Changed background. I've double-checked with Civil oath to make sure that the new background is appropriate, and he said that it was fine. That said, I couldn't change the background thumbnail despite a couple of instructions given, so I'll leave this open for now.
Thanks for the clarification. Consistency is a fair enough reason (I don't have a stake one way or another on this, though I guess this should be listed in RC at some point), and I already forwarded this to inteliser to make changes when Noffy made her comment. I didn't know that Utada Hikaru used that specific order back then either, I saw Hikaru Utada being used during that time for billboard top lists but that was about it.
Stepping in as GMT here. No one here other than nhanvgiang, Ryu Sei (the mapper), and some of the BNs are allowed to post here (thanks McEndu for helping out). Anyone else who posts something offtopic gets a silence.
nhanvgiang, a few things to note for next time:
1. State **all** of your concerns with the map in the problem post rather than just saying that the map has "a ton of issues" and then waiting for people to respond. The problem post is meant to list all of the issues with the map -- the mapper should not be waiting for your responses.
2. If various mappers have told you that the problems are non-problems, please do not reopen the thread unless there are still problems in the map that you have mentioned in the problem post. Since you have not mentioned any further problems in the map, you should not reopen the mod until you've stated further problems.
3. Please do not make the original mapper and the BNs who nominated it wait for your responses on your map. It's very rude, and you're wasting people's time by having others pay attention to you when you yourself have not prepared anything in advance. Be very clear with what you feel are the problems with the map at the start of the thread instead of saying things like "i'm looking at the map again" or "let me find this map" when you should've prepared the map in the first place.
I (nor anyone in GMT) will not silence you for this because I don't think you're trying to annoy people on purpose, but please keep this in mind in the future when you use the Problem button when you're modding a map in Qualified.
Discussed a bit about the capitalisation thing and we decided to use the capitalised artist name instead since that's what Sharpnel officially uses. Discogs has a weird way of capitalising tracks/artists that aren't necessarily representative of how artists present their music or themselves. Added the rest though.
Last minor point, but to datoujia: I wouldn't really consider myself an Etterna mapper tbh. I don't talk to anyone from the EO/SM community, and I mostly talk to osu!mania people or people who are in both EO and o!m. I think him asking me was justified if he wanted a clearer clarification on why some LN lengths aren't acceptable but I definitely think that he can be more receptive/ask for more clarification if need be
Also stop with the aggression. There is more than enough aggression from you and the circle that you're in, though obviously your circle is far from the only group of people who have been aggressive in this discussion. I've already told Abraxos 12 hours ago to stop being as aggressive as he has been over the past few months not too long ago, and he agreed to stop. I've also punished him for his behaviour in the comments section as well.
I would like you and the people that you're associated with to do the same here. Please let the moderators do what they're supposed to do instead of brigading and using the map's discussion section as a punching bag for all of your frustrations with him. Thank you.
@Paran: The short LNs are supposed to be a form of accent, but it wasn't supposed to be as difficult as it should have been. Abraxos initially asked me about whether the LN lengths were fine because he knew that I had some experience with mini LN lengths, but I made a really big mistake and thought that the really short mini LNs were actually much easier than I thought it was. I told him when I saw the scores and did some research that a minimum of 30-35ms would probably be better, and I've made that suggestion for the RC proposal here (https://osu.ppy.sh/community/forums/topics/1463447?n=21). Abraxos agreed and will make changes soon. There is no "stubborn" attempt to make patterns difficult for no reason, so please don't assume as such.
I'll spend some time trying to formulate documented use of ghost notes and how it can be a legitimate form of mapping expression soon. This should hopefully lead to some actionable decisions about how RC can be phrased in this respect
Note that there is an explicit rule for the vocals particularly:
Every note should correlate to a sound present in the music. This should be a distinct sound, but **can also coherently represent a continuous sound with an indistinguishable start or end**. Exceptions in favour of simplification should be made when following the music completely accurately...
