After looking at Ascendance's post here https://puu.sh/CEE59/253f26785d.pngI have to really agree with this solution he brought up regarding the "BN DQ" button.

This gives QAH members a stronger voice in the community (as they should) while not giving the DQ button to everyone, potentially causing more chaos

+1

Ephemeral wrote:

we're not having an entirely separate [...] structure to house three gamemodes to sate the desire for relevancy and prestige of a handful of people. all gamemodes MUST be treated equally in this regard.

definitely agree on this part, I don't think that the words of a few should be dictating some parts of the modding/mapping scene. the examples u give are good for showing how the QAT (especially the smaller QAT groups formed in alt. modes) likely need to have some kind of implied check on their actions so they can't do unjust things like that

so in the context of this proposal I think that means either
1: drop the proposal, since the other open proposal addresses this concern by making BN and ex-QAT even players
2: add something to this proposal that would prevent the QAT from making poor choices as in the examples

re: the dq button stuff

a) people that want to check qualified maps (qahs) would apply and get it anyway, and dq maps
b) people that do not check qualified maps (not qahs) would not use the dq button
c) if abused people would just get kicked, i don't see how this is different from spam bubble popping

it just creates less "ok now ping a qat and put it on trello and post in the thread and shit nobody checked it in time now its getting unranked" kind of situations lol. how often do you really think people will get themselves kicked over dqing a map that shouldn't have been because they had a temper tantrum? and everyone makes mistakes, accidental pops are pretty much the same as accidental dq's (and both happen) so i don't see the reason that bns getting dq button suddenly upends the system when by and large everything remains the same with less moving parts

While I think it's makes sense for each gamemode to have their own system, I think this makes things a bit too brittle in regards to osu's future. We've had a certain defined number of gamemodes for quite some time, each vastly different from the other. This proposal solidifies that notion even further, like a solid block of concrete. I know peppy has plans that would allow people to make up various gamemodes like addons for the game and eventually allow those various gamemodes to have rankable maps, whatever they are. Consider a soup of gameplay elements mixed together to produce a whole variety of hybrids for which no distinct line can be drawn to mark that one needs to be operated differently than the other. Suddenly that solid block of concrete becomes too brittle to work, something more flexible is needed. The current system of having all gamemodes under one umbrella doesn't make much sense now, but this proposal is going to crash and burn in the future.

Agree with Ephemeral about the cases mentioned. Both Ascendance being stonewalled, and Taiko QAT environment. I don't think calling it a "dictatorship" is accurate, but it really did feel like certain QAT's were constantly imposing their views onto the entirety of taiko maps.

I'm sure things have improved a bit since last year when I was triple-mode BN but I distinctly remember these still being big issues back then. I'm not as close with the minigame communities nowadays but it's sad to see they still seem to be issues today, talking to current ctb and taiko bn's.

Not sure what's happening with Mania tbh, I feel like there's just not much leadership there to begin with but /shrug. (9K SEE YOU IN RANKED)

Raiden wrote:

You have now just cut off the last bit of the rope that held us together. You have now just flat out accused us of simply wanting this proposal in order to maintain a position of power -basically called us power-hungry dictators-, which is not only a blatant lie, but also contains the aggravant of coming from someone on the higher ups. You have just now undermined YEARS of effort done in hopes of bettering and maintaining a game mode's environment stable and healthy, in the matter of seconds. You have just now ASSUMED that we, in our "thirst for power", ignored our peers or belittled them, and that the QAT somehow held insane amounts of power in the minigames.

correct!

it's very difficult to take the behavior i saw any other way, i'm afraid. i kept my mouth shut about it and my intervention as minimal as possible as per the terms of the upheaval, but after seeing a handful of some of the most strong-willed and valuable contributors i've seen in years be torn to bits by the system and the people it empowered, i'd choose literally anything else over seeing it continue again.

if we must have tyranny, it will be the tyranny of the majority and nothing else. ideally, involving as many people as possible will ease this somewhat, which is what the floated proposal aims to achieve by opening the BN up significantly and empowering them in the process.

When exactly did "working in the bn/qat for a long time" go from an achievement and a respectable service for the game to a despicable act against the game done by the power-hungry dictators up there?
I refuse to believe those words came from anybody that cares for osu anymore, it really shows how distorted you guys views are.
Also it's been repeated several times, this just won't make things more complex to handle as it doesn't require any sort of special roles for us to work and the mental puzzle coming from having different system working is easily avoidable with accesible information.

And last, our proposal also speaks about the need of raising new QATs, while Raiden talking about also using BN Apps as frequently as the standard ones. How can you guys just argue against things we already got feedback for and will apply as per requested, ignoring the thread completely?

After reading the responses above, I am really shocked that the long-standing work and contributions made with the entitled responsibilities are regarded as inauthentic intention by the introduction of this counter-proposal. I honestly fail to see the correlation and am pretty sad to witness the distrust of a higher-up through this.

I would say everything in taiko and other non-standard game modes mostly worked fine with the existing system for years, which is the main reason we constructed this counter-proposal in attempt to preserve the usual workflow and organisational processes. Changes mentioned in the linked proposal seem to be unnecessary for these modes as similar flaws have not appeared since the beginning of my service as a BN and then a QAT.

Lastly, in case the linked proposal realises and this counter-proposal cannot co-exist with it, I hope the non-standard game modes could stay good and continue to thrive without encountering disastrous situations.

I think what we've realised here is that we need a more qualified "Community Manager" or w/e Ephemeral's role is.

It's kinda worrying to see this sort of response from a community manager I agree, but especially when I know the case for ctb is taken highly out of context. Whilst ascendance is a great friend of mine now, his attitude during the time he was being "stonewalled" from the bng had the potential to be a huge issue, and even caused issues for the start of his return to the bng. You can say it was a dictatorship, but that's just simply not true when the reasons for not letting someone return should be the knowledge there has been no change since the reason they were kicked.

