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[Proposal] Spread requirements based on song length

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Pennek
As I see it

Current System: Blatant cut-off --> Alienates a lot of mappers. (makes me not want to rank or map it at all, just because it's 4:30 or 4:50.)

New System: Gradual cutoff with a lower/difficulty spread

In general , there will be less workload for mappers who want to map long songs, which do not fit with the current Ranking Criteria. This also means that there will be more content for mappers to choose from, because as it is now, it can't be denied that some tracks just are a lot more troublesome to rank. This turns a lot of mappers off from ranking those songs (me included). If the changes are made, this will help introduce more new content to the game in general. BUT, this won't help new players as much, and it is undeniable that there will be less content for them as mappers who in the current system map 2-3 minute songs with a full spread, switch to longer songs that do not require a full spread.

This is a trade-off --> More content in general vs. Less content for new players. (how much less content is debatable)

Imo. this trade-off is fine. It isn't like everyone is just going to stop mapping their favorite anime TV-openings, their favorite FELT-songs and maps which are less than 3 minutes long. This will just bring more content for mappers to map, bring more new mappers in because they can map their favorite songs easier and bring more content to the game. If anything, not being able to play a song because you can only play Normals at the moment, and you have that one song you really like, which is a HIX-spread, should motivate you to become better at the game. I really don't understand why this has become an 8-page discussion. I fully support the proposal.
Akareh
I dislike mapping short vers/TV sizes, so I'm in favor of this, for what that may be worth.
As far as the cut goes, AncuL's proposal seems the most reasonable to me.

The song length proposal could also work if it was a gradual cut. Having NH be something like 2 minutes while I or X is 4:30 seems pretty unreasonable to me.
I could see something like a 2 minute N, a 3:smth H and a full 4:30 I work fine for a spread, though. We could maybe limit that via % of song that has to be mapped or something along those lines.

Still, more in favor of less difficulties but everything in the set having same length, personally.
pimp
if the drain time is <3:30 your set's lowest diff must be normal or lower
if the drain time is 3:30-4:30 your set's lowest diff must be hard or lower
if the drain time is 4:30-5min your set's lowest diff must be insane or lower
if the mapper picks a song that is 3 minutes long, he could easily eliminate the need of a normal difficulty by extending the song by 30 seconds, if he is not skilled enough to make a decent extention using only the original song he could just add harumachi clover to the mp3, there would be nothing preventing him from doing this... same applies for the other lengths to eliminate the need of the hard or insane...

unless more specific rules are added for compilations like i said, the hard cut-off will be the only reasonable way for dividing ranked and approval.

any song can be shortened if the mapper wants to do everything alone without guest difficulties.
Skubi
I agree
LwL

pimpG wrote:

unless more specific rules are added for compilations like i said, the hard cut-off will be the only reasonable way for dividing ranked and approval.

any song can be shortened if the mapper wants to do everything alone without guest difficulties.


But it would remove a lot of the incentive to do so. You can not reasonably regulate extensions because you can then just call it a remix and it's allowed (it could be left up to QAT discretion but that's just a recipe for drama tbh).

There's no benefit at having a hard cut off vs. a more gradual one. A hard cut-off makes certain song lengths far less desirable for mapping which is just bad for musical variety.

This isn't necessarily about making everything easier to rank (though I think that should be the way this goes), if it was "3 diffs for >4 mins, 2 diffs for >5 mins, 1 diff for >6mins" it'd still help with the problem, even though the workload for 5-6 minute maps would increase (by not that much if it just has to be one additional diff that's at least hard or below or something like that).
pimp
i don't even know why they allow compilations to get approved, osu! is probably the only relevant rhythm game that allows this... at least i don't remember seeing compilations in the other rhythm games i played.

if exploitable rules are added, people will exploit them the weirdest ways as possible. they already exploit the current hard cut-off. we should be thankful that we are even allowed to get maps approved with only one difficulty, because having a spread on every map ranked would be the best for the community in general and especially the new players...
AncuL

LwL wrote:

There's no benefit at having a hard cut off vs. a more gradual one. A hard cut-off makes certain song lengths far less desirable for mapping which is just bad for musical variety.

the first sentence is saying that there's no benefit while the second one tells that it has benefits. nice

PimpG wrote:

if the mapper picks a song that is 3 minutes long, he could easily eliminate the need of a normal difficulty by extending the song by 30 second

yea but by then there's less urge to do that. there's a difference between having to map 4 other diffs compared to 1
LwL

AncuL wrote:

LwL wrote:

There's no benefit at having a hard cut off vs. a more gradual one. A hard cut-off makes certain song lengths far less desirable for mapping which is just bad for musical variety.

the first sentence is saying that there's no benefit while the second one tells that it has benefits. nice


I don't see how having less variety is a benefit but ok
AncuL
I misunderstood sry
LwL

pimpG wrote:

because having a spread on every map ranked would be the best for the community in general and especially the new players...


