Sorry, I don't really play touchscreen but I read freedomdiver's (hopefully impermanent) obituary and thought this should exist as a feature request.

Maybe one day touchscreen will become a separate gamemode, although chances are it will just die from lack of staff interest or an active playerbase. Touchscreen really does take skill, and I wish there could be a competitive scene based around it. But it's selfish of me to try and turn osu! into my own game, at the expense of other's enjoyment.

Sorry to anyone who might have disagreed with me before, or who will disagree with me after this, but I think leaving this game until these issues are resolved (if they even can be) is the best course of action.

Touchscreen is a valid way of playing the game, but it makes long jumps much easier than with other peripherals because you have 10 input points (10 fingers) instead of one. You can hover your fingers over opposite sides of the screen and make 10* back-and-forth jumps without moving either of your fingers from where they are. So TS makes it much easier to gain PP on maps that are all jumps and no streams.

Which is a shame, because then touchscreen players like freedomdiver has to worry about their top scores being called "cheaty" and "unfair" to the rest of the community that doesn't play TS. A separate leaderboard would be better for TS players so they don't have to worry about this, and it would be better for the rest of the community so they are able to compete fairly on the PP leaderboard without having to change peripheral. If TS becomes more popular and nothing is changed, then the top PP players will be all TS players.

Maybe a separate leaderboards is actually a way of recognising touchscreen as a proper-but-different way of playing the game, giving it some recognition to allow for greater diversity without enabling an unfair ranking system?

Btw, I think using mouse and tablet are similar enough to each other that they can coexist on the same leaderboard.

How would it be implemented?
I imagine it being up to each player to select what playstyle they use on their profile. And whatever scores you get while that playstyle is selected on your profile ends up being added to your PP ranking for that playstyle. If you make a play on touchscreen while accidentally having tablet selected on your profile, you can edit the score afterwards (right-click it?) to make it add to your touchscreen PP. Or maybe osu! is capable of detecting which type of peripheral a player is using. I'm agnostic about which implementation would work best, and I'm not sure what is possible.

But couldn't anyone lie about their playstyle?
Yes, people could achieve 900+ PP scores on touchscreen and say it was on tablet. But TS plays have a really obvious signature of the cursor warping from place to place, so it's easy to tell which scores are or aren't made with TS. And if someone invents a program that makes TS plays look like tablet/mouse plays, then I think it would still be difficult enough to cheat that I think the benefits of the separate leaderboards outweigh the cost of enabling a difficult way to cheat. Maybe osu!lazer could recognise significant cursor warping (i.e. more than is expected due to simple lag) and automatically flag scores as TS scores.

Edit: A new top PP score (900pp exactly, funny how both the 800 and the 900 PP mark were set by those exact scores Oo!) has been set by freedomdiver. Kudos to him/her for bringing attention to this issue in a rather spectacular way. Peppy made a thread discussing solutions to this issue.

There already being cheating isn't a good reason to provide more ways for people to cheat. I dont complete disagree with touchscreen having its own ranking (although I dont fully support either), but it should not be added until a better implementation method can be created

Don't think there is a need to add addition rankings.
Then it could be argued that we need different rankings for mouse, tablet, tablet + mouse, straw, etc.

Interesting, but brings alot of new problems and questions with it:

- Is this about all rankings and scores or just the 'big pp'? What will happen to the existing scoreboards on beatmaps. Will a touchscreen top50 or top1 score on a map disappear? https://osu.ppy.sh/b/66514 Wanna know how many top50 plays on this are set with touchscreen? Or do you not care at all about that and only care about the high ranks / big pp plays. - if so: this feature will never happen.
- So what about all existing touchscreen plays? I'm talking all recent touchscreen plays as well as the ones that were set years ago. You can't tell players to change their existing touchscreen plays to another gamemode, since they don't keep track on every score or are retired players.
- When is a play even a touchscreen play? Is -GN's FC on https://osu.ppy.sh/b/24722 and other touchscreen plays considered touchscreen-scoreboard worthy?
- Probably more problems I haven't thought of yet.