MBomb wrote:

It's kinda worrying to see this sort of response from a community manager I agree, but especially when I know the case for ctb is taken highly out of context. Whilst ascendance is a great friend of mine now, his attitude during the time he was being "stonewalled" from the bng had the potential to be a huge issue, and even caused issues for the start of his return to the bng. You can say it was a dictatorship, but that's just simply not true when the reasons for not letting someone return should be the knowledge there has been no change since the reason they were kicked.

the case(s) he is referring to is not in regards to attitude, but it's been something that's largely private and behind the scenes (cuz my attitude was only really an issue back in 2016 and early 2017)

if you're actually curious you can poke me ig

If anything, reactions from QATs on this thread only validate what Ephemeral said. The only difference between this counter proposal and the original is that the power stays withing a few people's hands, promoted through a non-transparent system, as said before.

Nothing in the new proposal stops QATs (renamed "Management Team" to make it look like they disappeared) from managing each mode in a different way. The proposal doesn't disallow a mode specific part of the Management Team to get its own activity requirement, score system or whatever.

The only clear forced changes are :
- BNs having a DQ button (which is a joke compared to the veto right that is waaaaaay more powerful, and that they already had)
- New veto mediation system (which is much more fair than the actual system)

The one thing we severely want to avoid is the "black box" of mediation.

A map is sent through, who knows what happens, and an answer is put out for who knows why. The new system is to prevent the QATs from having all the power of deciding vetoes, but they can still participate, just their opinions will not recieve any elevated weight.

The main arguments i see as to why this wouldn't work is that they "don't trust" their BNs to handle this responsibility, which seems to be the core issue that you want to resolve. There are other ways to solve this than having a prestigious group handle them i think?

Btw, i don't see any comments from any mania, and ctb QATs so is this problem only for taiko?

My perspective is the perspective of mostly an outsider regarding the other modes, but I always thought the situation was questionable when I still was part of the QAT. Ever since the system where QATs had full power over the qualified beatmaps was abandoned, I felt that the leadership of the different gamemodes barely worked together and the quality standards, management etc of each mode has drifted away from each other more and more. I think this is a bad thing and a lot of changes and improvements to the mapping and modding system could go by a lot more smoother if the different gamemodes wouldn't already each do their thing.

To give a personal example, I've been ranking my first taiko mapset in years last month and the situation in taiko seems a lot different from standard. Of course one major difference is the size of the team - it's just natural the BN of taiko is smaller than standard's BN team because the gamemode has fewer players, mappers and modders. However, there were other differences which I really couldn't get behind. Like why the guideline part of the taiko ranking criteria seems to be enforced in such an uncritical and unthoughtful way, with the people enforcing it seemingly for the sake of it, instead of actually thinking about what improvements or damage it would provide to a map. Or why I get told by BNs to change something in my map, then when I discuss with them it turns out they don't actually think the change would improve the map (if anything arguably make it worse) but they mentioned it for the sole reason of "There have been maps disqualified for this in the past".

This is of course just an example, but I could give more examples of differing approaches to quality assurance and other topics from the time when I was still QAT. I don't understand why stuff like this would be managed any differently across multiple gamemodes. The only meaningful difference between the gamemodes should be the size of the teams. But in reality, there are other differences and (like the one I just mentioned) not all of them are "worse" in standard than on taiko or the other modes, like you constantly wanna put it.



Your goal with this proposal seems to be to manage the other gamemodes in an even more different way than standard (since right now, all gamemodes technically run under the same system, and even here the differences exist). Why not allow to bring them back together? I don't see why taiko or catch or mania should enforce quality in a different way. If anything from the other proposal clashes with the smaller team sizes in other modes (for example, the majority vote thing in the BN), then that's a valid issue to bring up. If anything from the other proposal clashes with your ideals of how quality assurance should be handled, then bring it up, but in that case it won't just be relevant to one gamemode or three gamemodes, it would most likely be relevant to all gamemodes. Otherwise I don't see the need for handling everything in a different way.

Myxomatosis wrote:

My perspective is the perspective of mostly an outsider regarding the other modes, but I always thought the situation was questionable when I still was part of the QAT. Ever since the system where QATs had full power over the qualified beatmaps was abandoned, I felt that the leadership of the different gamemodes barely worked together and the quality standards, management etc of each mode has drifted away from each other more and more. I think this is a bad thing and a lot of changes and improvements to the mapping and modding system could go by a lot more smoother if the different gamemodes wouldn't already each do their thing.

To give a personal example, I've been ranking my first taiko mapset in years last month and the situation in taiko seems a lot different from standard. Of course one major difference is the size of the team - it's just natural the BN of taiko is smaller than standard's BN team because the gamemode has fewer players, mappers and modders. However, there were other differences which I really couldn't get behind. Like why the guideline part of the taiko ranking criteria seems to be enforced in such an uncritical and unthoughtful way, with the people enforcing it seemingly for the sake of it, instead of actually thinking about what improvements or damage it would provide to a map. Or why I get told by BNs to change something in my map, then when I discuss with them it turns out they don't actually think the change would improve the map (if anything arguably make it worse) but they mentioned it for the sole reason of "There have been maps disqualified for this in the past".

This is of course just an example, but I could give more examples of differing approaches to quality assurance and other topics from the time when I was still QAT. I don't understand why stuff like this would be managed any differently across multiple gamemodes. The only meaningful difference between the gamemodes should be the size of the teams. But in reality, there are other differences and (like the one I just mentioned) not all of them are "worse" in standard than on taiko or the other modes, like you constantly wanna put it.



Your goal with this proposal seems to be to manage the other gamemodes in an even more different way than standard (since right now, all gamemodes technically run under the same system, and even here the differences exist). Why not allow to bring them back together? I don't see why taiko or catch or mania should enforce quality in a different way. If anything from the other proposal clashes with the smaller team sizes in other modes (for example, the majority vote thing in the BN), then that's a valid issue to bring up. If anything from the other proposal clashes with your ideals of how quality assurance should be handled, then bring it up, but in that case it won't just be relevant to one gamemode or three gamemodes, it would most likely be relevant to all gamemodes. Otherwise I don't see the need for handling everything in a different way.

