hello,

over the time i’ve been a beatmap nominator and a quality assurance helper, i have seen one issue arise more than any other in my vetoes and in other’s vetoes and DQ mods: the lack of versatility in the Ranking Criteria regarding break times. since the RC was written under the assumption of a song timed in 180 BPM, the guidelines established per difficulty are up to the mapper’s discretion when given a song marginally lower or marginally higher than 180. while the basic understanding of higher bpms require more breaks and lower bpms can live with less breaks, i think there is still a severe gray area regarding the break times in higher and lower BPMs.


with that said, i believe the following should be amended in the taiko ranking criteria (Underlined portions are added):


Kantan (Guidelines):

1. You should insert at least 1 rest moment that is 3/1 or longer after 16/1 to 20/1 of continuous mapping. This can be adjusted to 8/1 or 12/1 in a BPM higher than 240, or 32/1 or 36/1 in a BPM lower than 140. Less frequent rest moments or shorter ones may put too much strain on beginners.
2. As a substitute for the above guideline, you may insert no less than two 2/1 or 3/2 breaks after no longer than 8/1 of continuous mapping in a BPM equal to or lower than 180. This should give beginner players ample and frequent time to avoid strain.
3. Use a base slider velocity of 1.2x in a BPM higher than 220. This is simply to ensure the readability of notes for beginners at higher BPMs.

Futsuu (Guidelines):

1. You should insert at least 1 rest moment that is 2/1 or longer after 16/1 to 20/1 of continuous mapping. This can be adjusted to 8/1 or 12/1 in a BPM higher than 240, or 32/1 or 36/1 in a BPM lower than 140. Less frequent rest moments or shorter ones may put too much strain on beginners.

If you plan on using a Futsuu as the lowest difficulty of a mapset, it has to abide by the following guidelines:

1. 1/2 patterns should not be longer than five notes. (Note: While this amendment has no direct correlation to the gray area I discussed earlier, using 4 notes as a cap implies the song has a syncopated beat-and that is not always the case).
2. Use a base slider velocity of 1.2x in a BPM higher than 220. This is simply to ensure the readability of notes for beginners at higher BPMs.

Muzukashii (Guidelines):

1. You should insert at least 1 rest moment that is 3/2 or longer after 16/1 to 20/1 of continuous mapping. This can be adjusted to 8/1 or 12/1 in a BPM higher than 240, or 32/1 or 36/1 in a BPM lower than 140. Less frequent rest moments or shorter ones may put too much strain on intermediate players.
2. As a substitute for the above guideline, you may insert no less than two 1/1 breaks after no longer than 8/1 of continuous mapping in a BPM equal to or lower than 180. This should give intermediate players ample time to avoid strain.

Oni (Guidelines):

1. You should insert at least 1 rest moment which is 1/1 or longer after 16/1 to 20/1 of continuous mapping. This can be adjusted to 8/1 or 12/1 in a BPM higher than 240, or 32/1 or 36/1 in a BPM lower than 140. Longer periods of continuous mapping may put too much strain on players of this difficulty level and shorter rest moments would count as continuous mapping.

rationale:

1. in moderate bpm (~140), i decided that the best course of action to edit the current guideline would be to double the amount of time mappers have to insert a proper break moment that follows the song. musical ideas are usually represented in 4 bar phrases, so increasing the current guideline by only a matter of 2 or 3 bars wouldn't be ample enough to insert a proper break that didn't sound forced.
2. as for the addition of the new break time guideline, i wrote this with the idea that, essentially, two 1/1 breaks in an 8/1 phrase is equal to one 2/1 break every 16/1 phrase. breaks as frequent as that, as many maps and players have shown, do not cause any sort of strain on the target audience. since that was the point of the current guideline, i feel that the new one also accomplishes just that.
3. i also think with there being two proposed options, the gray area i talked about will shrink tremendously, and will give mappers more room to execute more creative ideas.

feel free to discuss these proposed additions
shoutout to nepuri for helping me a little bit <3

i guess you had enough of me explaining why 1/1 breaks are enough to compensate for the lack of 2/1 or 3/2 spam in a muzukashii. lol

lole

I agree, current guidelines about breaks are not good enough, your proposal is cool but I think you should handle it by measuring time in miliseconds, just take a look at the new osu!catch ranking criteria to have an example of what I'm talking about. o/

So k_hand:

I disagree on something. Specifically the high BPM part. Because while making a spread the general idea above 240 BPM is to reduce snappings themselves; as in 1/1 maximum snap in Futsuu and 1/2 maximum snap in Muzukashii instead of 1/2 and 1/4 respectively. Above that, increasing break amount by decreasing continuous mapping is not a good idea at all, because it will make the map A LOT easier compared to lower BPMs. So keeping the amount of continuous mapping as 16/1 and 20/1 is a better idea to represent the hardship of the high BPM.

