osuqat

[osuqat]

The QAT Gazette #6

Hello!

Even though I recently wrote about the osu!taiko, osu!catch and osu!mania Beatmap Nominator test results and feedback (with some assistance from OnosakiHito and Feerum), it’s been a busy few weeks for us here at the Quality Assurance Team, so I wanted to bring you all up to speed with a more general-purpose article as well. In a truly perfect world, I would also be calling on one of my colleagues to present their much anticipated discussion articles, but with the pressures of exam season, sadly real life priorities have to take the front. This would not be a major issue had the stars not aligned against me, with Feerum’s computer tragically suffering from an acute case of not turning on. Therefore I’ll be filling in with another informative interlude for you guys.

With the welcome new additions of Cryptic and Doyak to the team, as well as the recent retirement of some of our old stalwarts DakeDekaane, Desperate-kun and Fycho, it’s obvious that the working fields of the QAT have changed quite significantly since our original post back in August of last year! Therefore, in order to clarify who’s doing what in the modern age, let’s take a little update as to the current state of affairs:

Beatmap Nominator Tests

Beginner osu!standard: Cryptic, Irreversible, Mao

Advanced osu!standard: Mao, Okorin, pishifat

osu!taiko: Nardoxyribonucleic, OnosakiHito

osu!catch: Deif, JBHyperion

osu!mania: Blocko, Feerum

Metadata & Reports: alacat, Doyak, IamKwaN

Spotlights (Ranking Charts): Kurokami, OnosakiHito

Ranking Criteria: Okorin, pishifat

General Assistant: Cryptic

Additionally, with the exception of alacat and Kurokami (who will focus solely on metadata checks and Spotlights, respectively), all of the above listed team members now lead their own subdivision of Beatmap Nominators, working closely with them to promote team-working and communication. After reviewing recent feedback from the Beatmap Nominators, each of these subdivisions will compete with one another, with the highest performing groups receiving a reward.

We have welcomed a brand new wave of 14 Beatmap Nominators into the world! As mentioned in the opening part of this post, the conclusion of Beatmap Nominator tests for osu!taiko, osu!catch and osu!mania produced many fruitful results, with some returning after absence, others confirming their proficiency with a second mode, and others still crossing into the land of bubbles and yellow badges for the very first time. If you’re even passingly involved in the mapping and modding scene, no doubt you’ll be seeing these new and old faces around, so please give them all a big congratulations and a warm welcome! Whilst a review of the recent series of tests can be found in my previous article, new opportunities never cease - osu!standard Beatmap Nominator tests are currently underway also, so expect our family to grow even further very soon!

The Ranking Criteria subsection has seen many new recent additions up for discussion. As well as additions and amendments to the osu!standard general and specific subsections, there are now Skinning and Spread-related proposals up for discussion. The latter in particular will aim to resolve a number of current deficiencies in the General and Mode-specific Ranking Criteria sections which have become apparent in recent months, such as acceptable difficulty naming, how drain time is calculated, and the way in which hybrid-mode and collaborative mapsets are handled. If you want to help shape the future of our fair game, be sure to check those discussions out here!

Ask us anything!

Will BNG / community members be given the chance to apply for the QAT in the same way as the GMT from a few months ago? 

Presently, the GMT is a sizeable group encompassing a number of different roles, from technical support staff to language moderators and osu!media creation, so it is almost always “open” to new members who fit the criteria. The QAT on the other hand is a relatively small team with a specialised work field, so we will only look at recruiting people once there is a need to do so, such as replacing a departing member or leading a new working field.

What does it take to join the QAT? 

Despite the previous answer, this doesn’t mean we’re not constantly looking for potential future members. Where the need arises, members will be promoted from the BNG (typically from the Advanced Tier in osu!standard) after demonstrating consistently high standards of activity and proficiency in their field. Maturity, integrity and the ability to lead and motivate are also essential qualities for anyone in a supervisory position, but a willingness to take proactive steps towards improving the community in some way should also not be overlooked.

What is the point of mapping if anything you post isn't going to be noticed by anyone? 

If you never try, you are guaranteed to never be noticed! Everyone has to start at the bottom, but with hard work and dedication, they can climb to the top all the same, from taking your first steps in mapping and modding, to becoming an Elite Mapper or joining the QAT. This is a great aspect of a community-driven game such as osu! - each and every member has the potential to bring something new and exciting for all others to enjoy. If you want something to happen, make it happen. Don’t wait for the change - be the change.

