Introduced to fairly universal acclaim roughly 7 months ago, Loved was to be the grand solution to the age-old issue of the ranking cycle restricting or otherwise preventing maps that the community adored from receiving scoreboards.

Since then, Loved has gone from being a purely vote-only approach, with polls held in Community Voice every few weeks to determine which out of a set of 10 predetermined maps gets in, to the current system where simply having 100SP and 30 favourites is enough to enter the category at any time.

There has been a fair bit of discussion about the new requirements to enter the category. A fairly vocal portion of the community believes that the requirements are too strict - preventing good maps from entering the category. Others believe that the requirements are too lax, creating essentially a selection of maps that aren't really loved at all.

Let's take a look at the principle issues that are often brought up where Loved is concerned.

Requirements are too high

For some, the task of receiving 100 SP seems almost insurmountable. Unless you are an active modder or mapper, kudosu is a fairly precious resource. Convincing someone to "invest" in your map's future in Loved is difficult, especially if you're not well connected.

There seems to be no way besides either earning the kudosu yourself and dumping it on your map in the event that you cannot find people willing to support your work.

A number of maps widely considered to be loved (but not actually Loved) have hundreds or even thousands of favourites, but only paltry amounts of SP, preventing them from entering the category.

This is something that we can fix. Several commentators on the topic have suggested drastically lowering the SP requirement by half, reducing it to 50 SP - a value that a mapset of significant age is likely to encounter far more organically than 100. I don't disagree with this, and I think this is something that can be done.

Requirements are too low

On the flipside, maps with only 30 favourites cannot claim to be "loved" by any means of the measure, especially when favourites are simply garnered by people clicking a button upon visiting a beatmap listing.

Very rarely is the SP requirement brought up as being "too low", but the favourites argument is certainly more compelling and something that requires further consideration on our part. Raising it seems the most appropriate choice here.

Why is Star Priority even a factor in determining whether a map is Loved or not?

Doesn't this just lock the list of people capable of contributing meaningfully to Loved to the modding community?

In a way, it does. This was something we were aware of when introducing the SP requirement into the system.

For years, kudosu has been almost completely useless. Giving the modding community some well-earned power in determining the contents of a listing that would encompass adored and universally liked maps seemed appropriate, especially given that the modding community most of all has comprehensive experience in vetting these maps for play and helping them improve.

We want to preserve this approach, or at least some aspects of it. Modders should have a tangible and perceptible 'reward' for their efforts, especially when it takes hundreds or thousands of hours of work to obtain the SP required to elevate a map to Loved alone.

What if the mapper is inactive or has left the game?

This poses a conundrum. What if a mapper does not consent to having their map deemed "complete" enough to have a scoreboard? What if they do not or never intended the map to have one in the first place?

At what point do we assume the mapper's intentions for the map in this process? Is this something we should consider at all?

I have no answers for these questions. It is a complicated topic, and we have deliberately erred away from adding very dated maps from the most part after this issue was raised VERY early on in the community voting for the first round of Loved.

There are maps that I would love to see in the category, but with their creative directors long vanished from the game (Larto is a good example of this), often times with unclear intent for their creations that are left behind, it will likely remain a very difficult issue to resolve fully.

How do we solve these problems?

This is why this thread exists. I'd like to hear what you think of the issue, and how you'd propose solving it. Keep in mind what has been said above. Please also remember that favorites are an 'effortless' resource - they only denote the number of players willing to click a button (essentially a like) without any further time investment.

What I would personally propose, is that the Loved requirements are reworked to be thus:

At a base level, a map with 50 SP and 100 favorites qualifies for Loved status.

For every 16 favorites obtained over 100, the SP requirement is reduced by 1, to a minimum of 25 SP at 500 favorites obtained.

A map with 1000 or more favorites immediately qualifies for Loved status, if its mapper asks for the map to be entered into the category.

----

What do you think should be done?

This is a lengthy post to begin a discussion with, but I figure it is important to lay out our methodology regarding these choices to make it a little clearer on what we want to achieve with this system, for all parties involved.

I think this is kind of a shitty issue because like, loved is supposed to be a section for maps that are generally liked by the community right? but maps don't have to actually be "good" maps to be liked by a big part of the community, which are mainly players.. while a big percentage of mappers would for example dislike the map a lot lol. I think that's the main issue here, and it's kind of hard to solve as you can't always satisfy both sides.
However, I do think the quality of maps in the loved section could be improved, there's some maps that honestly shouldn't be in there. Perhaps a bit extreme but some maps look like people's first ever maps, and I don't think those belong there.

In my opinion the best solution would be to go back to how it used to be, where staff (maybe even make a group of people for it that are up to date with popular maps etc) picks maps and then the community votes on which maps get added to the loved section. I believe staff has somewhat of an understanding of what good maps are so it'd probably be a better idea to do it like this. If this were to happen it would be nice if we get the option to make suggestions for maps that have over xx amount of favorites to be added to the polls, because there were quite some complaints as to why certain maps weren't in them.

Your proposition seems better than the requirements we have now, but it'd still cause the issue above.

While I enjoyed the voting since it was a more direct way to get maps the community loved out there, I get that the lack of participation at times along with the hopelessness for some people was definitely a problem.

The favorites method you propose is nice, as it absolutely gateways any "going for loved" maps from happening, but it severely limits certain modes with smaller communities where a fantastic map may only acquire around 40 favorites while in pending.

I think bringing SOME kind of voting system (where users propose maps) alongside the SP/Fav system would be nice, but I don't want one to make the other obsolete. There's something possible but I'm struggling to think of a good middle ground between being somewhat feasible and still gatekeeping low quality maps.

I agree with this idea. However, I believe that, since the requirement for SP can be reduced, it could also be possible to reduce the number of favorites. Obviously 100 favorites is quite a bit, considering that there are several hundred thousand maps and few ways to publicize them (main ones being Discord, the osugame subreddit, or Twitch streams.) As such, if a mapper wants to get a leaderboard on his map, I think it should be possible to do so with some large investment of SP - say 150, 200, whatever. To even get that much SP would require quite a lot of modding / "community contribution" so at that point the leaderboard would be more of a reward for contributions to the mapping community.

