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Let's rework QAT stuff!

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Mordred

Proposal wrote:

Glossary
Core Team
Members of the Global Moderation Team (or osu!team in general), whose main responsibility is managing the system rather than necessarily being part of it. I really don't think GMT should be managing anything mapping related, most of them have no idea how anything here works, granted there are a few exceptions but overall I think this is a bad idea



Membership of the Quality Assurance Team

Membership in the QAT is limited to a four months term. Beatmap Nominators get elected/chosen to occupy the vacant seats within the QAT in order to receive the ability to proactively assure the quality of the currently nominated content. Whether or not you want do that for all game modes or just standard is in the open. removing very qualified people just because their term is over doesn't make sense to me, I don't want to replace people with less qualified ones just because of that

The QAT lose their moderation permissions and only retain their Beatmap Nominator privileges together with the disqualification button. I'm ok with this as long as the GMT starts actually moderating beatmap threads when necessary

The Core Team compiles a list of possible candidates at the end of every term based on (yet uncertain) criteria. (Probably candidates applying for the position simply)
Members of the Beatmap Nominators can vote for member(s) on the list.
Once a QAT drops out of the team for any reason, for example by not being re-elected or reaching the maximum amount of re-elections in a row, they are on cooldown for the position equal to the duration of their just expired membership in the QAT. again, I'm very against the idea of blocking qualified people from this position, though the idea of making the qat position a bit more accessible isn't something I'm entirely against



Changes to the Ranking System

The Beatmap Nominators lose their right to qualify beatmaps (second nomination). literally why

The QAT is the only team that can qualify beatmaps. Thus, they are forced to proactively process through all nominated content and only push the content forward that is deemed to have a sufficient quality level. forcing someone to do a voluntary job makes absolutely no sense, yes sure you can just remove them if they don't fullfil their quota but nobody should be pressured to check a lot of maps they don't want to check

Once hitting Qualified, a beatmap may only be disqualified when it directly violates the Ranking Criteria, rendering all subjective-level concerns moot, as the map has already passed quality revision by the QAT. this basically says improving the map is not allowed anymore, what if the mapper wants to change stuff from mods? not allowed because it doesn't violate the ranking criteria

Maps nominated by members of the Beatmap Nominators will end up in a queue checked by the QAT. Whether they are being assigned or can pick maps by themselves has yet to be decided. being assigned to maps is the worst thing you could do, as you said it's still tbd but this really shouldn't be pushed through. if anything everyone should be allowed to pick what the want

New members of the Beatmap Nominators will need to go through the same application process as now, their applications will be evaluated by the Core Team. makes sense


Frequently Asked Questions

Why do you want to limit the membership in the QAT to a specific time period?
We are trying to combat two issues with that. First, people that occupy a position are eventually finding a comfort zone that they refuse to leave, making it hard to keep new ideas, new opinions and new views flowing and spawning. Second, people that occupy a position for a while but lose motivation are rarely resigning by themselves and usually simply stop doing things but are clinging to their title. As soon as you start to questioning the legitimacy of their position based on their activity and motivation, they usually come up with reactions that reach from “I am busy with school” to “I am super motivated now! (for two days)” By limiting the membership to a specific time frame, the QAT will always be restocked with new faces that bring new opinions along. Therefore, instead of keeping the QAT in a dormant state of always the same people being in charge, a highly volatile QAT assures that new eras are initiated more frequently. I actually kind of agree with a few parts of this, mainly the "they don't resign and stop doing shit" part. But instead of forcing a term limit you could just enforce activity requirements a bit harder and actually remove people from the team if they fail to meet them

Why will the QAT lose their moderation privileges along with that?
Putting someone in charge with critical moderation tools that can affect every user (silences, deleting posts, access to logs and account histories) requires a very specific kind of trust and faith into each individual that receives these tools. This trust must come from the higher osu!team itself. Given how the QAT are supposed to be chosen, the trust does not come from the higher osu!team directly. The BNG will put people of their ranks in charge, which is fine in itself, but this doesn’t make them automatically inherit the trust that, in comparison, the GMT receives when being entrusted with critical and sensitive tools and private information (e.g. the account standings that concern nobody but the moderators/admins and the individual user) as I said, I'm totally fine with the qat losing moderation powers, but I really think it would require the GMT to become A LOT more active in terms of moderating beatmap threads to prevent them from getting out of control (see guren / shiten / etc). And I think most GMT actually care about any of this happening which is why I believe that it would be better for the qat to keep moderation powers. Also aren't new qat approved by mao who is an admin from what I know?

Wouldn’t the core team basically be what the QAT is now? How does that change anything?
First and foremost, the core team sure has its origin in the current QAT. Their task is also a task that needs to be continued. The reason why we don’t want the elected QAT to handle the incoming BN applications is simply because we want to avoid the creation of echo chambers. The core team - being in charge of conducting the BN applications, the application assessments, running the QAT elections and compiling the QAT candidate lists - is way smaller than the current QAT. Also their only task would be to conduct these management tasks and therefore forfeit their say in the matters that concern the elected QAT. They will stay separate and focus on running these tasks neutrally, so that the QAT and BNG can focus on their task while the organization and logistics is conducted with full transparency by the core team. They would be responsible for providing the BNG/QAT a proper work environment by running the applications and elections and by running the logistics and oversee the entire system in moderation fashion without injecting their mapping/modding opinion into any of these. what how is denying the "core team", who are supposedly higher than the qat, from anything else that isn't strictly what you listed a good idea? aren't they supposed to be more qualified?

How would you avoid that the core team isn’t just denying applying BNs or QAT candidates arbitrarily?
This is achieved by having the criteria for being a BN and QAT way more defined. While a behavioral and activity assessment is necessary to assure that the incoming people are not complete douches and actually do things in a satisfying quantity, we have to reconsider whether or not a proficiency assessment is worth it at this level. Given the QAT is supposedly returning to proactive quality assurance, incompetent people in the BNG would have their output gatekept and have their performance eventually be reported as insufficient by the QAT to the core team. pretty much agree with most of this, though you'll never be able to keep things completely neutral so why are you trying

Why do you make the Beatmap Nominators lose their right to nominate? Why is the QAT supposed to nominate now?
By making the QAT being the ones that put the final nomination onto a beatmap alone, we assure multiple things:
The beatmap is being approved by the QAT instead of disapproved. This is a positive reinforcement. A quality assessment that eventually results with approval will always cause more positivity than a group of people being solely dedicated to “disapprove or ignore” created content. The only approval a mapper received from the QAT so far is that QAT just ignored the map, completely uncertain whether or not is has been assessed or not. By having the QAT actually put an “ok” or “not ok” onto each map, every mapper at least received some sort of feedback from the QAT instead of just interpreting the radio silence as either the QAT actually being fine with it or the QAT being just lazy and ignorant to it.
Beatmaps being approved instead of disapproved solves a core issue with the Qualified system. The Qualified system is a system built around anticipation. Once you get your map qualified, you are anxiously watching the 7 days passing by. During that time, instead of being filled with positive anticipation, you are rather afraid that some asshole QAT comes around the corner and disqualifies your dear creation. It’s 7 days of horrible uncertainty. “Are they assessing it? Does anybody care? Does my map fly under the radar? Oh god, someone posted on my map, soon the QAT will spawn and nuke it! All the delays!” - You see, instead of creating an environment of willing cooperation, open discussions and finding a compromise by *agreeing*, the current system makes the QAT shoot down maps, which is by its very nature perceived negatively. In order to fix that, the QAT is supposed to deliver the final approval instead of being the Damocles sword that hangs down from the ceiling, impaling your creation by sheer chance. QATs delivering an approval brings certainty to mappers and community that this creation is good to go and actually has been proactively assessed. the idea of a more active approach instead of reactive is something I definitely support, but all this is going to accomplish is shifting the blame from BN x to QAT Y, people will just get even more mad at a different person because now it'd be "qat approved" and you can't do anything whatsoever against it

