I would increase the workload of mapping TV-size maps rather than only reduce 4+min maps.

Stupidity and laziness level intensifies

UndeadCapulet wrote:

1. if the drain time is 4:15 - 5min your set's lowest diff must be insane or lower

While I do agree with the question at hand I do not get why there is no need for a middleground (Hard) level above 4:15. You are technically closing out a huge number of players with this step since no one will ever map a Hard if a standalone Insane is enough. We are talking about 30-50k people whose will be able to play these maps while the rest has to skip them because of the unreachable difficulty level.

I would lower the requirement to Hard. That is a far more acceptable difficulty level and can actually reach over 100k people which is double the size of the current number.

Kurokami wrote:

Stupidity and laziness level intensifies

UndeadCapulet wrote:

1. if the drain time is 4:15 - 5min your set's lowest diff must be insane or lower

While I do agree with the question at hand I do not get why there is no need for a middle ground (Hard) level above 4:15. You are technically closing out a huge number of players with this step since no one will ever map a Hard if a standalone Insane is enough. We are talking about 30-50k people whose will be able to play these maps while the rest has to skip them because of the unreachable difficulty level.

I would lower the requirement to Hard. That is a far more acceptable difficulty level and can actually reach over 100k people which is double the size of the current number.

A lot of things wrong with this comment. //Stupidity and laziness level intensifies// (I am merely quoting an ex-QAT).

1. Hard level is also worked into the proposal, being specifically for songs 3:30 and above. The proposal is effectively scaling time-length with difficulty.

2. Hard is not a middle ground, it would be the lower limit.

3. A "huge number of players" is just rhetorical nonsense... Where did you get your numbers from?

4. As someone who is over 50k, I can assure you that I can very easily play "Insane" level maps.

5. I can assure you that many 250-300k players can play Insanes. Where am I getting my statistics? From places like: https://osu.ppy.sh/p/pp/?c=GB&m=0&s=3&o=1&f=0&page=150 . A simple review of random players' top scores show the majority of them are Insane maps. Even random 300k+'s https://osu.ppy.sh/p/pp/?c=GB&m=0&s=3&o=1&f=0&page=200 ...

Okoratu wrote:

we need to define how easy we expect a hard to be rather than taking sets down for it so that we're all on the same page

Oh, I know! No idea how to word it but as an example: the Hard difficulty to be the lowest one in the set should be as easy as Oko's Normal (that actually is and works as an Advanced/a Hard): https://osu.ppy.sh/beatmapsets/450762#osu/1629268

BUT it mustn't be as hard as Reiji's Hard here: https://osu.ppy.sh/beatmapsets/666566#osu/1418862

I mean, the hard-to-read stacks not being allowed, high density and high spacings forbidden, not too many triples/streams in a row, something like that would be defined in such a kind of hard and it wouldn't hurt to add a guideline saying "you might want to keep it as simplistic in some terms as Normals" or should I say when you make a Normal it is suggested we should follow guidelines from a difficulty below the Normal, then why not using something similar for a Hard?

EDIT: In this case I REALLY think star rating would be helpful here. If a Hard has an Insane icon, you know for sure it is NOT easy enough.

kurokami 6 digits are faming Tons of low end 4 stars

i had my first 5* FC when i was 45k.....a year ago. and thats late to have that. most people i see get their first 5* FC well before 50k. some asspull it while still 6 digit now

Wutever wrote:

i had my first 5* FC when i was 45k.....a year ago. and thats late to have that. most people i see get their first 5* FC well before 50k. some asspull it while still 6 digit now

Yeah lol I fc'd shiori with some luck when I was still 110k or something

Yeah I had a 4.83* fc as my top play when I was 30k. That was over three years ago with less than 2k pp total. Most highish 6 digits will be able to play mid-4* nowadays, quite a few players between 100k and 200k are in 5*+ multi lobbies even.