It's interesting that you mention that, but that happens to be an issue regarding the Criteria and not the way the current QAT enforces stuff (most the time we also see ourselves having our hands tied by the criteria). This is also something we could strive to work towards fixing if we are to get the green light about being able to do so.

Nardoxyribonucleic wrote:

After reading the responses above, I am really shocked that the long-standing work and contributions made with the entitled responsibilities are regarded as inauthentic intention by the introduction of this counter-proposal. I honestly fail to see the correlation and am pretty sad to witness the distrust of a higher-up through this.

I would say everything in taiko and other non-standard game modes mostly worked fine with the existing system for years, which is the main reason we constructed this counter-proposal in attempt to preserve the usual workflow and organisational processes. Changes mentioned in the linked proposal seem to be unnecessary for these modes as similar flaws have not appeared since the beginning of my service as a BN and then a QAT.

Lastly, in case the linked proposal realises and this counter-proposal cannot co-exist with it, I hope the non-standard game modes could stay good and continue to thrive without encountering disastrous situations.

I mean, the system is "fine" for you guys who benefit from the current system . It's not just higher ups who think this though.

Anyways, since it's unlikely that this counter-proposal will be adapted, it might be nice to explain what parts of the current proposal would result in "disastrous situations". I feel like a system that you might not agree with, or consider "disastrous" might be better for the community too. It just might not be something you like

-Kazu- wrote:

Myxomatosis wrote:

...

It's interesting that you mention that, but that happens to be an issue regarding the Criteria and not the way the current QAT enforces stuff (most the time we also see ourselves having our hands tied by the criteria). This is also something we could strive to work towards fixing if we are to get the green light about being able to do so.

Yeah okay but this was just one specific example I gave about modes not working the same way on a quality assurance related topic. Restructuring vetoes and disqualifications are other topics in a similar sense where your proposal goes against Mao's proposal for (in my opinion) no good reason.

The reason you see no comments from mania is how it works. The mania QAT doesnt really veto anything per say, but acts as a person who disqualify something if an issue is found by the QAH. Then they will give their opinion on the issues if they have not been solved. Thats why i dont think the system should change for mania. Theres no real issue and most people dont mind the QAT. Mania as a mode is also pretty dead currently so putting all the power on all BN's would just resolve in more dq's over subjective stuff and make the mode even more dead. I just dont think mania is at a size where the standard proposal would work for the mode. I do like the proposal to keep bn applications open at all time since that will help a lot making the mode less dead.

i personally believe the only thing that really won't work in the 'standard' proposal is the majority veto mediation stuff - because there's only like 3 bns per minigame at any given time (not including qats who would also be involved in the voting). everything else is remaining more or less the same, as you guys would still be handling apps, still be dictating changes in RC (as kazu mentioned), and so on. while eph was extremely aggressive for no apparent reason i don't think he's really wrong about the fact that managing these gamemodes completely differently is a bad idea. in my opinion you should try to focus on adapting the proposal that is very likely going to be forced on you anyway into a form that is compatible with your views on how the mode should be run, given the terms of the proposal. staff doesn't really like "uppity community members" snapping back at them =D

Hey there!

I was sitting a little bit in the background for a while now after this proposal we the TCM QATs posted in the forum and have read most of the posts. Now i thought is the right moment to post here to represent the mania-view in all this.
I apology that my writing could sound a bit emotional or a bit to personal. I try to keep everything as professional as possible. It may also contain a bit “off-topic” stuff, not directly related to the proposal or the replies to it.

(TCM stands by the way for Taiko/Catch/Mania, because i find names like “Special modes” or “Minigame modes” simply not correct for such an important matter.)

Okay. So, let’s see where i start.
First of all i would like to thank everyone so far for the reply. It is heartwarming to see such an positive reply and support from most of all TCM people who have posted here. Not everyone was for this, but almost.

It’s already for years, that whenever the standard osu game mode run into trouble on the organization side of things (BNG/QAT etc) every other game mode has to apply changes too, not considering if these would affect the game mode in a positive or in a negative way. For any non-TCM person saying now that this is not true, you simply has not such a relationship to our game modes as we have and simply could not see what was going on for real. I’m not telling that every change was negative, my problem here is that the standard game mode is still considered as the “one and only” - game mode and that the opinion of the other modes never really was respected or didn’t matter at all. It was often just a “Yeah, just talk, we do it still the other way”.
And now, right before some really huge changes in the management of beatmaps and the teams which working in there, it is once again the case that just because standard run into trouble, may it be vetos, mediation, BN applications or whatever, all other game mods have once again to suffer under this.
I’m now QAT for over 2 years (Not such a long period as some standard QAT, but still a long one if you ask me, long enough) and it was really always the standard game mode who run into trouble. Problems with organization, vetos and mediation seem to be the biggest issue here.
But does it mean it did not worked in the other one? No. Sure, we are not as big as the standard game mode, therefore we do not having a lot of vetos or mediation, yet we always managed to solve these in most of the cases with a positive outcome for both sides.

Now let’s talk about the “Management” aspect. Let’s take BN applications and evaluations/re-evaluations as example.
I am not sure where the problem here is. Don’t get me wrong. Having the BN applications open all-time is actually a really neat idea. I am not against it and i would welcome these changes in cooperation with our proposal.
I also know that in the past the applications were not always running fair or smooth. Results were delayed or, one of the biggest issue, people did not get in because some QAT were biased against the person so they have not get in.
It happened, yes. Not with every QAT but it was unavoidable. I admit it happened to me too, right at the beginning of my QAT time and the first BN applications. Throw stones at me and scolt me for this, but i stand to my mistakes.
But i learned from this very fast, as did the other who did this.
We tried ways to avoid this. Like anonymized modding posts we could check. But did that help? Not really. We QAT are not dumb. After a long time in within the modding community we simply can recognize the persons by how they are writing their mods.
What i want to say. It will never be possible to have a completely unbiased evaluation team. Even if we would replace these people with volunteers from the Beatmap Nominators. There will always be a person who doesn’t like the other and will find some ridiculous ways to not let someone pass.