Isn’t that just another try to do something like the BN tiers we used to have?
Yes it is and it shows a lot of parallels. The BN tiers weren’t a bad idea in itself, however had several shortcomings: how were tiers not a bad idea? do we really want to go back to having what, 5 qualified maps at a time?
The assessment of who becomes a second tier BN was done via a test. Not only are tests itself always a very slippery slope in terms of validity, but also were all BNs forced to undergo this revision. Aside the rather disappointing outcome, the result led to people ending up in the second tier that never asked for it while keeping away those who actually wanted to be second tier but never have been given the chance to do so. By having the QATs elected, attaining such an equal position is done by choice, because the candidate wants to be a candidate and the BNs actually want this person to be in charge. valid point
The second tier BNs were by all means not organized. They were confronted with a wall of bubbled beatmaps they were supposed to check all alone. While this still holds true, the idea is to organize the QAT way better than the second tier BNs were organized (they weren’t organized at all). organization isn't gonna change much, people will still be overwhelmed due to the much larger number of BNs than QATs (even with the proposed system)
The second tier BNs were still facing a nomination limit which hindered them to nominate more than one map per day. This isn’t a thing anymore. that doesn't guarantee people will actually make use of it, many people never even hit the limit (speaking of current times at least)
The second tier BNs didn’t have the authority of a title and also did not receive additional prestige despite their higher rank. The QAT still existed above them, making the second tier BNs an unloved group of people set between the normal BNG and the QAT that would still shoot them down. In this suggestion however, the last nominators are also equal to the last gatekeepers, as Qualified will only account for Unrankables or deep deep disagreements from the very own team the new QAT will operate in. a "title" isn't neccessary)
It was absolutely unclear when new second tier BNs would be appointed and under what premise they are appointed. Having the QAT be assembled by recurring elections makes sure that there are always other people put in charge and that there are always enough active people around that are willingly taking the seat and people can actively pursue this position without being accounted to arbitrary choices of promotion from the former QAT. makes sense

This sounds like getting a beatmap ranked will be quite harder again, as you need to not only get yourself a BN but also a QAT now. What’s the point?
The point is that you can’t have it both ways. You can not ask for a dedicated team to proactively assess quality and at the same time have the same valencies available. Asking for better quality assurance will indefinitely raise the difficulty in getting something Ranked, whether it be simply taking longer or the quality requirement itself just rising. In order to combat the concern of being lost and forgotten among all nominated beatmaps and to not have the community play “fetch the QAT” after having fetched a BN, the general shared queue is organized by the core team, where all nominated maps are being collected and eventually distributed for revision among the residing QAT, so that eventually every beatmap nominated will receive some sort of feedback from the QAT. Whether or not the feedback will lead to a qualification or the QAT just leaving the workable feedback behind so the mapper can keep working on their creation is some other topic. The general queue assures that every nominated map will receive QAT feedback and combats uncertainty and the impossibility to “fetch a QAT”. However, in order to fulfill the gatekeeper and quality assurance task, the feedback can also be “negative” and will not always lead to a definite approval by the QAT either way. Sometimes, beatmaps are just in such a distant state from Ranked in their perception that beatmaps can be possibly bounced back to the BNG entirely (“popped without rebubble”), declaring that this needs way more polishing while pointing out the cornerstones of what it is lacking. The QAT will not be giving you a step-by-step introduction on what to fix exactly how but is only advised to word the shortcomings understandably and offer a direction, not a direct manual. this isn't going to assure quality at all, it only lowers the amount of people who might be "okay" with your map. do you actually every bn is in love with every map they nominate?

Why would you decline feedback being provided during Qualified stage? What about the community feedback?
Having the community leave feedback during Qualified stage is a nice idea on paper. You have experts or dedicated people push a map forward and present it on a silver platter to the community. However, as described in another question, in case of the map being *not accepted by the community*, it gets charged up with massive negativity. Getting your map disqualified is always a huge letdown. The Qualified stage is also a huge window of uncertainty. It puts mappers and supporters in anxiety, praying for nobody to show up and nag on something. Is this what we want? Hoping for people to slide through a critical revision phase without anybody bringing up suggestions? While suggestions are all appreciated and even dearly wanted by the mappers prior Qualified stage, as soon as the map hits Qualified, most mappers become massively reluctant to listen to the suggestions people provide then. The map already jumped through a lot of hoops, it has been assessed by modders, BNGs and QATs, people that are deeply involved into the scene of map creation. While we understand the desire to also offer the creation to the community, we also have to embrace the fact that you can never make it right for everybody. Qualified stage as it is now is also easily exploitable in order to gang up against specific mappers or maps, to keep a map in a limbo forever, especially since you can hold something back indefinitely for reasons that can be entirely subjective and are a simple matter of taste. By having the QAT proactively assess the quality of beatmaps BEFORE the Qualified stage is reached, we assure that every map hitting Qualified are “actually good to go”. Community feedback sure is valuable but feels a lot like a hindrance when only brought up during a phase where the mapper is the most reluctant to receive this feedback. By limiting Disqualifications to direct Ranking Criteria violations alone (as in seeing Qualified like a grace period for human mistakes to happen) and by limiting it to a stage where fellow QATs can deeply disagree with the assessment of their colleagues (avoid abuse, checks and balances), we make the Qualified stage be a stage that is way less filled with anxiety, because as long as your map sticks to the RC and isn’t over the top terrible, you have the certainty that your map will slide through because of the certainty of the map being good to go, as it is QAT approved. This change also assures that the community brings up their feedback at the point of the map review process where it is most desired by mappers: before it hits Qualified. I totally understand the "anxiety" part you mentioned, in fact I feel very nervous myself when I have something qualified and keep checking the thread very often, but while your "solution" removes this part, it will also add a part of "feeling disappointed / defeated" for anyone that disagrees with the map, as they are unable to do anything whatsoever against it
on top of that I agree with everything nao said
hi-mei
Cherry Blossom
Criticisms :

SPOILER
It's my turn to write an essay i guess. I haven't read the other posts yet before posting.
It's time to drop some criticisms concerning the current system, from someone that saw from an external view the evolution of the QAT since their creation, and the older system with BAT.
Note that i don't generalize, so if you don't feel targeted by reading this, you are not targeted.

I've noticed that today, the QAT are just called to press the DQ button on maps when the QAH, BNs or other person make a post in "report a qualified map" thread. This was initially an idea that came from me in 2015, the main goal of this thread was to help the QAT doing their job faster and particularly avoiding a map's disqualification in day 6. It seems now they don't take anymore initiatives to check by themselves the qualified section, searching for overall quality issues according to their own quality standards, like it was done in the past (I am just talking about std by the way). It seems they rely too much on a thread, like a mapper relies on aimod to check if his map is safe or not.

In my opinion this current team should not be called "Quality Assurance Team", it must be called "Press DQ button team" instead, few exceptions come when we see that they decide to create and apply new rules like the time in Qualified section after being Disqualified....
We don't ask them to bring us miracles and sort out good maps from the bad ones in terms of quality, we just ask them to be engaged actively in maps overall, not only "controversal" ones, by giving their own opinion as a mapper and a "guardian" of the overall quality in official osu! ranked beatmaps, like you can see explained in this post concerning an "old" controversial map https://osu.ppy.sh/forum/p/3619207. I won't mention any names, but a lot of current mappers need to get this kind of post in their maps, and these kind of posts should be given by the QAT. Some members of the QAT just lack of serious engagement towards the controversal maps.

Concerning accessibility, this is probably the biggest thing you should rework, because it currently looks like a bad joke in my opinion. I don't want to mention any name nor critisize. More than half of the QAT currently look more like showcases than engaged staff members in the mapping community that cares about overall quality. There has been always favoritism or circle groups since the beginning, nothing new, and i don't really care that you promote your friend as staff, the only thing i care is that there must be a good reason. Does he fit this position ? is he enough experienced ? and most importantly is he impartial ?
It looks like being impartial is a too-serious thing, disqualifying your friend's map for subjective reasons is difficult to handle, i admit it. I've seen in the past some real facts which ended like "i thought we were friends" after a unrank (qualified section wasn't born yet), but if the QAT are doing favoritism towards their friends, we won't improve anything.

I hope some QATs don't see their title as an achievement or a promotion from BNG, and should consider it as a difficult "position" with many responsibilities. And i hope they realize that they have the "ability" to drive the mapping community, including quality standards. The fact that many "controversial" maps passed the ranking process easily, without having not so much serious discussions and criticisms, may be the fault of some QATs that were too passive, and that didn't realize the impact they have towards the mapping community. Or they just let things go on, and don't care about mapping because they think someone else can report the map or because the mapper is their friend. If some QAT members don't have what i said in mind, in my opinion they have nothing to do there.

_____


Well, after reading https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eWMLHEJJcyy2rr-EtAF0gqiy3YCRcSVcPmtUV8E-3eM/edit

- Having assigned maps to check to QAT members would not be a bad idea, it provides a maximum of fairness to everyone.