Aside from that, I definitely agree with Krfawy that SR for the lowest end difficulty should be within whatever the icon for that difficulty is.

Regarding more specific guidelines, I still don't think too much is needed. Others would need to weigh in on this but imo all the spacing stuff would be covered by the SR limit usually, so what might be needed to add would be reading and stamina related things. Therefore, just taking guidelines that currently apply to normals I would propose adding to lowest diff hards I'd suggest the following - I'm basing this on the goal of making these difficulties not frustrating to play as a whole, this is again based on personal experience but if there was one part I couldn't play that never felt like much of an issue, if the entire map was out of my level it just felt bad. (personal annotations in blue)

Avoid long chains of active hit objects with 1/2 gaps. Too many consecutive clicks can be exhausting for new players. - in my experience most hard diffs of decently fast songs do this already anyway so it shouldn't be an issue, and would ensure playability

avoid switching between 1/1, 1/2 and 1/4 stacks repeatedly. This may cause reading issues for new players, since two different rhythms are visually the same. - especially if someone is already challenged by the general speed of a map, having to switch up the rhythm on visually similar patterns can be hard

In addition to that, for lowest diff Insanes:

Avoid frequent streams made of more than 5 notes. Short reversing sliders can be used in exchange for these when the song supports it. - stamina is an issue, and while a single longer stream is just a problem on that stream, having many of them can make the entire map frustrating

not the right place to suggest osu specific guidelines, a thread for that will follow.

this draft is now applied

Note: the QAT reserves the right to reevaluate if this approach made the quality of spreads that end up in the Ranked section significantly worse within the next 6 months of this being applied in case this proposal spectacularly falls flat on its face

The wiki pache is cached and can take up to 3 hours to refresh with the new information

OK so here's clarification:

- The guideline about beatmaps should have 2 difficulties was not added to the final draft, because the exhaustive reasoning required to ignore such a guideline would be "nope, i dont want to"

I forgot mentioning this on the thread, sry

If you think this should be added, please bring forth arguments and how you would evaluate such a guideline under the definition of what a guideline is

moving the thread back to RC proposals

ah, this entire "all or nothing" attitude is horrible. So the only solution you guys managed to find was to draw shitty red lines of where stuff is either "too long to have an beginner difficulty at all" or "not long enough so map a full beginner difficulty".

I'd like to repeat what I repeated on other places already, but please somebody explain me why you guys think that "all or nothing" is the only approach that you actually were able to go with?

You say "Hey, look, we get it, mapping a 5 minutes Easy is awful and boring to everybody, it's stale and uninteresting" and then you deduct "SO DON'T MAKE THEM AT ALL!" instead of "Make an Easy that has a 1 minute of drain time, that's enough!"

It doesn't make sense. Sure, for some shitty reason or another, making beatmap sets with varying drain times between difficulties is frowned upon to heavens. (I don't know why, but ok). Also there is this one rule that prohibits you to use less than 80% of the song or something. Fair enough, but why must this be adhered to in all difficulties? Why does the rule not say "If you never use more than 80% of the song in any of the difficulties, then you can't rank it, because you should cut the song, since you never use a huge chunk of the song in any of your difficulties, but if you use 80%+ of the song in at least one or two or whatever amount of difficulites and you can do whatever length on the easier ones, then be my guest".

What I am proposing instead is to keep beginner difficulties mandatory as prior the change and as we are used to it, however, allow people to map easier difficulties of shorter drain time, so they keep getting created for beginners to enjoy, but still don't make mappers vomit the same copypaste pattern into a 5 minute map, where even the untrained monkey from the basement would fall asleep at playing it.

Ranking Criteria wrote:

Difficulties lower than the hardest difficulty of a beatmapset can use their play time as a metric instead of drain time, but their drain time must be equal to at least 80% of their play time. (Not applicable to difficulties below 30 seconds of drain time.)

From what I can tell this basically just wants to accomplish allowing breaks in lower difficulties, but along with that it also implies that only the top difficulty can have less than 80% of play time as drain time, which seems a bit strange.

