Hi everyone!

It's been a minute since the "Captain's Pick" vote collaboration between Ephemeral and I was rolled out and I've taken into consideration feedback from both Reddit and the osu!forums.

Two concerns that stood out were a lack of lower level beatmaps and that maps selected could be biased by the representatives of each mode. I am here to address these issues and propose a solution that will hopefully work better in the long-run than previous Loved implementations.

As you may or may not know, Captain's Pick is a community-driven effort to revamp the Loved category and spark new interest through the addition of more community chosen mapsets. Through the collective efforts of myself, tasuke912, Zak, and Halogen-, we created a grouping of worthy (in our opinions) maps to be put forward for voting in our respective gamemodes of proficiency. I am looking to also find a representative to divide osu!mania into 4k and 7k denominations as there appear to be separate communities for both.

The plan for now is to open up a Google Submission for for anyone in the community to nominate mapsets which they believe are worthy of being Loved. I am providing an optional space for you to "pitch" your maps as you why they deserve to be selected, as well as limiting the maps submitted per submission form to one at a time to avoid large map dumps. I wish to give more power to you as a submitter to explain what makes a mapset unique and give the community a larger voice versus giving us a list of links and creating our own, unavoidably biased lists for each week.

This submission form will remain perpetually open to responses (barring abuse of the form) and voting is planned to occur weekly for standard, and possibly staggered further for other modes that don't have the large pool of graveyarded maps as standard has.

I am very receptive to any comments, concerns, feedback, or questions that people have about this plan and would love to hear what you think can be improved each week.

Let's bring the love back into the Loved category.

Here is the submission link

Note: Chinese players without access to Google may submit maps to me directly by Forum PM. Thanks 09kami for pointing this out.

Reddit Post

EDIT: I have begun manually adding submitted maps into this public spreadsheet. Here you can view what maps have been submitted and which are more popular compared to others. If you already see a map listed here, don't be afraid to submit it again under your own name. More votes only reinforces that map's status!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing (Sorry to all Chinese players who don't have access to Google :c)

Ayyo this is awesome, the previous Captain's voting was already stellar and much better than the other loved votings. Adding user suggestions makes it less of a "a few guys act alone on behalf of the community" and more of a community based effort with the final judgement made by the same people who brought us the great previous one. Hope this goes through and continues!!

Also I assume it's okay to vote for maps that didn't make the previous picks right? Asking mostly because I'm a massive yakubyougami fan.

Big thanks for your continued spearheading of this process, Toy. I commend you for doing this while having the responsibilities of OWC around the corner, and you've been pretty awesome to work with in the limited contact we've had. Of course, thanks to Ephemeral for allowing this to happen, as well.

Hi! I think its a pretty good thought. Although I'm not 100% sure what does "Loved Category" nowadays state for...so I'm a bit confused

I'd like to hear about the maps which people raised to the previous 100kds requirement months ago before the system was "officially" put on hiatus that still haven't been added to Loved.

Otherwise this sounds great.

Thats some sweet news to hear, i'm always up to look at the loved section as I believe it's a breath of fresh air compared to the more common stuff ranked is used to show.

However regarding osu!minigames i'm still not enthusiast in the 30 favs rule. Standard benefit of the advantage of having a huge active community (i'm pretty sure it's at least twice bigger than every osu!minigames combined) and I believe it's a fair cap of quality you can ask for.
But we kinda run in a wall when it comes to CTB, Taiko or Mania : favourite is not a good way to valuate because it's not revelant in any ways.

First of all it's super difficult to get 30 favs in any of these mods (well, let's say just difficult for mania) and so this cap is too big.

"Then we just lower this cap and it's all good !!"

Actually it's not that simple because if we lower it, it might just be even more terrible as it's not that hard to get let's say 10-15 friend/randoms to fav it. I believe everyone start to understand how bad this is.

Another point is fav is a really largely community driven system and it does not reflect the spirit of loved. Most favourited maps are often driven by trends over either mappers or artists/songs and not the map ITSELF in particular.
Let's take one of my favourite maps and one of I believe is the finest goods of mania pending :

b4kn - Act V - The Battle At Mammoth Mountain

It's structurally super interresting, it's freaking blast to play and it's mostly feels really unusual from most ranked (and pendings) we use to play.
Yet as i'm writing this, it only have 4 favs (yeah I didn't faved it because I start to be really limited with 3 favs remaining lmao) because it's super niche.

I believe we all agree loved should be this section that doesn't feel like a ranked v2, yet I believe theses ruleset goes completely againsn't it.

If you want your loved section to be a succes, just be confident in your Captains knowledge as i'm sure these persons don't need to deal with dumb restrective rulesets to pull out some of the best experiences of osu!minigames.

