This thread is supposed to be a collection of ideas that may help to make the ranked beatmap section more interesting again, by encouraging mappers to try out different ways of mapping and increasing the overall diversity of beatmaps.

Backstory:

Recently I've talked to several people about the current osu! standard mapping meta and there seems to be an overall agreement that there is not enough diversity in the ranked beatmap section. There are several reasons for this stagnation that range back several years, including the addition of PPv2, people's will to create harder and harder maps to a point where the difficulty limits the creativity somehow, the narrow-minded QAT back when they were fully responsible for disqualifying mapsets (I partly take responsibility for that) and probably also the guidelines of the new Ranking Criteria which some people want to follow in every circumstance.

In my opinion, map diversity has improved a fair bit during the last year, mainly due to the success of the Mentorship Program, in which a lot of newer mappers are pushed towards more focused and diverse mapping. However, the program is not enough to influence the whole mapping community, especially mappers who are not that new and already have a few ranked mapsets.

Now, don't get me wrong: There are several reasons why people map and rank their maps and I am not saying that everyone should try to be as 'special' as possible. Many people just want to map the songs they like and they have the most fun while sticking to their known formula. However, I want to find a way to help people who are tired of making the same maps over and over, or who are still fairly new and only know one way of mapping a song. I want people to think more about their goal when mapping and how to achieve it the best way possible.

Collection of Ideas:

Desperate-kun wrote:

I've already tried posting in people's map threads and suggesting them in what direction their mapping could go in the future, but it felt pretty cocky because they didn't ask for it and I could only guess what their goals with their mapping were.

The idea I currently have in mind would be opening a 'Honest Feedback Queue' (name pending) in the Modding Queue forum, where people could post links to their recently ranked mapsets, and also write what their goal was when making the map (for example, 'bringing the song into the ranked section', 'trying to make a fun alternating map', or something like that). Someone from a small team of experienced mappers and modders would then look at the map and evaluate how well the goals were achieved and what the mapper could do to improve those results in the future.

Please help me by sharing your ideas and we can probably make something work in the near future! Feel free to discuss ideas that others posted, too.

Will be pushing to make osu!-specific Ranking Criteria a bit more loose again, people seem to take all the things that apply to logic and get stuck in "must-only-do-this".

Basically when seeing discussions people tend to turn off their brains and argue that logic >>>>> all and any personal expression and based on the current ruleset we have, this mindset is to be expected so we're in the process of taking a few steps back on that direction to encourage more diverse ideas again

The core problem with lack of diversity is the fact that mappers are encouraged to map pp because of their maps gaining more exposure by doing so. Nothing encourages the actual players to play technical maps for fun and most people care about their rank so naturally simple maps that boost their ranks are what most people go for. As long as current pp system is in place there is no actual incentive to try being innovative and branch out to map more unique and varied song categories/mapping techniques but instead grab more "fame" and "recognition" in the community by mapping maps for the masses to play and grind. It's evolved to the point where basically every few months or so a mapper tries to make the optimal pp map with the knowledge of what gives most pp given by the data on previous pp maps and with every pp map getting ranked the tolerance for having these pp abusive maps grows higher and higher, essentially it is an endless loop to chase the ultimate pp map which is the opposite of being diverse.

If the current pp system was revisited and somehow made so that technical maps have more value (I highly doubt that a balanced system like this can be made) then we could move away from "pp" mapping and the only thing mappers would aim for would be to make unique maps or maps for them selves to enjoy or fun enough maps for the players to care about playing them since now these would be the options to become relevant and respected mapper. There are of course those too who don't care for this recognition currently but those mappers are in the severe minority and those are the people who are innovating in the frontlines of mapping even now.

Since removing pp entirely is out of the question (being realistic here) and I don't think it will be ever made balanced I think we will be stuck in the current loop of "mapping for pp" until someone decides to make radical adjustments to the core "player skill ranking" itself or create an alternative ranking system which drives players to play different maps. The only idea that I have for this more balanced "pp" system would be to have seperate categories when counting total pp. These would be divided by speed, stamina, aim, consistency etc. that in total would add up to give you a rank. This system would make it so that all maps that exist cator to atleast one of these attributes and therefore players would have to play a lot of different kinds of maps to gain points in all of these categories, not just the simple jump spam tv size pp maps but technical maps too.

I know that this turned out to be more of a rant against why pp is ruining mapping but essentially I feel like this is something that needs to be addressed before mapping can turn a new leaf and start heading towards another direction. Given that the previous attempts at "mapping with rewards" and monthly charts which even give "monetary" support in the form of supporter tag wasn't encouraging enough I don't really see an alternative.

I've said multiple times across threads like these that the main issues with mapping and modding right now are threefold. They all interact with one another and they all influence eachother, and as of right now there are things being done to alleviate this so I'm actually pretty happy so I don't know why I'm ranting someone please stop me:

[Qualification]
The qualification system, as it stands, is overly punishing and discourages creativity by causing frustration and distress to mappers and modders in the name of subjective quality standards.

Everyone is aware of "the bullshit shuffle" - that desperate clambering a mapper does during qualification to deny any and all changes because even the slightest applied change would require a complete reset of at least 8 days of progress (7 qualification days and 24 hours for bubble->qualify), as well as at minimum calling back the initial qualifying BNs, or needing to replace them in the worst case.

This kind of thing isn't really bad when someone can just say "Don't make mistakes, then!" but then the subjective nature of quality and what constitutes it kicks in - people can and will argue about anything, so over time people will find the "least arguable" way to map just to avoid any potential backlash - so to do so, it needs to be simple (so it cannot be misunderstood), it needs to have a clean aesthetic (so people don't have 'omg trigger' mod comments), and it needs to be comfortable to play (so players cannot point out something as "bad for play"). By not-so-sheer coincidence, this style also allows for abnormally high PP results.

How do we fix this?
A system in which a qualified map could be modified during qualification without resetting the duration or requiring a refresh on the icon would do a lot to help this - it would be up to the QAT to determine whether a map's changes were significant enough to warrant a DQ to reset the map's progress. Mappers want to be special, they want to be more interesting, but it's just not worth the added stress and frustration.

[Modding Styles]
This entire point is easily thrown away by people who disagree with me by saying "Shiirn just salty he doesn't pass BN tests", but hear me out here.

Every single BN in the past two years has become so by passing a test designed to test their ability to mod a map. Sounds simple, right? But what constitutes modding? Are we supposed to look at the consistency of a map? At how it's made? At how clean it is? This ties in heavily with the "Golden Three" outlined in point #1 - "Simple, Clean, Comfortable". Modding focuses on these points because they're the most obvious things to look for.

The BN test and other styles of modding came into being because of a handful of deceptively tantalizing thoughts - "If a change makes a map more comfortable to play, it must be a good change" - "If a change makes a map look better, it must be a positive change" - "If a change makes a map more easy to understand, it must be a smart change" - all of these statements are very seductive, but as explained above, they are far too limiting and dampen people's creative potential by shackling their experimentation.

Simply put, it caused people to overspecialize in a specific mapping mindset that, when summarized or not looked at too deeply, "Could Not Possibly Be Bad". And therein lies the failure of this game's community process: Someone took a very short-sighted approach and assumed that short-term benefits must equate into long-term prosperity, that they thought that "Making things better by force will help everyone become smarter", without realizing that people improve by making mistakes, by fucking up and learning from it, by doing weird shit until they figure out something that works, instead of being told and smacked down early on in their modding/mapping career that "That's Just Not How Things Are Done"

How do we fix this?
Kind of already being done. People are realizing that maybe not all is at peace and that maybe Soylent Green Tastes Funnily Like People, and the BN test has been abolished so with those two factors this will likely fix itself on its own given time.

[Performance Points]
Probox did a nice boxy rant on this that covers pretty much everything so ima just leave that there.

I only have few things to say about it cause I share the same opinion as ProBox & Shiirn.

It's about the number of map about the SAME song... Because let's be honest, I'm pretty sure we're all fed about seeing every month an Harumachi Clover map getting ranked. Two, three or four maps at least it can be okay, but when there is nine maps getting ranked in less than one year, about the same song, it's pretty disencouraging. I agree that's a simple song to map since it's repetitive and the rhythm is simple to handle, though. I know that it become a meme cause I don't know why. Why not setting a rule that could avoid those kind of thing?

Also it's about the song length. I think that some song are pretty short, like for instance this map: https://osu.ppy.sh/s/586306 or this map: https://osu.ppy.sh/s/542081 , and there is more of them (I'm not talking about the mapper, but more about the song itself). People usually map short songs cause it means that the map will be more played/easier to map, so a lot of people will prioritize short musics instead of mapping full length. I think the minimum length of a beatmap should be at least 1min (or 45 seconds if you're really picky with that).

Otherwise, I totally support the Qualification part of Shiirn's text.