Hopefully these answers give you a little insight into how the Quality Assurance Team recruits members and what it takes to earn our recognition. If I didn’t answer your question this time around, don’t worry! I may revisit unanswered topics in a later issue. That being said, keep the comments rolling in and your ideas might just help shape the future direction of not just the QAT, but osu! as a whole!

It’s time to call curtains on this issue of the QAT Gazette, but we’ll be back real soon with some more news and reviews. If any of my colleagues survive their ordeals with exams, technological malfunctions and the slew of Beatmapping Contests, World Cups and other community events currently ongoing, you can expect some more hearty discussion sessions from them also, so stay tuned!

Thanks for reading!

—JBHyperion

[osuqat]

BN Test Review #2

Hello!

Our modding community has been hard at work for the past four months, pushing the quality of mapping forward every day in order to give the playerbase new and exciting content to enjoy. For those that want to go the extra mile and have the final say on what maps go on to become official osu!content, the Beatmap Nominator test is at the top of their to-do list. Through tribulation to eventual triumph, we are proud to again welcome a new batch of promising modders from osu!taiko, osu!catch and osu!mania to the Beatmap Nomination Group! As always, information on what makes up the Beatmap Nominator test and selection process can be found in this thread, but if you want to see the nitty gritty details on all the applicants, responses and results, then look no further!

Additionally, the test creators will again share their insight on the creation and testing process, noting what people excelled at, and what people should brush up on for future tests. If you’re considering an application for the BNG in the near future, be sure to give this a read and prepare yourself for the trials ahead!

So without further ado, let’s get right into it!

osu!taiko (by OnosakiHito)

Total # of candidates: 19

Passing candidates: Arrival, Doyak, Jonawaga, Kin, Skylish, Stefan, Surono, thzz

While the outcome of this test could have been different at any time, I would say that everything was according to the Keikaku. In the last months and years, since the new evaluation system kicked in, we had the chance to observe and gain data from the past Taiko BN Tests which showed a very high fail rate. I was always wondering why that is, until I actually took one of these tests by myself and noticed how hard they really were. I can’t say if it was intentional, but there were many points I had to think about twice or thrice for myself whether they were an issue or not, and that made me actually realise how much of a problem for a fresh modder it could be to take these tests in Part B and why the fail rate might have been that high.

According to this knowledge, we changed the difficulty to make it closer to what we expect for entry into the BNG. That’s why Part B contained mostly basic issues, like for example excessive overmapping, two notes at one spot, broken Slider Velocities or just very poor flow. The thing is, being a Beatmap Nominator is also a learning process that doesn’t end with passing the Test. It’s a process that goes far beyond that and which actually forms a Nominator over time. This is what made us reconsider the current structure of the Part B test - modders should prove that they know at least the very basics in modding and have the possibility to prove themselves as BN later on through their additional suggestions.

Now I can say that this change has obviously given us some fresh air in the Taiko ranking process, as we got seven new BNs which I want to congratulate at this point. Overall, most of applicants did pretty well on Part A, as the average score was 32.3 points, demonstrating that they had a good knowledge of the Ranking Criteria, or know where to consult it.

As for Part B, the average score was 25.6 points. While we have seven new BNs, most people still missed a few crucial points which must have not been ignored. For example, only 4 out of 19 people managed to find the broken barlines / Slider Velocities in the test, despite these being very obvious errors noticeable by simply test playing the difficulties. Others ignored the metadata checks, or simply the fact that we were using too quiet volume samples (only 6 out of 13 noticed this!). Another problem area we observed was with the modding itself: Some people lost impression points by simply not explaining or giving reasons why they suggested a certain change. Sometimes the mods contradicted themselves too, by criticizing a single pattern as being overmapped, while suggesting a whole new part on another place which is much harder. What worried us the most though was the suggestion to disable widescreen support. I will disable everyone who writes that again! This has no effect when unticking, aaaaaah!

On a more positive resonance, most people actually know a good portion of the basics in Taiko, such as having lower SVs rather for lower difficulties on high BPM songs, or not using ¼ beat snap in these. Also when thinking about certain pattern constellations like oddly placed finishers or the very obvious overmapping In the Inner Oni difficulty, nearly everyone found these out.

Overall, I’m fine with the outcome of this month’s test and will wait and see what is going to happen in the next weeks and months. The BNs have overcome their first hurdle. Now the real work begins!

osu!catch (by JBHyperion)

Total # of candidates: 8

Passing candidates: Benny-, F D Flourite

For my second round in charge alongside Deif It was great to see a few more applicants, but I still hope to see further improvement in this area ready for the next cycle, since in my opinion our gamemode is lagging behind osu!taiko and osu!mania quite considerably in this aspect. Overall I have to draw on the positives though: we might have lost one BN in Electoz, but we have gained two more this cycle, so we’re at least moving in the right direction.