In order to allow lower difficulties to have breaks and stuff, you could instead base the drain time used in judging spread on the top difficulty, rather than each and every difficulty individually with an 80% play time exception on all difficulties but the highest. So rather than saying "If the drain time of a beatmap is...", it would probably be better if it said "If the drain time of the highest difficulty within a beatmapset is..." (or something similar).

Nice change, less unnecessary work for mappers. Tbh, mapping deathcore or neuro on lower diffs is a pain in the ass and nobody play them (and u cant reflect the song properly due to restrictions). So yeah, im happy with this change.

I am not talking about breaks. I am talking of lower diffs to simply have a shorter total drain time, whether or not the objects are placed on the start, end or middle of the songs, with our without breaks, fragmented or as one piece somewhere in the song is some entirely different topic of detail.

BUt yes, you quoted the right rule and yes, changing it to something like that and actually tell people to just make *shorter* Normals instead of no Normals at all is an actual middle ground between people screeching "too much work to make redundant 5 minutes Normals" and "but we need beginner content on all sets".

There is no reason as of why it is strange, it was common practise years ago and I don't know what has changed so people randomly hate it other than "I want people to enjoy the full song". So right now, you rather gut out the majority of the playerbase out of your mapset when the song is too long altogether and deny them ANY experience at all instead of at least offering them a fragment of the song as game content, which makes way more sense to me, to be honest.

You obviously would keep the 80%+ rule for the highest difficulties and only allow reduced drain time for the beginner difficulties as per your length tiers in your current (and shitty) amendment of the spread rules.

Just clarifying that my post was not a response to yours, Loctav, I just happened to take a really long time before actually posting mine.

While I would agree with you that this probably isn't an ideal solution, it at least makes the step from full spread to marathon a bit smoother, allowing for more of 3 and 4 minute maps to enter the game. And although it ultimately shifts the audience of maps above the 3:30 threshold to where they are no longer beginner friendly, there is unlikely to be lack of maps entering the game that are when considering that most of songs mapped are not 3:30+ (as of this moment, anyway). Again, we'll be reviewing this later, as mentioned by Oko.

varying drain times just widens the gap in difficulty between diffs which will make spreads have to be even denser negating the entire purpose of this proposal

Trigger Me Elmo wrote:

varying drain times just widens the gap in difficulty between diffs which will make spreads have to be even denser negating the entire purpose of this proposal

excuse me, what?

You are suggesting that we require shorter lower diffs in place of not requiring them at all. However, longer difficulties are inherently harder to play, as they require better concentration, endurance, and consistent finger control - things that the players that current spread rules are meant to accommodate almost universally lack.

By only requiring shorter lower difficulties with scaling drain time length (as I understand it), the ramp up in difficulty between diffs becomes larger (If I'm missing something here, please feel free to clear up this misunderstanding without being condescending). To compensate for this, the (completely subjective) rules of "reasonable spread" will be enforced and require mappers to have a greater number of lower diffs in general. This causes the entire goal of this spread, encouraging more mappers to map and rank longer but non-marathon songs, to be completely voided. In fact, I see only detriment in that: less people will be willing to map this length of song, and it becomes so arduous to rank these sets that nobody wants to deal with it, BN or mapper.

Loctav wrote:

ah, this entire "all or nothing" attitude is horrible. So the only solution you guys managed to find was to draw shitty red lines of where stuff is either "too long to have an beginner difficulty at all" or "not long enough so map a full beginner difficulty".

I'd like to repeat what I repeated on other places already, but please somebody explain me why you guys think that "all or nothing" is the only approach that you actually were able to go with?

You say "Hey, look, we get it, mapping a 5 minutes Easy is awful and boring to everybody, it's stale and uninteresting" and then you deduct "SO DON'T MAKE THEM AT ALL!" instead of "Make an Easy that has a 1 minute of drain time, that's enough!"

