Disclaimer: This post is meant to generate discussion surrounding the state of the upper echelons of the mapping community. While it's written like a proposal, my main goal with this post is to hop into the thinking tank and discuss about all of this.

Summary

The BNG/QAT have been going through multiple identity crises, cycling from one system to another, back, forth and around. The current state of the BNG/QAT is more than a mess - lots of prominent QAT members left their roles, getting into the BNG seems like a coinflip and people just can't agree on what makes a map stand out or what makes it quality. We keep shifting around systems with vetoes and BN admission to, seemingly, no end.

osu!mapping seems to be in a sandbox stage where everyone experiments with different mapping styles all the time. This combined with a lot of things being seen as subjective makes it hard for any ''objective'' quality control to exist at all within the game (believe me I've tried). Vetoes and disqualifications often lead to a whole bunch of drama and, more often than not, fail to accomplish their goal altogether.

We have so many mappers getting into the BNG now that I see the purpose of it less and less. Why not just give mappers with a certain amount of ranked sets + a certain amount of modding activity the privilege to nominate maps? Away with all the time consuming admission, activity tracking etc etc. If almost every semi-decent mapper is able to get into the BNG, why is the process still such a pain to go through with tri-monthly coinflip admissions and all the like. It's clear that the game needs the community to bond together more than ever right now and I don't think the BNG/QAT teams fulfil the roles they used to in previous times.

It would be much easier if people with a certain threshhold (such as ranked maps) automatically got nomination rights and if abuse or neglection is seen, the rights are removed from those people for a certain amount of time. It seems like the natural course of action for the game to go as of now.

I realize this change would be controversial as these teams also give people status within the game that people will want to hold on to, but you have to think outside of that too - is this really the most efficient way to deal with things anymore?


Things that would likely be impacted with this change (positive=p and negative=n)

1. No more BNG/QAT circlejerk (p)
2. Shorter waiting times and less hassle to get maps to ranked status (p)
3. Presumably less quality control leading to a more diverse meta, but also way more lenient towards maps that don't meet certain expectations (p + n)
4. Potential inflation of content leading to less plays per ranked mapset (n)
5. No elitism and inflated egos among mappers because of status (p)
6. Massive decrease in workload for many people doing the admissions and BNG related administrative work (p)
7. Less drama regarding vetoes, disqualifications, circlejerking, BNG admission etc etc etc (p)
8. ??? (discuss)

TLDR (but please just read the post lol): Role of the BNG/QAT is starting to look a lot more arbitrary in recent times due to evolution of the mapping community. Should we look in different directions?

I agree with a lot of your points, however, I don't think the privilege should just be given as simply as you suggested, players who meet the requirements and want the responsibility should at least have to sign up or something. Just because someone has ranked a lot of maps or has lots of kudosu, doesn't mean their behavior is exemplary. I don't think those who are known to be trolls (not in a good way) or just ill-mannered people shouldn't be given the opportunity so easily. Also I think it's important to not make it too easy to nominate maps as an influx of maps getting ranked would diminish the attention they receive and the lack of community feedback would definitely have an impact on a lot of mappers' motivation to map.

Voli wrote:

No more BNG/QAT circlejerk (p)

how is that a positive change

if they delete bng and qat → rip ctb cause almost all of active mappers are bn lol

Pachiru wrote:

if they delete bng and qat → rip ctb cause almost all of active mappers are bn lol

T_T

imo voli's post is really silly anyways. all these "positives" he lists are either incredibly subjective or a very very big minority (for example, elitism over a title lol)

removing bn/qat would bring problems like-
1-ex's bn's/qat's having more time to make them self maps(why u want them to make more maps with them good quality instead being pointing errors, and waste hours checking others ppl maps searching for metadata errors?)
2-helping who is really friend of them instead random ppl who spam them everyday (why u want stop the socialization of bn's caused by "tiaguinho123" spamming in them chat "check my map plox"?)
3-reducing drama in forum's- (how dare you suggest something that would end our fun of reading long very dramatic discussions?)
4-letting good mapers rank things with them style instead the safe styles(how dare you want break the bn's common quality sense style?)
5-letting players decide what them want play instead finding the most easy safe playable map (you really want break the farming machine?)
the list is too big i will end here

you said you don't think the BNG or the QAT fufil their prior roles, could you define those?

