1. Ardan's Normal (2.14 stars, 191 notes)
2. Easy (0.38 stars, 5 notes)
3. Hard (3.26 stars, 267 notes)
4. Insane (5.06 stars, 355 notes)

ShiiTsuin wrote:

Hello from my modding queue! Looks like you're fairly new to mapping, so I'll do what I can to help you improve for future projects!

General

I'm not particularly good at metadata, but you should have the song name, song artist and maybe the song album as well.
This means including Linkin Park, Victimized and Living Things in the tags. Not particularly good at this shit though :3
This might not be perfect, but adjusting the timing offset to 7,834 produced more desirable results
The BPM is also disputed for this song, but it's generally described as 95/96bpm, so you might want to consider halving the bpm to match this, or you could keep it at 190 for ease and to match up with similar production of this song.

Hard

According to the ranking criteria, a map between 3.75 and 5.25* is considered an Insane difficulty. This should be renamed to Insane

Insane

As I recommended renaming the Hard to meet the Criteria, This should be renamed to something else, maybe Victimized since it is the top of a spread
00:07:853 (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) - I won't accuse you of plagiarism, since inspiration and coincidences are a thing, but this comes of as an incredibly similar reproduction of 384059043's version in his Marathon of Living Things. I feel like your variation doesn't play as well though, since the spacing is all over the place.
00:11:641 (1) - Should this be a bezier slider? or would this not player better as the linear sliders you use around this area? Depends on whether you want to maintain consistency or not.
00:12:904 (1,2,3,4,5) - Another star shape i presume? the smaller spacing makes variations in the shape more apparent, and it doesn't really play that well. Have you experimented with using a simple triangle pattern which leads into 00:13:536 (5) . You could then change the shape of 00:13:536 (5) to accommodate this pattern better, and it'd likely play better than your current pattern.
00:14:799 (3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10) - Given that this is right at the start of the beatmap, I feel like this might be a bit too high intensity. Now, you could argue that the music starts off really high intensity compared to the bit between the break and first kiai time, and you'd be right. However ,I feel like this level of spacing is just too high to be properly playable. A lower spacing between these might be a good alternative, if you're willing to remap the rest of this section to accommodate the change. Also, Not a huge fan of the shape, with the mostly straight stream and sudden curves. Changing this into a more appropriate shape may actually eliminate the need to change the spacing of the stream since it'd be more natural to play. One last point, have you considered doing NCs on each beat?
00:18:509 (2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8) - Also not a huge fan of the shape of this stream. I would have thought that using varied spacing might have achieved a greater effect of emulating the the guitar/chime. Not sure why the stream is split into 2 combos, I'd rather it be one big one if you aren't going to split into beats and stuff.
00:29:878 (15) - Not sure there is a need for this note, since having the circle mapped on the red tick stack on the slider on the following white tick appears to achieve the same effect.
00:34:930 (33) - ^ Note that playing round with hitsounding might also help with achieving this.
00:39:983 (3) - ^
00:25:536 (1) to 00:39:115 (48) - I feel like you completely forgot about combo'ing this entire section. As a reminder, you can't get a mapped ranked if things like hitsounding and combo setup are shit because they're important in conveying information. I suggest going through this and combo'ing it to certain aspects of the section.
00:39:430 (1,2,3,4,5) - You didn't combo the entire section up until this 5, is there meant to be a huge focus on this one little bit? Or did you just forget to combo the rest when you did this bit.
00:39:983 (3) - No need for this circle.
00:44:483 (1,2,3,4,5) - Pretty confident you were inspired by the Living Things marathon when you did this bit, since it initially plays almost identically to it. Not sure why you opted to map the rest of this little bit as 00:45:115 (5) , since the reverse slider doesn't do it any justice.
00:45:746 - Kiai time would have been better mapped to the vocals, rather than the thumping in the back. I was getting real confused at times. Things like 00:50:167 (3,4,5,6) played pretty much fine though, even though it looks to be an edit of the Living Things Marathon again. I actually kind of prefer how you've done it though, since I thought that 384059043's spacing didn't quite do this bit justice, then again his was a full album, so I kind of expected there to be simpler design. 00:50:483 (5) - The end point of this slider should not be sticking out a fair bit from the slider end.
00:55:220 (3,4,5,6) - Same as before tbh, though i feel this one is more randomly place. It's c/p from the other 4 1/2's though, since even with the slider positioning changed, there are still issues with where you placed the points on the slider such as with 00:55:694 (6) .
01:02:720 (3) - Same as mentioned earlier
01:05:246 (3) - ^
01:07:773 (4) - ^
01:10:299 (4) - ^
01:12:825 (4) - ^
01:16:062 - Bit of a shame there's no mapping here. Noticed this on 384059043's marathon as well.
01:17:325 (1,2,3,4,5,6) - Plays and looks very similar to 384059043's marathon.
01:44:246 (2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8) - Personally hate the shape of this stream and it's spacing.