**would be effectively represented with a consistent, predictable snap.**
This has been used to justify patterns like fast bursts to low humming bass wobbles. Even if the main vibrato rhythm of the vocals is indeed closer to 1/3, it's still rankable because there have been precedents where you can ignore the actual rhythm present for an exaggerated rhythm if it is **represented effectively**. The discretion of whether it is an effective representation is done by the BNs in question, which the BNs who nominated it do agree on. There are other BNs who agree that the idea of "shriller voice = faster snap" is an effective representation of the vocals as well.
There are obvious dissenters here (some who don't think that dump mapping should even be permitted), but I legitimately don't believe that a consensus across every BN can ever be reached in a mapping ecosystem that's meant to be pluralistic. If there is a demand for these kinds of maps in the community, and the two BNs who are ranking something believe that they would be doing a service to some community that they're in by providing a map to be ranked, then I don't see any issue with ranking it even if there are BNs who disagree with maps like this being ranked. This is especially true when mappers are, in general, nowhere as open-minded as the ranked ecosystem is supposed to be.
It's fine to contend about objective issues, but when it comes to discussing something subjective like dump mapping when, frankly, most mappers participating here in this discussion aren't experienced with, they should relegate their opinions to people who are far more experienced in the topic.
I mostly stand by what I say about the sync as well, though lemonguy has already made some timing changes. I do feel that every single accommodation to every microfluctuation would, if anything, make the chart worse overall because it hinders the playability of the map to a certain degree since some rhythms would be unexpectedly fast. You can already see it with some of the changes here, and I think more changes to it would just make the map considerably worse for changes that people would only notice if they were to look at it in the editor on 25-50% speed. And the main purpose of maps is for them to be **played**.
deta: I'm going to isolate your comment in particular since your comment (and Abraxos' response to it) has been getting numerous reports and I would like to address them.
- I don't really see anything in the map that breaks even the ground rules of basic mapping. And apparently, many modders and people whom lemonguy have asked don't think that there's anything egregious in the map either. To suggest to him that "he should find more modders and not ignore the problems" at hand is extremely passive-aggressive and unwarranted. You should NEVER assume that the mapper has not put in the effort into getting something ranked.
- Saying things like "I believe fixed those issues and ranked it is not hard for you cuz you already had two BNs and the LVD team or many other mappers to help, right?" comes off as really rude to me because you're basically assuming that the mapper is reluctant to change them because the mapper is lazy. He's not being lazy, and you're completely ignoring the conversation going on if you're going to say something as presumptuous as this. lemonguy has been giving cogent responses and having amicable conversations with everyone, so why accuse him of being lazy? His main reason for not wanting to resync the map to a beat-by-beat level is that he feels that players cannot feel these deviations egregiously enough because the map is already fluctuating a lot in tempo to begin with, not that he was lazy.
It's pretty easy to read passive-aggression off your comments, so please, tone down the rudeness of your messages please. This goes for Abraxos as well, though he's clearly far more explicitly aggressive with what he's saying.
To everyone else: I suggest to wait for Unpredictable to give a response, since he is an NAT and is the other person who nominated this map. I believe that ultimately he has the final say on the matter (along with Scotty), and I think the points from both parties have been expounded enough here.
The map seems to be on the trajectory of being DQ'd because of other reasons (Halogen's mod and a few other suggestions like applying tags), but I do want to touch on the sync component of this real quick:
In general, I really don't know how much the errors will matter given that it's still a 15ms deviation for 1-2 beats *at most* in a live performance of the song, especially for a map that is structured in this way.
- It's hard to establish an internalised metronome because of the difficulty of the streams and the fact that the streams in this are quite variable in BPM to begin with (because it's a live performance). Any player who consciously adjusts to the BPM of each fluctuation on nomod would be a player that's so competent that he'd beat out the best players in osu!mania by some distance. There is no player who can consciously adjust to the microfluctuations in this song/map to ensure SSS-caliber accuracy, so I don't think fixing these fluctuations that happen on a beat-by-beat basis is really necessary since players can't really feel these fluctuations in gameplay to begin with. It's especially true since the deviation is just 15ms on a map that almost every player is unlikely to come close to getting even a 7:1 ratio on.
