Ephemeral wrote:
nobody will ever be able to rank their own maps. even in the new proposed system, it requires community consensus and always will require consensus of some form.
Most "best" mappers don't really need mods, and they search for approval In-Game, by asking for test plays/little mods from players, since the best way to mod a map and find it's errors is TO PLAY THEM. As I said many times I got to play maps even before they got submitted/just after they did, and guess what, they got ranked months after and the map was pretty much the same, of course, you can't really go around telling very experienced mappers what to change in their maps, unless you find some critical mistake, which would be really rare.
care to elaborate? this is vague.
Way too easy to abuse, and a good reason to speed-mod/do shit mods everywhere just to get kudosu. You could say this incentives people to mod maps to get kudosu, I think it just makes them do bad and fast mods. Different points of view I guess.
Then again you could ask your friends to give you some kudosu, spam your own map with kudosu, etc. Having 999 kudosu on your map does not mean it is good, liked, popular, anything, it just means some players with kudosu are willing to spend it on that map for whatever reason. Some little changes like being able to give one kudosu per player per map AT MOST (like, even if I have 4000 to hand out, I'd only be able to give each map one) could be good.
and then what? they are removed from the team once reaching 0 points? all this will do is cause people to not look at maps for fear of reprisal, meaning the entire system will collapse in on itself. smart suggestion.
If you get to be a MAT/BAT you shouldn't be worried about that, just do your job wisely and carefully and you won't have any problem. What you say is a possibility, but if you made it to that position and yet you're as good as any random modder/mapper/player then something's wrong. Being a MAT/BAT should mean that you're over the average so you can give better mods, also meaning your judgement is good enough to decide that a map should be ranked. If someone can get to that position without those minimum condition, then even the bases are wrong.
Remember you will also win points if you bubble a map which gets ranked and DOES NOT get un-ranked. Unless you're a lazy ass that just goes and bubble some random map once every three months because it's your friends map and you barely look at it, then you're fucked.
If you think it that way, this is even kind of useless since it would be REALLY rare and sad that any MAT/BAT reached a point where he would lose his position by repeating the same mistake 2/3 times.
credence is likely already given to "proven" mappers by some members of the team already.. others call it "speedranking". see the problem here?
there has always been a profound difference between a good mapper and a good modder - the two are not always mutually exclusive. a fantastic modder may be a terrible mapper, and vice versa. it is also exceptionally difficult to retain interest in actively playing a game where you are spending 80% of your time for said game on working for other people's projects for practically no benefit other than the occasional "thanks". what you are proposing in essence is that we begin to treat this position like people actually receive any form of benefit for helping out. the moment we start excessively reprimanding people for mistakes is the moment this team begins to fall apart, and practically anybody in the staff team at the moment is aware of this.
while i can understand your frustrations about the system, i think that you are looking towards the wrong part of the system to attempt to fix what is wrong. being more strict with the BAT/MAT will not solve anything, only cause more issues. the system needs to be fundamentally changed at the most basic level, which it will be, provided peppy ever gets around to implementing the new ranking system over all the other thousands of bugs and feature requests.
As I said speed ranking is fine.
Even when I agree with everything you've said in this last quote, I'd rather have 3 active BATs/MATs that actually want to do their "jobs", than 500 BATs, 400 MATs that just go mod/rank their friends maps, or just AFK for years. I personally think mappers ENJOY mapping. I just made one map and dude I enjoyed doing it, getting mods and stuff, I even like to play it! If you're looking for some benefit by doing something you don't like IN A GAME where the maximum profit you can get is to have fun, then dude you're really screwed, no offense.
This is a game and the main reason I think people is here is because they like it. It's fun to play, to map, for some people it's fun to mod, etc. I do understand the system flaws come from the most basic level, but I have no idea about what or how to change that so I'd better talk about the actual one (also, I'm kind of sure there are many ideas of what to do about this and that they're gonna be applied in some near/not so near future).
Maps stand out because of their mappers... val0108 can just go make any random map that's playable for most people + popular song and it will automatically stand out, same with La Cataline, or any other skilled mapper. It's really hard and rare for a map to stand out when it got mapped by some new guy. I rarely play new stuff nowadays, but when I did every damn map that made me say "wow, nice", was from a well known mapper, every, fucking, time.
Anyways, I'm kind of sure my arguments are based on what I consider "a good map" and "good mapping", since I think that ANY map that's fun, readable, flows with the music and "looks nice" could be ranked, while others may even go around saying some map is un-rankable because there's one hit circle that's barely hidden under a slider... so feel free to ignore me (no sarcasm). :p