Now look, I did have a go at modding your Insane Difficulty. I'm not saying that you directly plagiarized 384059043's mapping here, but there's an alarming amount of similarities in spacing, timing, patterns and choice of sliders/hitcircles in certain circumstances. I completely understand that we all sometimes need a reference to work from when we are a new mapper, and yes you have certainly performed modifications to his design, but you shouldn't rely solely off of someone else's design. This wouldn't be allowed to be ranked without a huge controversy.

Good luck with any future mapping you have! If you want more help in the future, pm me ingame or on the forums, or repost to my modding queue.
Just remember to try and map on your own without using someone else's work as a base

Thank you!

DilPil111 wrote:

Hi there! Here is your mod from my queue.

Easy

Slider Velocity is way too high! If I was a new player, I wouldn't be able to play this. Slow the sliders down!
Other than that, rhythm so far is fine.

Hard

From 00:09:097 (1) - to 00:20:465 (10) - needs to be remapped, flow is bad, spacing is a bit too much for a hard and rhythms are too difficult for a hard.
From 00:25:518 (1) - to 00:39:886 (9) - rhythm is too dense for a hard difficulty.
01:38:623 (4) - add a break here
01:43:834 (5,6,7) - rhythms are too difficult for a hard

Insane

00:12:886 (1,2,3,4) - If you wanted it to be a zigzag pattern, make it more symmetrical. If not then use higher spacing on the more intense sounds
00:14:781 (3) - This stream looks really ugly and out of place, use the "convert slider to stream" tool
00:17:939 (1) - This slider is repeated too many times
00:18:491 (2) - This stream is really uncomfortable to hit
00:27:334 (2) - Move this slider back one beat and make it one beat longer
00:44:465 (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,1) - This jump is great
Other than a few ugly streams and sliders I think this difficulty is fine

Thank you!

Maxylan wrote:

NM From my queue ~
I'm sorry in advance if you find this mod to be harsh. But I've learnt that the best way to improve as a mapper is through hard criticism and no sugar coating, so here it is.

NM

[General]
Your map is unrankable, period. It's a song that I'd love to see ranked though! I'd say your best bet as a mapper is to start over on this one, because inevitably when you pick maps that are too complex for your current mapping skill level you will find yourself scrapping them. And that's okay! We all have done it countless of times with countless of maps and in the end, that's how you improve as a mapper. Taking criticism, scrapping maps and implementing what you learn on every single map and mod to make something better.

