Intro Stuffs
So right now we're having our own splendid experiment of legislature going on in "New Rules Discussions". It reminded me of drafting a constitution, and I'm taking AP Government right now. So what I realized was that BATs ( I say BATs for convenience but this also applies for MATs) are the executive power with regards to osu, and right now they're acting as the legislative one. And throughout pretty much everything, they're also the judiciary power, deciding what can be ranked and what can't. Though I think they've been doing a pretty good job for all this time, I thought a change might be in order especially with these new rules coming in.
So in the new rules, there's plenty of hard and fast rules, but there's also a large section of guidelines. It looks like these will be up to individual BATs to reinforce and judge. Right now, basically whichever BAT modding the map makes a call, and then the mapper abides by it. If the mapper objects, they talk to other BATs and come to a consensus.
My proposal is to set up a panel of 3 judges, one of who is a M/BAT and the other two being other members of the community. These people are elected every so often (say, 4 months). They then act as an appeals court- that is, if a mapper strongly disagrees with a BAT's decision, it's taken to this panel for a decisions.
This serves to separate the legislative and judicial powers, and allow the community a bit more voice about which aspects of beatmaps they think should be acceptable or not. After all, maps are made for the public to play, it makes sense to give them some influence over what they think is worth ranking.
Also, a visible appeal process should lessen frustration, both on the mapper who wants to keep his map element and the BAT who has to argue against it repeatedly. The concept of a unbiased intermediary in the form of a judge works reasonably well in real life, why not apply it here?
Everything, especially the court setup, is open to discussion. Voice your opinions please!