God damn I'm really bad at writing thread OPs. Every time I try to make a short OP I end up with a whole damned article.
TL;DR: (still long WTF)
Some people want old ranked maps to be deleted.
Reasons: Old maps discourage new players from playing osu, because they search for songs they like and end up playing bad unfun maps from 2009. Old ranked maps are often unrankable by today's standards, and would not get ranked if they were in pending today. So why are they still ranked.
Osu is a game that develops and improves over time, but ranked maps right now stay static and out of tune with the game's advancement.
Old players might get offended by losing ranking for old scores they gained on old maps. This was more relevant back when scores was the main ranking, but now with PP old players might change their opinion on this.
Instead of just deleting old ranked maps, why not give osu seasons like every other leaderboard game that exists today, and have maps re-ranked per season? This will shell out bad maps every 4 months or so. Per season, stats from last season would be displayed in account history, and the stats would be reset for the new season, so everybody would have their chance to re-earn their rightful spot on the leaderboard based on their current level.
Opinions? Would you like osu to have seasons?
i.e. instead of deleting old ranked maps, just make them become unranked as the level of mapping goes up.
Old scores gained on maps that became unranked would be kept in account history for previous seasons, but would not affect new seasons.
You'd need to regain top scores of maps that get re-ranked for the new season; this will keep the leaderboard competitive and skill-based over grind-based, following the direction of PP over scores, in conjunction with seasons.
Original OP (WARNING: LONG!):
TL;DR: (still long WTF)
Some people want old ranked maps to be deleted.
Reasons: Old maps discourage new players from playing osu, because they search for songs they like and end up playing bad unfun maps from 2009. Old ranked maps are often unrankable by today's standards, and would not get ranked if they were in pending today. So why are they still ranked.
Osu is a game that develops and improves over time, but ranked maps right now stay static and out of tune with the game's advancement.
Old players might get offended by losing ranking for old scores they gained on old maps. This was more relevant back when scores was the main ranking, but now with PP old players might change their opinion on this.
Instead of just deleting old ranked maps, why not give osu seasons like every other leaderboard game that exists today, and have maps re-ranked per season? This will shell out bad maps every 4 months or so. Per season, stats from last season would be displayed in account history, and the stats would be reset for the new season, so everybody would have their chance to re-earn their rightful spot on the leaderboard based on their current level.
Opinions? Would you like osu to have seasons?
i.e. instead of deleting old ranked maps, just make them become unranked as the level of mapping goes up.
Old scores gained on maps that became unranked would be kept in account history for previous seasons, but would not affect new seasons.
You'd need to regain top scores of maps that get re-ranked for the new season; this will keep the leaderboard competitive and skill-based over grind-based, following the direction of PP over scores, in conjunction with seasons.
Original OP (WARNING: LONG!):
SPOILER
I've seen some people mention wanting to have old ranked maps deleted. I'm sure everybody already has their own solid opinion about whether old ranked maps should be deleted or not, and personally I do not want to ask them to be deleted, I just want to shell some things out.
1. The reason some people want old ranked to be deleted is because, well, they're bad. Not only that old ranked maps don't follow today's ranking rules at all - a lot of them break length limits, don't have more than one difficulty, have hold sliders that are counterintuitive to play, etc - not only this, but a lot of those maps are plain BAD.
Examples for why many of them are bad:
(A) Terribly low AR for the speed the map goes at. This makes some of them practically easier to read with HR, and almost impossible to read without it.
(B) Completely inconsistent movement patterns. I'm not sure if distance snap simply didn't exist or mappers just chose to ignore it completely back in the day, but some maps have completely ridiculous movement patterns that require either memorization or being 10 times better than the map's "level" to play correctly with reading.
(C) The timing just doesn't match the song. Putting aside the fact that I think even over half of today's ranked maps fail to have a correct timing for the melody of the song, the situation today compared to old ranked is night and day - over 95% of the old ranked maps (I literally downloaded 200 of them and forced myself to play them to see and it was terrible) have horrid nonsensical timing on the level of "just put notes snapped to the bpm, song feels more intense at a point? PUT MORE NOTES! timing? what's that?".
Please say something if you disagree with this - I have yet to see somebody who thinks old ranked are nearly as good as today's ranked, and I believe most people agree that for nearly all old ranked maps, were they a new map today being in pending - it would not get ranked.
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So ok, unless you're going to say you disagree with the above, then we agree old ranked maps are bad. Is there a problem with this, though?