More technical reasons why it's unrankable (Will focus on the insane map for this, because focusing on this difficulty will prove my point later):
- There seems to be little to no thought behind object placements.
- Already 2 seconds into the insane map you're mapping 1/2 sliders over.. what instrument? It's not following the guitar very well and the drums are only ever full beat and they don't require sliders to be mapped effectively (TL;DR Start listening closely to every sound on every tick before placing a circle or a slider on it, for example. I personally listen to about a 2-3 second bit of the song around 3-4 times depending on the complexity of the sounds before I place anything.)
- Another example of this is 00:27:807 (3,1) . You map the vocals, but it's poorly timed, and therefor close to unreadable. Not only is the offset off on everything here, you can easily hear it is if you listen to this part with 25% or 50% speed. But 00:27:255 (2) - starts 1/2 beat too early for mapping the vocal (also it overlaps with 00:27:807 (3,1) ) And to add insult to injury you start this part by mapping the drum taps! Which goes against mapping this section of vocals and sets an unnatural expectation for the player to follow! 00:25:518 (1,2,3,4)
- The flow can be very, wierd. Sure, it does follow circular flow to some degree, and you don't have to follow circular flow to make a good map. But, the quicker a map gets the more important it is to follow good flow, and having alot of circles stacked on top of cliders which forces the player to stand still with the cursor feels horrid to play. To add insult to injury those same circles that are stacked are mapped with a 1/2 time gap which is insanely long.
- To ellaborate further on my previous point about flow. Here's a few examples of pretty horrid angles which ruins it.
00:11:623 (6,7,8) - 00:12:255 (8,9) - 00:13:518 (5,6,1)
As you can tell, these sliders don't lead into each other well for various reasons. Mainly because they're either pointing at a slight downward angle or simply because the speed combined with the fact that the slider leading up to it is close, and has a 1/2 beatgap and 1/2 circle on top of it.
- 00:13:518 (5,1) - Aesthetically, you should aim to use as little variation as possible when it comes to sliders with sharp red anchors and regularly curved sliders. A good map can have both curved and sharp sliders, of course. But you should be able to justify having different shapes for different reasons because curved and sharp sliders have different impacts.
- You should use more spacing between sliders. You have quick sliders in a quick 190 BPM song. Therefore to get the most natural movement possible for a player the spacing should be equivalent to the speed so that the player never has to slow down his cursor.
Distance/Time = Speed.

[]
And here's some other a little more specific stuff.
[insane]
00:18:728 (7,8,9,10,11,12,13) - If there's no particular change in speed or rhythm density in the song, use consistent spacing in the stream.
I chose to do this to represet the bell kind of noise in the background. Since the stream was representing that i changed the spacing because i saw that there was a small pause every now and then before the bells would start again
00:13:202 (3,6) - If you feel you're forced to continue flow in a direction where a circle/slider will overlap a previous one, make sure you stack them instead of overlapping them.
00:09:097 (5,6) - When using repeat sliders, try and make them smaller, with more kicks, or to make them not repeat more than once. There's a fine line between making repeat sliders big enough or not big enough to be readable when you make them repeat more than once.
For example: With small repeat sliders you intuitively hold them down because there is no way to know how many times it will repeat simply because you don't have enough time to see the second repeat arrow. Any rules can apply to these because a player will just look at when the next approach circles come for the next note.
With medium repeat sliders you intuitively only think they will repeat once because it's possible, but veeeery hard to see if they'll repeat more than once.
With big sliders, you have plenty of time to see if it will repeat more than once, and so any rules can apply to them.
(I wrote way too much on this one but hopefully this explains it)
00:37:360 (2) - Ahem, this takes me back to what I mentioned earlier, listen to the sounds in the song and there's a drum roll here that's just begging to be mapped.
00:45:728 (1,2) - This is another example of poor flow. 00:44:465 (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8) - these jumps are called snaps. And they're not bad! These repeatedly used snap jumps is something I like in the song, as it's a well-executed way of repeated movement back and forth which the player can interpret and get used to immediately. But after moving the cursor back and forth for so long. 00:45:728 (1,2) - Waiting for a full beat and then clicking a circle stacked directly under the last jump feels awful for movement.
00:50:149 (3,4,5,6,7,8) - Exactly the same as above ^^
01:18:412 (8,9,10) - Almost the same as above, the only difference is this time you use a weird angle to break the snaps between 01:18:412 (8,9) . 01:18:570 (9,10) - Still has the same issue as the rest above ^^
The upper three problems were done to match the vocals, due to a loud "Vic" standing out infront of all the instruments
00:44:939 (4,6,3) - Whops, overlaps everywhere. The entire section following 00:46:360 (3) - is overlapping with the snap jumps I just complimented.
01:28:676 (1,2) - With the low AR, it's downright impossible to know when the stream is going to start if you start the stream off with a repeat slider. You either break at the slider or get one million 100 scores in the stream.
01:29:623 (9,10,11,12) - Same as above but to add insult to injury this also overlaps with the previous stream. And the repeat sliders are repeating too many times.
01:35:939 (4) - Ending a repeat slider on a strong white cymbal noise, then waiting for a full beat for the next circle. Kill me now.
Honestly i played this part fine, didn't feel wrong. It was matched to the drums
Sorry, I'm harsh on this one, but that's an unforgivable error. Not only are there plenty of sounds during the full beat after the repeat slider that you can map. But you should also NEVER end a slider/repeat slider on a more important sound.
(To quote pishifat: "Start sliders on strong sounds and end them on sounds with equal or relatively less strength")
Oh yeah, I was so caught up in modding that I almost forgot to mention this.
01:41:939 (3,4) - I see this alot, the circle, waiting for 1/2 beat than a very quick repeat back and forth. This does not feel good to play, at all. It's impossible to know the slider velocity is going to be so quick, so when a player holds their cursor for the 1/2 circle in a static position, they see the long repeat slider and think that it will be a slow slider. When in reality they go from 0 to 100 with lightning speed. You did this frequently in your map and it's always for me at least a guaranteed 100 during playtests.
[]
Now let's look at the technical side of the beatmap!

