The number of difficulties rule was very very heavily rejected by the community back when they were first introduced like, a year ago? Can't remember when it was.
Anyway I don't really see any benefit. Sure, there might be sets that might have a spread of lower quality, but then it's hurting sets with actually quality and thought put into them. Dunno if I'm allowed to link example mapsets here but I'm sure my opinion would be understood anyway.

Also, regarding the mp3 extension rule, I don't really see a reason to deny extensions if the mp3 is properly extended without any badly trimmed sections; plus I'd rather see an extension of a song rather than a crude 1-2 min cut. Imo those are even worse than extending an mp3 just by a few seconds. (Also the song compilations stuff that others have pointed out already so ya)

Shad0w1and's proposal seems interesting enough for consideration imo.

StarrStyx wrote:

Also, regarding the mp3 extension rule, I don't really see a reason to deny extensions if the mp3 is properly extended without any badly trimmed sections; plus I'd rather see an extension of a song rather than a crude 1-2 min cut. Imo those are even worse than extending an mp3 just by a few seconds. (Also the song compilations stuff that others have pointed out already so ya)

In my personal opinion, either way is bad, cutting and extending alike. Extending stuff by a few seconds just to adhere to personal laziness to avoid mapping a fullspread and making the set accessible to the entire playerbase (instead of just to a small minority that can even play most Approvals, which are mostly Extreme level) is contradicting some core philosophy we have been trying to defend for years (make stuff accessible and enjoyable for the majority, not just to only the top players). Like it or not, but those who play Extreme level maps are in the sheer minority. Encouraging to circumvent the necessity to produce content for the majority of our playerbase is unwanted, because with that new people will eventually not find content they like and they can play.

While the argument usually pops up that there are "already loads of mid level content to play", don't forget that newcomers to this game usually look for music they already know. And as time goes on, new music gets produced and therefore new osu beatmaps on these tracks. If these tracks are all available but only for the top tier player segment, it discourages newcomers to actually stay in osu! and enjoy it with us together. (because if you are into the hottest newest Trash Metal album and beatmaps exists of that in osu!, I doubt you can be bothered to play 500 Anime opening maps first before you can even remotely play what you actually came for)

Cutting songs is horrible, too, especially if done poorly (like literally just cutting it) and is also some sort of epitome of laziness, because mapping a full spread on 4.49 minutes long songs is definitely tedious.

I understand both sides of the argument and I can relate, like every mapper, with the laziness that comes along with mapping fullspreads, but the limits get stretched more and more. First someone extends a 4.58 minutes song to 5 minutes, then they start with 4:50, then 4:40 and as longer this goes, we have 2:00 songs just being looped five times just to avoid the fullspread. This shouldn't be a thing, in my opinion.

clarification, does the extension thing only apply to extending a song to marathon length, or does it also apply to extending really short songs (lets say like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuJvZdKlJH8 ) to at least 30 seconds?

As for the 8 diffs thing, which i don't really like the sound of, if you absolutely can't remove it, and the community hates it this much, why not just make it a guideline you can break if you have good reasons? I'd prefer it not being there at all but that is always an option.

For the difficulty number limitation rule: Mapsets cannot include more than 8 total difficulties of a single game-mode. The highest difficulty of a game-mode is not required to fit within a reasonable spread, so long as no levels of difficulty are skipped.

Actually as stated many times above, this is rejected by the community for several times and even for the last time it got rejected, the vast amount of reasons put forward by the community are not, likely to be addressed in this new draft. Additionally, are there any advantages of this possible new rule over the current one?

Loctav wrote:

StarrStyx wrote:

Also, regarding the mp3 extension rule, I don't really see a reason to deny extensions if the mp3 is properly extended without any badly trimmed sections; plus I'd rather see an extension of a song rather than a crude 1-2 min cut. Imo those are even worse than extending an mp3 just by a few seconds. (Also the song compilations stuff that others have pointed out already so ya)

In my personal opinion, either way is bad, cutting and extending alike. Extending stuff by a few seconds just to adhere to personal laziness to avoid mapping a fullspread and making the set accessible to the entire playerbase (instead of just to a small minority that can even play most Approvals, which are mostly Extreme level) is contradicting some core philosophy we have been trying to defend for years (make stuff accessible and enjoyable for the majority, not just to only the top players). Like it or not, but those who play Extreme level maps are in the sheer minority. Encouraging to circumvent the necessity to produce content for the majority of our playerbase is unwanted, because with that new people will eventually not find content they like and they can play.