It doesn't make sense. Sure, for some shitty reason or another, making beatmap sets with varying drain times between difficulties is frowned upon to heavens. (I don't know why, but ok). Also there is this one rule that prohibits you to use less than 80% of the song or something. Fair enough, but why must this be adhered to in all difficulties? Why does the rule not say "If you never use more than 80% of the song in any of the difficulties, then you can't rank it, because you should cut the song, since you never use a huge chunk of the song in any of your difficulties, but if you use 80%+ of the song in at least one or two or whatever amount of difficulites and you can do whatever length on the easier ones, then be my guest".

What I am proposing instead is to keep beginner difficulties mandatory as prior the change and as we are used to it, however, allow people to map easier difficulties of shorter drain time, so they keep getting created for beginners to enjoy, but still don't make mappers vomit the same copypaste pattern into a 5 minute map, where even the untrained monkey from the basement would fall asleep at playing it.

Just curious why you're so upset at a change that's meant to allow mappers more leeway in what they want to map and possibly have more interesting content in the ranked section? The same way you don't understand why people are so against different drain times in varying difficulties I don't understand why you're advocating so vehemently on keeping beginner diffs at all. Certain songs simply don't reflect them well, and I only see this change being a positive thing in making more interesting ranked content, not a laziness thing.

There's SO many more Easy/Normal difficulties. Like actually a metric fuckton. Literally over half of all ranked maps for standard are under 3*. That's not an exaggeration.

Let mappers rank harder stuff. If newer/lower ranked players want to have an experience at all, maybe it can be a challenge to work up to in order to play a map they want. They'd have to do that for marathons anyways and I don't see anyone complaining that their favorite Mazzerin map doesn't have a beginner diff.

I DO however like the idea of varying drain time IN ADDITION to the proposed changes to the RC. While I still think forcing beginner diffs is a bit silly, giving the mappers an option to map it or not with a lower drain time could lead to some interesting ranked mapsets in the future.

[deleted as part of purging my old post history]

loctav, how can u see this working on practice? say, you got an easy with less drain required, so you gonna ignore intro or outro? like, it completely doesnt make any sense. when you map a song, you shud cover the entire thing to make it completed as a thing, otherwise it will look like a joke to be honest.

how can you ignore some part of song and map another one? lets say its some DnB map, so all you do is map drop part without introduction? LOL its just a terrible idea to allow drain time manipulations depending on a diff name. as i can see it working in some cases like infamous 30 second CBCC or w/e when the introduction is cut and all the player does is retry till he gets the concept of the map such as patterning and the rhythm.

not to mention that we already have this in place, some people put breaks in lower diffs, nobody cares. so yeah leave it as it is now since its the most healthy change in rc for a while.

hi-mei wrote:

nobody cares. so yeah leave it as it is now since its the most healthy change in rc for a while.

Healthy? ... Try to think like a responsible adult, please... How healthy is making rules that serve for the only purpose of encouraging mappers to be lazy and ignoring the need for new content for beginners in the ranked section?

I'm all against this new change even though I don't agree with Loctav in the idea we should go back to these times where you had a 3:10 insane and a 0:50 Normal, but beginner diffs should be mandatory...
The "marathon" with one diff rule kinda made sense because they were like "boss songs" (try to think of them as if they were in a official rhythm game) even though they were a lot of them that could've easily had a full spread judging on how their rhythms allowed easy charts on them.

Also the increasing number of Marathon maps is a problem, maybe not in osu because you have a lot of BNs, but in Taiko, Catch and Mania the thing works really different... The most worrying case being the Taiko one where currently there are times when you find the QF section with 4 marathon and 2 sets.

Is it really ok for you to forget the core of games are PLAYERS? I don't want to brought some unrelated issues to this into this discussion, but this always comes on point when discussing about changes: You are ignoring what is better for players every time you make decisions as BN/QAT.

