed to 6.1* from modding (I think NRG's mod prompted removal of a couple sliders?). The original diff: http://puu.sh/pgG8V/52ae6c6495.osu . Please don't give Bearizm shit for those two maps. AFAIK neither were mapped for pp, they both ended up much easier and/or inflated from the modding process. His if you can't hang diff used to have some awful 1/6 streams that would have made it less of a farm map but they were removed because they felt like being mugged.

Each person has their own difficulty so it really hard to make a nearly perfect system. Right now i think the only problem with PP is DT, really don't understand it. A beatmap I had to play for 2 months to actually FC it and make it to my top score, then i try DT a 3* star song, I got FC on the first try then it became my top score. They really should change DT to x1.06 to balance things.

blahblahblahblah we've seen this topic many times before blah blah blah it's just made by people who don't have pp wanting verification that they do have skill or some shit

EtienneXC wrote:

You're making a points system based on combo.

There's your first mistake.

Coming from someone who doesn't play standard that's a huge statement there you're making, bub. Or maybe it's shit for me to expect non-players of the mode to have accurate and good opinions. ahahaha

chainpullz got it well summed up. Which means that I don't have to throw thelewa-quotes.
I have some other complaints about pp nonrelated to the topic though :^) (related to your last chatscreenshot but also in relation to the playerbase)

You're very likely to get better at getting pp as you get more pp because you happen to play maps that give you more pp and thus play patterns that give more pp more often than patterns that don't give you as much pp so in the end you end up with pp maps feeling easier because you just practiced those kinds of pp maps a lot more than the ones that don't give as much pp and you end up with a skillset that either favors pp farming or doesn't favor pp farming. Hi I can make a nice sentence.

CXu wrote:

You're very likely to get better at getting pp as you get more pp because you happen to play maps that give you more pp and thus play patterns that give more pp more often than patterns that don't give you as much pp so in the end you end up with pp maps feeling easier because you just practiced those kinds of pp maps a lot more than the ones that don't give as much pp and you end up with a skillset that either favors pp farming or doesn't favor pp farming. Hi I can make a nice sentence.

I feel like I just got waterboarded.

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Edit: I also just want to point out that 2015 skystar maps are incredibly easy to farm pp from fwiw. Whenever he started mapping more like RLC and less like Amamiyo is when they went from unique and difficult to farm to still interesting but easy to farm. The best thing to do would be to completely ignore reddit and most of G&R because they don't know shit about quality/difficulty.

It's players like the one quoted above that have played both sorts of maps and can make objective statements and comparisons between the two. You'll see players like Narrill/Bauxe who don't have shit reading claim certain *difficult to read* maps to be easy pp because they in fact are easy maps when your reading doesn't suck despite what unsaturated scoreboards might lead you to believe. You'll see players like [ Toy ] commend other players like Baha for his ability to play fast maps etc. despite the fact that most players would consider this type of difficulty much easier than the difficulty [ Toy ] excels at.

CXu wrote:

You're very likely to get better at getting pp as you get more pp because you happen to play maps that give you more pp and thus play patterns that give more pp more often than patterns that don't give you as much pp so in the end you end up with pp maps feeling easier because you just practiced those kinds of pp maps a lot more than the ones that don't give as much pp and you end up with a skillset that either favors pp farming or doesn't favor pp farming. Hi I can make a nice sentence.

Why can't people make more 2012 era 260-280 bpm 100-200 note longstream maps so I can get pp really easily from my skillset?

Why do you think 2011 and 2012 was way more innovative than now?

F1r3tar wrote:

Why do you think 2011 and 2012 was way more innovative than now?

I just said "era" because I noticed a lot of the 6.5*+ stream maps I can shit out fcs like nothing are from that time period.

Usually they are removed from osu or have the diff name "another" too. It's also especially funny because no one ever calls that farm but it's easy for me.

IMO PP accompanied with top plays shows what you can do, and that's about it
it doesn't shows true skill, but it still shows skill to some extent

CXu wrote:

You're very likely to get better at getting pp as you get more pp because you happen to play maps that give you more pp and thus play patterns that give more pp more often than patterns that don't give you as much pp so in the end you end up with pp maps feeling easier because you just practiced those kinds of pp maps a lot more than the ones that don't give as much pp and you end up with a skillset that either favors pp farming or doesn't favor pp farming. Hi I can make a nice sentence.

Huh, never thought about that, I do play a lot of farmpp maps but they generally in the lower side of bpm.
that would explain why maps like shoujo satori and dark flight dreamer makes me want to kill myself, even though most people feel comfortable playing those.
i feel like those patterns would be fine if the bpm was just lower by like 30.

My honest sentiments not relating to topic: PP matters until you become obsessed with gaining it.

On topic: While I do run an osu! series consisting of my live plays called "PP DOESN'T MATTER!" on YouTube, I feel that the current system is the best there is at the moment for measuring skill level. Unless peppy decides to employ what others here have already mentioned, machine learning, which for that matter is ridiculously complicated AI, or a completely new way to measure map difficulty, that is.

Though, in terms of the nitty gritty where more PP is awarded for jumpier maps than streamier maps, I haven't really noticed that, because I was too busy having fun and enjoying the music that comes my way.

Streamy maps award tons of pp what are you talking about

High BPM stream underrated tho

Barusamikosu wrote:

High BPM stream underrated tho

And yet they still give a lot

can't get pp without full combo :^)

sigh

In a system where the value comes from whatever is created, the creators will adapt to make creations which yield the highest value for them. Just give something to base a value off, and you bet somebody is going to find a way to milk the shit out of it. There are two ways to fix that really, and I think most know what they are.

Fix the damn system or do away with it completely.
Easier said than done, so let's just deal with what we have. As bad as it may be, it can and was much worse.

Also regarding to modern day pattern use in maps that dont abuse the SR system to huge proportions (30 second maps?), the system may overweigh lots of easy things, but how I see it, quality is getting better. If the system was made for maps in the 2012 era and the system now sees easy maps as hard, then I think that's saying that we are learning to map "hard" patterns such that they are easy to do. If you really are so butthurt about maps being overweighed, restrict yourself to pre 2012 mapping and have fun.

it is okay. you'd need some kind of neural network/machine learning approach to get actually good results.