The main point is that you're basically too late.
Even if it would be balanced to implement seperate rankings, you're many many years too late to suddenly do that. Only because the scores give big pp people are suddenly critical about it.

I can confidently say seperate rankings will never happen. I can also confidently say that any rational adjustments to pp algorhythm won't fix it either, you'd probably still see freedomdiver top 100 global if that's your concern.
Only thing you can basically do is hope that people will change and not view ranking number as something super serious but view the beatmapscore a player set (and whether it was with touchscreen or regular playstyle), not the number attached to it.

Swerro wrote:

Interesting, but brings alot of new problems and questions with it:

- Is this about all rankings and scores or just the 'big pp'? What will happen to the existing scoreboards on beatmaps. Will a touchscreen top50 or top1 score on a map disappear? https://osu.ppy.sh/b/66514 Wanna know how many top50 plays on this are set with touchscreen? Or do you not care at all about that and only care about the high ranks / big pp plays. - if so: this feature will never happen.
- So what about all existing touchscreen plays? I'm talking all recent touchscreen plays as well as the ones that were set years ago. You can't tell players to change their existing touchscreen plays to another gamemode, since they don't keep track on every score or are retired players.
- When is a play even a touchscreen play? Is -GN's FC on https://osu.ppy.sh/b/24722 and other touchscreen plays considered touchscreen-scoreboard worthy?
- Probably more problems I haven't thought of yet.

The main point is that you're basically too late.
Even if it would be balanced to implement seperate rankings, you're many many years too late to suddenly do that. Only because the scores give big pp people are suddenly critical about it.

I can confidently say seperate rankings will never happen. I can also confidently say that any rational adjustments to pp algorhythm won't fix it either, you'd probably still see freedomdiver top 100 global if that's your concern.
Only thing you can basically do is hope that people will change and not view ranking number as something super serious but view the beatmapscore a player set (and whether it was with touchscreen or regular playstyle), not the number attached to it.

Tbh, I don't really mind that freedomdiver or other TS players are in top ranks. I'm mostly neutral on the idea of whether to have TS-only leaderboards. It seems like a complex issue, and I haven't had the energy to think about it thoroughly. Nevertheless, I thought the idea should be in Feature Requests so that people (like you) could discuss it.

An alternative could be a simple filter function for PP and map leaderboards. You start by seeing all scores for all playstyles, and then you can filter out TS, tablet, mablet, shoe or whatever. Would be an advantage for players of a specific playstyle, so they can compare themselves against others of the same playstyle. But it would also advantage those who want to compare themselves against everyone else except that one playstyle which they think is overpowered.

Edit: I thought -GN's FC on BARUSA was with tablet. Where did you get that it was a TS score from? (I'm curious in case I was wrong.)

I feel like there are a few issues with this idea that haven’t been mentioned.
The first issue I notice is that it assumes all players only use one type of input for play. And even if you were to account for this by putting a menu asking what form of input you used to complete the play, it would be more of an annoyance than help. I don’t see any reason why a pen tablet + keyboard player can’t learn to do better than a touchscreen player either. Streams would be harder on touchscreen, for an example.
The second issue is that this sounds more like an issue of wanting to see your scores seperately from others, like something not everyone wants or needs. I don’t see why there is an issue with touchscreen players making it onto leaderboards frequently or easily. If someone really had an issue with it, they could get a touchscreen device and play it the same way.
Overall it doesn’t seem like a problematic request though. It might be interesting to have the leaderboards show what playstyle the players on the leaderboards have set on their profiles from the leaderboards rather than stalking them to their profiles.

Jaye wrote:

Don't think there is a need to add addition rankings.
Then it could be argued that we need different rankings for mouse, tablet, tablet + mouse, straw, etc.