There is so much yet to say in this discussion, but the whole "give more ease to mappers" argument is not helping the community at all, if anything, nobody is asking you to rank maps. If you want to rank maps, then just put a bit more of effort and map lower diffs, isn't it simple?

Give me an example of how I should map multilayered Neuro song that cant be simplified to 1/1 rhythm on easy? or deathmetal etc?
The rule change is completely okay, nobody restricts you from mapping low diffs, go ahead if you want. But from my perspective its just a waste. The low diffs on hard songs are usually low quality because nobody cares about them, everyone knows it as a "filler diffs".

I am fully against spreads as a thing since it just kills any enthusiasm of people who puts lots of effort in their maps (I usually spend 200-300 hours on each map i make to find fitting patterns and keep the structure at the same time), and there are lots of people with the same mindset.

I got so many these 4:30 min songs that I could bring into this game but when I think about how much time it will take, I choose to better not even start mapping them.

So the only argument I see here is "b-b-but new players...." Well fuck. There are literally millions of low diffs you can evolve from. I basically got into this game by not being able to pass End Game so I started tryharding and eventually got better.

I only see this as a positive change since there will be more content in ranked, not the opposite.

LIf you think you are a good mapper then you should be able to map lower diffs on any song of w/e quality of a mapper you are. Being lazy is not a good reason to deliver an unfinished product

But overall good changes for the general public of mappers. Will destigmatise those naughty 4:55 min songs and we will finally see more attempts on those.

only thing I can see going wrong with these new rules is that there is a likelihood of there being a shortage of maps for players who are new to the game since I've noticed that many people want to map songs that are 4 minutes, so since a lot of mappers are lazy, they wouldn't make anything for new players

ARGENTINE DREAM wrote:

Healthy? ... Try to think like a responsible adult, please... How healthy is making rules that serve for the only purpose of encouraging mappers to be lazy and ignoring the need for new content for beginners in the ranked section?


Is it really ok for you to forget the core of games are PLAYERS? I don't want to brought some unrelated issues to this into this discussion, but this always comes on point when discussing about changes: You are ignoring what is better for players every time you make decisions as BN/QAT.

_DUSK_ wrote:

only thing I can see going wrong with these new rules is that there is a likelihood of there being a shortage of maps for players who are new to the game since I've noticed that many people want to map songs that are 4 minutes, so since a lot of mappers are lazy, they wouldn't make anything for new players

There are 30,000 ranked maps for osu!standard under 3*. That's over half of all ranked maps. There are also 2,500 maps above 5.5*. That's less than 5%.
There's plenty of content for new players. Higher ranked players are still players, and fundamentally make up more time spent on the game than anyone new.

Toy wrote:

There are 30,000 ranked maps for osu!standard under 3*. That's over half of all ranked maps. There are also 2,500 maps above 5.5*. That's less than 5%.
There's plenty of content for new players. Higher ranked players are still players, and fundamentally make up more time spent on the game than anyone new.

I remember someone up in the thread stating that we recommend newer players to play newer maps rather than older ones because mapping improves over time so they are usually more inuitive for players and gets them into the harder difficulties in the current meta. Ofcourse, we shouldn't hinder this proposal in favour of something like this at all as it doesn't seem like it'll affect players for now, like you said they aren't running out of maps to play any time soon, but atleast it's something to think about while developing the RC in the future.

If one day I only map an easy diff with a fast song like Road of Resistance it would be funny xD

Toy wrote:

There are 30,000 ranked maps for osu!standard under 3*. That's over half of all ranked maps. There are also 2,500 maps above 5.5*. That's less than 5%.
There's plenty of content for new players. Higher ranked players are still players, and fundamentally make up more time spent on the game than anyone new.

How are higher ranked players being affected negatively by mappers also mapping easy diffs? What. Your post doesn't really make any sense.

bossandy wrote:

If one day I only map an easy diff with a fast song like Road of Resistance it would be funny xD

Late to the party! Sorry.

https://osu.ppy.sh/b/1240759

re: "How are higher ranked players being affected negatively by mappers also mapping easy diffs? What. Your post doesn't really make any sense."

