I appreciate this finally got some attention, now it's time to clarify a bit more what were my original concerns I brought up in mapset you've mentioned with potential suggestions on what to change.
Your proposal could be working well but it tends to be useless in certain cases. If I'm about to make a 30 second mapset (whether it be original length or cut), in order to make it rankable with proposed changes all I need to do is just add some more diffs and all is good. Meanwhile this seems like perfect solution, this ruins the idea of making small sets for rather calmer songs, or songs which aren't really that various in terms of creating more interesting diffs. Would you find more interesting small mapset for calm song or bigger set potential for exact same song?
This leads to next thing I want to mention. Your proposal dismisses original concern I brought up
here regarding drasticall song cut of a featured artist. While originally I used mappers' guild rules regarding official songs cut (which is somewhat acceptable if cut contains reasonable length, can be seen of FAQ tab on their website) which doesn't really involve mapper to obey them if outside of the guild, I feel that specific rule should be live on
any song leading towards ranking section where major cutoff has place, as it is disrespectful towards artist and massively goes down on variety certain song provides, especially when this is a featured artist song. Which brings me to the proposal point I want to write down here (I'm not that good in wording my thoughts in foreign language but you should get my point):
- Avoid drastically shortening song's MP3. This is to ensure quality of a Ranked section with variety of songs. Meanwhile minor edits are acceptable, using major cut-offs of content created by artists should be discouraged.
While I have mixed feelings about point you brought up about mapsets which doesn't really add much into ranked section (having barely over a minute of total drain), in some cases there's nothing mapper can do about it, that's how the original song was designed so this may result in content bloat if were about to make at least 6 diffs for not that intense song. That's why this should be a bit more centered about song cuts overall instead of trying to go with the way you proposed.
Minor cuts like
5150 where you usually get rid of one verse & chorus section in rather long song (which is pretty popular nowadays) still can have place because their usage doesn't fully intend to get rid of all song content artist had created. While personally I don't fully support that, this seems to be a reasonable cut. Major cuts like
Uta, with 30 seconds of length out of original 9 minutes (extreme case), or longlasting in most played
Make a Move, with barely exceeding 50 seconds out of original 2:50 length (questionable case), should be discouraged.
Despite the thing I came up with quoting rules from mappers guild in original discussion post, I strongly believe the way cuts are being hold should be more strict, no matter if it's official featured artist song or not.
tl;dr major cuts bad, minor cuts good, total drain time proposal questionable