That said, I'm in full support of revisions to the system if it moved more in the direction of actually loved (or at least community recognized) maps. I know a lot of players constantly complain that terrible shitmaps get loved since those are the kind of things that tend to get 100 SP in the first place, due to new mappers constantly getting mods even though their fundamental mapping level is too low to make something rankable. nevermind the fact that half the "good maps" in loved are terrible shitmaps too

I look forward to further development of this discussion!

100 sp is super hard to farm, 50 sounds better, I'd just go with 50 SP (every 50 favs reduced by 10 the required SP?)

30 favs is way too low tbh, I'd said 100 favs

Vote system was bad also, because everyone voted for similar maps (High SR ones)

I liked when you guys picked the maps by hand, since we can actually see some gimmicks instead of High SR maps, ex: https://osu.ppy.sh/s/48738 , https://osu.ppy.sh/s/31084


Anyways I think community votes aren't good and 100 sp is way too high LOL, I'd just make a team of people checking maps by hand with a requirement of like 100 favs, but this also depends on what LOVED is supposed to be, if an alternative way to have a scoreboard for any map or a category to have gimmick/special maps.

i like the reworked requirements.

personally, i dont like the involvement of kudosu at all in this process since modders do not represent the community fully, especially the player community. the player community is the one gaining something in this situation after all, by getting more leaderboards to compete on.

i like the 100 favorite change tho, when a map has 100 favorites it's definitely loved by the community imo. 30 favs didn't feel like that.

i think the issue of inactive mappers' maps not getting loved could be fixed by a map over 1000 favorites immideatly achieveing loved status. if the mapper doesn't like it then they can request their map not have a leaderboard, since most people probably would want their map to have a leaderboard. there's nothing to lose by your map having a leaderboard so why would you not want one?

i wanna see a new voting system

requirements are 50 stars and 100+ favs but it is submitted into a loved queue manually by either the community or the mapper rather than having maps just being picked randomly

when voting comes around, higher ranked players have more power in the vote than lesser ranked players as most higher ranked players have more judgement on what maps are fun and great and what is just plain awful

dunno what to do with inactive mappers though,

i feel like combining the current system (or reducing the SP, but not the favorites) with a system of voting in batches works nicely - however, OzzyOzrock's point definitely is important

a quick search on osusearch only yields 37 unranked maps with at least one mania difficulty that have over 100 favorites, some of which are mixed sets, which might indicate that 100 is a bit steep for mania, and i'd be willing to bet that other non-standard modes also have similar difficulties.

it's also been proven, at least with regards to mania, though i don't doubt it's happened on other modes as well, that certain beatmappers have the power to abuse this concept of "loved" maps; i know of two maps in mania that had 100 SP dumped right onto it for the purpose of loved, one of which was the beatmapper of the map being loved in the first place; imo, the map wasn't all that great, and it certainly doesn't epitomize what the community "loves."

the number of favorites, imo, can be raised, because it takes much less effort to get a player to favorite your map if it is enjoyable. it doesn't take a detailed playtest and propositions of revision, it takes a playthrough and a click of a link. boom. something like 75 favorites might be a good middle-ground for all of the modes.

to counteract the SP reduction and make it possible to still keep the requirement at least respectably difficult, here's an idea: set the minimum SP to some value less than the current; 50 or 75 seems ok for this, however, put it under a contingency that no single user (including the beatmapper) can commit more than a certain fraction of the stars required for loved. 50% seems like an alright number. doing this requires the beatmapper to seek additional endorsement for the map - beatmapper has to commit SP, but also has to get others to do so as well. increased favorite count also makes it so that they have to seek more people to get the map to the status the desire.

just some thoughts.

Maybe bring back the voting system, and a then a minimum requirement (in terms of favs/kudosu) to be eligible for voting?
But then I feel that my proposed solution would really be iffy.

Sorta combining solutions here, but in short, my proposition is to have maps loved only through community voting. Come up with a formula that assigns a score to maps by favs/kudosu. Maps need to be of a minimum score in order to be on the list (not hard if your map is popular). The top 40 maps on the list are posted for weekly voting, and then say the top 10 become loved. Rinse recycle repeat?

What if maps under a certain amount of favourites have to be unrankable to begin with in order to be loved. This stops people too lazy to rank getting their maps loved instead and give mappers a reason other than aspire to do crazy things. Hopefully this will create a mix of good creative maps and big stupid jump maps that the community loves. I'm not sure if I'm edging away from loved and more towards a home for creative unrankable maps but I'd definitely like to see more high quality maps in the loved section.

Regarding other gamemodes there's nothing stopping requirements being changed for smaller gamemodes to make it easier to get them loved. For mixed mapsets the gamemode with the highest requirements would be used to stop people shoving on a shit ctb diff for some easy loved.

For the actual requirements to get a map loved some sort of dynamic system where more stars requires less favs and vice versa. This way popular maps will have no trouble getting loved but also leaves the door open to less popular unknown mappers with new and unique maps.

Dont think the amount of favorites needed across different game modes should be normalized as some game modes have smaller / larger player bases. I like the suggested ideas though.

50sp
100fav

I have the giddiest smile right now. Thank you for this.
#MakeLovedGreatAgain

Gonna ping my video here, since I did make suggestions on how this system could be improved:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuzKCss-OmY

imo, mappers should not in any way have the capability to get their own maps loved. increasing the number of favorites would help, but I don't think even 150 favs shows a map is loved by the community. lots of the low quality maps in loved that no one actually cares about, would never have been in the loved section had the mappers not put it there themselves.

sp: the way I understood the main post's explanation of sp involvement, it sounded like you were just saying "we're involving sp because it's actually worthless otherwise." I do think sp should be worth something, but I don't think the loved section is the right place to just force it into relevancy. the loved section is supposed to be about the community (which is mostly players), not mappers.

idk I think that's about all I have to say. loved section is bad because mappers gained the ability to get their own maps loved, loved section used to be about the community, yeah.
typed on a phone, plz forgive errors #makelovedgreatagain

How about the kudosu thrown in has to be from at least 15-30 different people? It is more representative of "loved" by the community rather than the mapper dumping like 50 on a map (which is not that many), that is more like the mapper being narcissistic towards their own map.

LMT wrote:

How about the kudosu thrown in has to be from at least 15-30 different people? It is more representative of "loved" by the community rather than the mapper dumping like 50 on a map (which is not that many), that is more like the mapper being narcissistic towards their own map.