I don't believe the BNG/QAT circlejerk to be an issue. mostly because a large number of the assumed circle jerk is by mappers who are capable and would have ranked their maps anyways. There is a form that you can use to report people you think are abusing this with their low quality maps or w/e.

shorter waiting times and less hassle to get maps ranked? > uhhhh what happens with newer/less experienced mappers is they suck at mapping. so nobody wants to rank bad maps right? it will take a while to improve for most, but once you reach a consistent level of not sucking people tend to rank your maps pretty easily so maybe your point here would need more elaboration.

less quality control > Isn't this contradictory to the "no more circle jerk" unless you mean no more "staff" circle jerk and only other circle jerk is allowed lol, ironic

inflation of content, > qualified already sort of handles this, I think you mean nobody would be getting their maps ranked because there would be 214234124 maps qualified.

elitism and inflated egos > will not go away, like how you and your veto squad would harass mappers you disagreed with and how you are posting this proposal because you and your friends are not really welcome back into staff for your abuse

massive decrease in workload > no because there would be 1294871230498 to check for broken gameplay and meta data in qualified

less drama regarding vetos > veto meta rn is mostly hate and stuff which your gang really brough up a lot of, it still happens among a lot of mappers just hating others and I really prefer if we have GMT/QAT enforce proper modding code of conduct and remove vetos alltogether if you really wanted to solve this lol

if abuse or neglection is seen

how are you supposed to moderate thousands of nominators

also u wont get rid of circlejerking, its more like giving everyone the ability to circlejerk lol

So we basically get a system that kinda works like loved, where popular maps get to ranking. The difference being, any mapper who pumps a map every other week can nominate for rank instead of maps being curated by a dedicated group. Yea, and there is not much preventing the map from being dq'd for subjective reasons.

I would be all for this idea if it were not abusive. You can strategize with your mapper friends to gain the upper hand and push your map to rank, blocking others.

I also see circlejerks happening between mappers, and the creator of the mapsets going "fuck it" and calls his/her friends to nominate and push the map to rank, ignoring everybody else's concerns. So the circlejerk problem you hope to solve is just going to be transferred to the same people under a different title.

lol

cosmiccc wrote:

I agree with a lot of your points, however, I don't think the privilege should just be given as simply as you suggested, players who meet the requirements and want the responsibility should at least have to sign up or something. Just because someone has ranked a lot of maps or has lots of kudosu, doesn't mean their behavior is exemplary. I don't think those who are known to be trolls (not in a good way) or just ill-mannered people shouldn't be given the opportunity so easily. Also I think it's important to not make it too easy to nominate maps as an influx of maps getting ranked would diminish the attention they receive and the lack of community feedback would definitely have an impact on a lot of mappers' motivation to map.

Thing is - because of the influx of all the new BNs and it being less of a role of an ''experienced mapper/modder'' than for example, the BAT era, it's already largely going this way. Half of the mapping community seems to be BN, so why is there still so much hassle around becoming one or attaining the rights to be one? It seems to be more ''sandbox'' than ever rn, thats why i wanted to start a discussion about it in the first place.

pkhg wrote:

Voli wrote:

No more BNG/QAT circlejerk (p)

how is that a positive change

Does it have any positive connotations? It means that you need a social network in order to get your content out there. This has been an age-old problem with no real solutions. You could argue that circlejerk is good for the quality of the content (since bns arguably put out more quality works than your average mapper, although im not sure how valid this one is anymore), but it's definitely not a good thing for people who try to break through but don't have the right BN connections.

