Recap from the Ranking Criteria:

If the drain time of each difficulty is between 3:30 and 4:15, the lowest difficulty of each included game mode cannot be harder than a Hard.

So a Hard diff is necessary if the drain time falls below 4:15.

This map was recently brought to my attention.

The beatmap information page lists the drain length as 4:04 while the editor test mode says it's 243s (4:03). However the mapper has pointed out that the system did not consider the duration of the final spinner, which is 11.143 seconds long. Replacing the spinner with some other objects does increase the drain time to exactly 255s (4:15), according to the editor test mode.

The problem is the one break in the song. The beginning and end of each break (the less opaque portion that you can adjust if you want) is, for some reason, considered as drain time by the game, even though the HP bar does not go down during this period. You can try it for yourself by comparing a map with a normal break, then delay the start significantly by dragging the break section in the timeline.

Now let's do the math manually.
The map starts at 00:01:278 and ends at 04:19:452, for a total length of 258174 milliseconds. This means that exceeding 3174ms of break time will cause the drain time to fall under 255000ms (aka the 4:15 requirement).

There is a single break from 03:13:452 to 03:17:395, for a full length of 3943 milliseconds.
The middle portion of the break (the opaque section) starts somewhere between 03:13:645 and 03:13:666, and ends somewhere between 03:16:816 and 03:16:838, for a length of 3150~3193 milliseconds.

So if you exclude the entire break time (even the start/end of the break), the map becomes unrankable without a Hard diff. But if the start/end sections are counted (like what the system currently does) then it could go either way (I didn't bother counting that specifically, anyway the start/end points can be manipulated to increase the drain time if it does in fact work like that).

So which way is the Ranking Criteria supposed to work? I'm leaning towards the former (that the whole break is excluded and it's currently unrankable) but I would like a bit of confirmation.

(inb4 "just map the break lol" that's a solution but I'm genuinely curious on how this rule works, it's a pretty important rule.)

too long didnt read but you could have just gotten your answer by reading the glossary in the rc

Ranking Criteria wrote:

Drain time: The time during which the health-bar drains. Excludes break periods. osu!taiko's drain time includes sliders and the intended length of spinners.

intro was empty so that should be counted in too. and outro should not even be considered anywhere to be counted

I replied there btw

lewski wrote:

too long didnt read but you could have just gotten your answer by reading the glossary in the rc

Ranking Criteria wrote:

Drain time: The time during which the health-bar drains. Excludes break periods. osu!taiko's drain time includes sliders and the intended length of spinners.

Yeah, I'm aware of that. It's just this part that stumped me.

Your Good Self wrote:

The beginning and end of each break (the less opaque portion that you can adjust if you want) is, for some reason, considered as drain time by the game, even though the HP bar does not go down during this period.

I wasn't sure if there was any obscure technicality that I wasn't aware of, so I wanted some clarification before posting directly in the discussion page.

The whole post was probably unnecessarily verbose, sorry about that.

Rivals_7 wrote:

intro was empty so that should be counted in too. and outro should not even be considered anywhere to be counted

I replied there btw

Thanks! Thread closed.