Now i want to bring up one more thing i have noticed over the years. It may be only me but i think one of the core problems is that the QAT weren’t seen as a “Management Team” for a long while now. In the past there was the BAT (i think, it was before my time in osu!), later the early QAT who had some authority within the mapping community. Once a decision was made by the BAT or QAT, people accepted it. May it be negative or positive. Was it negative, of course there was some backlash on it. That’s unavoidable. But at some point it still got accepted.
Now it’s basically like this:
1. QAT declares their decision. (May it be mediation or BN Applications)
2. A person who this was directed to did not accept the decision.
3. Person contacts Ephemeral
4. Ephemeral comes to us and asks us why this decision was made.
5. After hours of discussion, it mostly turned out that we had to take back our decision and “decide” in favor of the complaining person.
6. QAT lost, person won.

This happen so often in the past, that whenever something happened we were basically ready for Ephemeral to appear and let us discuss our decision once again.
Before we ever made a decision, we discussed this with all QATs. Everyone could bring up their thoughts on it. We spent hours of discussion before declare it.
And this all was basically for nothing because everyone could at some point go to Ephemeral and in most of cases this person won.
And now we are at a point where people lost most of respect to the QAT and the QAT lost most of his authority, since our decision would have been mostly lifted after Ephemeral.
I am not saying that people shall not have a opportunity to contest a decision, but i think this went the wrong way.
I am okay with reviewing it, i am also okay with being it Ephemeral who brings it up. But at the same time, Ephemeral should have stay out of the discussion and let us do the work, since not being involved from the beginning in it.

The QAT is a capable Team of mapper and modder who can handle this. Of course not everyone will be happy with our decision, but i think it would be way better to give back the QAT the authority they had, instead of removing them completely from earth.There will be unhappy people. It’s not to avoid. In any game. Be it a huge MMO, some MOBA or be it osu. You can not satisfy everyone.

Last but not least i have some words to Ephemeral regarding his last two posts:

Ephemeral. You was always a person to me i have respected. Same goes for ztrot and Loctav in the time they were still active. I have a bit “looked up” to you and the other because you really tried to change something. I respect the effort to make the game more community driven. I am all for this. That’s what i always tried as QAT too. I always was someone like “Okay, this is something new but let’s first see how the community reacts to it”. That’s why i have loosed up the “standards” and have let pass more and more new beatmaps into the ranked section. Way more than the past QATs did before me. I even had to “fight” a bit with my mania QAT mates on certain beatmaps. Not everyone was happy with this, it went so far that i or the other mania QATs were called “Incapable of this position”. Just because we tried everything to involve the community more in what gets ranked or what not.

But with your last post, this respect went down so hard. It changed my view of you drastically. You do not seem to even try to read through the community responses. Almost all TCM people here are happy with our proposal. You always insist that we shall involve the community more, you always try to act for the community sake.. but here, you seem to ignore it completely because you think it would be too difficult to have the standard system and our proposal running side by side. As Raiden already stated, you are calling us indirectly “power-hungry dictators”. If intended or not, but this is simply not right.
It’s not because of the power. It is to maintain the “peace” within the TCM - game modes.
Me and all other TCM - QATs have put so much heart and effort over the year to make our game modes to what they are now. Our decision were not always correct but our game modes are running smoothly and to 95% peaceful. Even with knowing that people from the standard game mode or even other staff member didn't take us serious. And now we shall throw away everything we did.
This is not right and i simply can not see how this will be turned down by a simple “no because no”.
I love my game mode. I love it no matter how much i have to defend it. Mania is not perfect and i often have to read “Mania is trash, game X is much better”. Yet i keep staying here.
I quit QAT once, but it was just for a short time because i simply knew i am missing something.
Many people are happy on how mania changed from the past, some are not. And i am 101% sure, this is also the case in the other game modes. They all changed positively because of the effort of all BN and QAT which love their game mode as i do love mania.

Two mistakes were done:

1. Posting the first “decision” without even discussion it first with the QAT. It was about the QATs fate and it was like “Here’s your fate, please discuss it”. Only the higher ups and the QAT leader were involved into this and i do not find this fair. I do not find it fair to decide about the QATs and BNs fate behind their backs and then just post an outcome for discussion. At least the QAT should have been involved from the beginning.
2. Ignoring our complains completely now. We were shut by a simple “no”, no matter how much we try to defend our system.

That’s all i think. There are much more, much of personal feeling i would love to bring up in here but i think it went already a bit out of hand.
I can only hope for you understanding and why we want to keep our system and improve it with our proposal.

Cheers

wowie, that was uncalled for

regardless of whether you agree with the proposal or not, i believe that was a step too far.

Let mini-game ppl manage themselves

Just dropping my 2p without engaging in any ongoing conversations since I'm currently on the way back home through snowy chaos:

To me, abolishing hybrid sets just seems wrong. I for one am a mapper of both standard and Taiko, and I'd love to one day be able to rank a set consisting of full spreads in both modes. I suppose I could make two separate sets, but that seems like a bit of a waste of space to me? I don't know, there is probably not much of a difference in having two sets other than them being listed as two sets in the listing and on one's profile.
What I deem more sensible is to have two whole nomination processes on one beatmap (if that's a possibility at all to begin with), i.e. 4 bubbles instead of two. Seems like a lot of work, but I'm sure that people that are dedicated enough to both parts of the set would not have a problem with that.
I realise that this debate is less about hybrid sets and more about the qat split, but since this is one of the downsides and as such the only aspect I am personally uncomfortable with, I thought I'd address it here.