Hello,

I might as well rant a bit.

It seems like BNs have have become this over-logical entities where every single thing have to be explained and justified, it is like as if even the smallest things that they point out require a one page long essay to satisfy them. I am not saying that this is bad or anything, just to not over do it, because not everything requires an explanation, not everything comes out from a logical thought process, I am sure that most of that artists created the things they created because they felt like it, not because there was a logical reason behind it.

In saying that, if we are unable to explain to the BNs with logical reasoning, then it means that whatever we do is flawed and must be changed, even if it feels completely wrong for us, thus if we really want to see our maps qualified then we must abide to what the BN wants, not what we want. And I do not know most of the BNs so this is a huge generalization, but it seems like every single BN has the same concepts of what they regard as quality, apparently, the BN test is to be blamed as it basically brainwashed all the BNs to think and do things in a very specific manner. And it is in this part specifically where our choices are taken away.

Now, for more concrete ideas on how to make mapping diverse again, I think we should change the mindset of all QATs and BNs of what they regard what good quality is. In my opinion consistency is the most important aspect of a map, after all, rhythms are repetitive and consistent and this is a rhythm game, anything else is not as important as long as it somehow makes sense with the song.

Ah well, I guess that what I have said is basically what Shiirn have said, also, I do want to highlight another thing he said, not everything have to be optimized and done as best as possible. Since you QATs and BNs seems to be this extra logical beings, you might understand this, if you optimize a function, then you will end up with very few solutions, aka you take away 99.99% of all the other choices and possibilities.

@Okorin
Nice.

@ProfessionalBox
I understand your thoughts, but even though we can't do anything against the PP-system right now, I still think an incentive to push those mappers who want to create something different into the right direction is not worthless. The mentorship is the perfect example of helping mappers improve their maps even with the PP-system in place. However, the mentorship program only works for the people who take part of it, which usually means a huge effort (either mentoring or menteeing for a cycle) so I still prefer to do something besides that, even just a simple queue like I mentioned.

@Shiirn
Changing how the qualified section works is a good idea. We should suggest this to the staff and developers after the currently pending changes are being pushed through. Though changing this will still require getting mappers to change their mind afterwards. It's always the easiest to continue in the way one's always done.

@Pachiru
You can't really forbid people to map a song that's already ranked. Also, there has been various examples where the same song has been mapped totally different by different people, in fact, with less similarities than some maps of different songs made by the same mapper. Meme maps are always going to happen, but unlike samey generic maps, they only make up a small percentage of ranked maps. Increasing the minimum song length won't really help either, there's no real difference between having 30s or 45s as a lower border. Whatever the lower border is will always be considered lame by people, because it's much shorter than the average ranked map.

@Xanandra
What you are saying is mostly true. I can ensure you there are a good number of BNs who are able to understand many different concepts of mapping, but it's true that a lot of them are narrow-minded. I think the BN test is not really a reason for this, since the example issues it uses are never issues like "this pattern / whatever would not be acceptable under any circumstance" except for blatantly unrankables, and, if someone would have pointed it out like that, the answer wouldn't have been accepted by the responsible QATs (atleast when I took part in that). However, I think the real reason for this mindset is the limited mindset of most QAT-members in around 2015, when we used to be very picky with maps to work against the trend of PP-jump maps. But I can also ensure you the mindset in the QAT has changed since - However, since QATs only disqualify on reports now, it's not noticeable in the community, sadly.
So basically the mindset of QAT has already changed heavily during the past years and giving them more responsibility again would work perfectly, in my opinion. A huge part of the BNs still need to be worked with, but that is up to the QATs now - I believe with proper dialogue they can be pushed in the right direction.



Thanks to everyone for their contributions! So far nothing really speaks against my initial idea so I'm going to try that out in the next few weeks and if people are interested I'll try to expand it by including more people into the project.

I think it all started with PPV2 and DQ impact score, also I don't think the mentorship is a good thing for mapping diversity, since people who get together to discuss mapping end mapping in a similar way, also they end modding in the same way.

And being honest if the pp system stay the same, then mapping will stay the same, slider camelia style maps and jump maps, something different don't get much attention from players.

This might get a bit long winded, but I think personally, that there are a variety of reasons as to why mapping styles have homogenised over the years. We briefly spoke about this in the Mentorship discord last night or so.

One recent event in particular highlights a prominent issue very well. -GN's conquering score on Shotgun Symphony brought the map into the limelight for many newer modern players, who viewed it with a mixture of disdain, horror, and awe. SS is quintessentially, '09 style 'shitmapping'.

It was wildly experimental, designed to be as challenging and uninviting as possible by its very nature. It lacks much of the consideration and polish that many modern maps do, but it remains no less coveted by a section of the playerbase due to this. 'Shitmapping' does not necessarily produce bad maps, but it does produce different ones. We are seeing variation in the maps that enter Ranked, but the process is incredibly slow and often has to percolate for sometimes years before it becomes noticeable.

I may be simply outdated on this front, but the airs of alternative mapping styles (and the pursuit thereof) have pretty much been abandoned in the past few years. We've seen widespread refinement of the 'modern' beatmapping style to what is arguably approaching its absolute limits. Quality has no longer become synonymous with actual quality, but instead a strict adherence to a particular mapping style that is thoroughly encouraged by a number of factors - familiarity and pp both among them.

This is a tricky situation, since arguably the biggest draw towards beatmapping for some mappers is the fact that the community at large enjoys the content they put out. Alternative mapping styles tend to generate cult popularity as opposed to gross popularity, meaning that they often draw as much scorn as they do adoration. That, and someone can put out a 'safe' modern-styled map which gives a reasonable amount of pp and they will be guaranteed a certain number of plays from players farming rank alone.

So, what incentive is there to even try new things when it is already difficult enough to get things ranked, as well as something that is not exactly current as far as the meta goes?

This is what I'd suggest we do:

1. Introduce 1-2 monthly slots for experimental/alternative maps that can either be Ranked or Approved without explicitly requiring full adherence to the Ranking Criteria. These maps would be vetted by the modding community to be playable at least a base level, but beyond that explicit requirement, anything goes. Maps would bid on these slots by using star priority.
2. Loosen the Ranking Criteria in general. By loosen, I essentially mean tacit revision of the rules and guidelines to ensure they number as few as possible. The RC has a stabilizing force on the mapping meta since it essentially mandates what can and cannot be done at a basic level. It should be as lean as humanly possible, and nothing more than that.

There's a lot of ways we can go about this. It's a fairly complicated issue, but it is certainly a growing problem, I think.

We also have the omnipresent problem of people struggling to deal with and incorporate criticism of their work. Much of modding is something of a hostile process since it is essentially a direct conflict of opposing ideas with one party required to capitulate. This makes it very easy for mappers to feel attacked, and modders to feel ignored, which only further cultivates a preference for "safe" meta-structured maps as they cause as little friction as possible.

fix spotlights

1. bigger picking team
2. incentives for picking team (not that important when there is a bigger team but ya)
3. more incentives for mappers to participate (time-based badges, titles, supporter, goodies, anything basically)
4. more incentives for players to participates (see above)
5. better presentation on website and client (where did charts button on client go, why is most played/latest ranked in 24h more important than actual quality maps)
6. better system to track scoreboard of spotlights (ingame leaderboards anyone)

could expand into

1. rank-limited rewards/leaderboards to not favour the top echelons
2. expanding incentives by having monthly/seasonal rankings of spotlights as the main form of ranking, and total pp as alternative (meaning seasonal in more in your face, and total pp needs more clicks to see) (however this could backfire since its technically forcing people to play these maps)

I think the biggest influence have the pp-system as mentioned by ProBox and the Qualification system in a way Shiirn describes it. Loosening the RC or allowing 2 experimental slots won't do the trick, as the sheer mass still thrives for uniformed mapping.

Modding styles and spotlights are, in my opinion, rather symptomes of what a discouraging Qualification process causes. The RC is already as loose as it gets, yet people seem to squeeze themselves into a scheme of unwritten rules that is mostly resolving around "causing the least uproar", so people do not post-Qualified shredder it and force it into a more generic shape again.