- It's a bad idea to make nominators able to vote for new QAT members, we already saw it when it came to vote for BNs when BNG members were able to. It has ended with some BNs that just did blatant abuse. I know QAT is "more serious" and these cases will rarely or never happen, but as i said it's more serious, so only the QAT must decide who is able to join the QAT.

- I would suggest to make the community able to vote for a Disqualification of the map if there are questionable issues, relying on only a group of people whether they are experienced or not isn't what a community-based game is. After reaching a good amount of complaints (with constructive criticisms) the map must be handled by the QAT and only the QAT has the last word, and must explain the reason on why the map remains qualified or gets disqualified.

- The second thing i would suggest is, as BN, before nominating the map, he must rate the map on a scale of 5, which 5 means the map is controversal as firetruck, and 1 the map is pretty safe. The highest rate, the highest attention on the map from the QAT.
Seijiro
For some reason this seems to be a recurring mentality when it comes to the whole process: "having few maps in qualified is BAD".
Excuse me, what?

I bring this up because of Mordred's post just above, but I heard many others complaining about that and I wonder why.
Most games hardly release new content as easily as osu! does. The game with the shortest release times I now as of today was a game releasing updates on a weekly basis with 4 small "levels" each time, which is by far way less than osu!. There might be others out there I'm not aware of, but I doubt it can even come close to osu! in that regard anyway.
In fact we even have too much content I'd say, to the point where you can't even get an idea of who does what because you don't have the material time to keep up with the content: that in itself is the worst thing a game could do with its own content imo. Imagine being a new mapper who just went through months of effort to make their first map get ranked and all he gets is probably a few thousands plays (depending on the song) because they never got a moment on the stage.
Maybe you, as an outsider, don't care that much for such things, but I strongly believe that people still make content for the game because they want to both challenge themselves into improving as well as letting others enjoy what they enjoy (although some of you "experienced" mappers may not fully understand this feeling).

Sorry for not really suggeting much here, but I thought this has to be addressed somehow if we want to change how things go. Every system possible can always become a wreck because of the wrong mentality and I believe this is one of those cases.


On a side note, let's also stop with all this pretending of trying to make it "community-driven" to the extreme when we clearly know that on mapping matters only modders, mappers and staff related to such things actually know what they do: asking a bunch of people who can't distinguish left from right is not what you call a smart decision. You also don't need to hold a vote for when a really bad or controversial map pops up because people WILL talk about it if it's a big deal (unless you like to go through a lot of tedious and useless steps to solve a problem that wasn't there to begin with...)
VINXIS
my man the ecosystem of osu! is not like the ecosystem of games like Ur Popular MOBAs or Smash the ecosystem is similar to super mario maker where the Consumers are creating the content they Consume Themselves. In these ecosystems, you would usually want a higher rate of content coming through compared to other games because of their ease of consumption and short longevity. With a low rate of content passing in an ecosystem like this, it is a sign of a dying game
Deca
I see some flaws with the proposed system that I'd like to point out.

1. The voting system, presumably conducted among the members of the BNG themselves, encourages nepotism to a greater degree than exists already.

Would you, as a BN, vote for a potential QAT who you are not on good terms with, assuming you are reliant on them to now qualify your maps, and cannot B4B? BNs will most likely vote primarily for their friends instead of individuals they believe are good modders or worthy of the QAT role because it is the smart thing to do.

2. The supply of qualified BNs is finite, and would quickly be exhausted by any term limits imposed on QAT membership. Alternately, if no term limits were imposed, or very long term limits, membership to the QAT would be largely static.

There are already very few members of the BNG that many people would say are qualified to be members of the QAT. Assuming the standards for QAT are loosened, it would still be quite difficult for enough individuals to become QAT material quickly enough to replace the outgoing members. Extending term limits on QAT membership to a long enough duration to alleviate this problem would not fix the "static" nature of the QAT and would still encourage complacency.

3. Adding members to the QAT would make it extremely difficult for new mappers to find BNs.

While I haven't counted, I'm pretty sure over half of the BNG has a "no requests" policy written on their userpage. Imposing a restriction of one QAT minimum would undoubtedly make it more difficult to get maps ranked, especially for newer mappers without BN and QAT friends.

4. This does absolutely nothing to solve the fundamental issue with the QAT (not properly assuring "quality") that a majority of people have and also has basically been done before with the BN tiers, and failed.

There will always be individuals who push controversial, subjectively low-quality maps. Many of these individuals are among the most knowledgeable members within the mapping and modding community. Ultimately, your proposal attempts to solve a fundamentally unsolvable issue: quality cannot be assured beyond objective unrankability and a few blatantly inexcuseable errors, and everyone has a different definition of quality.
abraker

MrSergio wrote:

In fact we even have too much content I'd say, to the point where you can't even get an idea of who does what because you don't have the material time to keep up with the content: that in itself is the worst thing a game could do with its own content imo. Imagine being a new mapper who just went through months of effort to make their first map get ranked and all he gets is probably a few thousands plays (depending on the song) because they never got a moment on the stage.
This might be the case in standard, but this is definitely not the case in other gamemodes.
Serizawa Haruki
I'm just asking for more clarification here

Wouldn't that proposal make BN probation completely redundant? Since those BNs can only nominate maps in combination with a full member of the BNG, the removal of the permission to qualify maps for BNs would mean that there's no difference between the two anymore. This wouldn't be a problem in itself, I'm just wondering if this aspect was considered.

And about QATs checking all the bubbled maps: Are they obliged to nominate a map if the quality is sufficient for the ranked category? Like, what if there's a bubbled map which has decent/good quality but no QAT is interested in the song/map because it's too generic/not interesting/whatever. Would one of them still be forced to nominate that map? Or is there the possibility of a nominated map staying in pending forever just because no QAT liked it and therefore didn't qualify it? Also, this queue of nominated maps would probably be very long. Is there a priority for certain maps like back in the days where BATs had to mod the maps with the highest star priority? Or can they choose which maps they want to check? Because that could potentially lead to certain maps not being looked at by anyone for weeks or even months since new maps get added to the queue all the time.
ErunamoJAZZ
Glad to know about this.

I have few words about some things in the proposal:
  1. I am happy the idea of a "shared queue" was proposed, I still thinking it is the best way to achieve a fair ranking process for everyone.
  2. I am worry about the idea of "increase quality in the ranking section"
    Even if I agree with MrSergio about ranking section have a lot of boring/notInteresting maps, if the ranking process become more strict, you must change the mapping culture, imo.
    I mean, in order to get their maps ranked, mappers mapping maps (lol), but if rank a "just okay" map becomes difficult, they will lost their motivation. It is the current culture.

    Now, thinking in solutions for this cultural issue, making a "mapper quota" (I mean, something like: you can rank 12 maps for year or so) will help mappers to focus in their best maps to be ranked.
    (it is just a idea)



cheers!
Smokeman
Reading MrSergio's post made me want to reply (thanks for inspiring me to give it a shot)

Ranking maps in osu! runs under the philosophy that everyone can do it if they put the work in. Such a mentality is very healthy to stir up new players dreams to get into the mapping sphere, although i can't speak for myself in this category, a lot of mapper have come from such background.
Throughout the years you would often hear that there is a bias against some mappers or even unknown mappers which turned up to be false seeing the rise a many new faces in recent times. I personally have seen it mostly through the mentorship program which i have been a mentor for for 6 cycles and been a judge on multiple contest (also done a lecture on advanced modding with more planned) in the hopes of getting peoples gears of imagination spinning and cultivate their love of creating.

Such a mindset would inevitably create over saturation as the community grew and we fostered new talent. Along the way you would also get mappers who were still in there developing phase wanting to get a map ranked to keep a momentum or motivation going for the sake of mapping. Almost everyone has a story about their "awful first map" and such with some continuing on that trend for the rest of their ranking career.

Now the problem arises that the disparity between the old guards or excellent mappers of our community are being put in the same category as those newby maps which met the minimum for ranking. This of course creates the notion that "everyone is rankable if it doesn't break the rules" which in all fairness is true as long as you could find Nominators ready to lower their standards in the most extreme of cases.

Keeping the last part in mind i would like to propose a new category: Official
The idea is that those maps are being lifted above the pool of casual or underwhelming maps and put into a higher tier regarding quality. Like this you would distinguish between quality maps and just ranked maps.
Let's define ranked as "just having a leader board" and "follows the rules" while Official would be all of those but also have "ASSURED QUALITY".

To be added could be possible monetization of these maps but that could be left up to debate. I'd suggest a donation box on the map page for the mapper to keep it mostly community driven. Like this you would battle and seriously deflate the whole mapping commission market which will undoubtedly create a toxic environment battling the shitmaps made through these once and for all as elite mappers would be incentivised to just create their best.