Edit: when it comes to beatmap moderation, I highly doubt that there is an issue with the qat talking to the gmt about content that needs to be deleted. Some of us have already been split into sections that they feel more comfortable moderating and I believe you could easily add a section for beatmap moderation within that structure. One could claim that it just takes more time and is annoying to deal with, but communication between our two groups is fast and transparent.

I'm not against different forms of leadership depending on mode but... I actually have no clue how this counter-proposal is necessary.

Maybe I am ignorant as to how the QAT works but I have no clue how the proposal by eph will have a negative effect on the other modes, I'm actually getting a headache trying to figure it out.

What is wrong with the BNs voting on whether a map should be disqualified? That sounds like perfectly healthy democracy, do we need QATs to decide this?

Also one thing I actually love about eph's proposal is this part

"We want to encourage discussion amongst beatmaps that may be considered controversial, so penalising BNs over subjective issues should be avoided. We also would like Beatmap Nominators to push more than just “safe” beatmaps into qualified."

This is actually wonderful imo, I am strongly for change in this game as the game feels incredibly stagnant right now and maps are honestly...kinda boring lately. While this might be MORE applicable for standard I don't see the major change this will put on other modes, and if it puts a major change I can almost gurantee I will like it.

Sorry if you guys feel betrayed by me or something but I have NO clue why this proposal will have a negative effect.

Ephemeral wrote:

concrete examples:

Ascendance being stonewalled for the better part of several years due to broad, very personal concerns about his suitability that culminated in a QAT handling the applications being conclusively proven to interfere with them in an effort to prevent his addition - a situation that required my direct intervention no less than three times

Are you out of your god damn mind dude? Ascendance was blocked for a reason and all the QATs agreed on that. That was nowhere near being personal, or at least not on my part but I am pretty sure it was the same for Deif and JBH. We kept him out because of behaviour and it was a valid concern at that time. The fact that we allowed him back was not your achievement, it was our decision. I do not remember when you intervened at all but if it happened, it was unnecessary and not needed at all.

If you think he got in because of you, you are simply wrong. His behaviour changed, without that no matter what you do, I would have say no forever without caring about your whining.

Also, keep in mind that when we kept him away from BNG I asked the spotlight dudes whether we should invite him or not and even they said that his behaviour is very concerning and most of them said no right away. So if you keep saying that only the QATs stonewalled him, then you should keep watching more closely instead of accusing me (or the other two members).

Feerum wrote:

Now i want to bring up one more thing i have noticed over the years. It may be only me but i think one of the core problems is that the QAT weren’t seen as a “Management Team” for a long while now. In the past there was the BAT (i think, it was before my time in osu!), later the early QAT who had some authority within the mapping community. Once a decision was made by the BAT or QAT, people accepted it. May it be negative or positive. Was it negative, of course there was some backlash on it. That’s unavoidable. But at some point it still got accepted.
Now it’s basically like this:
1. QAT declares their decision. (May it be mediation or BN Applications)
2. A person who this was directed to did not accept the decision.
3. Person contacts Ephemeral
4. Ephemeral comes to us and asks us why this decision was made.
5. After hours of discussion, it mostly turned out that we had to take back our decision and “decide” in favor of the complaining person.
6. QAT lost, person won.

Yap, this was our usual workflow and this is why QAT felt a little bit useless and kinda pointless at the end of my third year. I do not see the problem with having people on a higher level and let them have their final words in things. Ephemeral, what you want to achieve with that proposal is to shift this to the BNG and when problems come up "someone" will handle it. That someone will be you, or the management team or call however you want. Nothing will change. You will "give back" some power to the BNG but in reality, they always had that power, they just never wanted to use it. The veto system is placed for a reason, yet rarely and even falsely used.

TCM QATs are not asking for dictatorship as you assume. They are simply ask you to be able to keep their current workflow. Just because something is wrong in standard, we all know that is the case, there is no need to completely demolish the rest of the modes. Will your new system work with those? Probably yes but it will try to solve nonexistent problems and "maybe" even create new ones.

I am an old dude, and won't take part in the new system whatsoever as I got tired from all this shit but I still think that if the biggest minority of TCM community thinks that your new system suck then you should at least consider their opinion valid and not flatout cockblock it.

ok, let's clear the air here a little.

i admit, my previous posts were quite sharp in tone. i half expected this to happen given that a lot of people are void of the context in which to frame my posts. let me hash out the core issues of why i oppose this so strongly.

this post is gonna be really long. i can feel it in me bones

1. stillness is the enemy.

many of the posters in this thread advocate stability above all else, and while having stable systems is fine, stability is more often than not a detriment if it renders people unable to consider alternatives or improvements to the system at hand.

stability leads to stillness. stillness leads to stagnation, stagnation leads to disengagement, disengagement leads to stability.

this does not mean that i advocate every system we have being a constant introduction of outright chaos all the time, but in my opinion, the previous system had all but ground to a halt as an increasingly smaller group of people naturally aggregated authority over others.

left to its devices for much longer, this would only worsen - the QAT would naturally become more static, less able to respond to the changes in their communities as the people in them aged, grew distant, or moved on to other things. this is what has happened. it can't be allowed to continue happening. it has happened to every iteration of the BAT/MAT/QAT/BN model and will likely happen to the one we're about to try, too, but it is important that we keep the cycle moving and allow people to help shape the future of the game.

this singular ethos drives how i approach osu! from every perspective. it's why i try to get involved in so many things. it is something all of the osu!team share, one way or another.