While the argument usually pops up that there are "already loads of mid level content to play", don't forget that newcomers to this game usually look for music they already know. And as time goes on, new music gets produced and therefore new osu beatmaps on these tracks. If these tracks are all available but only for the top tier player segment, it discourages newcomers to actually stay in osu! and enjoy it with us together. (because if you are into the hottest newest Trash Metal album and beatmaps exists of that in osu!, I doubt you can be bothered to play 500 Anime opening maps first before you can even remotely play what you actually came for)

Cutting songs is horrible, too, especially if done poorly (like literally just cutting it) and is also some sort of epitome of laziness, because mapping a full spread on 4.49 minutes long songs is definitely tedious.

I understand both sides of the argument and I can relate, like every mapper, with the laziness that comes along with mapping fullspreads, but the limits get stretched more and more. First someone extends a 4.58 minutes song to 5 minutes, then they start with 4:50, then 4:40 and as longer this goes, we have 2:00 songs just being looped five times just to avoid the fullspread. This shouldn't be a thing, in my opinion.

Can you guys stop shaming mappers for being "lazy" just because they try to avoid mapping full spreads for 4:59 songs? Their laziness has absolutely no correlation with the map's quality, or the mp3's quality, or anything that matters quality wise. The only thing potentially negative about extending mp3's is poor mp3 editing, and apparent laziness. So what if people are lazy? You are operating under a slippery slope fallacy that because 4:58 songs are sometimes extended, songs that are 4:00, 3:30, 1:00 etc... are all subject to that extension practice. Just because X happens, it doesn't mean Y is bound to happen.

Laziness should not be your primary argument, it has no tangible bearing on mapping quality which is the concern of the Ranking Criteria.



Regarding the spread issue, the entire reason we even put this on the draft was because "8 is the maximum number Loctav thinks is acceptable/defendable to developers". We never got feedback directly from dev's regarding how accurate Loctav's claims were, and seeing Ephemeral being open to both sides of the argument makes me think dev's aren't adamant on restricting difficulties to 5-6 etc... Imo it's entirely unnecessary to restrict the number of difficulties on a set. There is no quality improvement in setting a cap from my perspective as someone who has both nominated many large sets, and made many myself. Rather, as people ahve already mentioned, only negatives. You can argue for "cohesion between difficulties" all you want, but good luck describing that. It seems entirely like an argument someone developing the game, with no knowledge of the mapping meta, would consider a reasonable argument. Do consider that often times, guest difficulties are there not for cohesion, but for variety and contrast. Also, how exactly will capping difficulties improve cohesion, if this wasn't already an abstract enough concept. Additionally, do you think cohesion is actually that important of a feature in mapsets? What defines a cohesive mapset? I don't believe this reflects the current mapping meta in the first place, and is too far removed from philosophies the current mapping community considers high quality. It's something you have to be active in the mapping and modding community to understand, honestly.



Anyways, just voicing my ideas. It's sad how lonely I was in the ranking criteria discussion. I'm supposed to be playing the devils advocate and trying to poke holes in the draft, and ways to abuse the current wording, so we can iron them out before the public proposal. I shouldn't be the only one who is arguing against capping difficulties... (though i guess council members are inactive too...) This issue is clearly something the vast majority of the community has disagreed on...

I think the limit of 8 diff in a set will be beneficial in the sense that mapper will stop that think that do a mapset is equal to make 5 extras because pp.
But its true that doing this a rule will be bad idea, like in Kenterz's example.