What I propose instead is:

1. Only disqualify a mapset if the Ranking Criteria has been violated or
   if the mapper agrees to the criticism, eliminating the "DQ first, discuss then" stuff, because it is easy to check whether the mapper agrees or if the RC has been violated. If people don't need to be afraid anymore that their stuff gets DQd because it is "controversial" while it actually sticks to the bounds of the RC, they are more inclined to take the chances. The RC can always be adjusted accordingly, if stuff goes out of hand, so rather than betting on a shitflicking concert in Qualified stage, I rather would use the RC as regulative tool. Everything that exceeds the borders of the Ranking Criteria is up to the judgement of the Beatmap Nominators and with a closer relationship between BNs and QATs we are working on, I believe that the self-control within this group will keep things in shape.
2. Rework the performance point system to actually account for the different layers of skill, which is not only Aim, Speed, Accuracy (and to a degree Stamina). Especially I propose to not sum up the Performance Points as one value anymore and rather have multiple rankings for the respective skills and make each map reward points based on what skill they test. Therefore when a map focuses a lot on Aim and Speed, you get mostly points in the Aim and Speed ranking, when a map focuses on Stamina and Reading, you get mostly points on Stamina and Reading. Along with that, Star Rating needs to go and should be replaced with a radar chart or something like this, just that this isnt showing AR HP and whatnot in a scale, but rather the different skill aspects (Stamina, Aim, Reading, Speed, Accuracy, etc.). Boiling down the multitude of skills (and therefore the multitude of maps that toy with each skill asset) to one value ultimatively lead to many people just focus on those skill assets that are easier to map and easier to play (or more common to be played).
3. Offer alternatives to Ranked play, not everyone wants to play competitively but still wants to "grind the content". Make it worthwhile. Ranked Score was a stupid metric to measure skill, but it was a fun incentive for many people to simply play as many different maps as possible.
4. Make the Beatmap Nominators be rewarded for qualifying mapsets by different mappers (and foremost mappers that do not have anything ranked yet). This is just a side suggestion,
   it helps a lot to focus on as many different people as possible, because obviously different people map different things. This may help, but the other points are more crucial to be tackled, to be honest.
5. Spotlights need to take a bigger spotlight in this game, it needs to be made way more prominent and mappers and players need to regain the feel of importance of the spotlights. handsome makes nice suggestions here.

Back to 2015, QATs could easily disqualify a map with dumb reasons(#M). That system is gone, but its harmful influence remains. BNs are afraid of disqualification on maps they nominated because of BN score and their standard becomes far stricter than RC. They say no to weird sliders, spaced triples... even combo color consistency becomes a problem. I don't mean BN shouldn't have their own standard, but you couldn't expect mapping diversity from that.

Thus, I agree with Loctav that BN should be rewarded for qualifying mapsets by different mappers, and mapset should be disqualified only if the Ranking Criteria has been violated.

I read through other posts as well. Reworking pp system could solve the problem fundamentally but that's a big deal. Modifiying qualified map without resetting the duration or requiring a refresh on the icon could be good for ranking process, but I doubt how much it could help with mapping diversity.

i'm amazed that a thread like this exists. i'm amazed that people above already have sights and thoughts like they described.

so, i think i can get involved into this, as a "controversial" mapper who always wanna try things different and be offended usually by all community people, and a former nominator member who have enough confidence and skill to judge any kind of maps in community.

i know this is like staff level people are gathering ideas, but i wanna go really detail here from the whole sight. (sry if this is annoying.)


1. Difficult maps is the topic we truly discussed for.
The pp system cant always recognize a map is truly difficult or not, we all know that. And people have sights already know it long time ago, still, no changes are done because the problem is like a more technical one: difficulty of reading or shifting patterns cant be easily measured by data. current pp system are based on maps' objects' density and distance settings among them, easy to be caught by mappers to create pp maps. What goes on are mentioned by Desperate-kun and other people above, then ruin both varity of other kind maps AND players' playing skills. (like "Newbie Pro Players" who often farm pp maps with dthd, may even don't know how to read ar8 patterns, cant deal with fast sliders, etc. and you call whatever.)

- How to avoid that problem, which means how to let diverse maps (with enough quality) get into ranked sections and complete players skills, may be the purpose of Desperate-kun in this thread.


2. Perception of difficult maps in cyber vision.
pp system failed in recognizing hard ones, but did well to get rid of easier ones from them, in case of the rank rules we built long times ago: we forbidden proper things in lower mapsets. so we can just focus on harder ones.
How we can call a map is difficult to play? We used to trust the pp system and think now we don't. i always wonder why we call a map's difficulty "Extra" when we have all dthd scores on the ranking board, shouldn't it be "Insane" level if so much people can do that? I'm not talking about the use of classification as diff names done, but from the automatic processing way machines do to give ranks. And as we known computers can hardly see if some map's reading is tricky or tough even from technical way, it's much better to judge it directly from the score board: less people performed good and then that map is surely difficult. Some people may say that it's more like a ppv1 version system, but actually and slightly not. i cant image a much better way to solve this problem for now, and it can be done right now imo. (even i don't now the specific detail way in programming, i know it can be figured out by statistics.)

- This new system will take more power in judging performance of players if the map is a "difficult" one, and do the opposite way if it's easy, let current pp system do the rest of work, it actually still did it well.


3. Perception of difficult maps in human vision.
This is not only for mappers, but also for players. It will be always the proper player who's playing a map knows what is difficult/easy/gimmick/fluent/stacked/etc. in a map, and we still focus on difficult maps. so if a good player become mapper, he would do difficult patterns well faster than others. Then how about other mappers? how they can deal with difficult patterns, including bns/qat/staffs?
①. they got some amazing player's replay which showed advanced playing skill: eg. Cookiezi dthd lemon tree 7 years ago, then proto-ar9 maps born like a bomb exploded, ended lower than ar8 age.
②. some legendary mapper came up genius idea or revolutionary style that is enough to change the whole mapping community: eg. happy30 used full screen flow sliders and jumps in his medium-term maps, opened up adventurous jump maps age. players from now on are not just focused on controlling tapping tricky rhythm, but also aiming with lager and faster jumps.
③. reference former mapper's patterns, and even think if it is appropriate to changed a bit: eg. mapping style evolution chain: distanced map → jump map; rhythm to main track → rhythm to any track mapper wanna emphasize.

- We can see two things from these facts:
- One is that: players or their playing skills can inspire mappers a lot, to create different things from current ones, and also mappers can create something new and tough for players to challenge. Players and mappers are helping each other to let each other improve and be better. Focus on difficult maps, it's obvious that pro players have a clearer thought of what is good or new for playing, and what's not. mappers are usually noobs to their own difficult maps, so modders, bns and qats are. the way i do to solve this problem is like asking pro players testing my maps as much as i can do, watching their replays and gather ridiculous matters in the progress, fixing them after that. what i wanna say is: modders or other people may also don't know much of difficult maps as well, they can just "③. reference former mapper's patterns", and give their own ideas or even override mapper's mapping thought (with drama comes). we should know that and avoid that. Also, mappers should usually judge or mod a map more in a player's way. Not only see playability, but also see possibility of difficult patterns from that player's vision. i still don't think most of people can mod my maps, they are lack of ability for modding new things because they never did that and had no experiments.
- The other is that: common pure players care almost nothing about mapping, they care much about their rank. So when a common pure player talking about map itself, it'll be always like the playing way, ofc for difficult maps as well. Then here, only playability really matters to common pure players, eliminating all other elements like rhythm setting, structures and other mapping field quality objects. that means if these group of people say "shxt map" to some map, it usually means it has a bad playability for them. that's one of thoughts can be considered in changing patterns ofc, but remember that's from a pure player's mind: playability is the main thing you need to think deep from that, and decide if you will still keep something to give advanced things (you cant avoid feedback like that anyway).

- Both mappers and players should learn see mapping things that way, especially mappers. without that consensus, dramas will never stop and be solved. that's more like because mapping is a pure art work, but osu game need rules to keep the community. manage that 1st, seeking compromise after that.


4. Detail progress in mapping community.
This is kind of complex, so i just pick simple ones as a common mapper.

If i wanna be a nominator: i used to participate some bn tests, and failed always. idk how the electing function worked, but i'm still feel pity to not be one of them. "i'm good at modding, and i did do that pretty well, but still got no chance to be a nominator. it's not a problem about communicating, but other different..." some talent modders i've met showed amazing skills in modding maps, and they have time, emotions and wisdom, should not be buried. the monster of nominators are their laziness, i know that very well because i used to be lazy
when i'm bat, that's a tough problem to be solved, i can just leave it to staffs because they are the only people can do something. the system of tier is abolished recently, some news happened to taiko/ctb/mania mode as well. i don't know what comes next to std mode, but i trust the people who contribute a lot in building it.