2. concerns about the motivations of some QAT - pt. 1

to cite Ascendance's case again here, i'm aware that there's a lot of ill history that he has that does not exactly speak well for him in the context of being considered for some things. very few people were more acutely aware of that than myself.

however, the resistance i saw when his name came up for any sort of consideration was incredible. despite his metrics, despite a nearly universal understanding that his modding was well above board and his improvement in recent years was being palpably felt via active contribution (namely to the QAH and other project), a few individuals in the team could just not bring themselves to shift their assessment of him.

this was later reinforced by an incident where one QAT was demonstrating levels of completely unacceptable bias, going so far as to completely omit themselves from a required component of their work in a particular project.

i'm not going to say who it was or any more than that on it, but it was a big enough issue that it was a major motivator to begin fielding proposals for a new system in general.

some might say here, "well, maybe you should've just removed that QAT then and leave the system as is". sure, we could've, and then we'd be staring the same issue down the barrel again in a couple of years when someone who believes their opinions to be above the systems we've all agreed upon crops up and nestles themselves into one of these critical spots.

3. isolation and 'independence' is not osu!

now, that wasn't the only thing that jumped out at me. in my time acting as liaison with the QAT leadership, i noticed a consistent theme cropping up in particular - the regularity in which the Taiko QAT in particular branched away from the decisions and opinions of the QAT leadership in general.

this wasn't a kind of "oh we disagree" sorta thing, it was a really incessant stonewalling of anything that some of them felt they didn't like. at one point, one of the leaders spent possibly maybe ten or twelve hours (or more) attempting to talk them through their points and concerns to act on a particular effort the leadership was trying to push. it was a gruelling slog.

he was met with stark unwillingness the entire way.

this unwillingness is exemplified foremost again, in the conduct displayed in this thread by some of the taiko QAT - the phrasing of their proposal as 'independence' when discussed in many Discord servers, the fact that they position their communities as separate from the broader osu! community.

this desire for isolation is against the spirit of osu! at its most fundamental level. we want to encourage people to participate, contribute, and feel like they've been able to leave a meaningful mark on whatever scene of their choice should they have the support of their peers.

4. all gamemodes MUST be treated equally, without exception

the scale argument is a super convenient excuse to use when dealing with gamemodes - i used to do it myself a long time ago. it was Loctav who originally pioneered the idea of all gamemodes being treated equally in osu!, and i spent a not insignificant portion of my time in osu! essentially acting to have my efforts reach the highest number of people.

i admit, i was wrong to focus so heavily on standard alone back in the days. each gamemode community is vibrant in its own particular way, but at the end of the day, they are all a part of the osu! community, and the osu! community does not thrive by actively fragmenting itself.

any system we deploy to handle the ranking system MUST be as equivalent as possible across all modes. we really can't have one set of instructions for one gamemode, and another for the other three.

some may be inclined to argue that fair is not always equal, and while that is true, i see absolutely zero merit in continuing the current structure for the non-standard gamemodes when the 'stability' argument is taken out of the question. stability is not important - engagement is.

to my knowledge, taiko still suffers from wildly inconsistent application of its particular set of mapping rules and is subject to the same sort of clique-driven consensus that has been around since the beginning, catch is doing relatively okay, and mania is pretty much on life support. there may be some reasoning to argue for catch to continue as it is, but i'm fairly confident that they'll continue to thrive under the new proposal.

the other two gamemodes really have no leg to stand on.

-------------

as with all things, i'm sure that the QAT that i've mentioned in this post had the best intentions at heart when acting as they have. we haven't really had a stalwartly 'evil' or abusive QAT ever, and it was not my intention to paint a broad group of people as this kind of maleficent evil for choosing to spend their time trying to make things better.

for that, i apologize. i'm not out to diminish or dismiss anyone's contributions, but i am also vested with the twin expectations of the broader community to help 'regulate' these systems, and also my own drive to ensure that things continue to be free, open, and inclusive of new people joining our community.

it is important to have the kind of perspective you need to stand back and understand when something just isn't going to work, and right now, i just really don't see this split-system proposal working at all.

So I figured this would be better here than on my tweets:
Gonna go through the main points of the original proposal:
1. Disband QAT: Go ahead.

2. DQ button for BNs: The most worrying is "in the event of a veto", please refer to 3

3. Vetos on majority of votes:
Taiko currently has 14 people (and for the record, Mania has 13 and CTB has 12), of which I definitely see 2-3 not voting (even on a large time window, like a week) due to not really checking discord or stuff like that. There's also the chance somebody doesn't want to compromise himself (for example agreeing with DQ'ing a friends' map but not voting just to feel like he really wasnt part of that, teehee oops i forgot to check discord *insert cute discord emoji*) The one who vetos can't vote, so that makes it around 10 votes, meaning if 5 people vote yes, its done. FIVE.


What this means practically speaking, is that if you circlejerk hard enough, you'll be able to rank 10* Kantans (bad example but you'll be able to do things like ignoring all the guidelines and adhering only to rules and stuff like that). Of course this is a super silly and extreme example, but that's the essence of why this is not gonna work in a smaller scale. You can go ahead and ask literally anybody in the taiko scene and you'll get told how this definitely can become a reality.

Now, into a more alarming example:
Say, we are back into October 7. SAO:A aired its first episode.
-"jfc ADAMAS is great, I'm gonna map that"
-"Hell, x mapper has already done it and is receiving mods"
-"*to personal discord server* Yo guys, lets go veto this and we all vote yes lmao xD".

Rings a bell? This is one of those things that will happen and go under the radar, because everytime something like this happened so far and we had basically the entire community/reddit/etc calling it for being ill-intentioned, there was always the blind higher up saying "come on guys he is just giving feedback to the map! nothing serious :s"

Automated systems are great and all, but not taking into account the ill-intentioned, edgy cases, technicalities, things that fall in the gray area between subjetivity and unrankeables, the stagnated criteria and how BN/QAT keep enforcing it "because how things are done here"... is not ok because you're missing a super important point there: we are not automated systems, we're humans.

