I tend to agree but can see where people are coming from saying that they have one diff that supports the song fine (e.g. a hard) and forcing people to make more difficulties than that may be detrimental to the overall quality of the mapset.
The proposed guideline would limit the easiest hardest difficulty to be a hard in case a Normal / Easy do not fit the bill when it comes to actually following the music without skipping collossal parts of it
As such the following scenarios are possible:
- Lowest difficulty Normal required, song fits extra: highest difficulty should be a Hard
- Lowest difficulty Hard required, song fits extra: highest difficulty should be a Hard
- Lowest difficulty Insane required, song fits extra: highest difficulty should be a Hard (so it's optional)
- Lowest difficulty Normal required, song only fits Normal, just normal is fine
- Lowest difficulty Hard required, song only fits normal: just normal is fine
- Lowest difficulty Insane required, song only fits normal: just normal is fine
this change would require two difficulties on mapsets that need a normal at least and can support more than a normal
in any case you would have to provide at least a Normal or Hard in depending on song length -> If you want to make a solo normal on a 30 second song you need a very calm 30 second song and for any other length respectively
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The main point
for the two difficulty requirement removal was that it generates very weird scenarios:
- Normal lowest diff: forced to make an Easy or a Hard depending on what you like more
- Hard lowest diff: forced to make a Normal (aka make the proposed change useless) or map an Insane you never intended to make
- Insane lowest diff: forced to make a Hard, Normal, Easy or Extra <-> if you never intended to make any of these yeah
logically this sort of levels out the "effort" required - putting that guideline Mo proposed in place is supposed to counteract trollsets where the creator just speedmaps an Easy difficulty within an hour and claims it's rankable even though the difficulty itself maps like 20% of the music and addresses a target audience that moves past them within days.
Adding the two difficulty thing as a guideline or rule would require explanation of:
- what necessitates this? Making lower difficulties optional was done because we deemed the ranked section to contain enough for getting anyone started so forcing either of them in whatsoever is somewhat counter intuitive
- If this was a guideline would "I think mapping anything harder or easier than what i have done would misinterpret the song" be reason enough to not do higher or lower difficulties than what you have done? How do you want to define this with the previous points in mind?
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As a closing sentence towards anyone bothered to even read what i have to say: please note that i'm a proponent of getting rid of the marathon category as a whole and require everything to have a full spread - the above is by no means my opinion but the result of argumentation within this thread that i don't have counter arguments for that don't conflict with the basic idea of this proposal (which was, making lower difficulties optional based on song length - which was green lit by the lead dev and owner of this platform) - asserting that i'm more righteous than anyone else on the matter is pretty arrogant so I won't