Why do I feel like I am an example of this statement =A=;;

using community vote again would be great, using a splash screen in main menu in-game for bigger exposure instead of adverting using osu!weekly only

additionally, is something like play counts (implemented in pending/wip, yeah) can be used to determine the maps being played frequent enough for being loved? if the goal is for 'loved', at least the part of community already been playing the map in regular basis for several times every day / week

1000 favorites for loved
a kudosu counts as 5 favorites
a single person can shoot only 10-15 kudosu at a map. they can shoot more but anything over 15 won't count towards the 1000.

numbers can be adjusted, the general idea is that a kudosu is like a more heavily weighted favorite and you can't have one or two people carrying the map to loved status via kudosu

I'd just like to throw this set out there, not trying to bash it too hard, since I'm on it.

O2i3 - TSLove
Mapped by [_Chichinya_]
https://osu.ppy.sh/s/549370

This set has 36 difficulties, so that's enough to meet the requirement, and I believe this set was circlejerked into the loved category my the GDers. 36 of the 100 required stars are from just one of the GDers, and the top 5 star donators donated a total of 84 stars, and all happen to have a GD on the set.

That being said, this set isn't good, and even if it's not trying to be good, it's not what I believe loved sets should be -- fun. With respect to the creator, as I know they worked super hard pushing this to be loved, I think sets like these are the reason that loved maps have lost so much value. Over half of the taiko maps are the same thing with more or less notes, which is just super low quality for something "loved by the community." I can't speak for any other mode besides the standard difficulty, but I don't even want to talk about that.

I know some of my points have been brought up before in this thread, but I wanted to give this super recent example of a set that got loved that just... isn't. I'm sure there are others, and I'm not calling for a witch hunt. That being said, I don't think SP should really have much to do with the loving of a set, since you can donate a shitload of sp, but you can only donate one favorite, and that's a lot more accurate at representing the popularity of the set. Frankly, throwing SP at a loved set seems like a waste, since loved sets are not ranked sets, and SP (I personally believe) should be used to say, "hey, this map should be ranked because I, a modder, approve of the quality," and not "I have to give the SP I earned by making maps more suitable for rank to a map that is not going for rank." I hope that makes sense.

So basically what everyone else has been saying.




also lul just /np the set into #osu and see how many people recognize it that should give you a good idea of how popular it is

Hey there!

As a mapper who is trying to get more involved in the community, I find it hard for mappers (like myself) to get a beatmap loved, due to the requirements.
For example, maybe a mapper that's new to the community is trying to gain some sort of attention or recognition, and may turn to loved as a result.
I see Loved status as an objective for mappers who are trying to "stand out" in anyway, but it's hard for the "new to the community" mappers to be able to do so because first, they'd have to either be well known in the community already or they have to connect with people on osu! to spread their map like propaganda, but since those mappers have neither, it'll be difficult.
Honestly, if we were to ask others to favorite and drop kudosu in our maps, I feel like we'd have a broken system of just mappers giving each other favorites and kudosu back and forth, but oh well \ :/ /
I mean, the only way I think a beatmap could be determined to be loved is through favorites and kudosu. Initially, I thought if a mapper would just submit their beatmap and try to justify why they want it to be loved and why they think it should be loved is not justifiable, because there isn't really a guideline on what a Loved beatmap is supposed to be.
I think keeping the favorites and kudosu is the best way to determine whether a beatmap should be loved or not, but I would like to refer back to my previous point on how "new to the community" mappers won't have it easy to reach out and try to get favorites and kudosu. I really think lowering the requirements is the best way to go, I don't think we should put a lot of pressure on mappers and make them feel disappointed when they try to get recognition. I've longed to have something like Loved come out, and I congratulate the osu! team for being able to accomplish this.
For now, 50/100 SP seems like quite a lot, and for some reason, 30 favorites also.
I propose that:
- We could try to lower the requirements to about 10-20+ favorites, and ~25 SP
- Or, we could implement a system where the less kudosu or ranked beatmaps a mapper has, the lower their requirements, and vice versa otherwise.

My points probably don't make any sense, but this is just how I feel.

Let's try to encourage mappers who are trying to aim for loved!

Using kudosu for that purpose was a shit idea from the very start. It was introduced as a mean to encourage modding and you should strive to make it that again instead of giving people the opportunity to dump their hundreds of useless kudosu somewhere.
Most notably SP is still easiest to gain by RECEIVING mods, best case is you don't have to mod anything at all so once again, getting mods is more attractive than modding. That does not encourage modding at all and SP is easy to gain if you are patient and get 1 mod every other week.
For me nothing changed from the inital iteration of loved maps, the section is still not more interesting than the graveyard, even less so due to the huge tendency of being overstarred. Most of all, I highly doubt that will change with changes to the requirements as Loved already has a face that it won't lose anytime soon.
In my opinion it is too late to make that section "small" by massively increasing the favorite-count.
Anything that will happen is the reddit-effect, meaning that popular mappers will get their graveyarded maps ranked without even doing much for it because they have the favoriting fanbase and other graveyarded maps that don't get played due to a lack of popularity simply won't get played and won't get the favorites and won't get loved.

Although I think that using SP and Kudosu is absolutely lame as a mean to get your map loved, it is still something that you can work for with a lot of effort, often no less than you would for a ranked map, considering the high amount of 100SP. That way loved wouldn't be a one-sided circle-jerk of celebrities but a product of communityeffort. Not necessarily high quality but you scrapped the qualityrequirement with the first voting rounds already. As such I don't see a problem with allowing communitymaps to get loved, even if they have 36 difficulties. If they are stupid they still won't get played but that is okay, graveyarded maps won't get played either. All that will differ loved maps from graveyarded maps will be that people cared about a scoreboard and did something for it. And what else is loved supposed to be at this point?

the number adjustements suggested in the OP are definitely a step to the right direction, but I think the important part on the SP side of things is to require enough unique SP contributors along with the flat number of required SP. This is to stop one person having excessive influence over a set's eligibilty for the Loved category. Let's say, for example, a set needs 20 unique SP contributors to qualify.

The other important adjustment that should be made is to the values for the 3 smaller game modes. Like it has been pointed out, 100 favorites on a CtB set implies wildly different things about the set than 100 favs on standard.

I've lost all faith in community voting after the last couple of rounds we had, so if that comes back it would need some heavy redesigning.