Pretty much the entire point of this proposal is under the theory that there is a theoretical amount of potentially quality Insane+ diffs of songs that are at the 4:15 or 3:30 thresholds that were not ranked because of the requirement of mapping lower difficulties for them. The idea is that with the proposal, those maps can now be ranked.

TBH personally I don't really hate Loctav's suggestion but I was thinking about some of my own maps and how I would map 1:30 or whatever maps out of the full 3:30 songs and in some cases it would just end up being really weird lol

ok even more clarification because people keep flipping out:

- the current wording on the RC page is active and in effect (it's rules being made more liberal and doesnt require anything that wasnt previously the case) with a 6 month trial
- this draft was not denied or whatever, it was moved back to debate the point of having something about having two difficulties at least in a beatmap set on the Ranking Criteria

--

Naxess point is fair it's a confusing clusterfuck to read for that case
ARGENTINE DREAM: Toy's point was that hard maps on long songs oftentimes get made first and then neglected because lower difficulties are required to get them ranked
the change loctav proposes ignores the years of debate that has taken place prior to this thread becoming a thing so im not quite sure what to do with it - the suggestion doesnt seem like a middle ground between any of the previously discussed ideas or the core idea of this change

---

also for some reason the mania rc from like 2012 or whenever mania was introduced now lists that you must have 2 difficulties
which is hilarious but also conflicting information that we should clean up whichever way we go

I wouldn't worry about mapsets with no lower diffs too much. It can be a great motivation to get better to play those maps especially when the lowest diff is a Hard which is like a month of playing osu!.

Let's just remind us that at the moment barely any of these songs are being mapped and when they do it's a set full of GDs (which isn't a bad thing imo). But it does show us quite clearly how mappers handle making such a set: "outsourcing" difficulties to other mappers. Diversity is all fine and good but with every GD you risk getting a subpar quality map especially when most of the experienced GDers don't want to map a 4:30 normal diff and you get yourself someone less experienced risking the integrity of your set.
"why not map the whole set yourself", in that time your could map 3 other sets.

Same for modders.

The only thing this will do is promote those mapsets by reducing the absurd workload. It's pretty good

Smokeman wrote:

The only thing this will do is promote those mapsets by reducing the absurd workload. It's pretty good

"Absurd workload"... Lol, mapping is something you do for fun...

Judging by all the replies so far in this thread this new ruleset's reason of being is to encourage lazyness of mappers.

""why not map the whole set yourself", in that time your could map 3 other sets." ... Are you seriously telling me you want 3 sets from the same mapper being ranked quickly? You have LOTs of good mappers who aren't being taken on consideration because the current status of the BN is so unregulated only BN's friends and known mappers get their stuff ranked easily... I'm pretty sure if you check now the unranked section there are plenty of good full sets potentially rankable.

Also every reply in this thread is taking on account only osu gamemode. So if that "unnecessary" is it for you guys just make the rule apply for osu! and leave the other 3 gamemodes exempt of it.

EDIT:

hi-mei wrote:

Give me an example of how I should map multilayered Neuro song that cant be simplified to 1/1 rhythm on easy? or deathmetal etc?
The rule change is completely okay, nobody restricts you from mapping low diffs, go ahead if you want. But from my perspective its just a waste. The low diffs on hard songs are usually low quality because nobody cares about them, everyone knows it as a "filler diffs".

In these exceptional special cases the mapper should prove their point on easier diffs not being mappable then the BN in charge would ask for QAT input on whether the set is rankable without easy diffs.

That would solve your issue a lot better without pushing rules that promote lazyness.

ARGENTINE DREAM wrote:

Smokeman wrote:

The only thing this will do is promote those mapsets by reducing the absurd workload. It's pretty good

"Absurd workload"... Lol, mapping is something you do for fun... This doesn't change that it's still a lot of work

Judging by all the replies so far in this thread this new ruleset's reason of being is to encourage lazyness of mappers.