- I failed to find anything that was hit sounded. Believe it or not, you need to hit sound the map to get it to ranked. It's booring but we all have to do it.
Didn't hitsound because i knew the insane/hard would need alot of work. Mainly the hard.
- AR 8 Is very slow for a 190 BPM beatmap and a 5* difficulty.
- Always look at AiMod!
- If you're not gonna map it, 01:46:202 (20) The end from this point on needs to be cut from the MP3 in order to be rankable.

AiMod

Summary

[Negative Takeaway]
- This song and any song with this BPM is above your current mapping skill.
- You need to read the entire "Ranking Criteria" before publishing your next map.
- Your current level of mapping, lacks consistency, aesthetics, flow, and rational thought behind object placements.
- You're good enough to pass 7* maps so in theory you should know what feels good to play, yet many of your angles, beat gaps and spacings go against that.
[Positive Takeaway]
- Don't let my harsh review kill your motivation to continue mapping! I remember first time someone telling me stuff without sugar coating in a mod, and it felt horrible. Yet I took what he said, and built on it. And when I did that I improved quicker than ever before!
- This is the point I said I was going to come to later, when I said:
"(Will focus on the insane map for this, because focusing on this difficulty will prove my point later)"
And that point is that the best way to put what you've learned into practice is finding a good, slow and easy song! You don't have to like the song, what's important is that you pick something that's easy to map so that you have an easier time analyzing the song, and implementing stuff you learned from mods like this one! For me, that song was Temple of Time. Only a little above 100 BPM with minimal sounds, boring, yet the best map I could've possibly chosen due to said complexity.
- Don't aim for publishing and ranking your maps! Getting a map ranked is every mappers goal, but in the end if you're not 110% satisfied with the map you're making, publishing it is a grave mistake because ranking a map can take up to 2 months. And even experienced mappers can get their map disqualified from pending due to the smallest of errors, and that's painful after waiting for 2 months tierlessly searching for mods to raise your star priority.
- Watch youtube tutorials! I bet you've heard this before, "I recommend watching pishifat/mo on youtube!". It's been said a million times over yet it still holds true. For me when I started mapping I had already benchwatched every tutorial I could find, but I had trouble remembering all the tips from the youtube videos until I started modding, which leads me to my next point...
- Start your own modding queue and/or apply for M4M modding queues in the future! Modding is great, not only do you get Kudosu which significantly decrease the time it'll take to get your own map ranked, but also when you're writing down the stuff you see when analysing, and write down the stuff you hear over and over in the youtube tutorials... It starts to stick with you, and the more you write it down the more you remember these details. Suddenly every single circle and slider you place in a map will be placed in that exact spot, with that exact curve, in that exact way. And you'll be able to say why it's placed that way!

I hope you found this review helpful! Took me 2 and a half hours but as long as it helped you take that next step as a mapper I don't regret a single second of it. Reply or hit me up in the P.M's if you need anything clarified or want more advice!

Thank you!