- Because of the limitations of the o!m editor, I feel that microfluctuations are basically impossible to account for. The heavy use of timing points will inevitably create some level of poor sync, the o!m editor is just not very good at keeping track of sync because of the audio artifacts it creates because of how music is slowed down, among other things.
- Sync wildly varies from player to player, I noticed. From my experience conducting tournaments, many players feel that a map's sync is off from either -20ms to something like +20ms. In general, there is an accepted notion that any deviation of +-10ms (maybe 15ms) is practically unaccountable to players because of hardware issues. Because of that I think some lenience can be given for a map like this, where there is a lot of effort put into syncing as is.
I really don't find these sync issues to be egregious enough to be unrankable personally, and if I were sent a chart like this on FFR with these drift issues, I would still accept it unconditionally because I don't think the deviations are egregious enough or last for long enough to matter to players. This is especially true for a map that is continuous fast jumpstream throughout.
Hi, I'm a high-level player (I can probably come close to FCing this on nomod) and a mapper as well. I don't think your points hold much water.
A few points:
- I think using ghost notes to convey a general intensity of the song has been commonplace since 2014 or so. A lot of players accept this kind of ghost note use, and many mappers utilise this approach. Many jumpstream maps do this, including ranked ones. I think Jole's Snows ~Soshite Kiseki~, Fullerene's hydra (long edit) and even Fullerene's AiAe (lower difficulties) fit this. I think both maps are rankable today and passed ranking without much contest. Azure Arbitrator uses ghost notes in the same way that those maps do. The use of 1/4s here is also quite systematic: to stronger guitar phrases, unless the guitar phrases are loud enough and continuous enough to stand on their own or when there is very long runs of 1/2 percussion, in which case just 1/2 doubles are used.
"The main rhythm of this song is still drum beats... which are 1/1.
270+ BPM stream would completely destroy the original rhythm expression of the music."
If the map were just arbitrarily patterned 1/8 jumpstream, I think what you say would make sense. But it's really clear to me that a lot of the patterning and layering is quite deliberate.
Just from the first jumpstream alone, the doubles are layered to the main guitar rhythms with occasional percussion, and the guitar notes that are different from the main phrase of the song are conveyed through different patterns (compare 01:10:022 to 01:11:689 or 01:14:870). Longer held guitar notes are conveyed through repeated patterns like 01:22:543 - and 01:24:185 - and 01:25:937 -. There's a lot of unconventional one hand trill+anchor use like at the guitar slide at 01:27:962 too, so there's a lot of deliberation in this map. And the patterns make sense and I can feel them. I can bring up numerous examples like the trills to the long guitar notes like 02:04:583 as well, but I think there's enough evidence from the first JS alone that the map isn't arbitrarily made.
If you want to give anecdotal experience (since you asked various high-level players yourself, and I'm a high-level player), I can feel almost all of the main rhythms of the song through the map's layering and patterning. The 1/5 use is in my opinion also appropriate because there is no stronger element in the song other than the choral vocals.
"Also such dump style breaks the mania ranking guideline: Every note should correlate to a sound present in the music.
Yea, guideline could be broke to a certain extend IMO, but I am really unsure because this guideline was broke all through this map.
And such thing didn't appear in any other ranked maps (Or at least in my memory). Why we still need guideline if it could be completely ignored."
I don't think this rule should be a thing anymore, or at least it should be redefined. To me (and from my experience dealing with RC years ago), this reads off as something that should've been amended years ago but was not because of general pushback against dump maps back in the day.
