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:
- 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.
- 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