As so, blindly taking for granted everybody will behave (or those who won't will be special cases easily solvable with a restriction) is not a productive system and definitely not one who will make osu move forward. And to me, sorry for not explaining all this right off from the start, things look grim the TCM community with those changes.

-Kazu- wrote:

3. Vetos on majority of votes:
Taiko currently has 14 people (and for the record, Mania has 13 and CTB has 12), of which I definitely see 2-3 not voting (even on a large time window, like a week) due to not really checking discord or stuff like that. There's also the chance somebody doesn't want to compromise himself (for example agreeing with DQ'ing a friends' map but not voting just to feel like he really wasnt part of that, teehee oops i forgot to check discord *insert cute discord emoji*) The one who vetos can't vote, so that makes it around 10 votes, meaning if 5 people vote yes, its done. FIVE.

"Beatmap Nominator Applications will always be open", did you stop reading right after the veto part ? What do you think will happen to the amount of BNs if applications are always open ? Current numbers are irrelevant, and even if they were, five votes is still better than the current system.

-Kazu- wrote:

As so, blindly taking for granted everybody will behave (or those who won't will be special cases easily solvable with a restriction) is not a productive system and definitely not one who will make osu move forward. And to me, sorry for not explaining all this right off from the start, things look grim the TCM community with those changes.

"we want to disband the QAT and replace it by a yet to be named “Management Team” that only focuses on promoting and evaluating Beatmap Nominators as well as making sure that the system runs smoothly" => this new team (QATs rename wew) is there for that behavioral issue.

Read the thing properly and think of it as a whole instead of instantly refusing..

-Kazu- wrote:

You can go ahead and ask literally anybody in the taiko scene and you'll get told how this definitely can become a reality.

He could ask us one by one and we'd still agree how likely to happen is it with no doubts.

If osu!TCM needs a change, then it is up to us to decide how and when, that would be true democracy, not forcing what the majority (a.k.a std) wants in our community (and no, osu! was never a community of the 4 gamemodes united to that extent, and will never be)

There is a reason why people who live in a given state don't vote for laws in other states. It is not so difficult to see, you just need to WANT to see it, lower your head and accept "maybe this wasn't the best for everyone after all" and continue going forward, the "actual" forward, not this "pushy" forward.

Nofool wrote:

"Beatmap Nominator Applications will always be open", did you stop reading right after the veto part ? What do you think will happen to the amount of BNs if applications are always open ? Current numbers are irrelevant, and even if they were, five votes is still better than the current system.

Last apps there were 13 applicants, of which 2 got in, the apps before that there had 12, the apps I got in had 14 applicants. Out of those, a bunch got in and some had been applying for a while now (EDIT: This part is key to understand that not necessarily having bn apps open pretty much always won't give us a lot more people. It's always the same bunch applying over and over and we barely ever have new faces, so even if we initially got like 20 extra, we would go back to getting 1 or 2 every other month and with BNs resigning/getting kicked the numbers would maintain themselves in the current ones). Do you really think 10 people will completely cure this?

Nofool wrote:

"we want to disband the QAT and replace it by a yet to be named “Management Team” that only focuses on promoting and evaluating Beatmap Nominators as well as making sure that the system runs smoothly" => this new team (QATs rename wew) is there for that behavioral issue.

Read the thing properly and think of it as a whole instead of instantly refusing..

The problem comes with giving the blind eye to those cases, it always happen, and will keep happening for as long as there's not solid proof about these things. We are talking about an entire rework to the way things work, so not only there's around 8 people that worked together into this counter-proposal but no way I would not read carefully everything before spewing pejorative comments.

the current system doesn't really prevent these things anyway, does it? i mean in this field proposed MT and QAT actually have the same authority, because the difference between the two teams lies in modding related things not behavior issues (or BNs acting in bad faith)... i don't see how NOT changing the system is any better than changing it; if anything it just changes the paradigm for how to get vetoes dispelled from "convince nardo or ELSE" to "convince x amount of your peers" and as you noted, there are not exactly a ton of active taiko bns and very few new ones, so the chance of "jury stacking" or whatever is pretty low.

Nao Tomori wrote:

the current system doesn't really prevent these things anyway, does it? i mean in this field proposed MT and QAT actually have the same authority, because the difference between the two teams lies in modding related things not behavior issues (or BNs acting in bad faith)... i don't see how NOT changing the system is any better than changing it; if anything it just changes the paradigm for how to get vetoes dispelled from "convince nardo or ELSE" to "convince x amount of your peers" and as you noted, there are not exactly a ton of active taiko bns and very few new ones, so the chance of "jury stacking" or whatever is pretty low.

You are very correct. The current system doesn't really prevent these things. That's why we want to have freedom because as Feerum said (and Kurokami reaffirmed), all you had to do to completely disregard the decision of the QATs was to contact Eph. Or JBH/Mao/any QAT Leader.

With this, we have our hands tied and most the time we have to let things happen just because we have precedent that makes us act like that.

Another point I think you are super right is the part where you quote "convince Nardo or ELSE". Except that you are truly taking it out of context, as most the time when we tell people to talk it out with Nardo is because we are in full agreement with them, but decisions in the QA Team are done as a team, and so we look forward to unanimous decisions.

for the first point:
that is not an issue with qat vs new system but rather an issue endemic to osu in general where higher staff refuse to let staff members make their own decisions with regard to their domain. ironic, i know, but i think that the best chance you guys have of getting staff to allow you that freedom IS to be converted into a BN management team because with that shift they will be more willing to allow you to take more drastic actions with regard to these "technically allowed but acting in bad faith" situations. if you don't change then there is no reason to believe that higher staff will randomly decide to allow you guys that freedom.

the second point:
the reason you agree with nardo is presumably because he explains things well, not because he's a qat right? in a system where qats words are not inherently much stronger than everyone else's, it is natural that people would focus on the arguments themselves rather than whoever is saying them. the current system is very heavily biased towards "well they're qats so you have to do it" rather than any sort of constructive discussion - i say this mostly from standard experience but from what i've seen it is even more like that in taiko. changing to a system where bns have equally strong voices and removing weight from what color a user's name is is better for promoting discussion and allowing standards to evolve and so on.