Star priority should NOT have come into play, whatsoever; this is how you turn the category from something prestigious into a low effort method of giving your maps a leaderboard.

...seriously, why are vanilla pp maps that should (barely) be ranked entering this section? The addition of something so abusable was pretty damn reckless. Loved should keep to its namesake and feature only maps enjoyed and picked by the entire community, and not a bunch of jack-off mappers with KD to spare. A similar issue is actually great maps that should and should've be ranked ending up here instead, because it's easier to do-- though that's arguably solved elsewhere.

I believe the polls were giving the section the best it had, considering the large amounts of effort and exposure by the community to vote for and push favourites through. Unsure what the best way to continue nominating would be, but it's certainly not automation. I believe the loved category should cater to all sections of the community, so as well as picking obviously prominent and popular maps (I don't like to dismiss this, a lot of the love comes from here), it would be wise to ask top players and mappers what they're enjoying too.

---

Lastly, regarding the penultimate debate in the OP: I find it hard to imagine a case where a mapper from days past would consider having their map given a leaderboard offensive. After all, they've submitted it for us to play and enjoy, right? Adding it to loved should only further display our positivity! Remember that loved is just a scoreboard at the end of the day and not to be compared with the official rankings where more issues could lie.

BeatOfTheDragon wrote:

lots of words

i disagree completely. i think most new mappers don't have something that really fits the idea of the category. it's meant for maps that are loved by the community, but i think most new mappers aren't able to produce a piece that really fits this. the current problem that most people currently have with the category is maps that aren't truly loved are being pushed into loved, so don't you think your ideas are a step in the wrong direction? especially by lowering the requirements, it just makes it easier for someone to gather a few friends together and boost their map to meet the criteria.

BeatOfTheDragon wrote:

I see Loved status as an objective for mappers who are trying to "stand out" in anyway, but it's hard for the "new to the community"

i think you should work to creating something that the community genuinely loves, not work to making something that you can just boost with some friends to meet the category's qualifications.

I pretty agree with idke that someone can actually play maps better can have a right to judge it. Loved maps are made for players anyway.
Though some maps like fool moon are not actually easy for player to play, we can use the fav stuffs to love.
And star priority should not go into this catagory. That is mappers stuff not players.

I think the best solution would be to just separate loved into 2 categories, where one has a large favorite requirement and the other a large SP requirement. That way we satisfy the people who want to keep Loved pure and filled with maps that are actually Loved, as well as an alternate category that serves the current purpose of Loved as a modding incentive.

Generally speaking, when the Loved level was originally introduced, it was praised as an attempt to get maps that were otherwise unrankable for a variety of reasons to get a scoreboard.

This is no longer the case. The Loved section has many maps that are otherwise perfectly rankable, either because they are full sets, don't break any rules, or are quite capable of having lower difficulties but don't purely due to laziness.

As it stands, a lot of new mappers actually try to aim for Loved rather than Ranked, purely because it's something they can reliably work towards. This is severely fucked up. It is a symptom of a problem both in the Loved requirements and the current motivational/activity issues plaguing the ranking system.

As it stands, the requirements for Loved are if anything, too generic. Ideally speaking there shouldn't be any maps in Loved that are just "normal maps except the mapper decided to go for loved instead of ranked because BNs are dead".

Right now, Loved is mostly being used as a "last resort" for shitty, lazy, or normal maps that aren't capable of going through the ranked system the normal way. This sounds so antithesis to the entire concept that it's outright silly. Loved maps, that is to say, maps that the community loves, that are perfectly rankable should be getting ranked just fine. If they aren't, that's the problem that should be fixed - not the threshold of SP or favorites. That's irrelevant.



Add a requirement to Loved that a map must be unrankable for some reason, and have one or two people actually vet these maps to make sure that they actually fit the spirit of the Loved nomenclature. "Couldn't find BNs" shouldn't be the reason a large percentage of Loved maps are Loved instead of ranked.

Maybe have maps "Apply" for Loved, and have a monthly or weekly vote on however many maps. Reject maps that fail for a month or something. This is far less important to me; I don't really care. If people can't get their map Loved because not enough people Love it, that's their problem. Not the system's.

Shiirn wrote:

As it stands, a lot of new mappers actually try to aim for Loved rather than Ranked, purely because it's something they can reliably work towards. This is severely fucked up. It is a symptom of a problem both in the Loved requirements and the current motivational/activity issues plaguing the ranking system.

Agreed, it seems like an easy way out. A way to get the recognition of being ranked but with less effort.

Shiirn wrote:

As it stands, the requirements for Loved are if anything, too generic. Ideally speaking there shouldn't be any maps in Loved that are just "normal maps except the mapper decided to go for loved instead of ranked because BNs are dead".

I agree that normal maps shouldn't go into loved, but some people just might not be able to get a map ranked as it sparks controversy. Not that it is unrankable, but because no one thinks it should be ranked.

By the way, couldn't the problems of "BNs are dead" be fixed by having MORE active BNs? It seems like the kind of thing that would need to be much bigger considering the massive playerbase osu! has.

Shiirn wrote:

Loved maps, that is to say, maps that the community loves, that are perfectly rankable should be getting ranked just fine. If they aren't, that's the problem that should be fixed - not the threshold of SP or favorites. That's irrelevant.

Again I think this could be more easily fixed by having more BNs. I don't see a downside to having more.

Shiirn wrote:

Add a requirement to Loved that a map must be unrankable for some reason, and have one or two people actually vet these maps to make sure that they actually fit the spirit of the Loved nomenclature.

100% agree with this statement. A separate group of people could be in charge of running the loved section (obviously QAT would still have some power) that are not necessarily great at mapping, but people who know what the community wants. Big problems in maps should be fixed (unless it is intentional) and the Metadata should be correct too.

Shiirn wrote:

Maybe have maps "Apply" for Loved, and have a monthly or weekly vote on however many maps. Reject maps that fail for a month or something.

Wasn't this the original set up for loved? I seem to remember something about applying floating around, and people used to vote on maps.

With CtB mindsest, I really don't see any reason why the voting system was done away. Ever since sp/favs was added, there's only been one ctb only set loved. Getting a map loved is just not possible when the minigame is 10x smaller than the others.