There are a couple of remarks to add which tie in to the growth of osu!.
if you go to the qualified section you will see that there are about 50 or maybe even more maps waiting to be checked by a handful of people for quality standards. If that "handful" was 50 people then i'd say that it consistently feasible to have quality checks even when 20% of those are having a rough patch in real life. Let's not forget that people are working on these and not robots, mostly people around the age of 18-25 which don't have an awful a lot of time to dispose.
With this logistical problem in out sites concluding that sub par maps would pass is not only expected but also assured. Anyone who has ever judged a map rigorously will know that such an endeavor can take up to hours especially when some sets have like 5-6 diffs.
The solution to this is not to get more people into quality checking. Leaving quality checks to the ones who have experience in such a field is of the utmost importance: You dont higher some dude form the street to fix your plumbing issue, you ask a professional cause you want THE GUARANTEE that the job will be DONE and it will be DONE GOOD. Like this we should throw away any form of public or community driven quality checks. Such a thing is ridiculous and will only cause mapper to play to the fiddle of the masses which will lead to a decrease in variety in mapping. We have to leave the options open for everyone to have a chance remember?!


I would also like to stress the lack of innovation in the field of modding and nominating. As a two times BN drop-out the biggest reason which got my motivation about the whole nomination progress tilted was the fact that you spend too much time as a BN on checking for unrankables. It is, and i stress, of utmost importance to develop a machine(AI, Bot, etc.) to check all of these issues. It will soon not be feasible to fulfill the demand for maps if we want to keep the same mentality going. I would consider myself highly opinionated and have often been refereed to as "unforgiving" when it came to quality issues of any kind from my mentees over the years. Having to spent your time checking for unrankables takes away form the time a BN could've spent to actually mention quality issues or other more important issues than "you muted a sliderhead by accident lol"
Checking for unrankables is a brain-dead routine which takes up more time than it should and just like "everyone can make get a map ranked" everyone who is willing to mindlessly "farm" maps with unrankables can get into the BNG.
As such you would actually see who is actually a capable modder instead of an AI stand-in.

"but who will make this AI think you are talking about": Peppy should pay someone to do it. At the moment the core part of osu! the maps are in danger and lazer could handle another year or two in development.


TL;DR
-Osu! growth is pushing the limits of the past system and it needs refinement
-Official category above ranking for Official maps. (possible monetization in this category would nullify shitmaps people do as commissions)
-Develop AI to assist the increasing demand for nominations and filtering of "incapable" or "unfit" members


Obvious problems:
"what about old maps?"
If the spotlight team is any indication there is a dedicated fanbase of old maps which could assist in determining which maps should be elevated to that stature of Official. All of this would require a lot of effort and i expect a year long project to be made out of it. Peppy might even have to look into hiring competent people to make sure this will be a success. As of now, up in the air but i guess the bold strokes have been presented

"Objectivity vs subjectivity"
We are a community driven game so check-mate

"Loved"
will stay as it is, it is not harming or interacting reasonably with the proposed system to introduce complications

"Controversial maps"
Chill your tits. A controversial map doesn't mean it is a map of sub par quality, in fact with this new system exchange of ideas should flourish as the ideal of Official maps, would be only attainable if you are actually good at mapping.

"UR as a metric for quality"
No. You want a stable system and not one which can be easily rigged by circle jerking. Any form of public voting is INHERENTLY going against the concept of QUALITY ASSURANCE, so please refrain from any such system in your suggestions.



As an addendum i would like to propose also the foundation of osu!archives. There have been a handful of people making guides and those are well and good but as MrSergio said there is a need for more in-depth osu! exchange. I was prepared to create a mathematical system describing and defining everything a map does to help normalize vocabulary on a well defined logical system. I gave up that endeavor as my studies came in their way but if there is interest in an exchange of higher concepts i am willing to help create such a foundation or at least support it with content.
(also Sergio, get on that book, would be really cool to have a book about osu C: )

Cheers, hope someone reads this : D
Smokeman
UndeadCapulet
uh ok i have a lot to say and not a very good way to structure everything so im gonna just wall for a bit.

i've been pretty close to qat operations for the past year now so i have a pretty good understanding of how they've been approaching quality assurance. the biggest thing that a lot of people here need to realize is that everyone on the team rn does in fact care about quality assurance, and have all at some point taken a stance against something they've considered to be low quality. they just all have a different criteria for what is low quality. every once in a while they all agree, but it's for maps like asymmetry, or calling, aka sets that the playerbase and newer mappers won't know are/consider to be low quality because they look nice and play nice.

before i go further with this, it needs to be very clearly stated what the intentions of this thread and all the proposals are. some people earlier have been slipping it in, but it needs to be very explicitly stated for the people under the impression the conversation is about something else:

this thread is about making a system where my maps can't get ranked.

well, my and my friends', but just simplifying for ease of reading. this isn't me being full of myself or w/ev, it's very definitely the case. one of the earliest posters literally put my name in their avatar and userpage banner to attack me (gmt where?), and many other people have brought me up both directly and indirectly. now i don't mind that this entire thread is an effort to get rid of me, but this discussion can't move forward until it's been directly stated.

it's very important that people in this thread realize that the majority of the qat do not find my maps to be low quality, but instead consider them to be above average, or even great. multiple have even told me that a map i've ranked this year is one of their favourite maps of the year. and it was a different map for each of those qats. and even for the qat's that don't think this, in every instance of my maps getting vetod, the qat have vouched for the design being of well beyond rankable quality. feel free to ask them, they will confirm this. my maps are not an issue to the qat.
instead of nuking my maps the qat would be far more likely to nuke sets made by mappers like professionalbox (which they've actually somewhat done already w/ calling), delis, andrea, etc. which the majority of the team don't like. if a system were implemented that made it so my maps couldn't get ranked, these would also all be obstructed. that is the consequence for wishing for subjective quality control, it'll apply to everyone.

this isn't exclusive to the qat either, the bng is also filled with people that, at the very least, support my mapping. i know people love to say i only get the same couple of people for my sets, but this is the list of bns that have ranked my sets:
  1. nao tomori
  2. zero__wind
  3. bonsai
  4. natsu
  5. lasse
  6. doormat
  7. hobbes2
  8. mir
  9. hailie
  10. halfslashed
  11. princess kisses
  12. ryuusei aika
  13. ayanokorin
  14. kuron-kun
  15. realazy
  16. frogyfro
  17. nevo
that is more than 2 unique bn's per ranked map, and that list gets even longer if you include my gd's, and even longer if you include bn's that have gd'd in my sets. now i'm not saying everyone in this list would bubble every map of mine (i know the opposite, in fact), but if i want to rank a set, i will be able to find people in power that support it. (also before people say anything, i haven't done a single m4m with any bn here, and many here i've never bubbled a set for).

some people seem to think this disconnect between mappers in power and "the community" is a problem, and as such have proposed to give "the community" power to keep maps from rank. this is a terrible, terrible idea. time and time again we've seen maps be called "the worst thing ever" by the community when they first got ranked, only to be seen as masterpieces a year or 2 after the fact (miss you, hw stuff, etc etc). these maps would never have been ranked under such a system.
community backlash is super witch-hunty and circlejerky in nature. a map being "controversial" usually requires a call to action of some sort, like what recently happened on hailie's shiten. but this call to action means that backlash happening is wildly, wildy inconsistent. shiten is a perfect example of this. that map doesn't really have much different from many of hailie's previously ranked maps, but it's the only one that saw drama on it because someone happened to post it to reddit. but all those previous maps got ranked with no issue, and most didn't see much backlash post-rank either, they all have many praise comments from the actual target audience instead of being flooded by the hatemob.
the call to action is totally random in both when it happens and on what maps it happens to. any pro streamer with lots of viewers can just casually say a map is shit and then lots of their viewers will parrot this idea. it could be on literally any map. mixing any quantitative metric like user rating into this makes it even worse. it's really easy to get a bunch of people together, either intentionally or otherwise, and mass-downvote a map. i know because i just did this with this qualified set: https://osu.ppy.sh/s/703956. this is a harmless set by a popular mapper, but i poked a bunch of people to rate it 1*, and now it'd be dq'd and potentially nuked.

the general playing community should never be considered a prominent voice in the mapping scene, they don't know what's good and are easily swayed by hivemind mentality. any system that takes "backlash" into consideration opens up the ranking system to 1000x more abuse than what happens at the moment.

a lot of other proposals going around are very similar to last year's bn tiers system (or any system that involves a significant downsize in who can qualify maps). the idea that reverting to something similar to that universally-hated system should be immediately discarded from any discussion. tiers did not make it so less "bad maps" got ranked, it just made it so less maps got ranked. but since this isn't convincing enough, allow me to reframe this:
the tier system didn't stop me from ranking maps. i got call on me ranked during this system with no issue whatsoever.

i've also seen a lot of people asking for some sort of subjective quality test again for people in power. this is also a bad idea. last time we had tests, it just led to dumb shit like how rizen couldn't get bn for 12 years even though every human wanted him to be one, and led to a spam of cheating from a bunch of people. but again, i need to reframe this: mao gave out the tier 2 test on the bn server a few months ago, and after i took it, i got the second highest score out of any bn to take it. and sure, that test was biased to the views of people i agree with, but little different would be changed if someone else wrote it, because it's really easy for anyone to game the system and cater responses to the test-writers. tests won't keep me out of the ranked section.

the people requesting changes right now need to come to terms that my maps are considered quality maps by a very significant amount of people, instead of requesting changes that will make ranking a map or joining the team worse for everyone. that, or they'll have to come up with a system that will somehow rid the bng/qat of every person that thinks my maps are good, and prevent others from joining in afterwards. good luck with that.