With that bein said, I wish you the best of luck for the loved section !

Cool, I just now pray that people still maps for ranked if we will have a weekly loved category .

Weber wrote:

I'd like to hear about the maps which people raised to the previous 100kds requirement months ago before the system was "officially" put on hiatus that still haven't been added to Loved.

Otherwise this sounds great.

I'd like to think most of them should be up for consideration - however, given that the concept of KD was somewhat exploitable, I feel like maps whose KD totals were contributed largely by small amounts of individuals shouldn't be given the opportunity to get to loved status (primary example: Another Lie's Beethoven Influenza, which only got loved because Another Lie KD farmed and literally dumped 100 of their stars into it). It's not "loved" if it doesn't really have support.

Xeo: I appreciate the compliment about my map, hahaha. That being said, 30 favorites might be a little high; however, but I don't think it's an unreasonable total simply on the concept of loved maps now: if the community really enjoys a particular map and it's well done/understandable, it'll likely get noticed. It's pretty easy to tell the difference between a map that is forcefully nominated as a result of recommendation and nothing, versus telling the difference from something that is nominated because it is truly different, and stands out for some reason.

I definitely understand the concerns about loved being a "ranked v2", and I'll certainly be keeping that in mind as well.

Why would you do this to the other modes again. We already told you, 30 favorites is unacceptable for anything that isn't osu!standard. How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?

XeoStyle wrote:

Thats some sweet news to hear, i'm always up to look at the loved section as I believe it's a breath of fresh air compared to the more common stuff ranked is used to show.

However regarding osu!minigames i'm still not enthusiast in the 30 favs rule. Standard benefit of the advantage of having a huge active community (i'm pretty sure it's at least twice bigger than every osu!minigames combined) and I believe it's a fair cap of quality you can ask for.
But we kinda run in a wall when it comes to CTB, Taiko or Mania : favourite is not a good way to valuate because it's not revelant in any ways.

First of all it's super difficult to get 30 favs in any of these mods (well, let's say just difficult for mania) and so this cap is too big.

This hard cap was set with mainly osu!standard in mind, my fellow map selectors are telling me to be lax about the Fave reqs in the other modes. While it may not seem intuitive for mania, it has its purpose in standard.

Backfire wrote:

Why would you do this to the other modes again. We already told you, 30 favorites is unacceptable for anything that isn't osu!standard. How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?

That cap is for standard only.

Necros96 wrote:

Hi! I think its a pretty good thought. Although I'm not 100% sure what does "Loved Category" nowadays state for...so I'm a bit confused

The Loved category was initially implemented to give maps that don't particularly meet the ranking criteria their own separate leaderboards that don't grant performance points. The goal in the continuation of this category is to give credit to maps and mappers who exceed the standards of quality in mapping, yet are unable to be recognized through ranked status due to failing to meet the set criteria.

How would maps that were designed for loved be treated?

Eg. if an osu favourites collab was revived and made some changes so that it can be submitted to loved, would it have to wait until it's re-graved? Or can it be submitted when fixes are done?

Toy wrote:

Backfire wrote:

Why would you do this to the other modes again. We already told you, 30 favorites is unacceptable for anything that isn't osu!standard. How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?

That cap is for standard only.

So what is the situation for other modes? Can you specify?

Sorry for playing around btw I wasn't trying to be rude.

If Katayoku no Tori doesn't get loved i'm gonna cry.
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/646861

This new system - I am a very very VERY big fan of. This new system actually feels like what Loved is genuinely supposed to be. The community hand picking maps & submitting them, instead of getting a random list of random maps & voting on them.

It actually makes us feel like we have control over which maps do & don't get Loved, and I absolutely love this.

Thank you.

Because Loved maps are receiving a leaderboard and being passed off as official content, should official metadata be applied to future maps in the Loved section?

30 favourites are gonna be hard to get even for standard maps that aren't super difficult or really outstanding gameplay-wise. The lack of lower difficulty maps in the loved section can be explained by that.

There are so many great maps worthy of being loved, but they are outside the radar for most people.

Sinnoh wrote:

How would maps that were designed for loved be treated?

Eg. if an osu favourites collab was revived and made some changes so that it can be submitted to loved, would it have to wait until it's re-graved? Or can it be submitted when fixes are done?

The graveyard rule is in place to prevent submissions for mappers who are still updating their maps. If the mapper specifies that the map is "ready" after making recent changes then it will be looked at case by case.

Backfire wrote:

So what is the situation for other modes? Can you specify?

Sorry for playing around btw I wasn't trying to be rude.