Voting system on the other hand was much better. Popular unrankable maps were loved often, old sets with no sp and yet were actually 'loved' by people became loved, those 10* diffs that simply wouldn't pass were loved, and spreads that were high quality and long abandoned were loved.

That + a large majority of the ctb players don't map, and have no kudosu to shoot. Voting is far more engaging for them because they can actually have a say on what they want to see.


tldr should bring back voting for ctb, our playbase is way too small to use the system for the other modes. If that doesn't happen, favs/sp count should really be lowered from it's current number to something reasonable. Imo 15 favourites/30-50 sp. Else we'll be having ~1 loved map per year.

Shiirn wrote:

Generally speaking, when the Loved level was originally introduced, it was praised as an attempt to get maps that were otherwise unrankable for a variety of reasons to get a scoreboard.

This is no longer the case. The Loved section has many maps that are otherwise perfectly rankable, either because they are full sets, don't break any rules, or are quite capable of having lower difficulties but don't purely due to laziness.

As it stands, a lot of new mappers actually try to aim for Loved rather than Ranked, purely because it's something they can reliably work towards. This is severely fucked up. It is a symptom of a problem both in the Loved requirements and the current motivational/activity issues plaguing the ranking system.

As it stands, the requirements for Loved are if anything, too generic. Ideally speaking there shouldn't be any maps in Loved that are just "normal maps except the mapper decided to go for loved instead of ranked because BNs are dead".

Right now, Loved is mostly being used as a "last resort" for shitty, lazy, or normal maps that aren't capable of going through the ranked system the normal way. This sounds so antithesis to the entire concept that it's outright silly. Loved maps, that is to say, maps that the community loves, that are perfectly rankable should be getting ranked just fine. If they aren't, that's the problem that should be fixed - not the threshold of SP or favorites. That's irrelevant.



Add a requirement to Loved that a map must be unrankable for some reason, and have one or two people actually vet these maps to make sure that they actually fit the spirit of the Loved nomenclature. "Couldn't find BNs" shouldn't be the reason a large percentage of Loved maps are Loved instead of ranked.

Maybe have maps "Apply" for Loved, and have a monthly or weekly vote on however many maps. Reject maps that fail for a month or something. This is far less important to me; I don't really care. If people can't get their map Loved because not enough people Love it, that's their problem. Not the system's.

Shiirn only one with balls to say what's on most peoples' minds

Sinnoh wrote:

With CtB mindsest, I really don't see any reason why the voting system was done away. Ever since sp/favs was added, there's only been one ctb only set loved. Getting a map loved is just not possible when the minigame is 10x smaller than the others.

Voting system on the other hand was much better. Popular unrankable maps were loved often, old sets with no sp and yet were actually 'loved' by people became loved, those 10* diffs that simply wouldn't pass were loved, and spreads that were high quality and long abandoned were loved.

That + a large majority of the ctb players don't map, and have no kudosu to shoot. Voting is far more engaging for them because they can actually have a say on what they want to see.


tldr should bring back voting for ctb, our playbase is way too small to use the system for the other modes. If that doesn't happen, favs/sp count should really be lowered from it's current number to something reasonable. Imo 15 favourites/30-50 sp. Else we'll be having ~1 loved map per year.

I'd rather see Loved maps managed by the QAT through an application process like Shiirn said. Voting system utilized too much of a "this guy is popular so there's a 200% chance we see more of his maps every week in voting" in ctb. Every week it was a new CLSW or Spectator map, which, although they are very good, did not give very much variety to the Loved section as a whole. Having people apply for Loved through a system that's moderated by a team that ensures the set belongs there seems like a much more viable and correct approach to the situation. When it comes to CtB though, I'd rather see 1 good loved map per year than 20 failed ranking attempts. We shouldn't be expecting to have as many loved maps as standard. That's delusional.

As of now, we have mappers who absolutely can't map and are just getting people to favorite their maps and have a lot of Star Priority through the countless mods they've gotten that don't improve their map at all. This goes for any mode, there's far too much that DOESN'T belong in Loved that's currently Loved. Every time I see "going for loved" in a map description I want to shoot myself because it completely ruins the purpose of the section. You get a map loved by it being a loved map, not by simply aiming for it.

Just my 2c.

I would recommend a score system where each map must attain a certain "score" to be eligible for qualification.

Let's say,
1 Favorite = 20 points
1 Star Priority = 10 points

To be eligible for Loved, you must get at least 1000 points.

If the player base loves the map, then they usually express this through favoriting the map.
If the mapping community loves a map, then they usually express this through starring the map.

Combining both favorites and star priority into one score system allows mappers more freedom to get their map Loved. They can either get support from the player base, or they can get support from the mapping community, or a mixture of both. Of course, we can shift points around later, or even logarithmatize the point system to have diminishing returns for # of favourites and # of star priority.

THe current SP system only benefits active modders currently. Not all mappers also mod, actually some of the best mappers don't do a lot of modding at all (see RLC Skystar ProBox handsome etc...) so they rely on the mapping community to promote their stuff. I hope we can find a balance through integrating # of favorites into Loved eligibility, not just Loved requirement. Currently # of favorites is useless above 30, while SP is useless above 100. Removing a dual requirement allows mappers to overlook one area (perhaps # of SP, if the mapper is not a known mapper or modder) through a significantly higher value in another (say # of favorites) and vice versa.

numbers are bad, numbers are how you get circlejerks, though knowing you this post was likely made entirely aware of the fact

I agree with Shiirn's point that Loved shouldn't just be an alternative Ranked status. I personally really dislike the fact that people are mapping "for loved". Loved isn't supposed to be a mapping goal, it should just be a place for (unrankable) maps loved by the community to get a scoreboard.

Right now, mappers are throwing a bunch of kudosu onto their own maps just to push it to loved status, and I think that defeats the point. A map with 100+ kudosu from the mapper doesn't tell me it's loved by the community, only by the mapper. So my suggestion would be that a mapper's kudosu onto thier own map doesn't contribute to the criteria for loved status.

This would devalue kudosu, but I see it more important to preserve what loved was supposed to be intended for.