I didn't see this before but I disagree with this almost entirely. Better for new players sure, hard to argue against that.

But overall? If that happened I can see myself losing interest in the game relatively quickly, it would mean very few long ranked maps, which happen to be the type I enjoy the most. It probably wouldn't even lead to more long difficulties ranked overall (making one diff for 5 different songs is a lot less tedious than 5 diffs for the same song), and the number of different songs at that length getting ranked would almost certainly decrease significantly.
pimp
was mostly refering to the players as "community in general", not the mappers

i don't want approval to be discontinued if that's what you were thinking
but i suppose having all songs mapped for every skill level would be the best thing from the staff's perspective, but they understand that mapping takes time, it's "voluntary work" so it gives no real reward for the content creators, and that's why the approval exists.
LwL
Yeah I can agree with that, in an ideal world every song would have a spread.
SenpaiKiseki
I'd say maps that are about 5-8 seconds short off of 300 seconds can be ranked on a case-to-case basis, but If someone did mp3 edits to extend it to barely hit this 5-8 seconds shortage, I feel like that shouldn't be rankable.

TL;DR being short 8 seconds makes me want to kill myself
qwr
Case-by-case basis is inviting people to complain about bias. Better to have a criteria everyone must follow.
Ambrew
I am absolutely behind this. I can say, with full confidence, that the extensions, mp3 editing, etc is based out of one thing: Laziness. It's stupid and completely pathetic. Seriously. This needs to STOP. How is this even allowed lol you guys are letting these esoteric people BEND the rules for the reasons that they're lazy, impatient or apathetic about making a full set. This is creating a CRISIS.

"it's his choice" "it's five minutes that's his choice"

His choice, his consequences.

This is a controversy amongst others that I feel is extremely perilous and actually quite sad. I could even conjecture that people who do this don't do it for the love of the music itself or that they genuinely care about the song, but that they want just "one map, one diff", say "It's 5 mins so I can get this ranked", and is even inviting other mappers to do the same. When I wanted to make a map of bassdrop Freaks 2018 Redrop version and tried to find people who to collab with, I was already aware it's only 4:30, but I was prepared to make a whole set. Mappers should realize THIS IS THE NORM. If this behavior continues, I feel like this kind of extending would increase to songs of 4 minute length, 3:30, and so on.

Say what you will, I firmly stand behind all my previous statements.
Krfawy
I will make it very clear that if my National Hangover Anthem aka Kac was looped to 4 minutes and people skipped mapping at least Normal difficulty for the song, I would be, putting it unbelievably lightly, pissed off to my very fucking death. If you make a spread, at least the standard one, and not a marathon map(set), then for God's sake, make it playable for noobs. We've already dropped the 1.99* star rating rule which is catastrophic in terms of how extreme so-called "easier" maps are nowadays and you want to take it to another level? God forbid, that is becoming a literal nonsense and pain in the back for the newer audience and I hope everyone agreeing on this issue starts thinking a little bit more soberly because that seems as if you all want to create only 5-10* content.

I'm crying for this proposal to die as soon as right now, I am not even going to hide how triggering that is.
LwL

Krfawy wrote:

I hope everyone agreeing on this issue starts thinking a little bit more soberly because that seems as if you all want to create only 5-10* content.


No, I want to create content I enjoy creating, and mapping the same song multiple times very rarely falls under that for me. And I'm most certainly not alone on this or we wouldn't see so many sets with 1 diff per mapper. And for many, mapping a long song probably invokes a similar feeling as most songs repeat themselves, which also makes it harder to fill a 4 minute set up with GDs in that manner.

Krfawy wrote:

I'm crying for this proposal to die as soon as right now, I am not even going to hide how triggering that is.


You can still force normals while helping with the problem if you just modify the precise rules a bit. It would still help as in terms of workload it's much less to map, say, N-I-X with the X being 6.5* or sth than a full spread that would almost certainly need an additional extra, or high star insane, as well as a hard.