Pachiru wrote:

if they delete bng and qat → rip ctb cause almost all of active mappers are bn lol

Wouldn't that be almost the same then? I mean, those people would still be able to nominate things I guess? I don't know much of CTB though so I can't say much on this one :/

bor wrote:

you said you don't think the BNG or the QAT fufil their prior roles, could you define those?

Pretty much what I responded to cosmiccc's post. Their roles used to be to objectively assure quality and sort out maps that should and shouldn't be ranked, but the mapping community evolved to a point where people have huge differences in opinions on what should or should not be ranked. It's basically become much more of a sandbox than former times, so a system like this would fully embrace that idea, so to speak.

Please also keep in mind this is just a topic of discussion as the disclaimer said. I want to know people's opinions on the topic, no need to personally attack me. I'm personally not 100% in favor of such a system but with the immense gap in understanding of the word ''quality'' nowadays and the inflation of BNG it just doesn't seem too far fetched to move towards a system like this.

Voli wrote:

pkhg wrote:

how is that a positive change

Does it have any positive connotations? It means that you need a social network in order to get your content out there. This has been an age-old problem with no real solutions. You could argue that circlejerk is good for the quality of the content (since bns arguably put out more quality works than your average mapper, although im not sure how valid this one is anymore), but it's definitely not a good thing for people who try to break through but don't have the right BN connections.

a lot of people already need social networking, its not difficult literally my first ranked map had 3 qat's on the thread and 2+ tier 2 BNs and I actually cannot speak to people irl very well lol, monstrata ranks maps as a non BN still as well, networking within BNG still needs to occur anyways because some BNs actually won't come near another BNs map even in the event of "b4b" so this

plus system proposed forces circle jerk around most popular mappers of a region/style so doesn't fix circle jerk at all lol

Voli wrote:

bor wrote:

you said you don't think the BNG or the QAT fufil their prior roles, could you define those?

Pretty much what I responded to cosmiccc's post. Their roles used to be to objectively assure quality and sort out maps that should and shouldn't be ranked, but the mapping community evolved to a point where people have huge differences in opinions on what should or should not be ranked. It's basically become much more of a sandbox than former times, so a system like this would fully embrace that idea, so to speak.

1, objective contradicts quality
2, point of ranked maps in general are just that they aren't game breaking so they are doing their job in assuring that

i believe such a solution is not necessary for a few reasons.

first - quality of modding and bns. while it does indeed appear that there are "too many bns" (a sentiment which i don't exactly disagree with) the solution is not to nuke the entire system but rather to use the existing mechanisms more. probation at the moment is completely useless. i'll quote a certain someone here: "as long as you don't literally rape a girl on probation you'll pass." QATs can regulate the "quality" of bns by using probation and removal of BNs who consistently break rules, nominate over unrankable issues, nominate consistently low quality maps, only nominate maps of mappers in their friend group, etc. all these things can already be prevented by the QAT, they just need to start doing it more.

second - an arbitrary threshold is not a good way to judge someone's ability to contribute meaningfully. look at various bns who were active with, say, low amount of ranked maps. naxess, wishkey, dsco, as well as various others in times past. similarly, low kudosu count, or high kudosu count, isn't a good way to judge either. there are plenty of very high skilled modders who do not mod regularly or post mods, preferring to help people in irc or whatever. there are also a lot of not-good modders who have extraordinarily high levels of kudosu - not gonna name names for obvious reasons.

third - there are already a lot of unspoken "objective" criteria as well as the actual objective ranking criteria. you won't see many maps that do not even attempt to follow the song, despite there being no objective rule against it. i assure you that all these awful maps that you see being promoted are being promoted by BNs that have different values than you - not lower standards, not circlejerk, not malicious intent.