Overall, all candidates demonstrated a reasonable to good understanding of the Ranking Criteria, with an average score of 37.4 on Part A, which was a slight improvement over the previous round of tests. Candidates were on average, more knowledgeable regarding spread management and metadata. Additionally, custom skin elements were handled rather well in contrast to the previous test cycle. On the other hand, questions related to the nomination process and consistency of settings (e.g. widescreen support, combo colours, etc.) were handled poorly overall, with correct use of timing points appearing to be a noticeable deficit in knowledge.

Despite a lower score on Part B of 29.4, I found that the modding section was generally handled well, especially when compared to results of the previous round where many marks were lost on fairly obvious unrankable issues. In contrast to the previous test cycle, the spread used in this round was Salad-Overdose, with modders performing best on Overdose and especially Platter difficulties. This was nice to see, considering the Platter difficulty caused modders a number of problems in the previous test. In general there were fewer obvious mistakes or unrankables missed this time around, though some that persisted included failure to identify insufficient note-to-spinner spacings, poor flow between regular dashes and hypers, and strangely, unfitting overmapping / undermapping. Additionally, many instances of only “partial” marks were awarded where candidates failed to fully explain the problem in question, such as not actually highlighting the location of unsnap errors reported by AIMod, or clarifying the BPM condition for hyperdash rankability. Remember to explain each issue in as much detail as possible, and then provide an explanation as to why exactly the presented solution resolves the issue. Lastly, it should come as no surprise, but the position of Beatmap Nominator is one of great responsibility, and as such the test should be taken seriously. Memeing on the test will ensure your application is taken about as seriously as you expect - that is, not at all.

Both our passing candidates have already received their feedback review and are preparing to dive into the world of nomination at their leisure. As always, we’ll be working closely with them over the coming weeks and months to help them settle into their new role, answer any questions they may have and hone their skills to keep striving for ever-higher standards of excellence. To those who were unsuccessful in the test, we encourage you to review your performance also so that you can overcome the mistakes and limitations of this round to succeed next time around. Even if you didn’t meet the required activity threshold but feel like you’d be a good addition to the team, you’ll get another chance to apply in a few months, so be sure to keep modding regularly, helping others in the modding and mapping community, and most importantly, gaining experience to polish your own skills. Maybe we’ll be celebrating your victory sooner than you know it!?

To conclude, many congratulations once again to our passing candidates, and good luck to everyone applying next round - I hope we get can along well both now and in the future, to keep developing our beloved game mode for even more people to enjoy!

osu!mania (by Feerum)

Total # of candidates: 11

Passing candidates: Julie

As you’re probably already aware, we only got one new BN this round, so please give a warm welcome back to Julie! This was a bit of a surprise following the last test where seven people passed! We didn’t expect people to find the test so hard this time, maybe it’s because 7K+1 is a mode which rarely gets mapped, but we wanted to try something different this time around. The song we used for this round was “Saiyajin”, from our Featured Artist, Thaehan.

The average score is 29.9 for Part A, which was quite a reduction compared to last round. This indicates that many people’s knowledge in the Ranking Criteria is lacking, with questions about spread, skinning and metadata getting a lot of missed or wrong answers. It wasn’t all bad though, as most people managed to get a good score on the timing, guest mapping and nomination rules questions.

Part B’s average was 23.5 though, which was really disappointing. We had 3 people which got over 60 Points in total and, sadly, only one over 70. The EZ and NM difficulties featured some bad patterns and were overall not very consistent between same sections. We are still kinda surprised that a lot of people missed hitsound issues over these difficulties. This was very noticeable in the MX difficutly, but thankfully most of the other problems in this difficulty, like broken SV changes and difficulty spikes were detected by most people. The difficulty that affected the results the most was the HD however. This difficulty had a huge number of errors, such as unbalanced patterns, hand bias, up to wrongly snapped notes and placed notes which didn’t follow any kind of specific sound at all.

Whilst I am sad that we only got one new BN this round, there’s no need to be disappointed - we are sure the next round will end better, so good luck to everyone next time too!