We should keep the loved system as it was before, mainly focused in maps that have a bigger appeal to the community overall.The staff should create a new category for the maps with 100sp and 30 favorites as maps neither loved or ranked, but maps that can potentially provide good content for the community. Let me explain;

Maps with 100SP and 30 favorites so far showed maps that were part of regular ranking process (maps that are accord to RC) that after getting mods and gathering SP couldn’t get BNs to move them forward or maps that are popular among certain groups of mappers that get together and shoot stars in a specific map. Neither of this is aligned with the original goal of loved section, but they’re a response to the stumbles of the ranked process.
Maps that originally were modded over and over again but failed to succeed in getting rank now have a final destination different of getting graved after a lot of hard work. As well as single difficulties created by mappers that are loved by groups of mappers in which (for any RC reason), ranking seems too unlikely, to get a positive response. Both of these possibilities only show that the amount of created maps is no longer supported by the traditional ranked section, and further layers should be added in accord to meet the huge demand.

For now we have ranked beatmaps that are said to be the game official content, qualified beatmaps that are the maps that are on the merge of getting that status after around a week of exposure to fix potential issues and loved beatmaps, that are maps that doesn’t fit the RC but are labeled as content popular among the community and therefore deserve to have a leaderboard, score, playcount, etc… status too.

The initial idea here is to split the loved category from its current format into two:

Loved beatmaps; the original idea of maps that are voted (or not), have a lot of favorites, doesn’t meet the RC, have leaderboard, etc.
Appreciated beatmaps (or any other name, whatever);

This category could work as the lower level of beatmaps and the borderline from pending/graveyard/wip – and – loved/qualified/ranked maps.
Here it’s where maps that are not loved by the community and/or couldn’t get ranked for any reason whatsoever could get into. By establishing a minimum amount of favorite/star priority number more content that has potential to please the community can get the chance of getting more exposure and be played. And since this category it’s divided from loved, it can work on its own main goals.
Just an example idea, this category could feature maps that have a certain minimum amount(x) of star priority, or a certain amount of favorites and star priority simultaneously(y and z), or even Monstrata’s point system suggestion. This could work as a better way to exposure maps as possible content for BNs to evaluate as viable or not for modding towards ranked category.

Another idea is that since this section is aimed to the mapping community, the people who are active in both mapping/modding should get the chance to designate the content they consider good enough to get beyond pending maps to appreciated mapset. Example of that, is that for the last 15 maps someone modded over the course of x months, he can shot a “special” star in one of the maps he modded, therefore, considering it as the best map he looked in that period. After getting a certain amount of special stars, just like regular SP or SP+favorites, the map can get into the appreciated list.
It could also be used as a pre-qualification period, by adding to this category all maps that currently posses one bubble. So maps that currently have a bubble and are getting dust on the pending list can get the change of getting played and be more exposure to the community for both feedback possibilities. After getting all modifications and the heart icon it leaves the appreciated section to qualified section.
By adding maps with certain SP, maps with certain SP/favorite number and maps with one bubble I believe that the current core of the osu! mapping community can get a better exposure for the sake of new mappers, new ideas, acceptable content and “popular” content, compared to the cruel graveyard, a section of the game that currently has great quality content coexisting with content that is totally underdeveloped.

Now, this is all just general raw ideas. I’m not the revolutionary armed knight that will save the day. I just had a few ideas after seeing some debate over the loved category and wanted to share them in hope that with some further debate we can come up with a good way to improve the current situation for both ranking/loved system.

P.S: Ephemeral, little puppy son of a gun, you didn’t reply my messages about why my map didn’t get loved GRR

I agree with shiirn. I don't like seeing rankable mapsets in loved, because they should be going for ranked. Using loved as a last resort trash can for your map isn't really what it should be for imo.

now that class is over, an explanation of my previous post

1000 favorites for loved
a kudosu counts as 5 favorites
a single person can shoot only 10-15 kudosu at a map. they can shoot more but anything over 15 won't count towards the 1000.

numbers can be adjusted, the general idea is that a kudosu is like a more heavily weighted favorite and you can't have one or two people carrying the map to loved status via kudosu

if you generalize the entire community as "the community" then mappers and modders and like-minded people will be mostly excluded. this became very apparent when loved was first implemented and the voting system turned the loved category into generic jump map category. which, yes, is true to the name "loved," but do we really fucking want that? i dont, you dont, and if you do want that, you shouldn't. there are too many amazing maps rotting away in the graveyard because it's too hard or even impossible to rank them. they deserve a scoreboard.

in my opinion, the loved category should be a category that can represent the vast stores of unranked maps. in other words, the loved category should have a broad variety of maps. generic, bland or even shitty maps should definitely have a place in loved as long as they are popular, since there are plenty of those in the graveyard. we'll call these category 1 maps.

there should also be maps that people more knowledgeable about mapping can appreciate; these, we will call category 2 maps. the number of people who vie for category 2 is a lot less than the number of people who vie for category 1 (as evidenced by the voting system), but it's complete idiocy to discount these people and call them circlejerkers and throw them under the bus. they make the maps for you to play and they know more about mapping than the community, give them some goddamn time in the sun. not all of it, just some of it.

these two categories are broad generalizations and not mutually exclusive but i think that they have enough truth in them, for our purposes. previously, category 2 maps were being mostly excluded because community voting was heavily skewed towards category 1 maps. currently category 1 maps are being excluded because of the 100SP requirement. generally, a mapper/modder is not going to throw their stars at Blue Stahli - Anti You.

really, the idea of combining favorites and star priority into one system i mentioned before should solve both of them. do mappers think a certain map is shit, but it's a famous, heavily played map that brings joy to many players? no problem, just toss all your favorites at it. is the map an obscure masterpiece that no pp farmer would even touch but that mappers adore? no problem, throw your SP at it. to prevent a single person or two from carrying a map to loved, make it so that only up to 15 of their stars will count.


regarding mappers using the loved category as an alternate ranking system... just make it more difficult to get a map loved. make the loved requirement 3000 points if you have to. loved maps are meant to be like wine, they get better as they age. eventually it grows in fame and reputation and is played more and more, circulating through multiplayer lobbies, to the point where it's not a map that was submitted one week and thrust into loved section the next, it's a well-known map that people actually, genuinely like. nobody is going to artificially vault it into the loved category because the 3000 point requirement is too discouraging. the only way for it to be in the loved category is if players or mappers or both all known and love the map, and at that point it'll take its place in the loved category.

also making it so that only unrankable maps can be loved is just stupid. that's so subjective. what is unrankable and what is rankable? there's no clear delineation, there's an enormous gray area in between. pretty much any map, with thorough modding, can be ranked. are only 2b maps and 10* jump maps going to be loved? that's a silly restriction. if it's loved, it's loved, and it can go into the loved category where it belongs.