Krfawy wrote:

I will make it very clear that if my National Hangover Anthem aka Kac was looped to 4 minutes and people skipped mapping at least Normal difficulty for the song, I would be, putting it unbelievably lightly, pissed off to my very fucking death.


And as it stands you could just loop the song to 5 minutes instead and map only one diff, yay so much better! The point of this proposal is precisely to reduce the excessive amount of looping that came up recently, because not having a gradual cutoff is just screaming for loops. The workload difference between N-H-I-X-X and N-I-X is decent, but if the first is 3:40 and the second is 4:10, it's not that bad. However having a 4:40 N-H-I-X-X spread vs. a 5:10 single diff is huge.
peppy
Hi I'm new to this thread.

I tend to agree with this direction. It is hard to map easier difficulties over longer periods of time because it is harder to keep things interesting.

The argument of not having enough beginner content doesn't really hold because we already have a huge library of easy difficulties.

We should probably also disallow extending songs for the only goal of hitting a length. Cutting shorter is fine; extending should not be.
Pachiru
thanks ppy
but if cutting a song is fine, why entending shouldn't be then?
Kyuunex
I agree with peppy.
including the part "Cutting shorter is fine"
peppy
Cutting shorter is done to make it more playable/suited to a rhythm game. Making longer is done to avoid mapping certain difficulties with basically no exception.
lewski

peppy wrote:

Cutting shorter is done to make it more playable/suited to a rhythm game. Making longer is done to avoid mapping certain difficulties with basically no exception.


Yeah, extending is almost always done just to hit five minutes, but I seriously doubt most people cut songs for any reason other than not wanting to map the whole thing lol
Mordred
People cut songs because they're lazy. Extension are done for the exact same reason, barely anyone likes to make a 4:59 spread
pimp

peppy wrote:

Making longer is done to avoid mapping certain difficulties with basically no exception.
are you just refering to mp3 loops?
including a song to the end of the mp3 counts as making longer or will it just be considered a "compilation"?
Kyuunex
before moving forward, we should decide what kind of extensions are a no-no.

are r3 ok? because it can be considered a compilation, one song after another.

another example are short ~29 second anime opening/ending songs, like Harumachi clover, where the song is under 30 seconds but mappers have been extending them to hit the 30 second mark.


as for cuts, i personally cut the song for playability and "not making the player bored" sake. Most songs have pretty much copy pasted rhythm.
The most common song structure is intro, verse, pre-chorus, chorus (or refrain), verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge ("middle eight"), verse, chorus and outro, and then the song is pretty much over. pretty much copy paste with different vocals.

making a song shorter serves more purpose than just putting less work. in fact, it does not require that much work if i don't cut a song, i just copy paste items, change them up a little and etc.
Vacuous

Kyuunex wrote:

before moving forward, we should decide what kind of extensions are a no-no.

are r3 ok? because it can be considered a compilation, one song after another.

I'd say that r3 is not ok because in almost every circumstance where it has been put in a "compilation" it's been to extend a song past 5 min. If the compilation itself is all r3 music box songs that'd be fine but just pasting it onto a 4:40 song should not be acceptable imo
Nao Tomori
i think extending to meet 30s mark is different from meeting 5min mark. cuz otherwise its literally unrankable for 30s but for 5min its just to have less effort. extending to approval length with r3 or whatnot is what is being targeted here after all
Topic Starter
UndeadCapulet
eek thread derailing fast

@peppy thank you for your approval! will get the extension stuff drafted in soon

@everyone freaking out about extension ban, please do me a huge and favour and 1) reread the op, most reasons people have for extensions are irrelevant with this proposal, and 2) wait until the ban is drafted until you start heavily discussing, i already know all the things needed to consider like compilations, 30sec, 1sec extensions, etc. that will be accommodated for, it's just going to take some time for me to draft it up/oko to get back home from vacation to actually push it

things are happening now, i won't let those things hurt the game, just hold on
moonpoint
some of us discussed this on a discord, if you're interested in reading what some other people think about it then you can click right over here.
Teky
I agree with the idea of more length = less diffs mapped. I am interested to see what people against this idea say and their reasons.
LwL
In general regarding extension ban, if it's done (which is hard to do objectively because you can just call it a remix), the rule should be worded as such that you can still extend songs if you want, you just have to still map the spread required for the original length. That would also eliminate the problem with <30 seconds songs. This is simply to allow people to extend songs or maybe use minor remixes that happen to put it past 5 minutes and might be seen as "lazy edits for extension" by the relevant people (and such a subjective judgement will be necessary at times since it's simply not possible to 100% objectively determine what is an extension and what is a legitimate remix or compilation).
Fu Xuan
peppy our saviour
Topic Starter
UndeadCapulet
ooooooooookay here's the draft: https://gist.github.com/Okorin/190bc363 ... 919eb8e1cf