""why not map the whole set yourself", in that time your could map 3 other sets." ... Are you seriously telling me you want 3 sets from the same mapper being ranked quickly? it's more free content for the game so I don't see a downside to that You have LOTs of good mappers who aren't being taken on consideration because the current status of the BN is so unregulated only BN's friends and known mappers get their stuff ranked easily... obviously someone who is well known in the community can rank their maps a lot easier than some random no name mapper, it's like that in a lot of communities I'm pretty sure if you check now the unranked section there are plenty of good full sets potentially rankable. probably, and those sets will get ranked sooner or later if the mapper wants to push them

Also every reply in this thread is taking on account only osu gamemode. So if that "unnecessary" is it for you guys just make the rule apply for osu! and leave the other 3 gamemodes exempt of it. I personally don't care about other modes, but this could help the already rather dead ones to be a little less dead

EDIT:

hi-mei wrote:

Give me an example of how I should map multilayered Neuro song that cant be simplified to 1/1 rhythm on easy? or deathmetal etc?
The rule change is completely okay, nobody restricts you from mapping low diffs, go ahead if you want. But from my perspective its just a waste. The low diffs on hard songs are usually low quality because nobody cares about them, everyone knows it as a "filler diffs".

In these exceptional special cases the mapper should prove their point on easier diffs not being mappable then the BN in charge would ask for QAT input on whether the set is rankable without easy diffs.

That would solve your issue a lot better without pushing rules that promote lazyness. Then the qat would be spammed by tons of people that don't want to map low diffs for pretty much anything that isn't super simple anime, do you really think that's a good idea?

people also seem to forget that this change only applies to songs that actually reach 3:30 drain. plenty of songs are shorter than that, so all of those would still require full spreads, and even in case they exceed 3:30, the set would still need a hard difficulty

Oh? the rule has been newly added?

still a bit concerned about not being able to have breaks in some situations.
regardless of the difficulty of the song, some low intensity parts quite simply should not be mapped

example https://osu.ppy.sh/b/1367351
the total drain time is 4:17 without any breaks.
because of spread rules, someone following new spread rules would be required to map the preview point due to drain rules. I would even argue that doing so would be harmful to the map, a break is the only thing that can express the song well at that point.

there is no benefit in that situation for drain being enforced rather than length. using breaks can also be a stylistic choice in some cases, having the rc state that some styles are unrankable just doesn't make any sense.

using song length as the spread requirement + 80-90% of the length must be drain is a much better solution imo

So my biggest concern with killing the 2 diff thing are the silly mapsets this now allows.

The point of this change was so that we'll be able to have more 4 minute Insane+ maps ranked. But removing the 2 diff thing now allows us to have a 3:30 single Hard set or even a 0:30 single Easy set, which let's be honest isn't contributing to the ranked section in any meaningful way (in most cases) and seems counter-productive with what the changes are trying to improve.

Consider also that a typical TV size spread is maybe 6 minutes of drain. This change now allows us to have 4 minute long songs with maybe 8 minutes of drain. That's reasonable enough. But now it also allows sets with 3:30 minutes of drain, or even less (I realise you could've already made EN spreads in the past, but I'll get to that in a sec).

This change was put in place so that newbie players stuck to their shorter songs since those are typically easier, and experienced players had more access to longer songs. So why are we allowing sets with only low level difficulties?

I wouldn't put it past people to try and rank a song with only a Normal diff or something along those lines. It's even been done in the past for 5m+ songs. This would be favourable for beginner mappers, especially those who's only goal is to get something, anything, into the ranked section. Instead of learning to build a full spread, those mappers will just try to push their single difficulty Normal into ranked.

I understand that some songs wouldn't benefit from forcing harder difficulties into the set where a single Normal would probably suffice (see: R3 Music box), but it's not reasonable to relax the rules to the point where we could get upbeat anime openings with only a single Normal on them.