fourth - mapping is not more or less diverse compared to previous years. i promise you that these similar types of maps that you crusaded against were being promoted in 2012, 2013, whatever, as they are now. similarly, the type of maps that you promoted and see as quality content have also been promoted and are consistently promoted to this day. the difference is in the level of personal involvement with maps outside your "bubble" - you started looking at many more maps, i assume, which is why you started noticing these terrible maps more recently. i realize this sounds extraordinarily presumptuous, and it may indeed be completely wrong with regards to your experience. but i firmly believe that mapping has not evolved or devolved in quite a long time. the same ideas that are prevalent now were prevalent since a really long time ago. the only difference, really, is the inordinate amount of terrible 1-2 pp maps, but that has nothing to do with this proposal.

in sum: i don't think sweeping changes are necessary as the situation is not particularly unique. the tools to deal with "low quality" bns are already in place, simply unutilized as far as i can tell.

Nao Tomori wrote:

i believe such a solution is not necessary for a few reasons.

first - quality of modding and bns. while it does indeed appear that there are "too many bns" (a sentiment which i don't exactly disagree with) the solution is not to nuke the entire system but rather to use the existing mechanisms more. probation at the moment is completely useless. i'll quote a certain someone here: "as long as you don't literally rape a girl on probation you'll pass." QATs can regulate the "quality" of bns by using probation and removal of BNs who consistently break rules, nominate over unrankable issues, nominate consistently low quality maps, only nominate maps of mappers in their friend group, etc. all these things can already be prevented by the QAT, they just need to start doing it more.

then how come this isnt happening? there should be a causation for this and i'm curious as to what it would be. My guess is that it's emotionally stressful to constantly engage in conflicts and have to ''disband'' people, upsetting them and what not, combined with the fact that all of these roles are voluntary so many people just don't want to deal with the stressful aspects of it. I agree with your description of regulation, but the issue is that many of those things (low quality nominations, nominating friends maps) are hard to determine and that those things always instigate drama and uneasiness.

second - an arbitrary threshold is not a good way to judge someone's ability to contribute meaningfully. look at various bns who were active with, say, low amount of ranked maps. naxess, wishkey, dsco, as well as various others in times past. similarly, low kudosu count, or high kudosu count, isn't a good way to judge either. there are plenty of very high skilled modders who do not mod regularly or post mods, preferring to help people in irc or whatever. there are also a lot of not-good modders who have extraordinarily high levels of kudosu - not gonna name names for obvious reasons.

yes. i agree very much with all of this and my suggestion (amount of ranked maps/kd) is far from a perfect/working one. It's hard to determine a general threshhold which makes someone capable or incapable of the function without unnecessarily ruling more special cases (like dsco or naxess) out. Though, the current method (qat picks out bns) or previous methods (like tests) still rule out these odd cases, arguably to a similar extent.

third - there are already a lot of unspoken "objective" criteria as well as the actual objective ranking criteria. you won't see many maps that do not even attempt to follow the song, despite there being no objective rule against it. i assure you that all these awful maps that you see being promoted are being promoted by BNs that have different values than you - not lower standards, not circlejerk, not malicious intent.

fourth - mapping is not more or less diverse compared to previous years. i promise you that these similar types of maps that you crusaded against were being promoted in 2012, 2013, whatever, as they are now. similarly, the type of maps that you promoted and see as quality content have also been promoted and are consistently promoted to this day. the difference is in the level of personal involvement with maps outside your "bubble" - you started looking at many more maps, i assume, which is why you started noticing these terrible maps more recently. i realize this sounds extraordinarily presumptuous, and it may indeed be completely wrong with regards to your experience. but i firmly believe that mapping has not evolved or devolved in quite a long time. the same ideas that are prevalent now were prevalent since a really long time ago. the only difference, really, is the inordinate amount of terrible 1-2 pp maps, but that has nothing to do with this proposal.