---

now, with all this said, i don't think everyone here is wrong about the current qat structure being kinda bad. in particular, loctav's proposal, whether intentionally or not, hits on what i find to be the true issue with the qat atm.

back in the bat days quality assurance was a very active process. bats nominated good maps. qat is not structured this way. instead, qat's quality assurance is a reactive process. people in the bng nominate whatever they feel like, and the qat are expected to respond to things in the qualified section that are low quality. if they do not react to something that some people find shitty, they are flamed for it. at the same time, if they react to something that some people don't find shitty, they are flamed for it. they have no option that leads to a content community, because the community is too diverse and at least some group of people can be vocal about how their action or inaction was wrong. qat literally warn new members ahead of time that their job sucks.

for those not around at the time, gaia's asymmetry set is still the biggest shitstorm in osu history, where people complained about how overly nitpicky and unreasonable the quality assurance was. it was such a big event that peppy told the qat to pretty much stop doing that forever. every once in a while they still do this, but it tends to lead to the same result, so they go back to not giving a shit about subjective quality, because the community honestly doesn't want that.

like i said, bat didn't have the issue of literally everything they do or don't do making them look bad. so the proposals that are structured in a way that brings this action-based quality assurance, instead of primarily relying on reaction-based ones, seem better to me. now, i wasn't around at the time, so idk what the problems w/ that old system were, but from how it's been described to me it was mostly just changed to segue into peppy's stackoverflow system. any older people can correct me on this if i'm wrong, i'd love to have more info on this.

as such, i have drafted up a proposal of my own: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yvbUE4lslgG4GYOsTrM9PtiHAaHg2YH90mCX262XfTc/edit?usp=sharing

this proposal aims to mostly combine the bng and qat into a single entity whose purpose is to actively control quality, instead of relying on "catching bad maps" in qualified. it draws from some ideas in loctav's proposal but keeps moderation privileges in the mapping community, which we do desperately need, and gets rid of all the tier2-esque stuff and team downsizing that would do nothing but lower overall ranked content. it's mostly but not totally finished, and pretty easy to iterate upon, so any feedback would be awesome to make it better.


edit: discuss the proposal here i guess: https://osu.ppy.sh/forum/t/843955
Cherry Blossom
Dear UC.

1 - I personally find your maps insteresting in terms of creativity and "controversy" because they are not the kind of maps we see everyday, and bringing some variation would be nice to this game imo, and i respect you for that.
Even if the system is re-built from the bottom, controversal maps still can pass, the only thing that would change is the way people would take and handle them. So saying that a system where your maps can't get ranked is pretty wrong.
Your maps are not about quality, they are about the way they are mapped. Refer to this quote, you will probably recognize the map.

Loctav wrote:

You can stop arguing about what is subjective, what is objective, what is intersubjective and what would the map may look like if mapped by sprosive. That doesn't really matter at all. The Ranking Criteria itself is a formal guideline of "fundamental rules" that MUST be hold in in all circumstances. Everything else is on a "case by case" basis. This does NOT MEAN that mapping must ONLY obey the RC and nothing else. You still must map reasonable.

I looked on this map - and top tier players may like it, but as *QAT* stated, this is NOT what we expect to join our official osu! rankings yet. It is unpolished, it is overdone, the music is not complimenting the map sufficiently (no one said, it must be a 1:1 copy of the music, but the degree it is syncing and pleasing the music is subpar).

And *MAPPER*, we discussed that already. You seem to forget partially that this is a game, after all. And I do not know who you let testplay, but I suggest you to find more testplayers, especially ones that do not run around your skirt and yell "oooh, *MAPPER*-sama, you do so great", because that's how many people here talk. They lack of serious criticism.

If you fail to map beatmaps reasonably and stop trying to squeeze an abomination chimera of the big black, freedom dive and strange program on a 173bpm e-guitaresque song, where every normal person would use like 45% of the sum of all hitobjects used here instead, please do not try to get them approved - or at least don't be so pissed and butthurt about it, if you can not make it into the "Official osu! beatmaps".
2 - Concerning gaia's asymmetry, the DQ reason (lack of concept), would be applied in all maps who plays like a simple map with various patterns, and then you don't know why, there are 1-2 patterns that don't fit the song, and sadly it looks like the QAT closed their eyes towards this "new mapping era" with many maps that lack of concept and are mostly overdone. I remember other cases like Asphyxia's jump map that got disqualified by himself because the commuity found that the jumps were simply overdone, or the long toumei elegy drama etc...

3 - Miss you was another case, it was something "new" and we were waiting for someone who would be able to fc it, and rrtyui came and showed to the whole community that the map could be humanly fc'd. And as you said, i consider it now as a Masterpiece compared to the other technical maps ranked today just because the mapper was able to maintain its own concept from A to Z, without making the map much overdone even if i find it a little overmapped, something you can't find in most of current technical maps, that used to be super rare in past, but now that look pretty common and generic.
And finally, technical maps from the same era as Miss You weren't pushed far in terms of difficulty, and they were more mapped reasonably than today. And when you start making more difficult stuff, the exigence in terms of quality raises.

4 - Concerning your suggestions :

- "BNG will be given forum moderation and disqualification privileges, with a rule set in place preventing them from using powers outside of thread relocation in the Beatmap Management/Ranking Criteria sections, disqualification, and modding page moderation."

Giving ability to BNG to disqualify maps isn't a good idea, from my own experience, i've seen BNs (i won't mention them) who abused of their "notoriety" to do some mods after qualification, and they were enforcing their ideas of ideal mapping, and they were begging for DQs in the "report a qualified map" thread that wasn't initially made for this kind of "dq reason". I know time changes, but this caan easily lead to abuses and be quickly out of control.

- "Qualified beatmaps will no longer be disqualified for subjective or intersubjective issues unless a contributor to the mapset requests it or a BN places a veto."

This isn't a good idea, when i'm reading this it looks like "i can do everything as long it meets the RC and consistent my map is safe", that's not how it should work especially in a community based game. The community should be able to have an impact on the map's judgement, and sometimes having reviews from experienced players/mappers, former BN/staff members is way better than having some from current ones, in terms of "quality" of the judgement.
abraker
Let me address concerns around the concept of giving community more power. Giving the community power over maps more than modders and BN is indeed bad and a sure way to get more pp maps ranked. The community cannot be in power 100% of the time. The community still needs to be given power because they have so little right now despite the point of making maps is for the community to play them. So let the community have power under one condition: if all else fails; When mapper and modders/bn can't reach an agreement and qat can't, don't want to decide, or want to leave it up to the community to decide.

In short, bn and qat usually can tell a quality map from non quality, however when they can't, they are no better than the community.
Monstrata

Monstrata wrote:

Loctav wrote:

as I said before, this proposal shares a lot of similarities with my proposal that I worked on with the QAT, so please give it a read https://osu.ppy.sh/community/forums/posts/6910042


1. This is the tier system all over again, but I'd criticize it not just because "the past systems have all resulted in failures" but why a tier system like this won't work to begin with. The "Core Team" which is replacing the current QAT, is still going to have unreliable and uncertain criterias. One of the changes we're looking for is to get a more clear criteria for acceptance into the QAT. Rebranding QAT to something else does not change the issue. Your proposal does a good job of defining the "New QAT" (Basically BN) but the issue is that under your new system, only the titles have really changed, but the core issues remain. Cleverly though you've hit the goal of "making entry to QAT more visible" but really, at this point people are looking at getting into the Core Team which is the real QAT.