I propose make this a guideline, where if any mapper wanna broke the guide, must to justify this very well


(Now, in a personal side, i can see how most players usually play only one or two extras in a set... so limiting the amount of extras in a set will be what the data is showing that player really wish?)
:thinking:

I also think a guideline is a better idea for the amount of difficulties.
The criteria for breaking that guideline should be either spread or unique approaches. I can see the appeal of no restrictions for the amount of difficulties but all to often you get multiple extra diffs that only differ in minor details stylewise where it is really questionable what justifies the existence of that difficulty when it is really just bloating the set, bloating the work for modding and qualification and achieving nothing gameplaywise that sets it apart from the other difficulties.
I really like the reasons for having smaller sets as it also comes with a potential increase in quality for these sets. Not to mention that the musical diversity might profit in the long run because instead of mapping 5 similar extras for the same song, we might see an extra for 3 other songs instead.

A problem would be how one could get mappers to not make GDs that match each other as seen here.
Because it would be lame to tell them later to remove one of the diffs due to duplication.

haven't read op+thread, just got linked to mons's post and from composer pov I disagree with non-purposeful extending. Unrelated to the diff-spread issue obv.

Monstrata wrote:

Can you guys stop shaming mappers for being "lazy" just because they try to avoid mapping full spreads for 4:59 songs? Their laziness has absolutely no correlation with the map's quality, or the mp3's quality, or anything that matters quality wise. The only thing potentially negative about extending mp3's is poor mp3 editing, and apparent laziness. So what if people are lazy? You are operating under a slippery slope fallacy that because 4:58 songs are sometimes extended, songs that are 4:00, 3:30, 1:00 etc... are all subject to that extension practice. Just because X happens, it doesn't mean Y is bound to happen.

Laziness should not be your primary argument, it has no tangible bearing on mapping quality which is the concern of the Ranking Criteria.

You're right in defending the fact mappers aren't being lazy for doing this but mp3 editing goes against the creator's work; a single measure being repeated to make it 5:xx+ instead of 4:59 could make the track be full 4/4 + 5/4 on one occasion which makes no sense etc if it wasn't structurally/musically intended. What would the guidelines/rules be required to say in that case; "extending is allowed if it's subjectively ok sounding and insert-more-details-that'll-eventually-be-more-restrictive-in-a-year-or-two instead of doing w/e" ? Longer extensions could be swell but then we'd have to 'set limits' on subjective povs in that
direction as well so it'll lead to issues as well. Write it out nicely if this does get allowed so such things don't come up.

Otherwise osu! has stuck to its 5:00 limit for quite some time so why not stick with the current Loved or unranked plan if a mapper doesn't want to do multiple difficulties; the Loved category also exists due to this issue, not only due to lack of mods/etc.

Other possibility: mappers can work on doing their own remixes: would even small variations to an existing track be allowed? In the music industry it isn't but this game disregards their copyright/etc laws already so it could be handled differently and mappers+staff can come to a compromise in this direction.

For the extension issue, I would again argue it is not about "why should we ban extended mp3?" but "why should that 1 second matter so much?"
As I explained before, if the spread rule could vary according to the song length, everything will be clear.

People are not afraid to make 1 or 2 more difficulties, but worried about making 5 more diffculties just because of that 1 second. would be nice if we could think about smt like this: t/432739/start=0

Actually, it is not reasonable to rank a single X diff, even it is an approval diff, in my opinion. i really wish the managing team understand the App should not be a reason for mappers to edit mp3, but serve to make the spread of ranked sets better.
Thus, mappers do not really need to worry much about extending mp3, therefore problem solved.

alice soft wrote:

haven't read op+thread, just got linked to mons's post and from composer pov I disagree with non-purposeful extending. Unrelated to the diff-spread issue obv.

Monstrata wrote:

Can you guys stop shaming mappers for being "lazy" just because they try to avoid mapping full spreads for 4:59 songs? Their laziness has absolutely no correlation with the map's quality, or the mp3's quality, or anything that matters quality wise. The only thing potentially negative about extending mp3's is poor mp3 editing, and apparent laziness. So what if people are lazy? You are operating under a slippery slope fallacy that because 4:58 songs are sometimes extended, songs that are 4:00, 3:30, 1:00 etc... are all subject to that extension practice. Just because X happens, it doesn't mean Y is bound to happen.

Laziness should not be your primary argument, it has no tangible bearing on mapping quality which is the concern of the Ranking Criteria.