If i wanna rank a difficult map: i'm a expert of it maybe, let me count here. 1stly find tons of mods because ranking progress requires it, and almost none of them is useful or helpful to truly build something based on understanding my map (lack of average modding ability as i mentioned before). 2ndly give feedback to ALL of them, or i'll be offended like "you dare ignore my mod?" spam because you will have so much angry pure players and more and more passer-by modders. 3rdly i'll find every nominators ever exists to see if they have interests to bubble/heart my map, mostly replied with "no" or nothing. 4thly you'll explain all detail things and sense of whatever anyone can't understand over and over again, took you much of time and spirit to do that, and even still facing result of disqualifying with qat's "additional mods suggested to be fixed" besides dq reason. that's a long and tough journey, i understand: community need to get rid of low quality maps, like put notes jumping everywhere then call that revolutionary map. it did pretty well, and most of talent mappers leave this game because of that. a map's quality can be easily judged by experimented modders and nominators, things won't be like this if we do our part well. (p.s. the most worse thing i can't accept is like if you don't reply mods after qualification, your map will be disqualified. how nominators can disqualify maps with reason like that, even without anything wrong with the map? clearly deep problems are still happened appeared sometime... )

If i wanna mod a difficult map: i'll discuss it at in-game channel/formed group/thread/etc. or i'll just "shxt map" anytime i can mention even without trying to understand what a new difficult map wanna do. this sounds personal, but i've received offend pm as well. so the point is that modders need to know what should be done: modders are common in giving ideas and finding issues when they met common maps, but most of them are like lost their mind when they have a difficult one. good modder can do his best to understand the mapper, thou not much of them can really do that: it's a really hard work to do for (not experimented) them. they contributes efforts to the map they mod and receive 1kds/m4m for that, they don't think it's always fair. as a modder, even a nominator, it'll be really kind if i know some map is deserved to be modded. a system can be built on data like mapper's created maps, modding performance, recent activity or whatever other complex things. no one would like to waste time on a pending to be graveyarded map, even a difficult-for-rank-but-still-graveyarded map. the truth is that most modders are mappers and they usually mod maps because it'll help them rank themselves' (communicating with only bng, do only m4m, never touched difficult map to develop their modding skill...). that may some kind of growing emotions to mod other one's maps instead of asking mods all over the world, idk how much the moddingv2 system completed, just a simple thought here.


5. About clarity of rules.
i don't know if there's effects done before, with some thoughts here thou.
rank rules is somehow not very clear even till now, or in other words: it's not being kept all the time. that's because some of them are not that appropriate, or maybe some other unexpected things happened (peppy himself used to banned all sliders which have too much nodes on it, it's like finally unbanned just recently, not that announced thou). and now it should be given a really detail version with things we always kept till now, like "overlapped arrows are always unrankble (reasonable and acceptable)". ofc we will keep that if it's done, strictly.
as for guideline, i even suggest to write some specific patterns there for guiding, and tell people how we won't overdone or underdone things while keeping both rules and mapper's own will, like "notes follows no beats are allowed to be used if song's emotion required that, but bunch of spam objects follows nothing is forbidden". this project can be done very quick by groups of experimented mappers.


i think things above i've mentioned are really basic and obvious matters everyone in this community should know. i used to describe or explain my idea in simple sentence or even few words, because i think it's not that need to give such a long speech. now for the 1st time i wanna arrange my ideas here, idk if these can help the community even a little bit, still hope the direction it may goes can lay on some of my wills.

OMG so much words, i didn't expect that as well x.x

hey HW just wanted to quickly comment

Hollow Wings wrote:

idk how much the moddingv2 system completed, just a simple thought here.

I have found moddingv2 to be much more comfortable for mappers with lots of experience and knowledge as it lets them explain choices very obviously and organizes the entire map so even people with less experience can see the big picture, so this will help mapping in the future as well, because it helps mappers without knowledge, learn knowledge

it's bad for super new mappers but that's not what the point really is in the first place really, there are other ways for them to learn

I think HW's idea for rating score based off of leaderboard competition to be an interesting one. it handles a lot of the problems ppv1 had, while avoiding the exploitation systems of ppv2 by self-correcting maps that are "too easy" to give far less reward. it would make people actively search out challenging maps, rather than just maps that exploit the system

Loctav wrote:

Rework the performance point system to actually account for the different layers of skill, which is not only Aim, Speed, Accuracy (and to a degree Stamina). Especially I propose to not sum up the Performance Points as one value anymore and rather have multiple rankings for the respective skills and make each map reward points based on what skill they test. Therefore when a map focuses a lot on Aim and Speed, you get mostly points in the Aim and Speed ranking, when a map focuses on Stamina and Reading, you get mostly points on Stamina and Reading. Along with that, Star Rating needs to go and should be replaced with a radar chart or something like this, just that this isnt showing AR HP and whatnot in a scale, but rather the different skill aspects (Stamina, Aim, Reading, Speed, Accuracy, etc.). Boiling down the multitude of skills (and therefore the multitude of maps that toy with each skill asset) to one value ultimatively lead to many people just focus on those skill assets that are easier to map and easier to play (or more common to be played).

Exactly what I was going for. I think this would be the best way to balance the system and players would have more motives to improve overall and the "global best" aka the current leaderboard should be formed by how you place in all the individual player skills added to a total + proper weighting (Having an actual leaderboard like the current one which gives you an exact number stating your rank globally is something that should exist because lack of this would just lead to great debates about which attribute is most important and which players would consider the most valuable = making it a replacement for the lack of not having an actual global rank like the current one). To be honest a change like this would go far greater lengths than just improve map quality but I think it would be fresh air for the whole game and would bring overall exitement in general.

Also the idea about star rating changed into a skill chart was excellent but rather than replacing the current star ratings entirely we could still keep them atleast for a while since people are very accustomed to having some sort of star rating, removing it entirely suddenly would be probably awkward given that the chart system will need immediate attention balance-wise when it would be rolled out.

I am pretty sure that multiple rankings and the debate, which attribute is most important aren't really an issue, but rather an enhancement to the game, as it gives people incentive to specialize in different things and/or compete in different skill assets globally.

If I would be able to design freely and come up with spontaneous ideas, I would replace or rework the current Player Level system, making the Player Level raise for each user accumulating ranks/points in the various skill assets. Therefore, those with higher levels are more "vesatile", as the points for levels you get from one skill asset eventually soft-caps out, while starting to train a different skill asset will start giving you more points to next level easier. I dunno, something like that. Instead of ranking people then, I would just give people levels. I don't think it needs a global overall ranking, because the skill in this game can't possibly be boiled down like that so simply. Players could choose which rank to display and maybe the display could even alter based on your specialization (sort of like osuskills.tk awards you different "titles" based on your specialization combination, I really liked that idea)

There are a lot of ways to make this interesting and make it account for the multitude of skill assets. I proposed something like this internally a few times already, but it was considered too "complex", which still saddens me, to be honest.

All in all, the pp-system is based around a biased view of what defines "being good" and also weightens it around the biased idea of what is "worth more" and "worth less". This entire balancing shenanigans can also be circumvented with splitting it simply into different rankings.

It will also cause mappers to specialize into mapping things shipping towards the specific rankings, increasing diversity of mapping just by that. Mapping generic patterns to yield the most reward out of the least effort will still continue to exist, but it will certainly create more different target audiences for beatmaps, as not everyone is competing on the same leaderboard that only aims at the three same skill assets always. And the sole creation of new target audiences creates demands, which eventually will lead into supply.

Well, over the past years most of the work behind the curtain has gone towards "Simplifying things". Look where that's gotten the game - most active players/modders are disheartened, bored, and demotivated because something so simple is quickly figured out and inherently boring.

It would be really good to press to intentionally loosen up on simplifications and allow for more complexity and just let the community sort it out on their own. Like Loctav said, there will always be a large chunk of the game that leans towards simplicity - but a community is not fueled by the lurkers or casual players, it is fueled by content creators and active players. Too much has gone towards making the game more accessible to the masses, to the point where the specializers are actively hampered.

Talking about it is nice and all, but there's no possible way to actually DO anything without convincing people with coding capabilities (and admin access) to work things out - ideas are a dime a dozen, implementation is gold.

Oh boy, my favorite mapping related topic. This type of discussion briefly appeared in the upheaval thread, some of what I said has been commented on already but I want to expand on it. I already see a lot of discussion about the ranking process, etc. so i'll try to add some newer concepts to think about.

General motivation

I think the only people in the end who decide the amount of innovation and creativity that go into the ranking system are the mappers themselves. A map that uses perfectly meta aesthetics, comfortable flow, very safe style, etc, is obviously much easier to rank than something that pushes rc boundaries. So if mappers feel more comfortable mapping in that way from experience then they'll do so, and push those for rank. The thing that will most stop them from pushing experimental types of maps is the boundaries that the ranking system provides- so it does have to do partly with the qualification system, but there can't ever be a perfect system (even though we can come as close as we can). There has to be some sort of quality assurance for ranked maps in the first place.

Rewards

Leading off of what i said above. If mappers are intrinsically motivated to adhere to mapping styles they're familiar with, I think that we need place a bigger focus on ways we motivate mappers to be different and take risks in their mapping. The spotlight works, sure, but I think at the moment people are looking at the spotlight to see what cool maps might be ranked, that's nice and all. But if we want map spotlights to act as an incentive to mapping creativity, we need it to leave more of an impact and it needs to be hyped up. I've seen mappers not even know that their map received spotlight, if we are going to use this as encouragement to create notable maps then that needs to change. Still, what does spotlight mean to the mapper? I would suggest some kind of icon on the mapset webpage as a reward, maybe something to add to the mappers profile also. (Probably not a badge or a title though because skilled mappers who can earn spotlight multiple times would clutter their profile with that.) Just realized that this was mentioned but expanding i guess.