This new loved system treats favourites as if they are just freely given out. I think the cap of 100 should be increased, or a new favouriting system is introduced if this new loved system actually happens.

I share the same perspective as Monstrata.

When loved first came out, I was super excited for one beatmap in particular by 09kami. Since this map got loved after the criteria changes, it of course needed to meet the 100 SP criteria. I ended up shooting 45 kudosu (and a favorite ) at the map which didn't really bother me, but there were already 100+ favorites which left me wondering why I really needed to spend so much kudosu on something that was already so obviously appreciated.

I think Monstrata's concept of forcing a common denominator between kudosu and favorites is pretty spot on. If players love it, they can be the sole factor in getting a map loved. If mappers love it, they can be the sole factor in getting a map loved. Neither party has to rely on the other to get a map loved anymore, but it will take more appreciation from 1 single demographic than it will from 2 (obvious).
//idk if it really is this way or i just all of the maps i see work out like this, but if mappers like it then players generally like it as well. this isn't always the case vice versa tho...

Anyways with that said, I also think there are some serious issues in beatmap quality.

Syph wrote:

Perhaps a bit extreme but some maps look like people's first ever maps, and I don't think those belong there.

Yeah, I agree and have nothing more to add LOL

Yusomi wrote:

This new loved system treats favourites as if they are just freely given out. I think the cap of 100 should be increased, or a new favouriting system is introduced if this new loved system actually happens.

also a really good point LOL like 3 weeks ago i purged my favorites to open space and i felt terrible doing it.

I agree with Shiirn the issue with the current loved section is merely a symptom of a deeper rooted problem with the ranking system as a whole.

As far as I can tell the reason it took like 8 years for the loved section to come about is that to do it well you basically need a 2nd set of nominators to manage it who would be better used managing the ranked section.

I think the best results would come by taking Monstratas system and adding a runoff vote to it for all qualifying maps. Restrict first round voting to top players/mappers and toss the top 10 most popular maps from this voting each week into a full community vote like we had originally.

down with kudosu boosting.

I think perhaps the early voting to introduce the system to the game set an expectation for Loved content to be appropriately 'curated', when the system was never intended to be. Our thoughts in mind when making Loved were not to introduce a listing that contains high-skill, high-acclaim maps that were otherwise unsuitable for ranking, but rather to provide an alternate method for mappers with content that was widely appreciated regardless of what difficulty level or paradigm it was made under.

I'm not sure that pursuing a return to the same curated voting that started off Loved is particularly helpful - though if there is such a high demand for curated content in that regard, we could look at setting up something else to achieve the same end.

Xd I want my kds back

How many people actually like the fact that SP is being used?
I think you should try to find another use for kudosu than loved, because kudosu doesn't belong in loved.

I depends on the definition on what a "Loved" map means. It could be "unrankable but loved by many", or under "for maps of all types chosen by mappers and players", or all the way to "here is a fast way to get publicity without effort w[deleted]k".

If it is the first one, there needs to be a sharp increase in the favorite's minimum, since loved my many needs UNIQUE players to love it. This on it's own could suffice if that is the definition we are going for.
If it is the second one, then the current one needs a reform. Maybe have two systems to get loved: One operating under favorites, One operating under SP.
If it is the last one, well the current system seems to want to move that way, but only for mappers with publicity. While this makes sense, as it is at this stage a publicity contest, an automated system wouldn't be a problem since ALL maps are equal under this definition.

These are my 2 cents in an issue I have almost no qualifications in.

Maybe the good idea is to make group of mappers+players who can make a decision: is map deserve loved status or not. Mappers or players can request a map somehow and this group will decide what to do with this maps.

Ephemeral wrote:

What if the mapper is inactive or has left the game?

This poses a conundrum. What if a mapper does not consent to having their map deemed "complete" enough to have a scoreboard? What if they do not or never intended the map to have one in the first place?

At what point do we assume the mapper's intentions for the map in this process? Is this something we should consider at all?

I have no answers for these questions. It is a complicated topic, and we have deliberately erred away from adding very dated maps from the most part after this issue was raised VERY early on in the community voting for the first round of Loved.

Why not to asuume that you have their permisson to move it to the loved until its proven not. I mean is this really different case from people taking copyrighted songs?

I would definitely discourage loved to become solely a shelter for maps that are in some way controversial, as I think all good and well playable maps should become ranked eventually, regardless of how they freely ignore the ranking criteria. Good and well playable maps should, the more controversial they are, help the ranking criteria to become more precise in determining potentially relevant factors when evaluating the maps as such. Holding it the other way around, that is the ranking criteria solely determining what can or cannot be ranked, will result in the ranked pool of maps becoming continuously dull and meaningless. I do not think you should encourage such development.

Now I had a look at some graveyarded beatmaps and it seems that the quality of the map - or at least the degree to which the map is interesting in some way - does not necessarily increase with the number of kudosu, but rather the amount of people the map received kudosu from. Now I thought about just have weighted kudosu on a map given by others more than ones given by the creator, but I think this is abusable too easily. Instead I think it's inevitable to ultimately have some kind of "loved"-score calculation that factors in the amount of people that gave kudosu, while at the same time have the creator not be able to get the required sp himself just by spamming his hoarded kudosu (which in my opinion doesn't represent what "loved" stands - or should stand - for).

Maybe the solution would be to just have a weighting similar to the pp-system; that is the first favourite counts relatively more than the second favourite and the second more than the third etc.. Similarly, the first kudosu from person x would then count more than the second kudosu from person x and more than the third kudosu from person x etc.. This would encourage maps that have received broad appreciation, thus be loved by the community, actually be "loved" by the community.

I think having kudosu weighted would ultimately discourage mappers hoarding them for their own maps to reach loved status, thus enabling kudosu to ultimately become for mappers just what favourites are for players: a way to express their appreciation towards a map. I also don't think you should have to rely on star priority to reach a certain threshold, as opinions on maps of the community of players and the community of mappers have proven to diverge on a lot of occasions. I think kudosu can be - if implemented properly - a great way to grant a voice to the mapping-community in the loved-process.