You're right in defending the fact mappers aren't being lazy for doing this but mp3 editing goes against the creator's work; a single measure being repeated to make it 5:xx+ instead of 4:59 could make the track be full 4/4 + 5/4 on one occasion which makes no sense etc if it wasn't structurally/musically intended. What would the guidelines/rules be required to say in that case; "extending is allowed if it's subjectively ok sounding and insert-more-details-that'll-eventually-be-more-restrictive-in-a-year-or-two instead of doing w/e" ? Longer extensions could be swell but then we'd have to 'set limits' on subjective povs in that
direction as well so it'll lead to issues as well. Write it out nicely if this does get allowed so such things don't come up.

Otherwise osu! has stuck to its 5:00 limit for quite some time so why not stick with the current Loved or unranked plan if a mapper doesn't want to do multiple difficulties; the Loved category also exists due to this issue, not only due to lack of mods/etc.

Other possibility: mappers can work on doing their own remixes: would even small variations to an existing track be allowed? In the music industry it isn't but this game disregards their copyright/etc laws already so it could be handled differently and mappers+staff can come to a compromise in this direction.

If such things occur, they should be brought up in the modding process anyways. The rules shouldn't replace BN's abilities to make sound judgements. I've never come across a poor mp3 edit getting past qualification anyways though .

I guess if you want to do some 7 extra mapset
you gotta at least have different styles on each difficulty and not have them be exactly the same,otherwise there wouldnt be a need for the other difficulty to be in the spread

Loctav wrote:

Like it or not, but those who play Extreme level maps are in the sheer minority. Encouraging to circumvent the necessity to produce content for the majority of our playerbase is unwanted, because with that new people will eventually not find content they like and they can play.

Do you want to give numbers to back up your data?

Let's take a top 5 played map like No Title, since this is probably a decent choice that represents what people want to play given its playcount https://osu.ppy.sh/b/766475

At the time of posting, here are the amount of passes and plays in diffs at various ratings:

Difficulty
Passes Plays

E
413892 650246

N
299507 614919
374551 1264139
============
674058 1879058

H
480281 2936976

I
671031 3449540
261651 2375593
195770 2166451
211253 1877997
============
1339705 9869581

X
45155 628154
129675 1354980
116640 1179720
138373 1566427
75497 1072797
133822 1602187
============
639162 7404265

Passes:
I > H > N > X > E

Plays:
I > X > H > N > E

I'll leave interpretation of the data up to others, but it certainly seems that most people rather play I and X rather than N or E.

bad edits to mp3s shouldn't be reason to stop mp3 extending / cutting. Bad mp3 edits getting ranked shouldn't even be a thing right now; BNs / modders aren't stupid. They can tell if an mp3 edit is garbage and would probably tell the mapper to do a better one if possible.

Really feels to me like a lot of the reasoning provided to defend these changes show a real disconnect between the higher ups / devs and the mapping community to me. I don't want to make it sound like I'm insulting anyone, it's just what I feel is the case.

blissfulyoshi wrote:

Loctav wrote:

Like it or not, but those who play Extreme level maps are in the sheer minority. Encouraging to circumvent the necessity to produce content for the majority of our playerbase is unwanted, because with that new people will eventually not find content they like and they can play.

Do you want to give numbers to back up your data?

Let's take a top 5 played map like No Title, since this is probably a decent choice that represents what people want to play given its playcount https://osu.ppy.sh/b/766475

At the time of posting, here are the amount of passes and plays in diffs at various ratings:

Difficulty
Passes Plays

E
413892 650246

N
299507 614919
374551 1264139
============
674058 1879058

H
480281 2936976

I
671031 3449540
261651 2375593
195770 2166451
211253 1877997
============
1339705 9869581

X
45155 628154
129675 1354980
116640 1179720
138373 1566427
75497 1072797
133822 1602187
============
639162 7404265

Passes:
I > H > N > X > E

Plays:
I > X > H > N > E

I'll leave interpretation of the data up to others, but it certainly seems that most people rather play I and X rather than N or E.

Exactly, most of the player base plays I/X or superior. Even high digit players play I or X instead of H or below.
That's also why adding a restriction to 8 difficulties per set it's just going to kill the Easy difficulty. No one is going to add an Easy instead of an Extra or another Insane. In fact, if you look at the data, you'll find that usually in every single set, the lower difficulties are often played 3-4 times less than the top difficulty.