~

With this, I would like to conclude our recap of the latest BN applications for osu!taiko, osu!catch and osu!mania. Hopefully you were able to take some information away from this, whether in preparation for your own Beatmap Nominator test in the future, or just as a casual observer interested in the development of the BNG and ranking process. Of course we couldn’t cover every tiny detail in this review, so if you have any questions, please feel free to ask! For those of you who are planning to tackle the next round of BN tests, either as a new or returning candidate, think hard about the test creators’ comments and try to apply them to your own modding. We all wish you the best of luck in your endeavours and will be eagerly awaiting even more success from osu!taiko, osu!catch and osu!mania modes in the next round of tests.

—JBHyperion

P.S. To anyone who is awaiting responses to your questions in the “Ask Me Anything” feature, I’ll be answering them in the next issue of The QAT Gazette (general update article) to avoid cluttering these focused articles too much, so please wait patiently!

[osuqat]

The QAT Gazette #5

Hello again!

A few weeks ago when I talked about the Best of 2016 Voting, I mentioned that I would try to get these delivered on a more regular basis and not leave months between issues, keeping you wondering what we actually do all day. To that effect, I’ll be bringing you a rundown of some of the recent happenings in and around the Quality Assurance Team and what’s coming up in the near future.

We have welcomed a new member to our ranks! A hearty congratulations to Nardoxyribonucleic, who will be assisting in the creation of Beatmap Nominator tests for osu!taiko along with DakeDekaane. Be sure to treat them well as they settle into their new role!

The Beatmap Nomination Group for osu!standard has recently been split into two Tiers. This will affect the process of beatmap nomination, so if you’re a mapper looking to see your work in the ranked section, be sure to check out all the details here.

Beatmap Nominator tests for non-standard game modes are currently being marked. We expect to see some new faces pushing quality osu!taiko, osu!catch and osu!mania maps forward within the next few weeks! After monthly reviews of BN activity in each mode, this will also coincide with the removal of any inactive nominators.

Updates to the Ranking Criteria are continuing. In addition to the osu!standard General and Specific criteria being formally approved last month, osu!taiko are almost ready to push out their new and improved General Ranking Criteria, with the Timing and Storyboarding sections currently open to feedback, and a first draft of the Metadata section expected to be available for feedback very soon.  

Lastly, a quick peek at some upcoming discussion articles on our blog:

You can find out more more information about the osu!standard BN Tier split and how it will affect the mapping scene in osu! by following the link mentioned previously, but for those wanting to dig a little deeper, you can expect a review on the test design and results courtesy of one of the creators, Mao, very soon!

Are you a rice lover or a noodle fanatic? If you’re an osu!mania player, mapper or modder, chances are you have an opinion on long notes. Our resident ET Blocko will be giving us his thoughts on how they are used in the current meta of osu!mania mapping, comparing their execution with respect to both visuals and playability.

Have you ever asked for a few suggestions on your map and received a textwall instead? Hopefully you received a lot of useful criticism to help you improve, but maybe you weren’t so lucky... What if the modder didn’t understand what you intended to do at all and is suggesting a remap? Or maybe you just received a hundred new combo suggestions? Feerum will be presenting his take on understanding the mapper’s style when modding, and why long mods are not necessarily better ones.

If you want to find out about all the lovely people who will be contributing to this blog, as well as remain in the loop with upcoming articles, keep an eye on our Announcement Page.

Ask us anything!

We’d love to hear your opinions on our work, suggest ideas for discussions, and also answer any questions you may have about osu! gameplay, mapping, modding and the game/community as a whole. Feel free to get in touch with us here and we’ll try to answer some in a future blog entry!

I’ll leave it at that for now, but we’ll be back real soon with more news, more discussion and more of your questions answered - I hope you’re looking forward to it as much as I am!

—JBHyperion

[osuqat]

Best of 2016

Hello, and long time no see!

As I’m sure you’re all aware, the Best of 2016 voting process recently concluded, where community members far and wide came together to vote on their favourite and/or most noteworthy maps of the past year, culminating in the crowning of the “maps (which) deserved to be named the “Best of 2016”. A lot has happened over the course of the past year with regards to mapping which may have influenced these results and the mapping meta as a whole - from changes to the way the Beatmap Nominators are selected and operate, to restructuring of the Quality Assurance Team, and even the addition of the Code of Conduct for Mapping and Modding, which I talked about earlier last year. Additionally, the process came with an all new weighting algorithm, factoring in not only the playcount, but the perceived “skill” of the player and even the difficulty of the map on a player’s vote.

