This game is mainly a solo-one excepted in multi-player when you can do tag coop, tag team, and tag coop team.
TAG2/TAG4 was a pretty nice concept but not well exploited or not enough in my opinion.
In my opinion we should innovate and add a co-op mode which can make stuff more fun to play with friends. It will also encourage mappers to make more specific TAG2/TAG4 maps added to their own mapset like if you added taiko, ctb, mania diffs to your std mapset to make an hybrid one.


So my current proposal is :

- Adding an official co-op mode which is TAG2 / TAG4 mode and a specific pp rank on it, this also includes specific leaderboards on maps. (for standard mode only, i don't know if it's possible to extend it to other modes)
The current tag4 maps in loved section don't give pps to solo players. So the main idea is to make them give pp to that specific rank. "Normal" maps that give pp can also be played with TAG2/TAG4 mode, they kind of work like converted maps.
TAG2/TAG4 rank is a specific rank such as the current PP rank. How does it work ?

- Player A and Player B get 300pp on a map X
- Player B and Player C get 200pp on a map Y

Player A has 300pp
Player B has 500pp
Player C has 200pp

You may think that the main idea of is to find good players to "boost" your pp score, but that doesn't really work like this because if there is a weaker player among 4 players, the map wouldn't be that easy to FC...

You go in co-op mod with your friends or other players you are free to invite. Or co-op mode is included in multiplayer mode, let's see about that.


FAQ :

1 - Do they give pp to solo-mode players ?
No they still don't, the main idea is to make them give pp to that specific mode. But tag4 maps could still be played by a single player and have the classic solo-player leaderboard.

2 - Will there be any specific mapping ranking criteria about TAG2/TAG4 maps ?
Probably yes, but more flexible than current ones for maps supposed to be played by a single player. It might allow 2b style or burai sliders for example in certain conditions.

3 - How to make tag4 maps ranked ?
That's the point that needs to get discussed. First, they must follow specific ranking criteria. They also must be classified as TAG2/4 maps before getting qualified/ranked to make sure they don't give pp to solo-mode players.

4 - How leaderboards are organized ?
It's just simple, instead of just 1 nickname, there are 2/4. Only the overall score matters, not each single performance. But the pp awarded will be the same for each players.

5 - Is there a specific star rating system for TAG2/TAG4 maps ?
No, there shouldn't. That means playing specific tag4 maps awards more pp than playing a regular map.

6 - Is it possible to have a TAG2/TAG4 score on "normal" maps.
Yes it is, they work like converted maps. But not a big deal to get pp, because the star rating is low compared to specific tag2/tag4 maps.

7 - Is TAG3 possible ?
No, because most of songs aren't made for being played by 3 players because of the number of sections.


I may have forgotten some points, so we could discuss about that. If you like this idea, please support it, thanks !
If this proposal comes true, i would really like to involve 100% of myself in TAG2/TAG4 mapping projects.

In mania, this kind of game mode can work out as these I think:
7k - 14k Tag2
4k - 16k Tag4
9k - 18k Tag2
5k - 20k Tag4 (10k if Tag2) [this is probably full screen wide notelanes on 20k]

This plays like a normal single key [ex. 4k] but since it's a tag, the layout would be 16 instead. A player will only see the lanes assigned to him and the rest will be hidden (blackened out)
(P1 - Lane 1-4)
(P2 - Lane 5-8)
(P3 - Lane 9-12)
(P4 - Lane 13-16)

Also, if watched on replay, all lanes would be visible and the lanes should somewhat be color tinted for easy identification of who's part was it.

Hey, main founder of TAG Club here. Our community found your great proposal so we gave it some boost! Here's what I would like to comment about this proposal.

At this point, non-TAG maps shouldn't be considered "converted" as players have evolved to enjoy more standard maps in TAG than TAG difficulties themselves. For example, community really enjoys playing tech maps as mappers usually put really interesting combos in those, making it a truly refreshing experience. Depending on the map, they also can be harder than actual TAG difficulties, which is why it's not a good idea to base pp based on total map star rating. Some TAG maps are extremely easy despite their high SR and this has been proven in multiple occasions, for example in TAG4 Tournament 2018. We don't want to nerf non-TAG maps because let's face it, a lot of them are really fun in TAG.