No it couldn't. Mouse/tablet/kb are all 1:1 input methods. You move, you click once. Touchscreen can completely remove the aspect of moving (two fingers in each corner of the screen reducing the game to just clicking). They are NOT compareable and touchscreen is basically cheating on a niche genre of maps. The issue is that the advantages of a touchscreen are so huge on fitting maps that a touchscreen play can achieve pp that's unreachable with tablet/mouse/kb. When enough fitting maps are ranked, touchscreen play will be like a completely different game mode with a FAR bigger pp return vs time invested. If nothing is done touchscreen will eventually be the only competitive peripheral.

Swerro wrote:

Interesting, but brings alot of new problems and questions with it:

- Is this about all rankings and scores or just the 'big pp'? What will happen to the existing scoreboards on beatmaps. Will a touchscreen top50 or top1 score on a map disappear? https://osu.ppy.sh/b/66514 Wanna know how many top50 plays on this are set with touchscreen? Or do you not care at all about that and only care about the high ranks / big pp plays. - if so: this feature will never happen.
- So what about all existing touchscreen plays? I'm talking all recent touchscreen plays as well as the ones that were set years ago. You can't tell players to change their existing touchscreen plays to another gamemode, since they don't keep track on every score or are retired players.
- When is a play even a touchscreen play? Is -GN's FC on https://osu.ppy.sh/b/24722 and other touchscreen plays considered touchscreen-scoreboard worthy?
- Probably more problems I haven't thought of yet.

The main point is that you're basically too late.
Even if it would be balanced to implement seperate rankings, you're many many years too late to suddenly do that. Only because the scores give big pp people are suddenly critical about it.

I can confidently say seperate rankings will never happen. I can also confidently say that any rational adjustments to pp algorhythm won't fix it either, you'd probably still see freedomdiver top 100 global if that's your concern.
Only thing you can basically do is hope that people will change and not view ranking number as something super serious but view the beatmapscore a player set (and whether it was with touchscreen or regular playstyle), not the number attached to it.

These are the most valid points in the thread, the issue isn't easy to solve. The only point I disagree with is that it's too late. There are cheated scores in the game right now, it's not too late to start removing them; the same can be said about touchscreen plays if the playerbase determines that they need removing. I'm not advocating that touchscreen plays are deleted, maybe hidden from the normal rankings though.

Also GN-'s score isn't touchscreen and he's being robbed of his pp because touchscreen players came along. It's utterly ridiculous imo that normal players have already lost some maps because of a niche, overpowered input method.

Evil_Ocelot wrote:

If someone really had an issue with it, they could get a touchscreen device and play it the same way.

Not true. Touchscreens are far too expensive for a lot of people.

plis no

Touchscreen isn't considered cheating and I don't see why it should as most people wouldn't even double think about it. It's not like installing software to autoplay or getting any help in playing.

But it definitely is a different meta and pp is not adapted to it at all, the problem IMO is that you cannot really programmatically differentiate touchscreen players from tablet/mouse users. Or at least it would require to check input drivers and all those things, which are a mess ... Or to ask to the user their input method ... before every play ? Because there will be many people with a tablet AND a touchscreen playing both input methods just to get the best of both metas ?

This is a good idea but IMO don't expect to have a solution soon as the technical difficulties are still to figure out as far as i know...

Peppy on th issue. Probably won’t happen

t/665986

Sandy Hoey wrote:

Peppy on th issue. Probably won’t happen

t/665986

Thanks for notifying. I edited the top post. : )

It's funny it wasn't an issue when tablet became popular..
If we take for granted that ts>tablet>mouse, and ts gets seperated, mouse shouldn't share leaderboards with tablet either. And then the other playstyle would kinda get a right to be seperated too.

But then what about the hybrid players? 0: What if someone plays pentab/M2? And does it matter if the cursor moves with the mouse or the tablet? Osu is about mastering your own style and seperating someone with his own style is like discrimating them. It's the same that a mouse player could say to a tablet player. If you want to complain get the upgrade.

EDIT: Tried to make it easier to read.