tl;dr of the draft:
  1. incorporated the op
  2. incorporated a draft of the upcoming compilation rules staff want that you can read about here: https://osu.ppy.sh/beatmapsets/786643/d ... ll#/289974
  3. incorporated the extension ban peppy requested
  4. incorporated this proposal: t/726926 to enable marathon rules to function for sets where the topdiff is lower than the required lowest difficulty
hope this makes everyone happy
Pennek
I love you all, what a time to be alive. I really hope these changes go through.
Noffy
1

Proposal wrote:

Song compilations must incorporate 3 or more songs. Using only 2 songs in a compilation is not a sufficient number of tracks to offer a compelling experience for players when compiled together, and should be broken up into separate mapsets.
Ooook so... would 2 songs be considered a compilation, or would it go under the other rule about "The audio file of a song must not be artificially extended in order to meet a time limitation in the mapset section of this criteria. ... If the audio file is extended in such a way, the mapset must still comply with the time limitations of its unaltered audio. Song compilations are not considered extensions, and are exempt from this rule."
What if one or both of the two songs is already over 5 minutes, but the mapper chose to combine them because they're directly related to eachother? The way this is currently put together would disallow that as well, because that'd still be considered a compilation atm.

I think a better approach would be defining "Compilation" in the Glossary as an edit which puts together 3 or more songs, and having rules related to the quality of compilations and other edits similarly to how they currently are to avoid confusion about this. Then it'd be obvious if a combination of 2 songs would be considered a compilation or an "artificial extension" and whether or not it's completely disallowed like the current draft implies

2

Proposal wrote:

Song compilations must be mixed properly and cannot include abrupt breaks or long fades between different songs. This is to ensure compilations achieve the same cohesive gameplay experience as other beatmaps.
ok what is a "long fade" here? There's no idea how long "long" could possibly be.

3

Proposal wrote:

The audio file of a song must not be artificially extended in order to meet a time limitation in the mapset section of this criteria. Illegal extensions include (but are not limited to) looping sections of the audio file, lowering the bpm of the song or section of the song, and adding small amounts of music to the song without incorporating it throughout the entire song. If the audio file is extended in such a way, the mapset must still comply with the time limitations of its unaltered audio. Song compilations are not considered extensions, and are exempt from this rule.
this rule is disallowing extending songs to be over 30 seconds, this isn't accommodating for 30 second songs at all with this wording.

Ranking Criteria wrote:

Mapsets must have a minimum drain time of 30 seconds. This ensures each ranked map has a practical play-time.
This is a time limitation in the mapset section of the ranking criteria. Which is exactly what your proposed rule specifies about when extending songs is bad and not allowed.

4

UndeadCapulet wrote:

incorporated this proposal: t/726926 to enable marathon rules to function for sets where the topdiff is lower than the required lowest difficulty
where? all I see is "Single-mode mapsets must include a reasonable spread of at least two difficulties. " which is not that at all. I don't see any exceptions listed, am I blind?
Okoratu
1 - they wouldnt they'd count as extension but i can see where you're coming fromwith this
your second idea about the glossary makes no sense to me because that's in the top of the proposal and there?
2 - dunno suggest some value
3 - ok we need to exclude 30 seconds from this? i mean i find 30 seconds mapsets pointless but whatever yeah
4 - probably not direct enough inclusion of that - yeah i dont see it either rn
Topic Starter
UndeadCapulet
fuck i knew i forgot something, will get the 30 sec extensions added in

and uh yeah noffy you should re-read, bc we took out the 2 diff minimum
Noffy

UndeadCapulet wrote:

and uh yeah noffy you should re-read, bc we took out the 2 diff minimum
I'm blind :psy:

2.) like over 10 seconds would count as long, I'd think? under that should be fine as it'd work well to add in a short break too (like a lot of old song compilations do)
Okoratu
Wait fuck i didnt see that either and i helped write it
Topic Starter
UndeadCapulet
the point of the long fades thing was to make p much any fade that wasn't a seemless transition illegal, as staff don't like those anymore. perhaps instead of fussing about how long "long" is we should just reword it to make that more clear?
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