Here Comes the Love

Ever wanted to see a scoreboard on some of your favourite maps that weren't qualified or ranked? The future is here with the new "Loved" beatmap ranking state. Read on to learn more!

Over the years, a common complaint with the ranking cycle has been that it is fairly restricted for most people. Truth be told, it requires an immense amount of effort from many people to get a map qualified and ranked - sometimes exceeding hundreds of total man-hours per map. This has bred a lot of discontent in the community as people have often felt that their own work faces an impossibly large hurdle in order to be recognized in any significant capacity, especially if it tailors to a distinctive audience, or seeks to attempt gameplay paradigms that are not allowed by the current Ranking Criteria.

We'd like to say that starting today, those times are over. Without further ado, we'd like to introduce the new "Loved" ranking state, which is now entering open testing.

Here's the details:

• Loved state functions almost identically to the Qualified state. Beatmaps marked with the state have their own scoreboards, but do not grant pp (performance points) for plays.
• Similarly to how Qualified maps work, Loved maps also increase playcount, count for most medal achievements (excluding star related progression achievements and some others), saved online replays, and everything else you'd expect from a scoreboarded map.
• Once a map enters Loved state, it can no longer be altered by the mapper without leaving the state again.

To start the open testing off, we will be holding community voting on a weekly basis to select the first number of maps to enter the Loved state. Maps may enter the Loved state in different ways in the future (such as via SP), pending some discussion and development of the system. For now, voting will be the only way.

The first vote will go up within a week or so. In the meantime, we'd like to present to you the first set of maps ever to be Loved:

Check them out here at the 'Loved' section in the Beatmap Listing!

Head on over, download the map, and play! It may appear as a Qualified map in the game client until a patch goes in later during the week.

We feel that this new state will make a lot of people happy once it becomes more fleshed out, and should ease a lot of the stress that some mappers feel when aiming to get more experimental things seen and enjoyed by other players. We'll be closely keeping an eye on the system and any feedback from people using it, so please make sure to let us know how you feel about it, or if you notice any issues.

We'd also like to give a shoutout to the feature request thread that started it all - we really do pay attention to the ideas made and supported in that forum, so if you've got an idea that you think would help make osu! more awesome, head on over and post it for the world to see!

If you think this is good, wait until you see what we've got planned next.

—Ephemeral