Nao Tomori wrote:

the second point:
the reason you agree with nardo is presumably because he explains things well, not because he's a qat right? in a system where qats words are not inherently much stronger than everyone else's, it is natural that people would focus on the arguments themselves rather than whoever is saying them. the current system is very heavily biased towards "well they're qats so you have to do it" rather than any sort of constructive discussion - i say this mostly from standard experience but from what i've seen it is even more like that in taiko. changing to a system where bns have equally strong voices and removing weight from what color a user's name is is better for promoting discussion and allowing standards to evolve and so on.

Again, we don't redirect to Nardo because he gets to be THE opinion that counts, it's because its often enough the one who hasn't stated his opinion yet. And we just gather all 3 QATs approach to the matter before taking actions

-Kazu- wrote:

Nao Tomori wrote:

the second point:
the reason you agree with nardo is presumably because he explains things well, not because he's a qat right? in a system where qats words are not inherently much stronger than everyone else's, it is natural that people would focus on the arguments themselves rather than whoever is saying them. the current system is very heavily biased towards "well they're qats so you have to do it" rather than any sort of constructive discussion - i say this mostly from standard experience but from what i've seen it is even more like that in taiko. changing to a system where bns have equally strong voices and removing weight from what color a user's name is is better for promoting discussion and allowing standards to evolve and so on.

Again, we don't redirect to Nardo because he gets to be THE opinion that counts, it's because its often enough the one who hasn't stated his opinion yet. And we just gather all 3 QATs approach to the matter before taking actions

i am saying that QATs are THE opinion that counts and that that system is very limiting for everyone on the receiving end of QAT judgements. often it may feel like there is no recourse to an unfavorable judgement and that your arguments and reasonings are ignored because you don't have a red name and they do. which is why a system which promotes equality and discussion rather than hierarchy and authority is better for handling subjective, reasoning based debates. that is what the new veto resolution system is trying to achieve.

What else can I say against "the new system doesnt fix that issue but it doesnt mean it shouldn't be changed to that"?

And not only it doesnt fix that (as you said, it just changes it to "convince nardo" to "convince your peers", which to me sounds like it brings a lot more bias than what you could call QATs, but let's just say it puts it in approximately the same chore) but also makes it potentially worse (because I said, while standard has 56 members and you can easily say "nahhh, no way x's group of friends consists in 28+ BN's, right?" smaller game modes has ~14 (lets say we manage somehow to make the number raise to 20 with how often we will -because we will also apply stuff from the other proposal, like opening apps more often, because one of the motivations of this proposal and cutting ties was how we could see lots of motivation from people only to get stopped by the "oh, apps are in 3 more months " and us being unable to just randomly pm the leaders and say "hi we will make apps rn please make the broadcast". I myself lost motivation countless times in the 5-6 years I have been in the modding scene, so there's that- make bn apps.


That's still a reasonable amount of people to convince, with around 9 people. We can even give it the 'luck' component and say your CJ consists of 5 people so you'd still need 4 people to randomly be in agree with you. That's still super manageable numbers.

If the issue consists in you being unable to understand that a group of people didnt let you do x, then just making it a broader team wont make it more fair.

What truly fixes this is having "less bosses and more leaders", potentially making people actually trust QATs because they not only are involved in the community but are also part of it. This would leave only the people who just can't get a no for a response and in that cases, well, tough luck :/

you are completely missing the point, which is that a decision from a fluid team of 20 people is better than hitting a brick wall of 3 who are dead set on their opinions... having a decision come from an equal level to you is better than having it handed down and enforced upon you. it's the same reason you guys don't want to accept eph popping up and changing the system instead of organically creating a system you want yourselves. your appeal to authority (people should just trust qat because they are qat) is strange - people should abide by decisions because they are logical and valid, not because the person making the decision is a qat. the current system weighs very heavily towards the "they're a qat" side rather than "what they said makes sense and convinces people they're right" which is, again, what this revised veto process attempts to address - since to have a veto upheld, it needs to convince several others that you are correct.

Ephemeral wrote:

1. stillness is the enemy.
3. isolation and 'independence' is not osu!

these points are the two main reasons I personally agree with applying the original proposal to all modes

of course it might not keep things perfectly stable, but as Ephemeral said better than I can, stability shouldn't really be the end goal

and the whole tone that osu!taiko (and -catch and -mania) is not the same community as osu! goes kinda against the point of them all being key parts of the osu! ecosystem. just seems like a really exclusory attitude that doesn't need to be here. it's also present in this thread a bit which is unfortunate

tbh... while there are some minor concerns about the original proposal when applied to all modes (Kazu mentioned some issues with vetos & DQs, etc.), I'm still failing to see why it would be such a disaster to just go with it and work from there. seems like it has the potential to do a lot more good than harm anyway

clayton wrote:

of course it might not keep things perfectly stable,

This is the key point. I rather use a stable and working system than go with an experimental shit forced upon me. And a huge chunk of people thinks this way.

There is no problem with trying out new stuff, do not misunderstand me, but there is a place and time for that to do so. There is a reason why 99% of the rest of the gaming companies has test phases or beta builds or call it however you want. No one ever forces changes onto their own player base especially not when they do not agree with it.

With that said, it seems like osu! mode guys are fine with the new system, why not just let them experience it? Fix the upcoming errors then apply it to TCM too. Maybe if these guys see how it work they will come up with their own internal solution to solve their problems with it. I do not think, that maintaining two systems at once for a set amount of time (1-2 months) is a big problem meanwhile I know this was never a thing in osu! history so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I shouldn't be the one talking here or trying to come up with solutions to satisfy both party as I am a dead guy and not even a team member but still, I think finding a middle way would have been the best for everyone for a while.