Another opinion about having a 1/1 break on every 8/1, personally, I find it logical but when you put that out in the gameplay, giving a 2/1 break indicates more relaxation. You can think like this: On an Inner Oni, no 1/1 gaps whatsoever but frequent 1/2 breaks. It's almost as straining as having a 1/4 plain stream. So, even though in math they seem equal, their effect on the player is not. So my opinion is to keep old rules and counting 1/1 breaks as continuous mapping instead of adding them up.

I support the idea of the proposal. Having more guidelines with respect to different range of BPMs is great for beginner mappers, and modders as well, especially the lines regarding high BPM. It is, however, essential to have more opinion flowing through the exact numbers that will be using.
I personally feel positive about the proposed values above-mentioned

Guidelines

Ya meant rules, roight? Given the fact it's heavily enforced for a guideline :^)


On-topic:
New break proposals:
I don't think there's got to be so much of a reason in precising scalings for breaks - the current RC clearly state that they are using a base BPM of 180. Everything scales for higher or lower BPM, no matter what, and hardsetting more values will just cause maps to be closer to have very similar structures.

Splitting breaks in half-values however is a good idea for some mappers usually use 7+1 beats for the basic skeleton - forcing a 2/1 break after two occurences of this just breaks the structure overall.

Lower SV on high BPM:
Just go along with "Use a lower base slider velocity in higher BPMs" - same argument, too many hardset values and you're restricting. Of course these values have to be reasonable, to avoid garbage like SV 0.4 on 186 BPM.

However, this guideline shouldn't be so much of an issue given how many players play 16:9. Sure, it would have been a guideline back in the olden 4:3 days, but players usually play on 16:9 nowadays so 220 BPM still gives plenty of time for a player to react.

Case in point, using 1/4 timing signature and 1.4 base SV - you notice that there are roughly 3.5 beats to see ahead of the receptor, which at 220 BPM is nearly a full second ahead. I think this needs more debate.

Futsuu base and 5 max notes
why was it 4 anyway

I agree with everything except the Futsuu part. I don't think players of this difficulty level should have to play at x1.2 SV. I still remember not having any problems reading with faster maps when I was at that level, so although it might just be me and some others, I think Futsuu should be played at x1.4

frukoyurdakul wrote:

I disagree on something. Specifically the high BPM part. Because while making a spread the general idea above 240 BPM is to reduce snappings themselves; as in 1/1 maximum snap in Futsuu and 1/2 maximum snap in Muzukashii instead of 1/2 and 1/4 respectively. Above that, increasing break amount by decreasing continuous mapping is not a good idea at all, because it will make the map A LOT easier compared to lower BPMs. So keeping the amount of continuous mapping as 16/1 and 20/1 is a better idea to represent the hardship of the high BPM.

Another opinion about having a 1/1 break on every 8/1, personally, I find it logical but when you put that out in the gameplay, giving a 2/1 break indicates more relaxation. You can think like this: On an Inner Oni, no 1/1 gaps whatsoever but frequent 1/2 breaks. It's almost as straining as having a 1/4 plain stream. So, even though in math they seem equal, their effect on the player is not. So my opinion is to keep old rules and counting 1/1 breaks as continuous mapping instead of adding them up.

i don't think it'll make them a "LOT" easier than lower bpms, since if you have a song in 240 and you played a song in 120, the time that passes in between notes is literally cut in half, but since those are perfect numbers to work with you do have some validity in this point. i do think in faster bpms, there should be more frequent break times specifically in the lower difficulties, maybe not the higher diffs, so maybe setting the guideline to say 12/1 or 16/1 is a good way to compromise there? i think 3-4 measures is enough as oppose to 2-3, 3 measures for REALLY high bpms and 4 measures as per usual for somewhat high ones

as for what you said about the new guideline, i held the same philosophy until i started working in the qah and saw a lot of maps with the same idea of "a lot of 1/1 breaks compensate for a lack of 3/2 or 2/1 breaks." to be honest, even then, i usually would think that it's just an excuse to avoid a veto or a DQ to fix the issue, it was fairly often that a player of that respected skill level would comment smth along the lines of "i didn't find this to be straining or difficult at all," so i started to kind of change my opinion on that.