I don't agree with that. mapping has evolved at a very rapid rate especially the past 1-2 years, with the mapping community growing a lot and people finding out many more concepts (look at all the technical maps, maps that focus on just aesthetics, maps that only focus on movement, sv manipulation, low AR/reading maps, small/huge cs etc etc) and maps are a lot more diverse because of that (if you dont take into account the generic pp stuff, yes that has largely been the same). Yes, I might've noticed more diversity as i started to get more involved in mapping and modding myself, but even throughout the 3-4 years that I've been active I did notice large changes, people have progressively been getting more open to other ideas/less generic maps.

in sum: i don't think sweeping changes are necessary as the situation is not particularly unique. the tools to deal with "low quality" bns are already in place, simply unutilized as far as i can tell.

Thanks for your elaborate post, this is the kind of discussion I was looking for.

pkhg wrote:

if abuse or neglection is seen

how are you supposed to moderate thousands of nominators

also u wont get rid of circlejerking, its more like giving everyone the ability to circlejerk lol

yeah that would be the premise of it - it isn't circlejerking if there's no specific circle to jerk with. I don't think moderation would be a huge issue - it would be easily noticable if someone routinely abuses their rights just as it is now. It's not like the entire osu playerbase would be able to nominate maps - its just that the BNG has so many hurdles while the group is super inflated either way > might as well make it fully accessible to any experienced mapper who wants to contribute. What the threshhold for that would be? Hard to come up with something that is 100% viable on the spot. This would need to be considered and it would proabbly be a combination of things (activity and demonstrated the ability to produce rankable content, for example.)

I agree with the idea of giving privilege to nominate maps when surpassing a certain threshold, but as you are aware of the quality control part, it should only happen when ranked maps have got a much more less meaning than now. Unless, the proposal seems to be fitting with this game's nature but will eventually have a negative impact overall in regards of map quality.

Taiko doesn't suffer from these problems, therefore no thanks.


No seriously, I can only speak for Taiko and the problems you're stating just doesn't apply for this mode. And I honestly believe it goes the same for CTB and Mania.

Alright, since apparently this kind of thing isn't obvious, I'm going to summarize this all real neatly.

osu!'s content generation system has been, from its very core, a peer reviewed process. This started off as simple as one of peppy's friends going "here i threw this together" and he went "sure fine". It's gotten a bit more complicated since then.

What is a peer review process? Well, most native english speakers would know offhand vaguely what the words mean together, and most non-native but comfortable english speakers would know a similar phrase in their own language once it's explained to them. (if you're not most, don't worry, everyone has to learn sometime.)

A native english speaker would say something like "that thing where other people check your work", often in review to scholarly pursuits. Wikipedia's first line on the article says "Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people of similar competence to the producers of the work (peers)."

And in good old wiki-walking fashion, [url=let's find out what the world's best "do my thinking for me" resource says on "Peers":

actually you know what rant over my energy for this stopped here honestly if this isn't a difficult concept and if it's reached the point where people are seriously so rabid over anti-circlejerk that they'll happily throw away the one thing that's kept this game running for years despite promises for a new, totally re-vamped client and content generation system (Which I am still hoping for, despite all odds) they're really not going to be convinced by reason anyway

Shiirn wrote:

Alright, since apparently this kind of thing isn't obvious, I'm going to summarize this all real neatly.

osu!'s content generation system has been, from its very core, a peer reviewed process. This started off as simple as one of peppy's friends going "here i threw this together" and he went "sure fine". It's gotten a bit more complicated since then.

What is a peer review process? Well, most native english speakers would know offhand vaguely what the words mean together, and most non-native but comfortable english speakers would know a similar phrase in their own language once it's explained to them. (if you're not most, don't worry, everyone has to learn sometime.)

A native english speaker would say something like "that thing where other people check your work", often in review to scholarly pursuits. Wikipedia's first line on the article says "Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people of similar competence to the producers of the work (peers)."