Other mode restrictions and criteria will be developed by the respective "captain" of each mode. This being tasuke912, Zak, and Halogen- for osu!taiko, osu!catch, and osu!mania respectively.

_verto_ wrote:

30 favourites are gonna be hard to get even for standard maps that aren't super difficult or really outstanding gameplay-wise. The lack of lower difficulty maps in the loved section can be explained by that.

There are so many great maps worthy of being loved, but they are outside the radar for most people.

At that point, it's unclear whether these maps fit under the criteria of "Loved", meaning well-recognized by a large portion of the community aside from the general quality requirement. If these maps are of quality, but don't meet 30 favorites, it shouldn't be terribly hard to get a small group of backers to vouch for the map I'd imagine

Monstrata wrote:

Because Loved maps are receiving a leaderboard and being passed off as official content, should official metadata be applied to future maps in the Loved section?

Very interesting point. I'd like to open that up to the decision of Beatmap Nominators, though I feel as it's not terribly necessary to regulate it very strictly.

when will my aspire 3rd place be loved btw its been a few months

Emilia wrote:

when will my aspire 3rd place be loved btw its been a few months

Fixed! You gotta let me know about these things.

Monstrata wrote:

Because Loved maps are receiving a leaderboard and being passed off as official content, should official metadata be applied to future maps in the Loved section?

It would be ideal for Loved maps to have correct metadata, yes. Or at least mostly correct.

Amazing change. I really dig this!
You guys nailed it.

As added discussion: What are your thoughts on maps with multiple difficulties that only change AR? Should they all be loved, or only the "original" difficulty?

Original difficuly would be better in my opinion. I mean don't we want to have the same diffs with an AR change right?

More AR difficulties would be appreciated but I don't wanna people deliberately overdoing it...

I personally see no harm in putting all the difficulties into Loved, seeing as none of them give performance points anyway. If any amount of pp was granted, then my answer would be to just put the original difficulty into Loved, but with the way it is now - what's the worse that could happen? (apart from one diff being favored over any others)

A few problems I have with the current system:
- Transparency is good, but what happens when you have 1000 nominations on a map where 999/1000 nominations are from people who can't even play the map and just want Cookiezi to play it, in terms of community backlash and map selection?
- In the case that you decide to go with vetoing, isn't the number of times a map has been nominated irrelevant?

I have no problems with transparency itself, it's just that the other criteria are vague, which could lead to confusion, ie. what qualifies a map for being loved? Whilst the general premise for this is that the community loves the maps, in some cases the part of the community that loves the map isn't the part that can play the map. (Hint: https://osu.ppy.sh/s/234785 does anyone enjoy this map honestly?)

Not trying to nitpick at anything, I'd just like some more clarification on how you'd actually picked loved maps before getting my hopes up lole!!!!

Dumii wrote:

A few problems I have with the current system:
- Transparency is good, but what happens when you have 1000 nominations on a map where 999/1000 nominations are from people who can't even play the map and just want Cookiezi to play it, in terms of community backlash and map selection?
- In the case that you decide to go with vetoing, isn't the number of times a map has been nominated irrelevant?

I have no problems with transparency itself, it's just that the other criteria are vague, which could lead to confusion, ie. what qualifies a map for being loved? Whilst the general premise for this is that the community loves the maps, in some cases the part of the community that loves the map isn't the part that can play the map. (Hint: https://osu.ppy.sh/s/234785 does anyone enjoy this map honestly?)

Not trying to nitpick at anything, I'd just like some more clarification on how you'd actually picked loved maps before getting my hopes up lole!!!!

At this point, maps are being selected based on # of favorites (real variable) and community appraisal (nominal). The latter is generally measured on a basis of someone active within the community (in this case myself) and their knowledge of how popular maps are.

Yes, it's vague, but the criteria have always been, because when we tried to set requirements (100kds) the system turned out worse than ever before. For the most part, it's not difficult to tell which maps are being nominated for the sake of a top player playing it and which are genuinely "loved" by a majority of the community.

can you maybe please update the form and mention that you only need 30 favs in osu!standard? Would reduce the amount of confusion this creates^^

Nwolf wrote:

can you maybe please update the form and mention that you only need 30 favs in osu!standard? Would reduce the amount of confusion this creates^^

fixed!

Too bad I hardly keep up with Standard beatmaps now.