The main problem I see is:
New players who just start the game often prefer to just search for songs they know instead of playing whatever is the latest ranked. As a result, they end up playing random ranked maps from 2009-2010. And then you see new players basically just either (A) quit the game because it wasn't fun for them (B) complain that they can't improve (C) say osu is all about memorization (without FL)
Well that's basically it?
However another "issue" is that if you're a seasoned player and you decide to do score grinding or PP grinding to beef up your account stats, the nature of the system implies it's more efficient to play terrible old maps instead of improving your scores on fun new maps, if you want to boost your score faster. In other words, if you want to get higher on the leaderboard, you need to play unfun maps. Now I bet somebody will go and say "well, grinding score isn't supposed to be fun anyway". But you know, retrying good, new maps, *is* fun. However playing maps that make no sense just to get their ranked points feels stupid and like a waste of time, but it essentially means that if you rather play your favorite unranked maps for fun you will have weak ranking display on your account. Again, I don't know if you can actually list this as a problem, because /who cares/. Just play for fun, right? So I'll just throw this out here as a random "issue".
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It still boils down to this: old ranked maps would not be ranked by today's standards. So why are they still ranked?
Lets look at this from a different angle: what would happen if they got unranked?
1. New players would not be able to find them as easily, and they'll end up playing new ranked maps. This might either lead them to enjoy the game more, due to more fun maps, or quit the game faster, because of not finding the songs they want to play on.
2. A lot of old players would lose a lot of their old scores.
On #2, I think that had osu still used the score system like it used to, there would be a lot of opposition for this. However now that the PP system kicked in, would losing those old scores really matter? Would players who grinded for hours to get an SS with HR+FL on some random map from 2010 be angry that their score achievement is no longer visible to the public? Does anybody even look at that anymore? <- I'm curious to see what old players have to say on this.
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Here's an idea: instead of deleting old ranked maps, why not create leaderboard seasons? Start an osu Season 2, players would get to keep their Season 1 stats which would be whatever stats they had on the start of S2, but starting from that point onwards, all of your plays would count towards S2. Stuff like global accuracy, score, pp, etc, would be season-specific, and you'll be able to see people's current season stats normally like right now, while old season stats would be archived per account and visible on a small table in a small section that belongs to it.
Almost every single game with a leaderboard has seasons that reset stats per new season. Frankly I'm surprised osu didn't do this yet.
Every time a new season starts, maps would need to be re-ranked. i.e. re-reviewed for ranking. If a map was ranked for S1, it won't be automatically ranked for S2 until re-reviewed. The re-review should be much easier and faster than an initial review of a map in WIP state, because you'd be going over maps in their already final state. So the process would be as simple just play each map difficulty once, and if it feels alright, re-rank it. If there's a minor problem you could even fix it while re-ranking. (For example the background image for No.39... the map is good... just replace the BG image lol)
Even though map difficulties are completely different maps, I think just checking the top difficulty can be enough to judge if the map was mapped well or not. Maybe two diffs if it's a collab map. So re-ranking shouldn't take long... with an average of 3 minutes drain time per map (and it really is less I bet), you could re-rank 15-20 maps per hour alone. With a MAT team of several people, who are osu players anyway who spend time playing maps anyway, and it wouldn't take them any more effort than re-playing an old map and saying whether it's okay or not, you could re-rank a few hundreds of maps per week.
For simplicity, just keep the last 2 months ranked maps from Season X still ranked for season X+1, and MATs can randomly take time to play maps from earlier than 2 months and onwards back in the timeline to re-rank them, or if they just remember a fun map from their memory re-rank it after playing it once instantly.
How's this for an idea?
1. The reason some people want old ranked to be deleted is because, well, they're bad. Not only that old ranked maps don't follow today's ranking rules at all - a lot of them break length limits, don't have more than one difficulty, have hold sliders that are counterintuitive to play, etc - not only this, but a lot of those maps are plain BAD.
Examples for why many of them are bad:
(A) Terribly low AR for the speed the map goes at. This makes some of them practically easier to read with HR, and almost impossible to read without it.
(B) Completely inconsistent movement patterns. I'm not sure if distance snap simply didn't exist or mappers just chose to ignore it completely back in the day, but some maps have completely ridiculous movement patterns that require either memorization or being 10 times better than the map's "level" to play correctly with reading.