Another thing: If touchscreen is considered op and cheaty, Imagine a touchscreen with it's screen turned of and touch enabled. Now imagine a tablet that can use 2 or more pens. Now imagine those pens can be worn like a fingerglove of for heavens sake, normal pens glued to your finger. That's not impossible and it would be the same as a large enough normal tablet with this kind of functionality. You can achieve the same on both. Even on mouse. If make a box the exact size of the dimensions you need to move your mouse from side to side you can use your mouse as a tablet.

by the way no, tablet is not better than mouse: they’re the same

Kondou-Shinichi wrote:

by the way no, tablet is not better than mouse: they’re the same

That's why almost all top100 players are tablet? Or was it bc The best mouse player himself switched to tablet?.. Hm..

Bruh.. It's commen sense that tablet>mouse

Objectively, tablet is better than mouse. However, choosing tablet over mouse won't make you a better player instantly.
Most players choose tablet over mouse because of absolute positioning and no mouse drift. These two minor reasons isn't enough to justify separate leaderboard, is it?

In touchscreen, it's a different story. it massively reduces the aim aspect of standard, one of the major aspects that makes a beatmap difficult.

But then what about the hybrid players? 0: What if someone plays pentab/M2? And does it matter if the cursor moves with the mouse or the tablet? Osu is about mastering your own style and seperating someone with his own style is like discrimating them. It's the same that a mouse player could say to a tablet player. If you want to complain get the upgrade.

It's their own choice; they have the keyboard, they have the tablet, why bother playing with M2?

Omnipotence - wrote:

It's funny it wasn't an issue when tablet became popular..

It's funny that the issue isn't about peripherals being "easier" or "harder". Also tablets vs mouse was a huge discussion topic when tablets became popular. There's no inherit advantage of using tablet so people started to accept them.

Omnipotence - wrote:

If we take for granted that ts>tablet>mouse, and ts gets seperated, mouse shouldn't share leaderboards with tablet either. And then the other playstyle would kinda get a right to be seperated too.

If we take for granted something subjective, your argument will indeed make more sense. The skill ceiling for touchscreen is inherently higher for jump maps. The skill ceiling for tablet is the same as mouse in every aspect, hence mouse = tablet. A touchscreen can allow people to hit jumps that just physically aren't possible with a tablet/mouse, hence touchscreen > tablet/mouse. Quite simple really.

Omnipotence - wrote:

But then what about the hybrid players? 0: What if someone plays pentab/M2? And does it matter if the cursor moves with the mouse or the tablet? Osu is about mastering your own style and seperating someone with his own style is like discrimating them. It's the same that a mouse player could say to a tablet player. If you want to complain get the upgrade.

People can play however they like, as long as they use 1:1 input methods. If someone started using a macro to click triples, I'd call that cheating. If someone skips the process of dragging the cursor across the screen to hit notes I'd call that cheating too. Clicking and moving the cursor are literally the only 2 components of this game, both should require 1:1 input.

Omnipotence - wrote:

EDIT: Tried to make it easier to read.

Another thing: If touchscreen is considered op and cheaty, Imagine a touchscreen with it's screen turned of and touch enabled. Now imagine a tablet that can use 2 or more pens. Now imagine those pens can be worn like a fingerglove of for heavens sake, normal pens glued to your finger. That's not impossible and it would be the same as a large enough normal tablet with this kind of functionality. You can achieve the same on both. Even on mouse. If make a box the exact size of the dimensions you need to move your mouse from side to side you can use your mouse as a tablet.

It's hard to understand what you're saying because you use tablet and touchscreen interchangeably. From how I'm reading it, your idea wouldn't work with conventional tablets, but let's assume it would. You've essentially just asked me to imagine a tablet that we've turned into a touchscreen without the screen. Yes it's still cheating in my eyes. The input isn't 1:1 anymore, so no it's not fair.

I think it would be cool if there was a mode dedicated only for touch screen players. Something like beatstream maybe. Since Osu! is going to be on ios and Android soon it even makes more sense to have one because it will have a large enough playerbase.

I play td I don't think it gives to much of an advantage as fast streams become near impossible with td jumps do become easier but I have also played with mouse and tracer pad and td is the least comfortable to play with making double clicks or im my case taps far harder so yes jumps are harder but streams and double clicks are harder let me know what you think