Therefore I propose this guideline:

Guideline wrote:

The highest difficulty of a mapset should correspond to the general feel of the song. An upbeat anime opening should have an Insane or Expert for the highest difficulty, while a calm piano piece can have a Normal as the highest. This is to ensure that the most popular difficulty of a mapset will properly represent what the song offers.

It's a guideline since we can't really draw solid lines on what is upbeat and what isn't. The wording is open for discussion too since I don't know the music theory word for the 'feel' of a song (I was thinking 'timbre', but I think that's for individual sounds and not a song).

I think this is a reasonable compromise to killing the 2 diff rule, since it'll stop people pushing single Normal sets when the song can clearly support an Insane, while not forcing the people who do make higher difficulties for long songs to add low effort difficulties.

I agree what mo said, it gives a risk of mappers pushing single diff tv size for ranking

However, the main point i want to bring is that the proposal itself is meant to encourage mappers to push full sized song as there's isn't much players play full sized low diffs, which this phenomenon isn't clearly happening when it comes to tv sized maps (at least compared to full size). So it's reasonable enough to remove 2 diff rule for full version songs (>4:15) but not in tv sized maps (mostly referred to 2:30 if counting rhythm game size and anime TV size songs, but it this case, it's referred to songs shorter than 3:30). And removing 2 diff rule is still unfair to full size mappers because mappers can map a tv size calm song (e.g. R3 music box) with only 1 normal or easy diff, rendering they can rank single diff mapsets with (more than) half of the drain/play time then full size mapsets.

So besides what mo has proposed (to prevent abusing this rule by ranking low diff approval while the song is upbeat), i would like to propose the guideline in another way to prevent this happening so tv size mappers should map almost the same drain time as single diff full version maps:

Ranking Criteria wrote:

If the drain time of a beatmap is...
...lower than 3:30, the lowest difficulty of each included game mode cannot be harder than a Normal and should include 2 or more difficulties, regardless of how the song feels. Because osu!mania does not have a difficulty-specific Ranking Criteria yet, an osu!mania beatmapset's Normal difficulty is defined as a difficulty below 2.00 stars. For hybrid beatmapsets that include osu! difficulties, the additional modes’ lowest difficulties cannot be harder than a Hard.

While i felt that songs with between 3:30 and 4:15 probably stays on the grey zone, since some "full sized" songs with that size (especially between 3:50 to 4:15, from my experience) and "Hard" isn't exactly lands on either "low diffs" or "higher diffs" but stays on between. So it's hard to desire should we allow a map that sized can be ranked with one diff or not.

Sorry if it's hard to understand, my English is quite bad and i am not good at explaining things

Just make an exception that maps under a certain length need more than 2 diffs, ez.
If single diff set and sr[diff] <= minimum required then add one more diff' with sr[diff'] < sr[diff] (assuming mappers map the highest diff first and then filter out on lower diffs)

Sets with 2 diffs on short and slow songs have been a thing in the past so ya, if that chill slow song is 4 min now you wont end up with 2 diffs.

Reference: https://osu.ppy.sh/help/wiki/Ranking_Criteria#rules

Wording amendment

Old
...lower than 3:30, the lowest difficulty of each included game mode cannot be harder than a Normal.
New
...lower than 3:30, the lowest difficulty of each included game mode must be Normal or easier.

Old
...between 3:30 and 4:15, the lowest difficulty of each included game mode cannot be harder than a Hard.
New
...between 3:30 and 4:15, the lowest difficulty of each included game mode must be Hard or easier.

Old
...between 4:15 and 5:00, the lowest difficulty of each included game mode cannot be harder than an Insane.
New
...between 4:15 and 5:00, the lowest difficulty of each included game mode must be Insane or easier.

--
Reason for change:

It's easier to answer the question what is the lowest difficult I can go. The current one makes you do a double-take