The climate towards dump mapping today is a lot gentler, and it should address the idea of using ghost notes to convey intensity a lot better than it currently does, because certain ranked maps that break this guideline continuously already slip past this guideline without issue. It's just very difficult to put it into words.
"Unlike the osu!std. Mania did expect more accurate snaps. As an instrument mania map with dense notes, such error would definitely leads to unsatisfying feedback."
In my eyes, there is no better way of conveying this song than with ghost notes at this speed. I don't really get the idea of "mania expecting more accurate snaps" when 90-95% of the playing community embrace maps like this, where there are ghost notes abundantly and they are commonly accepted as good and enjoyable maps. It's not to say that all maps with ghost notes are good, but players most definitely don't think that ghost notes alone can lead to "unsatisfying feedback". There are many factors that contribute to a map littered with ghost notes being unsatisfying to play, and I think Azure Arbitrator has very few of those issues unless you fundamentally disagree with using ghost notes to convey sheer intensity in the first place.
Also please stop antagonising each other for no reason. This seems like a miscommunication that really could've been cleared up if people weren't saying shit like "it's a shame that you weren't clear enough" or "3d chess gimmicks". If any of you feel that the reasoning given that any of the modders here are insufficient, do respond to them directly and ask for more information courteously. Monheim has been fairly direct with her responses but do tone down the passive aggression at points please.
I don't have any good solutions to this to either what Monheim pointed out; I think it would make the difficulty of these sections much more balanced if you were to change the triple to a [12] double, or find a way to avoid a 4-note 1/8 OH minitrill altogether. I think the former is a much better alternative but it's your map in the end.
For 26.484 the easiest solution would be to make it a 1/8 stream but with harder patterns (more hidden 1/4 minijacks, etc.), but I also understand why this is a 1/8 dense JS. I would personally avoid using 1/8 dense JS like this because I think they're more frustrating than not to play for higher-level players and would use hard 1/8 stream patterns instead, but the audience that you're going for will vary.
That said, 26.484 is also a spike but in a very different sense. It's much harder to attain good accuracy on it than any of the patterns mentioned since it requires much more speed to SS than other patterns, but it's easier for lower-level players because you can hit this pattern as a 1/6 jumptrill, which is probably easier than 4-note 1/8 one hand trills for players at this level. It's still very hard to SS for higher-level players though, and I feel that it's hard in a very frustrating way.
This will be an issue for most players regardless of skill level. Lower-level players will have issues hitting this pattern with good accuracy unless they mash through the one hand minitrill as [34][34], and higher-level players will have issues attaining good accuracy on it in general because the pattern is so much faster than any other pattern in the map.
04:23:776 (263776|3,263776|2,263828|0,263880|1,263932|2,263984|1,263984|0,263984|3) - is much easier than what Monheim posted because there is much less strain on any specific hand. You're hitting 2 1/8s on one hand at most at any given time in this section. That is much easier than hitting consecutive 4 1/8s on the same hand.
Going to step in here as a third-person observer:
What Monheim posted is definitely a difficulty spike from the rest of the map. The issue is the fact that 4-note one hand minitrills require much more effort to hit than every other pattern in that difficulty range. If you want an objective physiological reason for it, it's because it takes much more effort to rotate your wrist or move your fingers on the same hand at that speed since you're rotating your wrist 3 times in a very short period of time. The fact that so much precise movement is required in such a short period is what makes it difficult. I don't think it matters whether the pattern is used consistently or not; the rest of the map is much much easier than those 4-note minitrills.
All of the mp3 files have the same variable bitrate of about 159kbps. Not sure where you're getting 256kbps from. Not going to change this, but I changed the tags as requested.
discussed with a few others and decided to add a few tags to account for ~ambiguous romanisation~, also means that this is getting dq'd temporarily but that is ok
Changed all of the time signatures as suggested. I'll probably keep 2:29.794 as is because I think resyncing would be a massive pain since I'd be using another editor for this, but the rest of the time signature suggestions are correct. Thanks so much for this.