With that being said, we should also expand on other rewards besides just spotlight. Spotlight can in theory act as a bigger, more prestigious reward, but something smaller that mappers can earn for creating something neat (but not exactly groundbreaking) can help encourage mappers with that little bit of recognition. Like an 'honorable mention" sort of thing. I don't know what that reward might be (probably something that recognizes that map specifically, not just supporter) but an add on to the spotlight for honorable mentions can work. I've seen a lot of skilled mappers with potential say they're quitting, one reason why I think a mapper might leave the mapping scene is that they haven't received enough attention from their maps, so it comes down to how passionate they actually are about mapping, they don't get enough recognition telling them that their maps are cool. To be fair though the ranking system is largely demotivating and can be pretty unforgiving for maps that attempt to push boundaries, which is already kinda adressed with the qualification system in this thread.

The loved section

fix loved lol

User rating can help?

On a separate note, one thing that I think should hold more weight on maps is user rating. It seems as if the most played beatmaps get more attention than those with great user feedback get a lot more attention. I think this encourages pp mapping in a way because players seeing a farm map = lots of retries = more plays on map = front page of website & reddit for big pp plays (and yeah a new pp system as previously mentioned can add to this). With that being said, the amount of exposure a map gets is affected by, and sometimes reliant on, how much pp a map gives. We all know this in some shape or form. I would honestly just replace the most played section on the home page with something that factors in user rating - the only thing here though is that it's easier to give a map a good rating than it is to repetitively play it, and there's bias toward mappers we already know and like, so I'm just suggesting more of a balance in between the two. Thinking about this, CCBC hot like 250k plays in the last 24 hours but ended up with a rating of 6.5 lmao.

That being said, this type of system might just give exposure to creative maps rather than create more variety overall. But I still think it can make that "most played" panel more valuable and give mappers another thing to aim for.

BN flexibility

I saw a little bit of talk about this and think its a great step forward toward diversity. The only problem I see with this is - how? You can say that bns are allowed to change their perspective and take a little more risk but will they? The only problem is that this isn't something that you can enforce, but mostly just encourage. idk anything too specific about the future of the bng, subdivisions, etc. but if we were to penalize a subdivision for nominating a mapset that got a pop or dq, that would discourage taking risks bubbling something that's non-meta conforming. Idk what much else to say about this, but I'd like to see bng structure and map diversity more aligned, if that makes sense.


I think that's it, sorry if its wordy.

What Probox said fully resumes the core problem that limits mappers while mapping. We can't and we won't be able to do anything with PP ranking system. Even if the PP system changed the mappers would anyways adapt again to the new system so that their maps will be mostly played due to the effects it has on the player's ranking. If we want to discuss about the nowdays mapping styles and ranked beatmaps we don't have to consider the PP system tbh and we should only focus our selves to find a different solution that doesn't connect the mapping with PP system. When the score system was still above the PP ranking we had bunch of different mapping styles ranked (symmetric maps ex. Andrea, maps with linear patterns ex. djpop, unconsistent spacing but flowing maps ex. siriru, and etc.) while now we only have jumping PP maps and technical ones (that can be considered anyways a style to implement with the ones I mentioned above). Only way I think it may work is to IMPLEMENT the PP system in the mapping and not IMPLEMENT the maps in the PP system, it's a different concept: the ranking should adapt to the map and not the opposite. Well, I will now propose some of the ideas I got with reading your ideas as well. All my ideas are referred to the concept of beatmap category I am gonna to explain.

Beatmaps Category
I would add multiple categories to the qualified/ranked beatmaps in which every beatmaps with specific features and elements that reflect the specific category will be placed at. Categories like: Jumping maps, Techinical maps, Symmetric maps, Flowing maps, Innovative maps, Constant rhythmically maps, etc. where maps can be placed when qualified/ranked and this would push the mappers use different styles on different songs. Of course this would mean that the "PP system has to be adapted to the mapping and not the opposite": hardest maps of that specific category will give more points and PPs. Yea I am still talking about PP but this time it has been adapted to the style of the specific map and not the opposite. Mappers would map more different styles instead of the same annoying PP ones. Well, how can BNs and QATs decide in which category the future ranked map should be placed? This depends by the mapper, modders and BNs/QATs them selves. Once the mapset is finished and the mapper wants to push it on pending beatmaps he should specify in which category he wants the map goes so when the BN/QATs and modders will mod the beatmaps can even vote if they agree with the mappers or not. Of course a beatmap can be mapped with different styles so when I try to search a map to play I can select multiple categories.

Specific BNs
There should be a revisiting on selecting specific BNs for specific Categories. This means that BNs can be able to nominate/qualify different styled maps because they are able to mod and judge those specific categories. This would ofc mean that the team has to be enlarged so that we have a good amount of BNs for each categories (QATs should be able to mod/qualify all kind of categories).

Testplayers Group
Group with selected skilled players can be created to verify if that kind of hard map with that specific category can be played properly and if the map itself respects the style of the category the BN/QAT is gonna to select while nominating/ranking the beatmaps.

Well.. We can't negate that the standard mapping is the hardest one because compared to osu!mania, osu!taiko and osu!ctb every mapper can map as he wants on a full editor grid. It's like impossible to adapt the ranking system to the mapping styles (let's be honest) but the ideas I mentioned are focused especially on that and not on how to revisit RC to give different styles the chance to be ranked and to be played with same intensity of PP maps. I am aware that these ideas are kinda pushed because it would mean some big changes on PP system, BN/QAT system and the system of beatmaps in different categories. But well, despite this I wanted to mention them and nothing. Good topic tho.

I posted this in 2015 and it was promptly rejected, but seeing some of the discussion here I guess it's probably relevant again so I'm linking it again: t/371530

The gist of it is basically to add another state for maps, which would be a "frozen" state for when discussion takes place. The map won't advance in the qualification progress, but it also won't lose any progress until it is properly DQ'd. Only if the map is disqualified due to a significant change does the qualification timer reset, as then the change is big enough that you should have more people look at it again. If the change is minor, or it's a non-issue, the map gets fixed, and unfrozen to continue its journey through qualified.



I'd also like to add that spotlights and whatnot are nice, but they really need to be integrated into the game client and exposed to players. Even just having, say, "most played maps of the week" or "highest user ratings of the week" categories with 5-10 maps showing up in the game client could help promote at least some diversity.

I personally don't think mappers need incentive to map creatively, and I certainly don't think there are ONLY pp maps being made today.. The issue is not lack of mapper creativity, the issue is lack of support for creative/different maps by Staff/Beatmap Nominators. Most BN's are too afraid to rank anything that is something other than anime jump pp maps, which causes there to in turn be nothing but anime jump pp maps...

Don't believe me? Look at this literal quote from a BN on his userpage:

Naotoshi wrote:

most of my bubbles are on fairly bad maps, or rather fairly uninteresting ones. i saw it as necessary, this game needs new content, and without bns nominating rankable-but-not-amazing stuff there just arent enough good mappers out there to keep the game alive.

I think many BN share this same sentiment. The ranking criteria and the pressure of the system not to "rank anything you can't judge" has caused such a stagnation in quality, unique maps being ranked.

If you want to fix it, loosen the ranking criteria and let BN run free ranking whatever content they deem fitting. BN should never feel AFRAID to push a map because of potential backlash from staff/other BN just because it's different than a 1-2 anime jump map. It's so frustrating as both a player and mapper to hear people say that there are no unique maps being made today when it's clearly not true, one look at mappers like dsco or handsome show just how wrong that sentiment is.

Question about quality, would you rather have a map like Miss You, where 50% of people think its absolutely genius and 50% of people loathe it, or a random 5 star anime map that everyone thinks is meh/average ranked?

The current system, from the 24 hour icon bubble popping rule, to the strict regulations on BN, to the lack of quality assurance that comes from having a Quality Assurance Team is what's causing this influx of pp mapping, not mappers "not having the incentive to map creatively". You need to stop thinking of mappers as children that need to be goaded into being creative, and instead put your power and make a difference in the maps being ranked.

It's not necessary to change the pp system to fix mapping, just qualify better maps... Better maps than pp maps exist and are waiting without a willing nominator for months/don't even go for rank because the ranking process would prove literally impossible for them. You as the staff have the power to set the precedent for what can and can't get ranked, so just do it instead of wondering aloud "hmmmm how can we make mappers map creatively again??"