And in good old wiki-walking fashion, [url=let's find out what the world's best "do my thinking for me" resource says on "Peers":

actually you know what rant over my energy for this stopped here honestly if this isn't a difficult concept and if it's reached the point where people are seriously so rabid over anti-circlejerk that they'll happily throw away the one thing that's kept this game running for years despite promises for a new, totally re-vamped client and content generation system (Which I am still hoping for, despite all odds) they're really not going to be convinced by reason anyway

Fair - even if you throw the circlejerk thing out of the equation though (this wasn't the main point of the post by far), there are still the other things to look at. The BNG seems to be reaching its tipping point as it's overflowing with members (at least for STD), so I reckon a change like this wouldn't even make that much of a difference (because a lot of people already can noiminate) - It'd just remove the unnecessary hurdles and workload, while, at the same time, dealing with the veto problem - if mappers have equal rights, no one can really enforce their opinion on each others creations anymore, unless there are game-breaking flaws. From my experience, that is the direction we're headed in as of today. This is the gist of it, and therefore I thought it'd be a nice thought experiment.

not being able to enforce an opinion has the same result as not having one.

Making less points of conflict for the sake of less conflict is just going to homogenize things further.

this shit ain't rocket science


sick of these thot experiments

Shiirn wrote:

sick of these thot experiments

why? Conversation and communication is necessary for progress. Even if you don't agree with any of the proposal's Voli has made, this thread is an opportunity to sort out thoughts and come to new conclusions. The ranking system is quite obviously not perfect, and not like it will ever be, but if we don't talk about it and other issues, they can never be improved upon. Try having an impartial view point on the matter at least.

fwiw, wasn't the original idea of modding v2 basically exactly this, except that the thresholds were based on modding activity rather than mapping? The original BN/QAT arrangement back in 2014 was supposed to be a manual test run of how such a system would work, which was also why the requirements for being a BN at the time were lowered and they were demoted to just "regular users who can nominate maps" from "osu! staff members" (the old BATs).

I'm not sure what the plans for moddingv2 (or what you want to call it now) is in the future, but if the plan is still the same as the one back when work first began on modding v2, then I guess the stuff proposed in the OP will happen eventually.

cosmiccc wrote:

Shiirn wrote:

sick of these thot experiments

why? Conversation and communication is necessary for progress. Even if you don't agree with any of the proposal's Voli has made, this thread is an opportunity to sort out thoughts and come to new conclusions. The ranking system is quite obviously not perfect, and not like it will ever be, but if we don't talk about it and other issues, they can never be improved upon. Try having an impartial view point on the matter at least.

Discussing idiocy for the sake of discussion is idiocy.

No rational person who has the slightest bit of understanding of what constitutes mapping would ever even conceive of a situation in which peer review was intentionally avoided.

Mapping is, in itself, a peer review process.

Ranking requirements exist because peers came together and made a list of rules.

These peers largely chose eachother based off their own determination on eachother's value as a peer. Those who were considered experienced or knowledgable were generally placed higher than those who were not. Nepotism canceled itself out in various ways - but obviously still existed - but an alternative was never really considered because the system worked.

This obsession with killing nepotism has reached the point where there are people who want to remove any sort of influence "knowing the right people" has on becoming a nominator. It is trying to remove personal bias because they feel - rightly - that you shouldn't only be able to be a nominator by being friends with an existing one or whatever absurd delusion they have.

I'm not saying this kind of intention is bad.

It's good. Obviously. It's like, obviously something that should be right because it sounds right, right?

Well, it's more complicated than that.

The entire peer review process relies on the fact that we have peers to begin with. A peer isn't just a person, it's a hypothetical equal, someone whose opinion should have some value to you in some shape or form.

So if these values and opinions are forbidden from having any weight because "Well it's unfair that people who are seen as better are more likely to be promoted" (that's seriously what you guys sound like to me at this point rn really) or worse, "We can't scare people away by having anything but a positive, clean-looking environment" (because everyone knows every good community has no drama or conflict in it....... right?)

well, it just goes to show exactly how far the mighty have fallen, that this kind of "discussion" is even taking place.