Gezoda wrote:

On-topic:
New break proposals:
I don't think there's got to be so much of a reason in precising scalings for breaks - the current RC clearly state that they are using a base BPM of 180. Everything scales for higher or lower BPM, no matter what, and hardsetting more values will just cause maps to be closer to have very similar structures.

Splitting breaks in half-values however is a good idea for some mappers usually use 7+1 beats for the basic skeleton - forcing a 2/1 break after two occurences of this just breaks the structure overall.

Lower SV on high BPM:
Just go along with "Use a lower base slider velocity in higher BPMs" - same argument, too many hardset values and you're restricting. Of course these values have to be reasonable, to avoid garbage like SV 0.4 on 186 BPM.

However, this guideline shouldn't be so much of an issue given how many players play 16:9. Sure, it would have been a guideline back in the olden 4:3 days, but players usually play on 16:9 nowadays so 220 BPM still gives plenty of time for a player to react.

Case in point, using 1/4 timing signature and 1.4 base SV - you notice that there are roughly 3.5 beats to see ahead of the receptor, which at 220 BPM is nearly a full second ahead. I think this needs more debate.

i have to disagree with your first point-hardsetting more values won't necessarily cause map structures to be universally similar since every song is radically different and many people, especially when gds are on the set, execute breaks in a different way respective to the song. while i do agree big time that everything scales according to the rc's 180bpm, as i've seen time and time again, people don't take that scaling into account, which is the main reason for this proposal

about your lower SV comment, i think i can agree with the wordking "lower" instead of specifically 1.2x. that's personally just the value i see most often to compensate for higher bpms. and since you also have a good point about the 16:9 ratio (some people do play 4:3 still tho), perhaps increasing the guideline to 240 as oppose to 220 would be better then? because while in my opinion 220 is the point at which notes are coming faster than a beginner player is used to, i remember having trouble reading 240 when i was just a regular oni player, so, i get it

edit: one of the goals here is to hopefully enforce these as guidelines, not semi-rules, and i think by giving people two options to choose from by defining them clearly apart from each other will help that. that guideline logic as well, SHOULD give some leniency regarding the "This can be adjusted to 8/1 or 12/1 in a BPM higher than 240, or 32/1 or 36/1 in a BPM lower than 140" part. i wrote that with a guideline mindset in mind, not a rule one.

thanks for y'alls feedback

after some discussion with gezo in discord, we came up with some edits n stuff:

General (Rules)

1. Use a lower base slider velocity for the Kantan and Futsuu in sets timed in a BPM faster than 300. You may apply a similar slider velocity to the Muzukashii and Oni if necessary.

anytime "Use a base slider velocity of 1.2x in a BPM higher than 220. This is simply to ensure the readability of notes for beginners at higher BPMs." this guideline appears, we decided to make the guideline a little bit more lenient and versatile by changing it to the following:

1. Use a lower base slider velocity in a BPM higher than 240.This is simply to ensure the readability of notes for beginners at higher BPMs.

hopefully that helps some things out

edit: as per discussion with fruko, i've edited the guidelines for the already existing break times:

anytime "This can be adjusted to 8/1 or 12/1 in a BPM higher than 240, or 32/1 or 36/1 in a BPM lower than 140." this shows up, i've instead changed the higher bpm's limits to be 12/1 to 16/1-so edited, it appears as this:

1. You should insert at least 1 rest moment that is 3/1 or longer after 16/1 to 20/1 of continuous mapping. This can be adjusted to 12/1 or 16/1 in a BPM higher than 240, or 32/1 or 36/1 in a BPM lower than 140. Less frequent rest moments or shorter ones may put too much strain on beginners.