(C) The timing just doesn't match the song. Putting aside the fact that I think even over half of today's ranked maps fail to have a correct timing for the melody of the song, the situation today compared to old ranked is night and day - over 95% of the old ranked maps (I literally downloaded 200 of them and forced myself to play them to see and it was terrible) have horrid nonsensical timing on the level of "just put notes snapped to the bpm, song feels more intense at a point? PUT MORE NOTES! timing? what's that?".
Please say something if you disagree with this - I have yet to see somebody who thinks old ranked are nearly as good as today's ranked, and I believe most people agree that for nearly all old ranked maps, were they a new map today being in pending - it would not get ranked.
-----
So ok, unless you're going to say you disagree with the above, then we agree old ranked maps are bad. Is there a problem with this, though?
The main problem I see is:
New players who just start the game often prefer to just search for songs they know instead of playing whatever is the latest ranked. As a result, they end up playing random ranked maps from 2009-2010. And then you see new players basically just either (A) quit the game because it wasn't fun for them (B) complain that they can't improve (C) say osu is all about memorization (without FL)
Well that's basically it?
However another "issue" is that if you're a seasoned player and you decide to do score grinding or PP grinding to beef up your account stats, the nature of the system implies it's more efficient to play terrible old maps instead of improving your scores on fun new maps, if you want to boost your score faster. In other words, if you want to get higher on the leaderboard, you need to play unfun maps. Now I bet somebody will go and say "well, grinding score isn't supposed to be fun anyway". But you know, retrying good, new maps, *is* fun. However playing maps that make no sense just to get their ranked points feels stupid and like a waste of time, but it essentially means that if you rather play your favorite unranked maps for fun you will have weak ranking display on your account. Again, I don't know if you can actually list this as a problem, because /who cares/. Just play for fun, right? So I'll just throw this out here as a random "issue".
-----
It still boils down to this: old ranked maps would not be ranked by today's standards. So why are they still ranked?
Lets look at this from a different angle: what would happen if they got unranked?
1. New players would not be able to find them as easily, and they'll end up playing new ranked maps. This might either lead them to enjoy the game more, due to more fun maps, or quit the game faster, because of not finding the songs they want to play on.
2. A lot of old players would lose a lot of their old scores.
On #2, I think that had osu still used the score system like it used to, there would be a lot of opposition for this. However now that the PP system kicked in, would losing those old scores really matter? Would players who grinded for hours to get an SS with HR+FL on some random map from 2010 be angry that their score achievement is no longer visible to the public? Does anybody even look at that anymore? <- I'm curious to see what old players have to say on this.
---
Here's an idea: instead of deleting old ranked maps, why not create leaderboard seasons? Start an osu Season 2, players would get to keep their Season 1 stats which would be whatever stats they had on the start of S2, but starting from that point onwards, all of your plays would count towards S2. Stuff like global accuracy, score, pp, etc, would be season-specific, and you'll be able to see people's current season stats normally like right now, while old season stats would be archived per account and visible on a small table in a small section that belongs to it.
Almost every single game with a leaderboard has seasons that reset stats per new season. Frankly I'm surprised osu didn't do this yet.
Every time a new season starts, maps would need to be re-ranked. i.e. re-reviewed for ranking. If a map was ranked for S1, it won't be automatically ranked for S2 until re-reviewed. The re-review should be much easier and faster than an initial review of a map in WIP state, because you'd be going over maps in their already final state. So the process would be as simple just play each map difficulty once, and if it feels alright, re-rank it. If there's a minor problem you could even fix it while re-ranking. (For example the background image for No.39... the map is good... just replace the BG image lol)
Even though map difficulties are completely different maps, I think just checking the top difficulty can be enough to judge if the map was mapped well or not. Maybe two diffs if it's a collab map. So re-ranking shouldn't take long... with an average of 3 minutes drain time per map (and it really is less I bet), you could re-rank 15-20 maps per hour alone. With a MAT team of several people, who are osu players anyway who spend time playing maps anyway, and it wouldn't take them any more effort than re-playing an old map and saying whether it's okay or not, you could re-rank a few hundreds of maps per week.
For simplicity, just keep the last 2 months ranked maps from Season X still ranked for season X+1, and MATs can randomly take time to play maps from earlier than 2 months and onwards back in the timeline to re-rank them, or if they just remember a fun map from their memory re-rank it after playing it once instantly.
How's this for an idea?
but that is all subjectiv.