after this drama soulfear decided to quit OSU for good, and below is something that she asked me to convey for her. (DISCLAIMER: all the opinions below are soulfear's personal points of view and do NOT represent mine. Please also do not attack anyone based on anything said below. Form your own opinion please.)
Hi, I'm soulfear. By the time you read this, I will have already left OSU. Because I don't speak English well, I'll let aika convey some of what I want to say for me. This time I decided to leave OSU for good, because first, I don't want OSU to affect my emotions and my life again; and second, after this drama, I realized that the old OSU community is completely gone, and rank maps now becomes meaningless to me. Why? The reason is manifold. I am a sensitive and delicate person, who can always feel from all things that usually people don't feel. For example, it's probably hard for you to imagine that someone would look back and feel lost for a month after listening to an interlude in an anime, get goose bumps when listening to music because of what they can feel in the music. But here am I, and I believe there are people like me in the world too. And people making maps in rhythm game is that they want to make others resonate with them through their map design, and as long as there are no major unrankable issues (such as timing errors, note unsnaps and so on,) it is always the player to respect the will of the mapper. And every really excellent, non "industrial" mapper's original intention is to bring their own feelings to music to the players through the maps, so that players can feel the same way. In order to achieve that, they needs to perform exhaustive testplaying by themself. That is how I made all of my BMS-inspired maps: every single pattern and distance choice were determined by the feelings came from my own hundreds or even thousands of times of testplaying. There used to be a saying called "learn how to play," that is to learn how to follow the mapper's intention to play the map so as to feel the same how mapper feels the song. This is also the reason why in before one can experience a variety of maps in distinct styles. But what about OSU today? Because of the "culture" and some influential OSU people, the mappers must consider the feelings of the players, rather than players to comply with what mappers want to express. This of course doesn't mean I will never take into account the feelings and advice of players, and I have never thought in that way. However, the consideration of these must not result on destroying my map design's original intentions. Otherwise, maps will lose their meaning, because after all of these force majeures come from various sides, all the mapper wants to convey through their own map - how they "feels" the music - will just be gone. And here we come: all the emotions mapper want to express transform to some industrial maps, that is purely for the sake of being ranked. Will there be anything good for the excellent mappers to keep these meaningless maps? Consistent difficulty across the whole map? What a joke. There's never been such a "culture" in the chart design of any rhythm games, but there is in OSU. It is the presence of the "exceissve" "difficulty spikes" in the whole charts that make them being really impressive and unforgettable, such as sudden death at the beginning/ending, acceleration, etc. Take the CLASS mode (Dan, 段位認定モード) courses in IIDX, if one can manage to get through some of the extremely hard parts (like the accelerating section in Mei, or all the jacks and chaotic burst parts in Himiko) they will feel so delighted and accomplished as they are in the cloud 9. OSU is now no longer a rhythm game to me, and will only bring me sadness and anxiety instead of happiness. Since my imagination and creativity don't work at full strength here anymore, i think it's time for me to say goodbye.
this one thing (which VINXIS mentioned in his reply here) sets the reason to the majority of why most people cannot agree to the top difficulty to be ranked, despite ranked section in general does not have a high standard.
soulfear is trying to picture the incident as if people involved in the modding discussions were trying to completely change her concept/idea that she wanted to convey in the map. but what actually did happen is she just refuses to change some cross-screen, and absurdly designed patterns that apparently, according to herself, is the only way to express her idea.
taking an example, 01:18:781 (3,1) - this is a 1/4-gaped stream (190 BPM btw) with almost 240 pixels (entire vertical playfield is 384 pixels) of absolute coordinate distance in between. it happens only once in the song and according to soulfear, there is some form of "extreme dynamic" that is justified here to use such a pattern. and it happens only, once, in the entire map. this "extreme dynamic" is also NOT present/expressed in the song itself, in fact, the note 01:18:860 (1) which is 240 pixels apart, is not even hitsounded, it is using the default soft-hitnormal sample. what did soulfear respond when the modder bring this issue up? ⠀"this is the absolute minimum distance i can accept, and i cannot comply with smaller distance or a change of pattern. you need to try to understand me instead." - https://osu.ppy.sh/beatmapsets/733702/discussion/1548376/timeline#/3065612 (in chinese)
if one treats a map as ⠀"it is the players who need to respect my design and my feelings" instead of ⠀"mappers should consider players experience within the expression of the map" then getting backlash over stubborn and absurd gameplay design is only natural and it is NOT going to result in a "really impressive and unforgettable" map, at least most likely not a positive one.
to anyone that thinks this is just some "elitist" people trying to "destroy" a "unique" mapper's work, either you did not even check out the map properly, or you are pretending to be a white knight to defend something so called "unique" by yourself.
further more, mapping with this kind of mindset without well and proper execution in the balance to the map's difficulty aspect will also result in players rather feel frustration and not what the map was intended to express. while there is of course a need of respecting the mapper's intentions with a map from the player side, there are still fundamental game mechanics to consider to make a map have a proper sense and consistency.
many mappers are in fact able to express themselves properly in the editor, while still being either unorthodox, or modern (and so on) without contradicting the game's core gameplay elements. the so called "consistency" that was mentioned in the map's modding/discussion threads were never meant to mean "you cannot have stronger contrast than a certain degree", but rather means there should be proper gameplay design elements that justify a certain "big contrast".
mappers in general is in fact open to new ideas and adopt them, re-use them in other ways to make a map more interesting and open up for more variety in song expression. it is pretty clear that variety in mapping has increased significantly as time goes.
soulfear is wrong on 1 thing, you always have had to consider player experience, its not some new thing, this is an inherent limitatiton of game design and has definitely been a thing since osu existed, how are you expecting to convey anything you're trying to do otherwise?
This same type of backlash soulfear got was always there, its not a recent manifestation and soulfear themselves state this is something they do anyway so i dont understansd this narrative that OSU HAS CHANGED TO THIS...... when it never changeed to this it was always this
in fact it has been slowly becoming the opposite with people in general becoming more apathetic because of the realization that it doesnt really matter a map they despise is getring ranked because they will forget about it after a week
but yea just odd that somehow soulfear is thinking this is some new thing thats come up and not like they havent been in conflict with this since forever
ur opinion is cringe af tho if u had valid points to add and defended her map then u should've been in the discussions instead
not in here showing how "u care" while u actually dont cuz u literally did not actually check the map out other than playing the normal diff, cuz it really shows how ur try-harding to defend just to defend lol
in different to u, i actually was in the discussions and while addressing the issues also gave constructive feedback to the mapper like hitsound suggestions and other stuff
where tf were u? stop acting like u did something at all all ur doing is calling people names and act like ur the "nice" and "considerate" person
not sure whats even wrong with speaking stuffs what ppl think the mapper can do to enhance the map's quality and sharing opinions about the map idk i remember some ppl saying "gj making the mapper quit the game" because some dq mods arrived when his map got qualified which is kinda awkward, and this comment is nothing different than that
Comments73