Those numbers are not adequate for an analysis. You must take numbers only in 1 month or so.
If you take all plays, any conclusion will be wrong.

ErunamoJAZZ wrote:

Those numbers are not adequate for an analysis. You must take numbers only in 1 month or so.
If you take all plays, any conclusion will be wrong.

Well you can repeat the same exercise with Hitorigoto (https://osu.ppy.sh/s/596704) and get the same result, except there are no X diffs, so you only see I plays.

But finding maps that were ~1 month old had really small sizes for numerical purposes, but here https://osu.ppy.sh/b/1251083&m=0

I think there are more players who play ENH, but the ones that play IX retry many more times, driving up the playcount.

Still not a reason to limit the number of difficulties in a mapset, which everyone should have realized by now is a terrible idea.

xxdeathx wrote:

I think there are more players who play ENH, but the ones that play IX retry many more times, driving up the playcount.

Still not a reason to limit the number of difficulties in a mapset, which everyone should have realized by now is a terrible idea.

Thinking and proof are 2 different things. Without proof, your opinions mean nothing.

xxdeathx wrote:

I think there are more players who play ENH, but the ones that play IX retry many more times, driving up the playcount.

Still not a reason to limit the number of difficulties in a mapset, which everyone should have realized by now is a terrible idea.

Actually the number of (true) people who play ENH difficulties is pretty low. Most people who play and retry lower difficulties are people who HDDTHR them to be in the leader boards. The only change happens on old popular maps, but that's because it's one of the first maps new players download so it only represents that popular maps are the gate to new people.

pishifat wrote:

A mapset host must have equal or more drain time mapped than any guest difficulty mappers. This is to provide credit where credit is due. Drain times for collaborative difficulties must be listed in the creator’s words for via storyboarding.

Weird wording there, "for via storyboarding".

ErunamoJAZZ wrote:

I think the limit of 8 diff in a set will be beneficial in the sense that mapper will stop that think that do a mapset is equal to make 5 extras because pp.
But its true that doing this a rule will be bad idea, like in Kenterz's example.

I propose make this a guideline, where if any mapper wanna broke the guide, must to justify this very well


(Now, in a personal side, i can see how most players usually play only one or two extras in a set... so limiting the amount of extras in a set will be what the data is showing that player really wish?)
:thinking:

Endaris wrote:

I also think a guideline is a better idea for the amount of difficulties.
The criteria for breaking that guideline should be either spread or unique approaches. I can see the appeal of no restrictions for the amount of difficulties but all to often you get multiple extra diffs that only differ in minor details stylewise where it is really questionable what justifies the existence of that difficulty when it is really just bloating the set, bloating the work for modding and qualification and achieving nothing gameplaywise that sets it apart from the other difficulties.
I really like the reasons for having smaller sets as it also comes with a potential increase in quality for these sets. Not to mention that the musical diversity might profit in the long run because instead of mapping 5 similar extras for the same song, we might see an extra for 3 other songs instead.

A problem would be how one could get mappers to not make GDs that match each other as seen here.
Because it would be lame to tell them later to remove one of the diffs due to duplication.

I like this idea

blissfulyoshi wrote:

xxdeathx wrote:

I think there are more players who play ENH, but the ones that play IX retry many more times, driving up the playcount.

Still not a reason to limit the number of difficulties in a mapset, which everyone should have realized by now is a terrible idea.

Thinking and proof are 2 different things. Without proof, your opinions mean nothing.

how about just look at the ranks of people and the range of those ranks can perform at, its not rocket science to see most people play ENH, but many more relevant people who contribute to this game play I+

pishifat wrote:

Spread

Rules

All rules are exactly that: RULES. They are NOT guidelines and may NOT be broken under ANY circumstance.

1. If a hybrid mapset includes osu!standard difficulties...
   
   1. One osu!catch difficulty may be included. It must be at least an Insane difficulty.

Does this counter this rule now? t/292401

The current standing explains that catch the beat diffs on hybrid sets could not contain ONLY an X-level difficulty (Overdose). The new rule implies that only one difficulty can be added and it can be either I (Rain) or X (Overdose) level? Unless I'm missing something here, isn't this a bit counterproductive towards the growth of our mode, considering a good amount of hybrid sets have H-level (Platters) on them?