My proposal is different because it doesn't make this distinction. I don't believe there needs to be a distinction other than by tenure. Otherwise, the value of QAT is completely replaced.

2. Another big issue is making the ranking system a queue. This is no different from Tier 1 and Tier 2 BN's which failed. Replace BN's with Probationary BN's and QAT's with BN's, and you get exactly the same system that was implemented before. But what's changed? Yep, now there is no QAT. This system effectively rebrands the Tier 2 BN's as QAT's like i've said before. Except now, the Tier 2 BN's are only seeking out maps that are nominated (instead of whatever they want). And if they do try and nominate a map, a BN cannot qualify. Sure, you can say that they can just get a BN to nominate it first, but people also like to mod of their own accord. This is basically saying that modding of your own accord is not efficient because the system is now a queue.

This system also (as was shown in the past) results in low content, followed by Tier 2 BN's and QAT's yolo nominating stuff without thoroughly checking, and yes, this is true.

3. This proposal doesn't address one of the main issues which is quality control. It seems you are just assuming that the new QAT's will have some form of quality control that might be different from what it is now. It also doesn't address the issue of vetoes due to subjective issues.

Anyways, this proposal seems not really well fleshed out yet since honestly, it just seems like a rehash of previous systems, but with changed names. A name change won't solve anything. It doesn't matter if QAT becomes easier to get into if everyone knows QAT's are just Tier 2 BN's now. It's like you own a fast food shop, and rebrand all your cashiers to the title "Manager". Well great, everyone's a manager, so everyone has a special title, but it doesn't mean anything because they still all have to listen to the "Core Manager". Their job hasn't changed, only their title has.

Why I think Loctav's proposal just doesn't really work well... or rather, that it just doesn't touch on the main issues Ephemeral wants to try and resolve.
Nikakis
Monstrata's proposal looks quite efficient, I would go with his
Monstrata
@ UC

Your post just seems like a lot of defending your own maps because yes, it's quite apparent that should we start proposing higher quality standards, more of your maps will probably become vetoed, same with other people you've listed. I don't think that's the point. If anything though, it just means your mapping style isn't considered to be good quality work if quality control is upped. Since you're close with some QAT related matters, you should know that the current quality control is at its absolute lowest. Anything can be ranked with proper reasoning and intent, and there are no bad maps, just different maps. If we start drawing more subjective lines on what is good quality, and drawing more subjective lines on when "proper reasoning and intent" is enough to forego quality concerns, we will probably end up seeing less of yours, hailie etc... other people's maps ranked. Unfortunately that's just how it is when you map unorthoxed, I feel like you just have to accept that possibility.

See, what I dislike about your proposal (a lot of it is good) is how you deal with quality concerns and "vetoes". The numbers are way too liberal, especially when one of the goals is for the QAT rework (imo) is to increase quality standards. What about quality standards is changing? Simple: tolerance. The current QAT is far too lenient towards any map, and I feel your proposal won't address that because the number is just too lenient.

As well, with your proposal there will no longer be quality control past the two BN's nominating the map. This doesn't seem like a good idea given how often we get dq's for avoidable issues. But of course, this is true for current QAT too. Whoever thinks that a BN who becomes a QAT suddenly stops making mistakes xD.

So big takeaway: I don't think the core of your poposed system really resolves one of the main issues which is quality control and tolerance for "subjectively bad maps with good reasoning/intent". I like the voting aspect as it's something I am really pushing for too. But I feel it should lean towards holding maps back, not require a supermajority in order to hold a map back.
Voli

UndeadCapulet wrote:

proposal
uhh idk but just a question, why do you direct everything in this thread towards yourself? you complain about the suggestions here being catered towards blocking your maps and spend a good few paragraphs defending them when nobody even attacked them, and then you propose an entire system built around promoting your maps? lol

i don't feel this is targeted towards anyone in particular, this is a long overdue rework proposal thread of a system that hasn't been working the way it should for a long time.
Irreversible
the solution is simple: rank everything without any quality assurance (except stuff that's forbidden in the ranking criteria, which can be neglected anyway, if i look at the extra section for example) and we won't have these problems then, it doesn't seem like we could ever agree on something. and UC, truth being told, your maps look like a beginner has opened the editor for the first time and enjoyed himself for a while. where stuff begins to differ tho is that you and your fellas have acquired a somewhat so huge ego that you simply went on reasoning everything with "that's how i intended it" - this is where the system fails, because people like you simply don't WANT to accept criticism. obviously, a beginner also intended a map how he placed it, that doesn't justify one single dime tho. they differ themselves from actually willing to listen to advise and listen what other parties have to say and improve themselves that way. unfortunately, many people, i'd assume because of the mentorship server mainly in the first instance, gave on this mindset of "this is what i intended, so i won't fix anything". this is simply why we are where we are. btw. i wonder why about 8 of the people you listed uc aren't in bn anymore

tl;dr: from my point of view there is no fix to this problem, so the best solution is to let everything into the ranked section once a mapper feels like it's ready.
Nao Tomori
That post above is why he made the thread about himself, cuz lately there have been a lot of crybabies on all his threads complaining about the qat, which is why these threads are being made in the first place lol.
Fycho
I also made a proposal personally, it shares some opinions with current existed proposals. Feel free to read and discuss:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LI93mTTw_xVMuHZW_d11mBzaswfhdvGQXpau8KEZ5zY/edit?usp=sharing
hi-mei
@uc
Alright, guess someone should finally speak up about your case huh

this thread is about making a system where my maps can't get ranked.

Well, YES.
YES.
Everyone explicitly explained why is that (Just read my post above about mapping concepts, tldr: you ignoring structure, rhythm consistency, spacing emphasis and appropriate hitsounding, tho while its not explained in RC, you keep abusing this loophole making an excuse that there are no rules so ehhh).
You basically dont care about quality and have mentioned that multiple times, just look at this:
https://puu.sh/ClAWX/b95231f79f.mp4

And even after saying that on a stream, publicly, you dare to write all this? lol

it's very important that people in this thread realize that the majority of the qat do not find my maps to be low quality, but instead consider them to be above average, or even great. multiple have even told me that a map i've ranked this year is one of their favourite maps of the year.

Oh yes, because most of QAT's are your friends? Mir, Lasse, Mao, Yuii, Kibbleru etc (and some of the bn list you provided). No shit they gonna complement your maps.
Actually, the fact that they are in QAT is one of the reasons this thread exists (and also, the reason of how fucked up the situation has come to).

At this point its so ludicrous to pin point some people in QAT/BN and their opinions, while its obvious for everyone that its all one huge "family" which defends its members.

it's very important that people in this thread realize that the majority of the qat do not find my maps to be low quality, but instead consider them to be above average, or even great. multiple have even told me that a map i've ranked this year is one of their favourite maps of the year.

Yeah, but your case is the contrary - your stuff doesnt bring anything new - it pulls things backwards to 2008-2010 years, when mapping was in stone age. Christ, even back then people were at least trying to make stuff good.

the general playing community should never be considered a prominent voice in the mapping scene, they don't know what's good and are easily swayed by hivemind mentality. any system that takes "backlash" into consideration opens up the ranking system to 1000x more abuse than what happens at the moment.


Are you saying that because 99% of relevant players dont like your maps, or you really think that players feedback doesnt matter? The intent of any map is to be played, it can be understood to ignore the feedback of playerbase that cant pass the map or get a good acc on it, but in your case its all different, players say its "eww"
https://clips.twitch.tv/AmazonianMuddyCucumberOSsloth

That feeling when your "fun" map is actually the opposite of fun.

mao gave out the tier 2 test on the bn server a few months ago, and after i took it, i got the second highest score out of any bn to take it. tests won't keep me out of the ranked section.

That doesnt indicate anything, the tests were brought up because of the bias/prejudgement rather than to keep you out.
Really tho, this thread isnt about keeping you out of mapping, its more about some high-ups not liking the outcry of the both communities of mappers/players and JBH leaving at the same time. So its about the time to review things. Dont take it personally much.

Whats really important here, is that we should finally get rid of a system where if you got 2 nominators interested in your map, there is NO fucking way someone can stop it, like, be you a QAT or a God or David Copperfield - the map going to get thru once you exhaust the modders (hello hailie) and wait a bit till community forgets about the map in question.
Smokeman
tbf what I proposed didn't even consider Anyone's maps as it would work regardless, as the maps wanting to go for rank are irrelevant when a mapper is not the one getting it to ranked but rather BNG members.