The answer isn't even stopping the ranking of pp maps: if you rank more different/unique maps, more people will in turn want to make different/unique maps because they'll have the feeling that they'll actually be able to rank something that's not the same anime jump map or generic wub mapping style map

agree with kaifin except the "don't rank things you can't play" part because that's a rule that's in place for a reason and is usually forgone anyways by people who are experienced enough. it just keeps people at 80k ranking a 8* on their 2nd month in the bng or something. extreme example but the rule is fine (also not what this thread is about)

Hollow Wings wrote:

2. Perception of difficult maps in cyber vision.
pp system failed in recognizing hard ones, but did well to get rid of easier ones from them, in case of the rank rules we built long times ago: we forbidden proper things in lower mapsets. so we can just focus on harder ones.
How we can call a map is difficult to play? We used to trust the pp system and think now we don't. i always wonder why we call a map's difficulty "Extra" when we have all dthd scores on the ranking board, shouldn't it be "Insane" level if so much people can do that? I'm not talking about the use of classification as diff names done, but from the automatic processing way machines do to give ranks. And as we known computers can hardly see if some map's reading is tricky or tough even from technical way, it's much better to judge it directly from the score board: less people performed good and then that map is surely difficult. Some people may say that it's more like a ppv1 version system, but actually and slightly not. i cant image a much better way to solve this problem for now, and it can be done right now imo. (even i don't now the specific detail way in programming, i know it can be figured out by statistics.)

- This new system will take more power in judging performance of players if the map is a "difficult" one, and do the opposite way if it's easy, let current pp system do the rest of work, it actually still did it well.

Just going to say HW hit the nail on its head on this one. The skill chart Loctav suggest is going to work on everything but reading. Essentially you can do aim, speed, precision, reaction, which are essentially the same things that influences players to play hard maps now, minus precision (small CS). I would love to hope that this will someday be calculated using formula, but upon realization that the future will likely involve new gamemodes that players would want to be ranked, and that those gamemodes may have even more complex mechanics, this will become as unrealistic as you can image. I figure the best way to approach this is to interpret maps as a black box and do statistics on them like HW mentions.

(most important part of this post after the ~~~~. no tl;dr, read all of it, if any. most of the time i spent on this post was spent shortening it. everything below is a miraculous work of artistic brevity compared to the incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness babble it was previously. if you're really impatient just skip down to the bolded parts)

Slightly less important part first, quick and simple: stop pursuing flawlessness.
Creative maps are harder to rank because ranking criteria doesn't value merit, it values flawlessness. They are different things.
As a result, many ranked songs are boring but "flawless" maps.
Proliferation of flawless meritless mapping in ranking section influences community to continue this trend. It's an unhealthy cycle.

Do you want more diverse mapping?
Start ranking more diverse maps.
That means to value flawlessness less, and value merit more.
The mapping community, BNs, and QAT shouldn't be so scared of pushing creative maps even if they have some flaws.

If the ranked section becomes more diversified, the community will follow suit.
Yes, the community generally likes to shit on creative maps, just because they're different from what they know.
But if BNs and QAT keep ranking them regardless, then tastes will change for the better.