Also why are we limiting the amount of difficulties on a hybrid mapset? It's like we're being discouraged from providing content to our users. It's not like we've ever had a problem with too many difficulties in a set before in our mode, so there's almost no reason to enforce something on us like this. Our mode is dying, please don't kill it more. It's already bad enough that I have 1/2 of the ranked osu!catch maps in the last 2 months lol

blissfulyoshi wrote:

xxdeathx wrote:

I think there are more players who play ENH, but the ones that play IX retry many more times, driving up the playcount.

Still not a reason to limit the number of difficulties in a mapset, which everyone should have realized by now is a terrible idea.

Thinking and proof are 2 different things. Without proof, your opinions mean nothing.

borborygmos wrote:

how about just look at the ranks of people and the range of those ranks can perform at, its not rocket science to see most people play ENH, but many more relevant people who contribute to this game play I+

Pretty much this when I said what I said. I shouldn't have to go off topic to argue the semantics of my slightly incorrect word choice when the proof is in plain view.

borborygmos wrote:

how about just look at the ranks of people and the range of those ranks can perform at, its not rocket science to see most people play ENH, but many more relevant people who contribute to this game play I+

xxdeathx wrote:

Pretty much this when I said what I said. I shouldn't have to go off topic to argue the semantics of my slightly incorrect word choice when the proof is in plain view.

What plain view? What logic? Prove it with data. I'm not saying any of you are wrong, but if people interpret the same source of data differently, then whatever you say means nothing to those seeing that data, unless you back it up with something more solid than your own conclusion.

Note: I never said anything about H diffs.

Monstrata wrote:

If such things occur, they should be brought up in the modding process anyways. The rules shouldn't replace BN's abilities to make sound judgements. I've never come across a poor mp3 edit getting past qualification anyways though .

Can't say I have either so point taken.

Ascendance wrote:

pishifat wrote:

Spread

Rules

All rules are exactly that: RULES. They are NOT guidelines and may NOT be broken under ANY circumstance.

1. If a hybrid mapset includes osu!standard difficulties...
   
   1. One osu!catch difficulty may be included. It must be at least an Insane difficulty.

Does this counter this rule now? t/292401

The current standing explains that catch the beat diffs on hybrid sets could not contain ONLY an X-level difficulty (Overdose). The new rule implies that only one difficulty can be added and it can be either I (Rain) or X (Overdose) level? Unless I'm missing something here, isn't this a bit counterproductive towards the growth of our mode, considering a good amount of hybrid sets have H-level (Platters) on them?

Also why are we limiting the amount of difficulties on a hybrid mapset? It's like we're being discouraged from providing content to our users. It's not like we've ever had a problem with too many difficulties in a set before in our mode, so there's almost no reason to enforce something on us like this. Our mode is dying, please don't kill it more. It's already bad enough that I have 1/2 of the ranked osu!catch maps in the last 2 months lol

Nope, it's not meant that way, just a case of bad wording again LOL
It's supposed to say pmuch the same as that old rule, so I guess smth like "..having only one osu!catch difficulty suffices when it's an Insane or lower" would work better

In the interests of fair and accurate discussion on the matter, I pulled some stats down for beatmap plays across all difficulty ranges of ALL approved, ranked, qualified and Loved beatmaps:



Make of that what you will.

Ephemeral wrote:

In the interests of fair and accurate discussion on the matter, I pulled some stats down for beatmap plays across all difficulty ranges of ALL approved, ranked, qualified and Loved beatmaps:



Make of that what you will.

Just checking, this is across all time?

Across all ranked plays, yes. You'll note that it adds up to almost the exact number of purported "total ranked plays" at the top of the page as well.

But then the consideration is that there are still some sets that may not have an Extra or an Insane at all so it's still not really a perfect representation of what the player base plays these days. (Since you mentioned all maps Im just gonna assume it includes the older maps before 2013, and back then we didn't have much Extra difficulties (or sometimes not even Insanes) compared to now.)

edit: ok so it is indeed all maps

Good point.

