Beatmap Spotlights

The Beatmap Spotlights (or just Spotlights, formerly Ranking Charts) is a recurring curation program for recommending and highlighting beatmaps for their excellent and unique gameplay and design. It is accompanied by a seasonal league, where players compete on said maps for badge prizes.

The current season is the Spring 2023 season.

The Beatmap Spotlight Curators group page lists all of the team members. See the Beatmap Spotlight Curators article page for a more detailed listing of all the roles within the BSC.

Participation

To participate in the Beatmap Spotlights, download the osu!(lazer) client.

After installing and logging into your account, head on over to the playlists tab in the play section and find the Spotlights lobbies as denoted by a little pink bar, or filter by them from the top-right corner.

If there are no open lobbies, wait for the next season. The break between seasons usually lasts a few weeks, and new seasons are announced on the front page.

Spotlights seasons

For the list of Spotlights seasons, see: Seasons

The Beatmap Spotlights project is currently organised in pre-defined seasons. Each season consists of a pool of curated beatmaps and a competitive seasonal league for the whole community.

1. A single season lasts for 9 weeks and cycles between 3 playlists.

   • Each playlist is labelled with a letter.
   • Each playlist consists of 2 Hard, 3 Insane, and 4 Expert difficulties.
   • For the first 6 weeks, each playlist will last for 2 weeks.
   • For the last 3 weeks, each playlist will last for 1 week instead.
2. The schedule for each season is announced at the start of the season.
3. Each season's first playlist will be a themed playlist of some kind of gimmick.
4. At the end of each season, a player vote for the Beatmap of the Season will open along with the conclusion news post. Its results will be announced at the start of the next season.
5. The next season will start a few weeks after the conclusion of the current one.

Seasonal leaderboard

The seasonal leaderboard sums up the weekly ranked score results of every participant. Based on the seasonal leaderboard, every participant is assigned to a league bracket reflecting their relative placement within the leaderboard.

1. Seasonal leaderboard score is a weighted sum of all weekly ranked scores attained in the playlist lobbies.
2. Participants can only possess one weekly ranked score per playlist.

   • Replaying a playlist at another week will make only the best weekly ranked score count, overwriting the worse one.
3. Leaderboard will be updated after each playlist conclusion.

   • The participants will not be told their exact seasonal score, they will be assigned to league brackets instead.
   • The leaderboard will be released in the osu! community discord, in the #osu-spotlights channel as well as in the lobby chat of the next playlist.

Rewards

Rewards are distributed to playlist lobby winners, creators of Beatmap of the Season picks, and every participant present on the seasonal leaderboard.

The top 10 players of each playlist lobby will receive 1 week of osu!supporter.

After the conclusion of each season, votes are opened for the Beatmap of the Season, where players and curators each get to pick a winning map for each game mode, totalling 8. The winning entries are announced at start of the next season, and their creators will receive 3 months of osu!supporter.

During the season, every participant receives a temporary badge which reflects their current placement on the seasonal leaderboard, as described by the table below. These are updated after the conclusion of each playlist. Players who hold a Rhythm Incarnate badge by the end of the season will keep it permanently.

Badges	Bracket tier	Placement
	Rhythm Incarnate	The best of the best
	Diamond	Top 3%
	Platinum	3% – 10%
	Gold	10% – 25%
	Silver	25% – 50%
	Bronze	50% – 70%
	Copper	70% – 95%
	Iron	95% – 100%

The Rhythm Incarnate tier threshold is picked manually based on the season's participant count and general size of other tiers, though it is an absolute number that ranges between top 2 and top 50 in most cases.

This table only shows one of four badge versions. Each game mode has its own badge version.

Curation system

The curation system involves the process of curators selecting the beatmaps being put into the Beatmap Spotlights for each season.