So stop being such perfectionists, and have an open mind. That's all. It's too easy to be a perfectionist when you're judging someone else's map as a modder or QAT or BN or whatever, so just stop being a perfectionist and stop being so protective of the ranked section, it stifles the state of mapping. My standards are higher than anyone's, but I'd much much rather see some shitty maps in ranked section than the homogenized maps that fill it today.


~~~~


ppv2 incentivizes homogenized mapping. ppv2 is THE biggest problem, I don't need to tell you why (but i will anyway lol). ppv2 takes the most boring mapping and places it at the top of a subconcious and completely arbitrary heirarchy. ppv2 is pretty much the sole reason mapping is what it is right now. Want to get your map played often? Put in big jumps in a simple-to-read map. Want to map a memey song from sesame street, but also get it lots of attention? Put in big jumps in a simple-to-read map. Just an innocent mapper who likes to map in a style that happens to have jumps? Now everyone will heap attention and plays on you, which tells you and the rest of the community that that certain style is the only way to go.

ppv2 takes a single hyper-simplified style of mapping and makes it the focal point, the bread-and-butter pattern of the entire game. It's much bigger than just a pattern you see in most maps. It's a paradigm that the whole game is measured by, which is stupid. Even jumps themselves, a perfectly respectable pattern, are now vilified precisely because of the pp system. ppv2 as a system has taken the spirit of competition away from the players themselves and has injected them into the maps. The spirit of competition is good for a game, but is unspeakably cancerous to creative endeavours such as mapping. Instead of competing with each other for ranks on the map leaderboard, they are scrutinizing the maps themselves. If they lose or gain pp, it's no longer because they are better or worse than other players, it's because of the map and its patterns and its resulting difficulty-to-pp ratio. If you want to fix things, shift the spirit of competition away from mappers and back towards players. That kind of competitive milieu doesn't belong to mapping, not if you want mapping to diversify and flourish instead of stagnate.

I know I go on and on about ppv2. People know it's a problem, I just wanted to drive home how much of a problem it is. It's very easy to heap blame on mappers or QAT or BN or any other people, but it's not the people, it's the system. ppv2 as a system is the root cause; everything else is a symptom. PP mapping, PP mappers, community recoil from unfamiliarity -- all are not the problem. ppv2 is. And that's not to say that ppv2 is worthless and tom94 has destroyed mapping; it's been through some rough spots but ppv2/star system is valuable as a very rough approximation of difficulty.

Here's my personal suggestion; calculate skill with leaderboards again. You'll never be able to accurately put difficulty into an equation, it's too subjective and complex, so stop trying. Calculate skill by what rank you get on the leaderboards of a particular map. That will get people looking for different, more interesting maps, it'll create a more diversified "pp canon" which will in turn result in more interesting mapping purely through exposure to different styles. I wasn't around for ppv1, but from what I hear this is similar to that. Of course, the problem with ppv1 (from what I hear) is that because there was no quantified measure of difficulty, a hard diff from osuplayer111 would give more pp than a nice play on freedom dive, for instance. So here is what I am proposing:

0-2 star maps = tier 1 (pp value:1)
2-3 star maps = tier 2 (pp value:3)
3-5 star maps = tier 3 (pp value:7)
5+ star maps = tier 4 (pp value: 20)

PP of map = (100.00 minus rank percentile on map) x (map tier pp value)
Values and star rating can be adjusted and ppv2 values can be fit in somewhere, this is just so you get the general idea.

Reasoning for tiers: I grouped everything above 5 into one because I don't want someone bumping a 5 star map to be a 6 star map just to give it pp. In my experience, people play 5/5.5 star maps to 7 star maps at about the same frequency. I don't play 4 star maps anymore (except ones I REALLY like) but I'll still play 5, 5.5 star maps if they're interesting, and I do all the time, even though most of them are easy for me. The most apparent issue is Apparition being in the same tier as Hitorigoto, but then again, Notch Hell is 5 stars too. And getting top 10 on Apparition and top 10 on Hitorigoto both require significant skill. In this way, the system starts to pit players against each other instead of against the map.

If a map requires little skill to FC, then people will flock to that map to compete for pp, and the value of an FC on that map will decrease. Using mods will obviously remain advantageous (I personally would advocate removing FL from pp, because pure memorization to me is an entirely different skill from every other mod, but that's a debate for another time), but nomod won't be irrelevant either as long as the map is hard enough. In this way, via competition (this is actually a pretty capitalistic system that's based on competition and incentives, rather than forced and rigid regulation), values of scores will be equalized based on their difficulty decided not primarily by an inaccurate equation, but by weighing the performance of a player against other players.

Player scrutiny moves away from the map, which is good; that "spirit of competition" is eliminated from the mapping process, because no matter what mappers throw out there it is against each other that they have to compete. If they lose PP, it's not because they didn't fc because "the map is dumb and plays bad," it's because someone else did better than they did. They don't have to FC to get PP, they just have to do better than everyone else.

Maps below 5 stars can still be rigidly tiered because if you're mapping less than 5 stars, you're not mapping for pp anyway.

This should also mitigate the problems created by ppv2 by de-emphasizing jumps. It will take some time to have a long-lasting effect on the public consciousness, which by now is shaped extremely heavily by the ppv2 paradigm, but it will happen.

One problem I can see arising from this is the enormous amount ranked maps available. Because it's so hard to find unknown or old maps, plays on those maps will be enormously inflated. A solution to this would of course be to develop a map sorting system that can sort from lowest # of scores to highest # of scores. The date ranked should be easily visible as well, just so players know what era of mapping they're getting into. I think in general it should be easier to explore the ranked section, there's a lot of hidden gems out there that I have no idea how to get to. There might also arise a fun pp culture that involves just exploring the ranked section and looking for undiscovered maps to play. There are too many maps rotting in obscurity in both the ranked and graveyarded sections.



In my opinion, anything short of completely revamping the pp system can only partially ameliorate the negative effects ppv2 has had. Piling more extraneous features and categories like loved won't do much to fix the current situation, it'll all just be ineffectual flailing. But if a ppv3 is too drastic, then just stop being a perfectionist about the ranking system and things will be at least somewhat better.

edit: better spotlighting is also a good and less iconoclastic idea, handsome has some nice suggestions.

i think kaifin completely missed the point of my userpage quote. and that's compounded by the fact that i also nominated 2 of those dsco maps lol..

in any case: if you don't think pp causes this issue, go look on top played maps. they are ALL pp maps except for the occasional pop song that appears for a week then falls down.
as long as i'm getting mod replies like http://puu.sh/xyHBA/111a402cd5.png then it's pretty clear what most mappers map for. i mean, people want to be popular, and the easiest way to do that atm is to make a map that completely abuses pp algorithm and gets you tons of plays. yeah you get faded out and irrelevant after a week or a month or whatever but if you make enough of them (doormat, taeyang, lami. slayed, etc etc) you end up being well known regardless.
as a result, i agree that the main problem is the pp system not incentivising interesting maps and as a result the vast majority of players simply ignore anything that isn't 1/2 spam with a diffspike for that sweet peppy points.
aside from that, it's much easier to make a decent anime map (i mean cmon look at all those harumachis and sweets weekends and whatnot lol) than something actually hard, so naturally it's harder to get it ranked. i don't think that's an issue of bns being scared or whatever (we dont get penalized for bubble pops anyway) its just cuz the maps are held to a different standard than generic anime map #29583.

PP does cause the problem but not if you don't let it :/ Sure most players will only want and appreciate pp maps but if you really want to push interesting stuff, there's no need to look at the players too much. There's tons of mappers who prioritise good mapping over wanting to be famous for shitty generic farm maps.

I must say I'm a big fan of having pp tied to map leaderboards as mentioned earlier in this thread. I tried coming up with a working system but there are several problems with pp being tied to leaderboards as listed below. Ultimately I'm optimistic about the possibilities of this system though and feedback on this would be much appreciated as this could be made into something for real. Now for the problems I mentioned earlier that would have to be solved.

Biggest problems to solve with this proposed system:

1. Maps that aren't played giving inflated pp.Basically super old/unpopular maps with little to none plays on them would give more pp than they should simply because of nobody having played them. Solution to this is simple though; a formula that takes into addition total playcount on the map and compares the total playcount to amount of full combo plays with or without specific mods. In case of no full combo plays on the map, the highest acc A or B plays etc. all the way to amount of nomod passes or if those don't exist, best passes with ez/ht/nf mods. Problem with pp being tied to leaderboard + map playcount would be the fact that one could essentially boost his own pp value by adding to a maps playcount on purpose, therefore raising the value of his score. This would have to be taken into addition somehow, perhaps by restricting map playcounts to only plays which pass the map or by having a max cap of playcount that a player can add to a maps pp (while still counting the plays on his userpage) or a combination of these two.

2. PP tied into leaderboards would have to be balanced around players' own playcount / amount of time to play which is not a good thing as the more you have time to play = the more time you have to farm leaderboards (Theoretically this is how it works nowdays but with this new system you would be rewarded for having more plays on unpopular maps as not everyone would have time to chase the scores on them). This is the solution I came up with: let X amount of time pass for all the maps to be properly contested and then the system would balance itself when all unpopular maps would be farmed to acceptable levels. Also limit pp calculations to persons 25-50 best plays (same number for everyone obviously). Basically the downside to this would be that in the beginning pp values would inevitably be inflated but the longer this system would be in place, the more it would balance itself out. Since the leaderboard system tracks all online plays made on a map, the most extreme scenario (this is impossible to occur but very important to see how this system would age) for this system to face would be a situation where all maps that are ranked are all full comboed with all mods that boost pp value. In this case the only thing differentiating the ranked maps would be their total amount of playcount as some maps have 70k ranked scores on them while others only have 3k. Therefore in the most extreme scenario this system would have to prioritize the 3k fc maps over the 70k because of their rarity but if this were to happen then the 3k fc maps would get more plays until they would be equal to the 70k playcount map since the 3k would give more pp. Overall the system balances itself out.

3.PP would have to be flexible in a sense that it can go up or it can go down. Up in the scenario of you making an impressive score, down in the scenario when your impressive score wouldn't be so impressive anymore (other people replicate it or make an even more impressive score on the same map). This is not exactly a big problem but adding this flexibility would certainly give mixed responses as losing pp is something that could never happen before (except in rare cases) and might be seen as a negative thing.


4. How to seperate an 8* rare score from a 5* rare score. This system would be balanced the closer one would be to the highest rank but balancing this in the 5k-500k region would mean that a map has to have a base pp value because otherwise ranking up would be impossible as your best plays are very impressive to you, but very common overall. So as mentioned the solution would have to be adding a base pp value to a map. This base value is the biggest issue here because calculating a base pp value perfectly taking everything into addition is not possible. Wherever this base value would be poorly balanced, this poor balancing would become the point of pp exploiting. Basically worst thing to do would be to tie this to a visible thing like current star rating system as testing out the weaknesses of it is easy and one can quickly tell how to exploit it. My suggestion would be to tie this base value to a new map difficulty rating system (essentially an upgraded star rating system which takes into addition slider velocities, low ar and such more accurately than currently) and this new system would never be revealed to the public to prevent blatant exploitation from developing. The old star rating system would stay unchanged and would still be the go-to option for players to evaluate how hard the map they are about to play is (It works well enough and we have already become accustomed to it although admittedly changing star rating system isn't that unheard of as it has happened before). Ultimately after time passes people would still probably figure out where this new system would be balanced around and try to exploit it but since the playcount + fc% is there to balance the system, noticing what the base pp is formed on would be really hard and should take a long while.

Those were the major problems I came up with, I'm sure there are more. Now to move on, why should we adapt this new system into place then if its so much work? I seperated the benefits into 3 categories below: Mapping/Mappers, Playing/Players & Overall development for the game.