If you wanted to increase the diversity and quality of Nominators and thusly the QATs (for say, stopping friends circlejerk and introduce higher qual control) then you would have to make it more enticing for people who actually have the experience, knowledge, and technical skill to be an active part of the ranking process inducing a natural weeding out of those who are unfit.
Any system you build that wouldn't change that fact will be a waste of effort and everyone's time.
Any system based on community input will be a waste of time if what you want is "better quality"
Any system which just changes the hierarchy of the BNG or takes, or introduces function to its members will be a waste of time because you will still have the same people you are complaining about.

You cannot ignore the human factor in this as you select volunteers to do the job. And the guidelines for those picks aren't always based around they are the "crème de la crème" but rather because they have enough activity to keep the system running as too low of an activity doesn't even get you to be considered.

And that is fine. There is no reason for osu! to have quality control realistically. As long as new shit gets out w/o breaking the criteria the players will be happy. Every ranked map just adds to the vapid feeling of never ending content we have allowed people to expect. If your map doesn't give out enough PP or you are some highly regarded mapper then the average ranked map will be forgotten in about a week or two (unless you are some niche mapper). Now, you really think the BNG would care to try to get quality people for further pushing the same drivel out forever? You just want people who are capable enough to go down a checklist of things a map isn't allowed to do and that's it.
Such a system doesn't need for people who want to better maps, such people aren't rewarded by conducting such vapid tasks and rather punishes them for wanting to improve maps as that process takes much more effort and time than a casual Nomination check.

I tackled this notion of the current ranking environment in my original post and gave solutions to all of it. I think solving this issue is paramount to everything else. Just like mappers have started to circlejerk "anime" mapping so has the BNG in promoting those just to be able to easily make the quota for the month to not get kicked out... A toxic environment breeds toxic behaviour, who would've guessed.
abraker

hi-mei wrote:

Everyone explicitly explained why is that (Just read my post above about mapping concepts, tldr: you ignoring structure, rhythm consistency, spacing emphasis and appropriate hitsounding, tho while its not explained in RC, you keep abusing this loophole making an excuse that there are no rules so ehhh).
Maybe it will be worthwhile to make a thread discussing how to go about defining mapping structure and rhythm consistency in RC?
hi-mei
Well, some people are against it because in their minds it would do more harm than good. Even tho any single ranked map has some kind of these concepts, literally each one.

At this point we could easily inject the most basic stuff in RC. We only lack enthusiasm to do that.

Like, no shit, I'm down to do that with some help from MrSergio, we have been waiting for that for sol long. All we need is a direct command that its needed. We both like to make guides and stuff so it wont be that hard. We both have lots of experience in that stuff.
Cherry Blossom

abraker wrote:

Maybe it will be worthwhile to make a thread discussing how to go about defining mapping structure and rhythm consistency in RC?
This was an idea from those who were supposed to "reformat" the RC in 2015, but it has been dropped because of stupid things that happened in the same time that i don't want to remind.
Also, due to the large "diversity" of mapping, making a kind of guide like this would be difficult concerning insane diffs due to subjectivity over mapping ideas. I agree that it could be done for lower diffs at least, the main attention is focused on insane diffs but in lower diffs there is also a notion of "quality".
hi-mei
CB, I think youre taking it wrong - all we have to do is define an abstract concepts. Any diff of any map has structure, rhythm, flow, emphasis, aesthetics etc. We can define that in RC right now.
anna apple

hi-mei wrote:

@uc
Alright, guess someone should finally speak up about your case huh

this thread is about making a system where my maps can't get ranked.
Well, YES.
YES.
...
how much of a child do you have to be to sit there and constantly try to stop 1 person from ranking their map. If you are going to propose a SYSTEM. Your SYSTEM should be about including as many people as possible XD. idk why bother posting if ur gonna be like this
hi-mei
Yeah how much of a child do you have to be to take these lines unironicaly especially considering the last paragraph of my post.
Irreversible

bor wrote:

hi-mei wrote:

@uc
Alright, guess someone should finally speak up about your case huh

this thread is about making a system where my maps can't get ranked.
Well, YES.
YES.
...
how much of a child do you have to be to sit there and constantly try to stop 1 person from ranking their map. If you are going to propose a SYSTEM. Your SYSTEM should be about including as many people as possible XD. idk why bother posting if ur gonna be like this
1) It's not 1 person (regarding the "constantly try to stop 1 person"), like you do realize that the focus is on the maps that constantly cross every possible border and not the people behind (unless you want to take into account attitude, speaking of which, I rather feel like you are the child rather than hi-mei)
2) It's not only 1 person (regarding who proposes that certain maps simply don't belong to ranked and that ranked is a privilege)
Ephemeral
last call to get your shit in here - i'll be sitting down with the remnant QAT leadership on the 20th and going through all of the proposals/feedback listed in here before presenting them publicly

if you have a writeup/ideas, get them out now or forever hold your piss
Krfawy
Call me a blind one and I will agree on that term as I have quite an eye condition yet I can't see anyone complaining about the fact how people are managing particular difficulty levels. Of course, due to the fact the new duration rules are implemented people would say "who cares about lower diffs than Insane as no one has ever cared about them" and here I come again.

First of all, people are complaining about the issue of maps lacking of quality but it is only if it is about higher difficulties when anything is even attempted to be explained. Whenever we see animosity between the mapper and the modder about the lower ones where characteristics of a map become ambiguous people are, putting it severely subtly, reluctant to give any explanation to why things are made as they are which is caused by two simultaneous factors:

1. The new rules are structured in a way so people who clearly give no fudges about lower maps can get away with more than we used to allow in the past.
2. The community is too lazy to care about lower maps and they always think it's safe to spam with 1/2 sliders so everything seems 'easy enough to play for the newer playerbase.' As a result, more than half of the current community doesn't know how to map them and happens not to be keen as mustard on learning how to structure high quality easier maps.

It is high time someone agreed on the fact we need tiers in both BNG AND QAT teams where people are not in teams called "in probation" and "full ones", we'd rather need two factions called "people who can deal with lower maps" and "people who can deal with difficult maps". Obviously in some rare cases a few nominators would be put in both brackets. Just a reminder most people would fit only in one group and I am pretty sure no one will be happy about me saying that as I am being boldly honest. The "lower tier" would deal with maps counting hards and lower whereas the "higher tier" would deal with maps counting insanes and higher.

Of course, I am not qualified to judge other modes than the standard mode but as I can see most commotion happening in this thread is coming from the standard mappers, and so am I one.

And by the way, if someone is about to say "that would be too much work and no one is going to be that willing to take any action" - please, people in the staff had no issue with the tiers before where it was going to be a clear fiasco from the very beginning, so some logical solution, even if time-consuming, is going to be worth it. Not to mention the times where the nominators had to camp for their map modded to be qualified as there was a 8-map cap per 24 hours and if the limit was reached we had to wait and, as I said, camp for the cap limit to reset as if we were playing counter strike.

By the way two point o', aren't we supposed to put as much effort into mapping as possible to strive for the best results? Please, stop lying about the quality factors and striving for more variety, everyone knows this term is truly as rare as a myth about virgins attending high schools. Mappers always cover their inability to make maps as playable as possible with the fact of 'the ranking criteria saying it's acceptable to do so' or even with 'the song is long enough for the maps to ignore the rules and guidelines for the lowest difficulties' even if the lowest difficulty is labeled as 'normal' and it is really erratic to see such maps to play and behave as hards instead.