2014-present:


2015-present:


2016-present:

------

2008-2015:


2015-2016:


2016-2017:


2017-present:

It would be interesting to see how those numbers corresponded to Playcount. I would like to believe that the more dedicated players, people who put time in this game, will make up the majority of the Insane/Extra plays, and people just visiting the site / playing when they're bored for like 2 hours a month or something would make up the majority of Normal/Hard plays. All conjecture though of course.

I would prefer catering to more dedicated players in the community over people who just play once in a while.

A reasonable assertion would be that NHI-HIX spread would adequately encompass about 60-70% of the playerbase based on these statistics alone.

Easy difficulty outlier-status is easily explained by its incredibly high pass ratio compared to other difficulties - most easies are probably too easy for 95% of all players, even newer ones, and are frequently only ever played once or in very few numbers before players graduate on to Normal as the defacto "entry-level" difficulty.

blissfulyoshi wrote:

borborygmos wrote:

how about just look at the ranks of people and the range of those ranks can perform at, its not rocket science to see most people play ENH, but many more relevant people who contribute to this game play I+

xxdeathx wrote:

Pretty much this when I said what I said. I shouldn't have to go off topic to argue the semantics of my slightly incorrect word choice when the proof is in plain view.

What plain view? What logic? Prove it with data. I'm not saying any of you are wrong, but if people interpret the same source of data differently, then whatever you say means nothing to those seeing that data, unless you back it up with something more solid than your own conclusion.

Note: I never said anything about H diffs.

The fact that there are 10 million users and no more than the top few hundred thousand that are capable of playing insanes is not enough to support my original hypothesis?

there are more players who play ENH

That's the data and I see no need to analyze it to the point where you're convinced when most others are able to take it for granted

I think it's less an issue of easiness, and more an issue of sheer quantity. Every mapset that is not approval has an Easy difficulty, but the learning curve in progressing from playing Normals > Hards is a lot steeper than Easy > Normal (And Hard > Insane even steeper still). My point being, because there are steeper learning curves the harder you get, the more a player is likely to play more maps with similar difficulties. You might have to play ~1000 Hard maps before you've improved enough in skill level to properly play Insanes. But you probably would only need a fraction of those plays before progressing from an Easy to a Normal. Therefore, you wouldn't feel the need to "try" as many different Easy-difficulty maps.

It's why imo Easies are so untouched. Tbh I think the same holds true for Normal, but the number is offset by the sheer quantity of people who just play osu as a past-time like maybe for an hour every month or something.


But anyways. interesting statistics, thanks for sharing! I wasn't expecting Insanes to have that many plays. I always thought it would be the Hard or Normal difficulty judging from all the bundled beatmap playcounts. Reaffirms my opinion that a spread cap is unnecessary.

Important to note that the 2014-2015 discrepancy appears to be due to a change in the way beatmaps are recorded serverside, and is instead an aggregate of 2008-2014.

since spread cap of 8 isn't really needed here, would changing it so that it's a diff specific cap work better?
eg. capping at 4-5 insanes.
prevents things from getting spammy without limiting the max difficulty, eg if an a hyper or advanced was needed for spread

I think a rule limiting difficulties that are not significantly different would do well to address the bloat issue while still keeping things fair for creators. The difficulty (hah) then comes in determining what is "significantly" different.

As data displayed, the majority of plays can be found in the segment of Hard, Insane and Normal - and Expert difficulty being in the minority (together with Easy, which is clear because not all sets must have an Easy). The amount of Expert difficulties produced in recent history are in no relation to the amount of plays they actually receive. The excerise of increasing the set's amount of difficulties to add *even more Experts* (although they are not even targetted at who actually plays the set) just adds content bloat - a lot of the same, without a distinctive difference.

I debated with Ephemeral for a while and I can get behind two alternative proposals being made by fellow community members, one being to turn the set size limitation into a guideline, saying that "sets shall not exceed the amount of 8 difficulties per game mode, unless the exceeding ones are a significantly different approach of interpretation"

It is a middle ground between "we need a limit" and "whoever actually exersizes varied mapping and adds an actual multitude of map designs as alternative to their mapset, is allowed to do so, if the alternatives are distinctive enough from each other"