What would this new pp system mean for mapping?

1. In theory this system should be "farming proof" (unless I overlooked something which I might have) as if someone were to make a pp map for farming, everyone would farm it and therefore it would lose pp value as a higher % of players scored a really good score on the map. Niche pp maps that are super hard to fc would obviously reward the players who are able to fc them and their unique plays would get more meaning which means that the harder the map, the more contested the best scores would be, up to a point where the maps get too hard for people to be physically able to play for todays standards(9*+ deathstream maps etc.).

2. Freedom in the sense that there is no point in chasing the optimal pp maps anymore because of them being balanced on playcount + fc%. The initial thought would be to try to make the hardest map possible which is still fcable but if the map is fcable then it would lose pp value when multiple people would be able to fc it hence rendering this idea useless and those who would be able to fc the map would ultimately deserve the pp it would offer.

3. Making fun maps to play would be encouraged as the lifespan of a map would be something like this: Fun to play but not a good pp source -> People who play for fun play it and enjoy it and because of them setting relatively rare scores on the map it would prove to be good pp (not why these people play the map) -> More people play the map because its fun as told by their friends OR because of it being rare it offers more pp than some other maps of similar difficulty do -> Even more plays -> Devaluated pp scores at the "cost" of many more people enjoying the map. Ultimately the end result is that a map made for fun was played by all types of players and gained more recognition and playcount than it would previously had = Mapping whatever is more viable with the new system = Mapping diversity.

What would this encourage the players to do?

1. This kind of system would encourage the players to intially seek for rare fcs on forgotten maps but as time passes this would become much less optimal. Having forgotten/low playcount maps be played with an initiative is a good thing though (in the case where the map was previously overlooked because of its poor pp values and not because of its poor quality) since this would give exposure to many maps that haven't been played much.

2. Seek very hard accomplishments in terms of fcs or high acc plays on super hard maps and specialize in certain aspects of the game to try to get scores nobody else could get.

What would this mean overall for the game?

1. More balanced pp system while still being ultimately flawed because of the necessity for base pp to exist. However this is a better alternative to current pp and not as drastic option as rebuilding the pp into seperate categories like I previously suggested.

2. Most players would discover new maps to play from the already existing maps as the system encourages playing different maps instead of farming the popular maps like everyone else.




Ok I think this was all I had to say. If someone is legit reading through this entirely and ended up here then thanks for taking your time to listen to me trying to make sense. Please give me feedback and challenge my arguments, I tried to do so as best as I could myself but ultimately writing this was tiring and I most likely said some things that make little sense because of this.

tl;dr With effort this system (pp tied to leaderboards) could be made into a better pp system than the current one which would have overall a positive impact on the game

Perkele

before we go to all those fancy stuff, i think it's better for us to take a look on how the editor can be improved

not going to write a 3-page essay, but what i mean is that there needs to be an easier control on how objects are able to be made. it's hard to make an aesthetically beautiful slider when you start taking account on curves between bezier sliders.
more extreme SV ranges needs to be "unlocked". currently, we can only choose between 0.5x and 2x (without doing weird things) which isn't really enough for mapping something a lot more technical
handling timing points needs to be easier. putting a timing point for every slider takes time to do, and it should be easier if we can have an sv change that's bound to the slider
rotating stuff aren't really handy atm. i've proposed something that would make mapping symmetrical things easier to do t/626782

that's just some of them. i couldn't come up with any more ideas so i'll just put things that has concerned me since i started std mapping. also note that we have 4 modes so these problems are just small amount of them

and these can be easily ignored by more professional mappers. making editors more friendly is a way to make weirder maps easier, especially for newcomers

i just realized that my post is 1000000000x worse than the others help

I am going to pass on making a real wall of text on this one as others already gave a lot of reasons.
The one I consider the most grave for this debate is the effect of ppv2 on the community and mapping.

All I really have to say is that we knew the impact it had one year ago. We knew it two years ago. People posted it in the great thread that probably none of the dev has been reading for a long time (provoking claim with no backup but there hasn't been feedback from them anyway).
People posted it in other places.
It became apparent when tons of feature requests about pp popped up and got shittons of stars.
Players and mappers from pre-ppv2 eras complained about what ppv2 made of this community and what it leads new players to.
There have been several attempts to create alternative ranking systems that fix the weaknesses of ppv2.

People also made a lot of other suggestions how the editor, the modding system, kudosu stars, qualification and everything could be improved to provide the best environment for mappers to be creative. I'm positive that almost every suggestion coming out of this thread has been voiced before.

Point is: Most of it was ignored. Now, I'm not going to make a shitty "osz2" joke because the lazer-github is on fire since the start of the year but fact is that barely any major development on osu! has been witnessed in the past ~2.5 years (probably longer considering the age of "osz2" but I can only talk about the time I'm here) and that a lot of thoughts people are having and partially also voicing aren't getting the attention they might deserve.

How does all of the above help the issue at hand? It doesn't really.
What I want to say though is that I trust the people driving osu!lazer to get rid of this problem of stagnancy forever. Because people will get the possibility to get changes going with an open-source client.
It is nice that Desp as a popular community member can actually get this discussion going (despite this being nothing but a compilation of (duplicate) feature requests in the wrong subforum) and I'm interested to see what will come out of it as a short-time result.
Personally I can wait for lazer and until then I will do my best to support maps that I like.

It should be noted that all of the systems proposed above will break pp systems in other modes without additional measures.
Relative to mode specific sets, converts are rarely played. Having a system based on playcount or number of FCs will drastically change how converts are weighted, as their playcount is significantly lower.

Lets just go through what converts mean for each mode:

1. In Taiko, converts are mainly played for pp and devalue specifics. Converts disregard a lot of the RC with unreadable SVs and boring note usage. Specifics are usually more fun and challenging.
2. In Catch, converts very popular and loved by the community due to the diversity of unique patterns and playability. However, nearly all converts give little/no pp and I’ve seen many amazing/unique plays go unnoticed due to this, while image material FC #30 gets posted to reddit.
3. In Mania, converts are badly charted, underweighted, and aren't fun to play. There’s little reason to keep them around aside from farming leaderboard spots or ranked score

If the new pp systems are added, there need to be new kinds of leaderboards for these modes to accommodate, similar to the speed/aim ones suggested before:

1. Taiko needs to have separate leaderboards for converts and specifics. There are still some impressive convert plays, but they should be in their own category. This encourages more people to play specifics, which is usually more enjoyable.
2. Catch is the same, add a convert and specific leaderboards, but to encourage more people to play converts. There are many fun converts that aren't played as there is little reason to. Many top players have quit because the leaderboards are almost specific only, and it's boring considering we only have ~9 pages of ranked maps.
3. Mania needs to have key specific leaderboards. Converts maybe have their own leaderboard, but it's almost unnecessary. Doing this would encourage players to learn other keys, as there is literally no short term benefit to right now. Key specific leaderboards would also lead to far more 5/6/8/9k maps being pushed for rank.
4. Standard mode would also benefit from the speed/aim/stamina thing mentioned above, I haven't mentioned it much as it's already been discussed

If any of the pp system ideas proposed beforehand are implemented to other modes without these leaderboards, their pp systems will break.
If the ideas above are implemented, it gives tens of thousands of players who may have quit a reason to play again, it would almost be as exciting as introducing another gamemode.

If/when the pp system is reworked, new leaderboards should be the first step. They are required for pp in other modes to work (if based on map's play count), it's faster to implement with clearer short-term benefits, and it affects players from all modes to a greater extent.

Sinooh wrote:

all of the systems proposed above will break pp systems in other modes

can't you just not apply the new system to other modes? they already have different pp systems, no need to apply one system across the entire games.

ProfessionalBox wrote:

Problem with pp being tied to leaderboard + map playcount would be the fact that one could essentially boost his own pp value by adding to a maps playcount on purpose, therefore raising the value of his score. This would have to be taken into addition somehow, perhaps by restricting map playcounts to only plays which pass the map or by having a max cap of playcount that a player can add to a maps pp (while still counting the plays on his userpage) or a combination of these two.

You could fix this simply by taking into account not the total plays, but the total number of submitted scores. As in when you look at the bottom of a map leaderboard in-game, where it says "50 out of 6,483" the "6,483" would be the significant number.

ProfessionalBox wrote:

PP tied into leaderboards would have to be balanced around players' own playcount / amount of time to play which is not a good thing as the more you have time to play = the more time you have to farm leaderboards (Theoretically this is how it works nowdays but with this new system you would be rewarded for having more plays on unpopular maps as not everyone would have time to chase the scores on them).

I proposed in my earlier post to have an option to sort through the ranked list by least plays (it would also display the year each map was ranked so you know what era of mapping you're getting into). And I assume whatever version of Tillerino was created next would show maps with low playcount, which would facilitate the balancing of maps. We need a better way of exploring the ranked section anyways.

ProfessionalBox wrote:

PP would have to be flexible in a sense that it can go up or it can go down.

I agree that might be a problem, but I think it's the same as rank decay, so there really is no difference between rank and PP decay and people will realize that. I guess it sucks that now there's no permanent aspect to rank, though. We could implement a "peak rank" display to give the new system some semblance of permanence.

ProfessionalBox wrote:

My suggestion would be to tie this base value to a new map difficulty rating system

That does seem to be the obvious and presently best solution, but if we could have an traditional accurate assessment of difficulty then we wouldnt need a new PP system. It really is too hard to calculate. The easy solution is this: take into account the number of non-HT/EZ FCs and compare it to the number of scores on the map. Big Black has 10 of those while Hitorigoto has probably thousands, tens of thousands? So that value would factor into the calculations (see equation below). I thought of this earlier but completely forgot to add that factor into the mock equation I drafted up in my first post. As for low-leaderboard players receiving almost no PP, we can simply manipulate the equation so that even if you're in the bottom 1 percentile of scores, you can still receive some PP, say, 10 or 20 or something.

ProfessionalBox wrote:

What would this new pp system mean for mapping?

I agree with everything you say here, but I would like to add:
4. Besides not being to optimize a map specifically for PP which eliminates the ppv2 paradigm, which was the most poisonous thing to mapping;
Not only are mappers encouraged to make fun rather than pp-oriented maps if they want their maps to be played, they are now free to map in any style they want, any style they can think of, as long as the quality is reasonable. Before, maps went under scrutiny based on how difficult it was compared to the pp it gave, both good and bad. That scrutiny shouldn't exist either way, and by eliminating that scrutiny mappers are now more free to exercise their creative juices without pp-based scrutiny, and will result in more diversified mapping.


Updated mock-equation from previous post:

0-2 star maps = tier 1 (pp value:1)
2-3 star maps = tier 2 (pp value:3)
3-5 star maps = tier 3 (pp value:7)
5+ star maps = tier 4 (pp value: 20)

100% - 50% FC = Tier J (fc value: 2)
50% - 30% FC = Tier I (fc value: 5)
30% - 20% FC = Tier H (fc value: 6)
20% - 10% FC = Tier G (fc value: 8)
10% - 5% FC = Tier F (fc value: 10)
5% - 3% FC = Tier E (fc value: 12)
3% - 2% FC = Tier D (fc value: 14)
2% - 1% FC = Tier C (fc value: 15)
1% - 0.5% FC = Tier B (fc value: 20)
0.5% - 0.1% FC = Tier A (fc value: 25)
0.1% - 0% FC = Tier S (fc value: 30)

PP of map = (100.00 minus rank percentile on map) x (pp value) x (fc value)

Values can be adjusted and balanced or given a curve (especially so rank 1 is a worth a good deal more than rank 10, for example), this is just so you get the general idea of what is happening. There are a lot more different scenarios to account for than this simple equation can cover, of course. Please ask any questions or reasoning or arguments!