As someone who plays mostly easier maps I rarely happen to see anything good quality for this difficulty type and I actually have one dominant quality over people in the BNG and QAT who say "we can judge easier maps too". Namely, I am unable to play more demanding maps so my point of view is naturally more relatable as I can discover more faulty patterns and designs than the other who form the osu mapping police. Now try to convince me the 20K-100 tier players actually know what is unplayable for noobs, you are going to be laughed at by everyone with this reasoning for the most obvious self-explanatory point which I don't think I need to type about but I will do anyways: the better you play, the less things seem problematic to the players as well as they have extremely inappropriate and low skills in telling what noobs need in maps. The only exceptional cases I can think of right now are Andrea and aeril, whereas the second is not even a BN.
anna apple

Krfawy wrote:

As someone who plays mostly easier maps I rarely happen to see anything good quality for this difficulty type and I actually have one dominant quality over people in the BNG and QAT who say "we can judge easier maps too". Namely, I am unable to play more demanding maps so my point of view is naturally more relatable as I can discover more faulty patterns and designs than the other who form the osu mapping police. Now try to convince me the 20K-100 tier players actually know what is unplayable for noobs, you are going to be laughed at by everyone with this reasoning for the most obvious self-explanatory point which I don't think I need to type about but I will do anyways: the better you play, the less things seem problematic to the players as well as they have extremely inappropriate and low skills in telling what noobs need in maps. The only exceptional cases I can think of right now are Andrea and aeril, whereas the second is not even a BN.
I don't think you have the issue pinned down quite properly. Once players reach a point where they no longer need to play a difficulty, any understanding of those mechanics used in lower difficulties (namely the mechanics restricting their play) will cease to exist, this is because mechanics like "slider leniency abuse" will be use more and more frequently and choosing to not abuse slider leniency at greater difficulties makes those maps much harder for no real reason. This obviously applies to many more things about how newer players play the game. So when I open your profile and see a bunch of insane diffs in your top plays, I would find you are quite susceptible to the same faults as most (now) mappers are to in regards to understanding those mechanics. And would similarly be under the same scrutiny when it comes to properly judging diffs such as Easy, Normal, Hard; especially so in terms of their mechanics.

I actually agree quite heavily with the fact that many people don't care about lower difficulty QUALITY, which is and has been quite lacking. But along with the above mentioned reason, there are more factors in play when it comes to WHY this is occurring. Something that I don't think is really worth discussing in this form since, in BN applications, the QAT will review one's ability to mod lower difficulties to be of some "acceptable standard". I believe you should try to raise that standard via educating people and not pushing for some overly redundant system that already exists, just not being utilized yet.

As for someone within my rank range being unable to understand lower difficulties. > Wake up you narcissistic/egotistical fuck.
There are many people you are oblivious to who go around map threads and get them subjectively disqualified for lower difficulties. One of those people happen to be me. And yeah I'm able to explain in detail precisely what a newer player would do when approaching a map. In fact I did that right here: https://osu.ppy.sh/beatmapsets/738265/discussion/1825240/timeline#/619566, and once the map was qualified and people bothered to WATCH THE REPLAYS (instead of just looking at the scores) they realized that what I wrote was 100% accurate.

So no, you do not dominate lower difficulties. And no proposing some sort of redundancy in the system will be ignored. If you actually care about low difficulties as much as you propose you do, then you would do a few things.
-Learn what mechanics are used in what difficulty (learn)
-Make a public thread about how those mechanics work and for what difficulties (educate others)
-More frequently mod (at least the qualified mapsets) lower difficulties (enforce)
Krfawy

blacksocks wrote:

As for someone within my rank range being unable to understand lower difficulties. > Wake up you narcissistic/egotistical fuck.
There are many people you are oblivious to who go around map threads and get them subjectively disqualified for lower difficulties. One of those people happen to be me. And yeah I'm able to explain in detail precisely what a newer player would do when approaching a map. In fact I did that right here: https://osu.ppy.sh/beatmapsets/738265/discussion/1825240/timeline#/619566, and once the map was qualified and people bothered to WATCH THE REPLAYS (instead of just looking at the scores) they realized that what I wrote was 100% accurate.

So no, you do not dominate lower difficulties. And no proposing some sort of redundancy in the system will be ignored. If you actually care about low difficulties as much as you propose you do, then you would do a few things.
-Learn what mechanics are used in what difficulty (learn)
-Make a public thread about how those mechanics work and for what difficulties (educate others)
-More frequently mod (at least the qualified mapsets) lower difficulties (enforce)
I am happy that people do happen to be able to find few essential issues in easier maps once a year. Also it's an extreme pleasure to be informed about being uneducated on the mechanics used in the easier maps even though I've been showing the exact opposite for five years now, as well as modding maps with both pending and qualified statuses. Also, do you think I am capable of making videos and posting them on YouTube and educating the audience dearest on how to improve the mapping standards? Do you think I am owning the computer that is stable enough to even play osu and not to mention to make anything significantly demandiing such as tutorials? If I were, I would do that a long time ago. Instead, I am educating people case by case and most of the them happen to be from Poland which cases can be shown on my own beatmaps or supported by me, be it by contributing to the mapset as a guest mapper or a modder, because I do enforce some standards and obviously I am doing so in this particular category of mapping. Also, as long as I understand that my posts might be a bit too sarcastic and not that understandable for the taste of a generic user, especially given the fact that the English language is not my mother tongue, I am amazed by the fact you are giving me even more sarcastic and ridiculously constructed sentences. I have stated that I do have a quality that makes me more reliabe than most people in the BNG and QAT on this matter but where have you seen me say that I "dominate the lower maps"? Excuse you, could you please be polite enough and fix your register a little bit? I do not recall myself calling people "egoistical fucks" so I demand the same from you, especially as it shows a lack of your ability to behave in public and not mine. Obviously, I and my friends do call ourselves names when we talk to each other but we do it in a more casual and fun fashion, not in order to drag each other down, for Lord's sake. Also, if you were so into detailing my scores you would've noticed my Insane scores are: a) old; b) not that impressive; c) these maps are actually on the very low part of the 'difficult' spectrum.

And on the last note, just because you think I don't look at what the modders do it doesn't mean it's actually true. Of course, I can't look at everyone's works done but I do look at some of them, especially when I see some opinions that I agree or do not agree on. Not to mention the fact from time to time I am asked for my opinion on some matters, most recently on Nuvolina's FA map for SR3L's Candy song. I've been always attempting to be as vocal about my actions and opinions as possible so I am surprised you're acting as if I were doing nothing but fooling around in this community for the whole course of my existence in this game. As long as I do have troll tendencies I also happen to be serious about mapping as I started creating my own maps for two solemn reasons, namely: some songs I like have never been mapped; the easier maps have almost never been that easy to be actually played and osu is my first and only rhythm game I have ever played, so why not giving myself a chance in the mapping industry.
Myxo
@Krfawy
The problem with your thinking is that you seem to think the easier a lower difficulty is, the better. This might sound reasonable at first glance, but it really isn't for a rhythm game. I usually determine the quality of a lower difficulty by how well it expresses the song and how well it fits into a mapset's spread, and I think a lot of BNs and QATs would agree with that.

All I ever see you doing is complaining about Easy / Normal diffs being too difficult, while not understanding that the point of difficulty levels in osu! isn't to bound maps to very specific difficulty elements, etc. There's a reason why the ranking criteria is as loose as it is regarding that. You say the easier maps have almost never been that easy to be actually played, but if with that you just mean on first or second try, or you expect to actually do well on the maps (full-comboing them or having a high accuracy), then that might be true. But obviously you managed to eventually get into the game just like any other active player, by practicing and getting better gradually, and this is a very typical scenario for a game with community based content like osu!. In an official rhythm game, especially a linear one, you could have a couple of introduction difficulties and then proceed on to harder stuff. You would probably start with something lower than osu!'s Easy or Normal meta in that scenario. But it doesn't make sense to force people to go that low while compromising rhythm, contrast and song expression as a whole on their sets in a huge game like osu!.

If you want to continue pushing your extremely simplified approach to Easy and Normal mapping (which sadly often compromises a lot of other mapping aspects heavily), you can go ahead with your own maps, or influence your friends or mentees. But there's no point in changing the system to support these views, especially not with a split in usergroups.
anna apple
@krfawy I didn't demand educating others would be restricted to recording videos and uploading them to youtube. You realize there are many guides on mapping and more in the forums. And you can just get any reputable person to promote your thread if your ideas are really compelling.

Krfawy wrote:

Not to mention the fact from time to time I am asked for my opinion on some matters, most recently on Nuvolina's FA map for SR3L's Candy song.
but you didn't post a single thing on the low diffs so how is this any relevant to topic lol.

anyways I think Myxomatosis put it quite well.
yaspo
welp, went ahead and dumped some of my thoughts into a google doc under the premise of not holding my piss. Can't pretend I'll write an actual proposal forever. Mostly just opinions that maybe have been mentioned already, take with grains of salt
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JKreb4AiKVXGKUL1_INFKyhh3zVd-XO1nqPWoTXS_KU/edit?usp=sharing
Nao Tomori
results when
Uta
results when. also bn test when
UndeadCapulet
can y'all open bn apps and do probation results and shit, holding that off until after this super lengthy process is resolved is fkin retarded
Joe Castle

UndeadCapulet wrote:

can y'all open bn apps and do probation results and shit, holding that off until after this super lengthy process is resolved is fkin retarded
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