1. Beatmaps are selected by the curators of their respective game modes for the duration of one season.

   • Curators need to agree on each individual difficulty in an open discussion.
   • Game mode leaders lock in decisions and solidify the selection after conclusive discussions.
   • The selection process itself varies between game modes and adjusts around the needs of the members.
2. Beatmaps are selected based on their uniqueness and excellence. Each selected beatmap should be a leading example of content quality in gameplay, design, and aesthetics.
3. Curated beatmaps serve as recommendations to the entire osu! community, and are marked with a unique Spotlights tag.
4. To fulfil the duty of recommending excellent beatmaps to the whole community, curated beatmaps should cover a specific spread of Hard, Insane, and Expert difficulties.

   • 6 curated beatmaps should be within the Hard difficulty tier.
   • 9 curated beatmaps should be within the Insane difficulty tier.
   • 12 curated beatmaps should be within the Expert difficulty tier.
5. For each season, 27 beatmaps must be selected in total.

   • All selected beatmaps must be Ranked.
   • When selecting more beatmaps, the distribution between difficulty tiers should be followed.
   • Curators can select multiple difficulties of the same beatmap.
6. Curated beatmaps should be a healthy mix of recent and established content.

   • At least 25% of the curated difficulties must have been ranked within the last 3 months prior to the season start.
7. Individual curators must not recommend beatmaps they took part in creating.

   • At most 25% of the selected beatmaps can have such an involvement of curators themselves.
8. Every curated beatmap must be selected before the season begins. Once a season has started, beatmaps can not be exchanged anymore.
9. Curated beatmaps are being revealed incrementally during the season. The whole roster of selected beatmaps must be kept secret until every subset of the season has been unveiled.

Feedback

The current implementation of the Beatmap Spotlights is highly experimental and can change anytime depending on how players respond to it. Because of that, it is important to collect as much feedback and criticism as possible to improve furtherly on the direction and implementation of this system. Players are encouraged to leave their thoughts and feedback here:

• Feedback forum thread
• #beatmap-spotlights in the osu! community Discord server
• #osu-spotlights in the osu!dev Discord server

History

Originally named "Ranking Charts" and initiated in October 2009^{1 2} by peppy and Cyclone, the project aimed to highlight the best beatmaps of a month or a year³ by letting the Beatmap Appreciation Team and the Mapping Assistance Team nominate and vote for the most suitable candidates. In September 2011, charts for osu!taiko and osu!catch have appeared.⁴

The project underwent several changes and additions, such as themed Ranking Charts, mod restricted Ranking Charts or seasonal leaderboards. Originally, the winners of the Ranking Charts were awarded with osu!supporter tags. Later, rewards for mappers or seasonal leaderboard winners have been added.

The project lead has changed several times in its history. SapphireGhost took over the project lead in May 2012,⁵ followed up by DeathXShinigami ⁶ and Makar.⁷ Loctav and OnosakiHito took over the project in December 2013.⁸

In January 2014, the charts browser was added to the osu! client,⁹ and in June 2014, several renown players were recruited into the Chart Assembly Team.¹⁰ In March 2015 the project changed from its original design of nominate and vote into having renown community members single-handedly select a roster of beatmap sets they recommend.¹¹ In September 2016, the selection system has been mostly reverted¹² and put the Quality Assurance Team in charge of selecting the most noteworthy beatmaps.

Renamed to Beatmap Spotlights in March 2017,¹³ the system itself stayed mostly consistent while adding additional rewards like medals and enhancing the presentation of the Beatmap Spotlights furtherly. During an internal overhaul of the Quality Assurance Team, the responsibility for the project has been reassigned to Kurokami and re-implemented a community-based selection team. In November 2018, the frequency of the Spotlights have been changed to a seasonal release cycle.¹⁴ In March 2020, Loctav rejoined the project lead together with Kurokami, both reworking it into a new shape and assembling a new team of osu! curators.¹⁵

In August 2020, Kurokami stepped down from leading the project. At the end of November 2020, Loctav also resigned, and Venix took over the project along with pishifat.

After the conclusion of the Spring 2021 season, the project went on hiatus, which lasted until September 2021 when efforts of revival emerged, with pishifat stepping down from his management role, and Hivie joining instead. In February 2022, the project resumed operating after some structural and team changes.

References