Will the set owners be contacted if their map is chosen for the voting stage? Some sets are in the graveyard, but the mapper might still intend to rank them. Wouldn't be good if it was suddenly in the loved section

Also, will there be more people on the team in the future? I feel having only one person choose all loved maps going to voting is kinda limiting and not representing the whole community. 2-3 per mode would make going through maps a bit easier + has a wider scope of opinions


Also, here's an excel version for the Chinese, it doesn't get updated but it gives you an idea of what is being submitted https://puu.sh/ykeYj/29277c8abe.xlsx

Sinnoh wrote:

Will the set owners be contacted if their map is chosen for the voting stage? Some sets are in the graveyard, but the mapper might still intend to rank them. Wouldn't be good if it was suddenly in the loved section

Also, will there be more people on the team in the future? I feel having only one person choose all loved maps going to voting is kinda limiting and not representing the whole community. 2-3 per mode would make going through maps a bit easier + has a wider scope of opinions


Also, here's an excel version for the Chinese, it doesn't get updated but it gives you an idea of what is being submitted https://puu.sh/ykeYj/29277c8abe.xlsx

why wouldn't it be good? You can still ranked loved maps. but contacting them is good idea.

just skimming over everything and holy theres alot of maps on that submission already ( i have quite a few of them myself surprisingly )
Just wondering about 2 things really.

Once maps start getting added to loved based from the spreadsheet is it going to be similar to the previous way of just however many maps once a month or is it gonna be more frequent just asking because while i understand its still very much a WIP i have no idea what its looking at especially since honestly like half that spreadsheet is love worthy based on favorites alone with many exceeding the 30 favorites bar many times over but i dont see staff just adding 100 sets to loved at once as much as i would like it to happen.

other then that any plans on having more people help? especially for std? i could see this being pretty goddamn hard to keep up with with just you handling it toy. ( is this why your not OWC USA cptn? :thinking: ) especially with life, OWC, and the other 39930 ranked maps

Edit: i just noticed theres another vote LOL i check shit almost everyday and i didnt even know wow. well i hope these votes happen very often

When are more maps going to get pushed from the forms into the sheet? o.o

Captain's Notes wrote:

Oh boy. Lots of difficulties covering from 4k all the way up to 10k. I'm not entirely sure this should be added to Loved at the current moment because it seems like CircusGalop may still be adding to it constantly?

I can't update that any more because of the 32MB upload limit. Piano .ogg files of 15 classical pieces are shared, but the .osu files of those aren't.
So I decided to include only one of each difficulties in 4K 5K 7K and to nominate own map.

tatatat wrote:

When are more maps going to get pushed from the forms into the sheet? o.o

Whenever the captains for that specific mode have free time, it's currently a very WIP project

whats going on with the mania submissions lol. some have been on the spreadsheet for over a month without being looked at.

tatatat wrote:

whats going on with the mania submissions lol. some have been on the spreadsheet for over a month without being looked at.

I assume it's on hold for OWC

Primiriko wrote:

tatatat wrote:

whats going on with the mania submissions lol. some have been on the spreadsheet for over a month without being looked at.

I assume it's on hold for OWC

Huh okay I guess.

Just when censored move to loved section?! https://osu.ppy.sh/s/473410

SpectorDG wrote:

Just when censored move to loved section?! https://osu.ppy.sh/s/473410

I personally dislike when a map creator pushes their own maps "For Loved", because it's counter to the process of the system. If it's good, it'll be nominated eventually. Just be patient.

Toy wrote:

SpectorDG wrote:

Just when censored move to loved section?! https://osu.ppy.sh/s/473410

I personally dislike when a map creator pushes their own maps "For Loved", because it's counter to the process of the system. If it's good, it'll be nominated eventually. Just be patient.

I agree and especially if you're just trying to pressure people into putting your own maps in. Everything submitted to the spreadsheet will get it's chance.
There's hundreds of maps waiting for it, it's going to take a long time to get through everything, but that way we can truly fulfil the category's objective while not bombarding the voting with way too many maps at once.

tl;dr be patient, don't force your own maps on us, we know what to do and we only look at the submission sheet.

Look, it's reason why osu!mania community is still dead

Screenshots will be come

Sorry, I did not check into this thread for a week but how exactly is not promoting a map that you're trying to stick in out faces a reason for community being presumably "dead"?
That makes absolutely no sense, Loved is not for promoting your own maps because you want to, but it's for promoting quality content that did not reach ranked for some reason.

SpectorDG wrote:

Screenshots will be come

I also wonder what screenshots you're reffering to, but sure, go ahead?

omg is that joke? i hopes it's alive but :V kamikaze nominating maps :V .. yeah it's dead :'(

Can you please refer from personal accusations in a discussion thread? I would really appreciate it if you could just let us do our job and see what happens rather than do this. You can also join the osu!dev Discord server if you wish to want to suggest any changes.

Because you've asked so nicely, t+pazolite - CENSORED!! will be up for the vote on the next batch.

what happened to shining collection ? it got loved but isnt anymore now.