Thanks for creating this thread, I've been moaning about loved for the last few months.

Eph you and I have very different views of what "loved" should mean. It seems that to you that kudos mean as much as favorites regarding loved status (which I can never agree with). If we're going to be forced to use kudos then I love the idea of x kudos = y favs if. I think making kudos optional is much more true to the category. Kudos don't belong in the loved category and you probably know that, so let them be optional. Use a formula that weights kudos vs favs to accomplish this.

kudos + favs * x >= y (after reading through all the posts it appears monstrata reached the same conclusion with the EXACT same values I had in my mind)

Now just play around with the values of x and y until you find a nice outcome (and no please don't make x anything below 1, favorites SHOULD be worth more).

Another problem is the fact that the system is RETARDED for non-standard maps. There aren't going to be any mania maps that fit the new requirements after like one cycle if the requirements aren't made more dynamic somehow (I have no solution to this).

Now that we've gotten the "include kudos" version of the category out the way, I can give my own opinion and some better ideas:

Mappers shouldn't be able to strive for loved status and they shouldn't be able to get a map loved with minimal community involvement.

Involving kudos is retarded. ( I disagree than rankable maps shouldn't be loveable, that's not what the section is about, the effort a mapper puts towards achieving ranked or loved and the style of that map is completely unrelated to whether the community wants a scoreboard or not).

Loved is NOT a way for mappers to make their first steps into the community, it's the communities way of letting enjoyable maps in.

There are a lot of people who seem to think that loved should only be for unrankable style maps. While I would love this (all of the best maps in the sections are IMO the innovative unrankable ones), I don't think it's right. It's fallacious to think that this is a "this or that" scenario, in reality we should be asking "why can't we have both?". Legitimately, why the fuck can't we? In a proper system I believe that unrankable and rankable maps that the community loves would both float into the loved category without intervention from mappers and modders, we just need to set that system up.

Which brings me onto the discussion of what the loved system should actually be comprised of. For one it CAN'T involve kudos. Kudos just take all of my opinions and aggressively shits upon them. Involving kudos means that mappers must be actively involved in trying to get their map loved, they must ask for kudos from modders or dump enough of their own kudos onto their map. This does NOT show what the community wants, it shows what 4 or 5 modders want.

I can see 2 reasons that kudos are required. I believe that the people running the system aimed to solve the issue of a big circlejerk group moving their favorited beatmaps around from map to map in order to bulk move maps into the loved category (which is a legit problem). The obvious solution to this also allowed the elimination of the long standing issue of how useless kudos are. IMO this is a budget solution. I don't believe that favorites alone are an acceptable solution (it's abusable) but I also don't believe kudos are the solution. I've never seen anyone mention the abusability of favorites publicly but I'm pretty sure it's been discussed behind closed doors, so I'll propose a solution (if we're going to use favorites that is). Limit the amount of favorites a player can REVOKE in a given period of time (revoke one per week or so). Arguably this could be annoying, but people shouldn't be mass unfavoriting maps anyway if they really are a persons favorite maps. It's a simple and more effective solution than shitty kudos dumps and it stands as my favorite, simplest solution. With this limitation introduced, loved CAN be entirely based on favorites (which would be far better IMO).

But to be frank, I don't think any of the above solutions are good enough in the long term. I believe the solution should be a more seamless system integrated directly into the client. Essentially I don't believe a perfect solution should be the goal until the new client is released. Some thoughts on how the new client should handle everything:

Once a week people are awarded a certain amount of points based on their stats (let's call them vote points (vp)). Each player would be given vp based on multiple factors (arbitrary formulas like a players pp in a mode divided by 1000 plus maps modded in the last week divided by 2... etc..). vp would be MODE SPECIFIC and each player would receive a different amount in mode specific vp based on their stats related to the game-mode. Players would be able to vote on maps that they want to see loved using these points, once a week. A live list of the 100 most popular maps (by vp) would be available in game to make the process even easier. Every week to highest x amount of maps from each mode would be moved to loved (x being scaled based on the number of vp used that week in each given mode). At the end of the week, vp is completely reset for players and maps and then re-distributed.

I think a proper solution is a long way away and tackling this issue is going to be difficult, that doesn't mean the current system is acceptable though, something temporary needs to be done and I believe the system should be entirely based on favorites for now.

Imo the biggest issue here is that by making maps too frequently enter into the loved status eats away the novelty of being loved by the community when the map hasnt existed for more than a few months in the worst cases. Loved maps should be much more rare than ranked maps since time is the key factor in making something that is actually known by many and liked by many and when the system first came out people were most exited about these old classic maps that are several years old being able to have a category of their own as those were the maps that had gradually gained this widespread love for them.

Having 1-2 polls per year hosted through the client itself to help with the voting activity or having a roster of selected people to pick maps together for loved would be what I would suggest as now with the way the system is, getting loved even after changing the numbers on the system (whether it be 200 kds or 100 favs) is still much easier and preferred way to push maps forward instead of ranked (sadly) and will stay this way unless loved becomes something that is achieved and not "farmed". One only needs to look at current amount of qualified maps and compare the amount of loved maps added recently to see this trend.

If drastic changes like the one I suggested arent made to the purpose of loved then most likely the popular opinion on loved status wont change as the whole category is filled with maps that belong into ranked and the maps that deserve status of their own are being lost into the midst of these maps, making them unavoidably feel as "normal" or "unspecial" because of this same label on them. Basically loved right now is like what I think would happen if aspire contests were held as often. At first its new and exiting, everyone loves the idea as it is something we need and pushes the game forwards to a better direction. This would change quickly though as the oversupply of contests happening monthly compared to undersupply of great aspire entries due to lack of ideas and development in mapping would lead into inevitably lowering the bar on winning entries and therefore eating away the value that the initial contests had. In loveds case oversupply of loved cycles that are easier to achieve than ranked + undersupply of great maps due to lack of time and development in mapping = lowered bar and overall quality in maps that become loved, eating away the value from the initial maps that had had the time to become loved and deserving of the status.

tl;dr Make loved an actual achievement for a map that is in its own right harder to achieve than ranked, 1-2 picking/selection cycles per year done by community or selected panel of pickers, forget kds + fav reqs as they encourage to abandon going for ranked which is what all maps that arent breaking the criteria/lack something essential should do in the first place.

Just bring the voting system back