The scaling thing about rest moments being like typed out doesnt seem to make sense, it doesn't add anything. That's what it's supposed to state right now in the current criteria and is what gezo was saying - the breaks scale depending on tempo, writing out more values doesn't add information it's not written out to avoid running into this "oh my god there's 1500 hard set values in the RC that we have to follow now"

Okoratu wrote:

The scaling thing about rest moments being like typed out doesnt seem to make sense, it doesn't add anything. That's what it's supposed to state right now in the current criteria and is what gezo was saying - the breaks scale depending on tempo, writing out more values doesn't add information it's not written out to avoid running into this "oh my god there's 1500 hard set values in the RC that we have to follow now"

okay, but once again i bring up that the biggest motivation for this proposal is the fact that most people don’t really have any idea of how things scale when higher or lower than 180

that aside, assuming that those specifications were removed, would the new guideline be sufficient enough to accomplish the same sort of idea?

I kinda agree with Gezo and Okotaru here, if anything setting more values would lower the "freedom" part of guidelines. The prob here is more about those who apply guidelines as if they were rules without considering the song's settings.

"Rhythm related guidelines and rules apply to approximately 180 BPM maps. If your song is drastically faster or slower, some variables might be different. Apply reasonable judgment in these cases."
This means common sense should be used for bpms that are higher or lower than 180. BNs and QATs exist to prevent the ranking system from being defined by values that can't cover all situations because of subjectivity. Thought from my personnal experience some members of these groups (Nardoxyribonucleic and Aloda, if not more) have a pretty mysterious way of "applying reasonable judgment in these cases".



What i understand from this is that it would be perfectly normal to apply the current values of guidelines for a very high bpm song even thought those guidelines were designed for songs around 180bpm. If i understood this correctly that is.

okay, so since most of you have come to the consensus that adding more specific guidelines isn't a great idea, let's just remove those additions from the time being, although the question still remains on how to give mappers a proper idea on how to scale breaks according to much higher or much lower bpms, since that knowledge seems to be lost in general

gezo also said this however:

Gezoda wrote:

Splitting breaks in half-values however is a good idea for some mappers usually use 7+1 beats for the basic skeleton - forcing a 2/1 break after two occurences of this just breaks the structure overall.

is this something we can all agree on?

"Splitting breaks in half-values" sounds alright, thought it actually ignores one of the main issue we keep hearing about which is "continuous mapping". Isn't having more shorter breaks instead of less longer breaks like having no breaks at all for our current standards? It would be interesting to get more opinions from those who directly apply that mindset, as-in BNs and QATs. Afaik only 2 BNs answered here.

"by current standards" yes, you'd be right, by current standards that idea would be correct-but current standards aren't doing a good job of actually understanding what can be understood as straining for certain players of respective difficulties and instead just throw a guideline as a blanket for what is understood as straining

edit: continuous mapping as defined by the rc is any break shorter than 1/1, which is why that guideline or any variation of it was not applied to the oni

let me just clear up what's been changed up to this point:

1. the addition of the following proposed rule in the general section:
   Use a lower base slider velocity for the Kantan and Futsuu in sets timed in a BPM faster than 300. You may apply a similar slider velocity to the Muzukashii and Oni if necessary.
2. the revision of the 1.2x sv proposed guideline in kantan and futsuu to state the following:
   Use a lower base slider velocity in a BPM higher than 240.This is simply to ensure the readability of notes for beginners at higher BPMs.
3. the removal of the following phrase from any proposed guideline:
   This can be adjusted to 8/1 or 12/1 in a BPM higher than 240, or 32/1 or 36/1 in a BPM lower than 140.
   
   new/possible ideas:
4. since the biggest problem is the mapper's awareness that the guidelines are set in a 180bpm environment, it may be a good idea to end something along the lines of "Be sure to adjust these values in a BPM much higher or lower than 180." to the end of the break time guidelines. it may be redundant, but at least it is explicitly stated at the end of each guideline, hopefully avoiding the "i didn't know" excuse
5. addition of a similar alternative break time guideline to the futsuu? i personally don't think it's necessary since finding a 2/1 break is normally very easy, but it does seem a bit weird to offer an alternative for k/m but not futsuu. perhaps using the same structure but "two (or three) 3/2 breaks after no longer than 8/1 of continuous mapping" may be a good idea?

edit: removed one of the edits bc i think i was thinking about it wrong, sorry ab that

seconding the new edit and the two ideas
i'll take a closer look at everything later

I agree with the edits although to say:

The Rule about lower base SV in kantans and futsuus should have added: "Or equivalent adjustment via inherited timing points".

Newer mappers should not face a wall like this when people come to them in their kantans saying "screw you make this 1.2 or ill punch you", some should be able to do it with green lines if they want to, people might find that easier to manage.