Please note that at this current state, TAG is extremely broken in a lot of ways. Notelocking, random fails and ghost misses are something that we have been able to adapt for quite some time. However, before leaderboards will be set up, we need to get TAG to work better so we can compete better. In a recent dev blog, peppy was already hinting that we might be seeing TAG in lazer, and we are heavily anticipating that.

TAG3 is fine, but I'd imagine that it would just clutter leaderboards even more. I've personally been thinking if development team will ever finish the teams concept and start working on TAG leaderboards based on the teams. Multiple names in leaderboards just generally looks ugly and team names would fit much better.

Thanks for creating this thread! We'll be watching it closely.

EDIT: Also forgot to mention that the current pp proposal wouldn't work too well as you have to take into account the fact that patterns and difficulty can be different for each player. With the current system people would start making super farmy maps to boost lower ranked players by giving the harder jumps to the better player.

@Aiseca
So i guess it works well for mania if specifics lanes are assigned to each player.


@Mara
You're right about difficulties of tag4 maps.
TAG4 map's star rating may be too overrated because the maps are designed to be played by 4 players, so this means it looks like a compilation of different patterns for single players and each pattern/New combo are mostly distant each other and that boosts the SR considerably. On the other side "regular" maps have less star rating but they can contain more difficult patterns such as long jumps in the same combo, that is way harder to play by a single player because the map was designed to be played by a single player. So, here is the main difference.

I agree that there is a lot of non-tag4 maps that are pretty fun to play in TAG, but they would be pretty underrated in terms of pp.

As you stated, there are still some gameplay mechanics such as notelocking which is quite annoying, especially with high BPM maps.

About the team names thing, i think it's a good idea too but it would be messy too if the member of the team leaves or if there are new members in etc. But also putting only names in the leaderboard will be a mess, imagine :

#1 -GN , Ekoro, MillhioreF, CXu
#2 -GN, itsamemarioo, FGSky, rustbell
#3 -GN, player2, player 3, player 4
#4 -GN, player 5, player 5, player 6
etc.
Putting team names would avoid single players repeating themselves in the same leaderboard. So it's a pretty interesting point to discuss. Should we allow the same player to repeat himself in the same leaderboard ? should we make teams ? Or just should we keep things like that ?

Concerning these super farmy maps that boost weaker players, I guess there should be some kind of guidelines about consistency with difficulty and density. It's more about mapping quality and how the map fits tag4 mapping with the usage of new combos, if mapping tag4 maps becomes a new mapping meta in the future. I'll be glad to make some kind of guideline about how TAG4 should be mapped to avoid stuff being exploited for the sake of farming.

https://osu.ppy.sh/community/forums/topics/95265
Mara, you have a bunch of other TAG requests too

also this https://osu.ppy.sh/community/forums/topics/176407


At this point I recommend putting an ultimatum of such requests as an issue over here:
https://github.com/ppy/osu/issues

abraker, that specific thread doesn't include pp ranking as ppv1 was still a fresh and weird thing. Also this thread has already surpassed the old thread in terms of priority stars.

Will reply to Cherry Blossom's post later today.

wow this request blew up

there were not this many stars last time I checked

I just realized that if this will be made possible on mania, Touhou songs would be a perfect songs to map with these. ☺️

Would be interesting to see TAG coop modes have their own leaderboards and rankings - that'd give it the attraction and staying power it needs. You could just have the pp calculator check each part separately and add the pp values for all players together in a way (with different weightings for stuff like accuracy to prevent imbalance), and have that determine the worth of a team's play on a map.

Sounds like Lazer material to me, though...

-GN wrote:

You could just have the pp calculator check each part separately and add the pp values for all players together in a way (with different weightings for stuff like accuracy to prevent imbalance), and have that determine the worth of a team's play on a map.

I see players strategizing in which order to go in so they get the parts they want for the difficulty or pp they want. In that case, it's also best to have a difficulty rating for each order the players can go in.