As expected, the results and methods by which they were reached have divided opinion, heralding both joy for some and despair for others. Whilst a number of people seemed to be satisfied with the results compared to previous years, statements like “Popularity Contest” and “Most Retried of 2016” have been thrown around a lot by detractors. Many people have had their say on the pros and cons of this system, and I have no doubt that these will be taken into consideration to make next year’s “Best of” even better. Before that however, let’s switch focus back to 2016. Now that the winners and losers have been announced and since people have all started formulating their own ideas, I thought I’d throw my own into the mix. Note that these are all based on my personal opinion, so there will be a degree of subjectivity which you are free to agree or disagree with at your leisure. If you’re okay with that, by all means feel free to read on!

Firstly, let’s take a look at the weighting system and the trends it produced.

The switch to a more “experience”-based system rewarded higher-skilled players, but penalised higher difficulty maps, especially marathons, since these difficulties were clearly less accessible to the majority of the playerbase. Voting for a mapset where you didn’t pass any of the difficulties resulted in the weighting for that vote being fixed at the minimum of 0.2, regardless of your skill or the amount of times you played the map. Additionally, marathons received less playcount because of their inherently greater length. By contrast, mapsets consisting of full difficulty spreads contained a wider variety of accessible difficulties for players to attempt and were easier to replay multiple times, contributing to a far greater number of raw votes and score in general. I assume this was done to combat the previous years’ proliferation of players voting for maps they were unable to pass, but may still be able to judge and enjoy, hence the low (but non-zero) weighting.

Correlating playcount to weighting seems reasonable enough. After all, if you’re playing a map multiple times, chances are you probably enjoy playing said map. What I don’t understand is the dependence on a player’s Performance Points. The weighting formula already takes the difficulty of the beatmap into account, helping to avoid the problem from previous years I mentioned before. This aspect raises the question: “Are more experienced players truly more qualified to determine the quality of a map?” What makes this point more contentious is the consideration that the majority of the mapping and modding community - those who support, criticize and discuss mapping quality on a regular basis - span almost the entire range of playing skill. Surely they are the ones more experienced to judge what the “best” maps of 2016 were? The Mappers’ Choice Awards for osu!standard was an alternative, community-run event centred on this idea, allowing mappers and modders to share their own opinions. Of course this system had its own plethora of advantages and disadvantages, relief and disappointment, and, as someone who is becoming less-involved with the osu!standard mapping and modding community recently, I feel it’s a topic best saved for others to debate. The main point, however, is that it demonstrates there are alternatives we can consider. Should a player’s contribution to the game afford them more leverage? Could total playing time of a mapset replace the playcount weighting, giving longer maps a boost?

The simple reality is that no system will ever please everyone. However, that doesn’t mean you should attack maps you don’t like, or the staff for the methods used. Constructive criticism is key, so that we can all continue growing and improving. Maybe your favourite map didn’t win this year, but that’s okay. Does the act of people voting for a map suddenly make it a better map somehow? Of course not. Maybe lots of other people voted for a map you don’t like, and that’s okay too. You still have the maps that you like to play, and they’re no worse off. Remember that osu! is a diverse community, with players of all backgrounds, interests and skill levels, and it takes all of these people to grow and shape the osu! we know and love!

That’s all from me for now, though we’ll try not to leave it so long without an article in future! In the interests of trying to appeal to everyone and not single out any particular game modes or specific results, I’ve only really been able to scratch the surface on this topic. Therefore, please feel free to discuss and share your own opinions on what this year’s “Best of” did well and poorly in the comments below! Who knows, maybe your idea will help shape the future of community voting!

—JBHyperion

[osuqat]

BN Test Review (osu!taiko, catch and mania)

Hello!

As you’re probably all aware, we have recently welcomed a new batch of promising modders from osu!taiko, osu!catch and osu!mania to the Beatmap Nomination Group! Information on what goes into the Beatmap Nominator test and selection process can be found in this thread, but this time we thought it would be cool to share with you some of the results of the recent round of tests, such as the total number of applications, average scores, and common mistakes.

Additionally, we’ll share some thoughts on how the testing process went from our perspective, what we think people did well at, and what needs to be improved for the next round. Hopefully this should be of interest to those of you thinking about applying for the BNG in the near future!

So without further ado, let’s get right into it!

osu!taiko (by DakeDekaane) Total # of candidates: 15 Passing candidates: Chromoxx, snowball112

I was kind of excited after having 15 people solving the first test created by me in it’s totality. It’s worth saying that I liked this new format, as it simulates the real deal, instead of open questions which made applicants guess what we wanted them to write. Well, they still have to write what we want, but I consider it isn’t as restrictive as before, yadda yadda.

Most of applicants did pretty good on Part A, as the average score was 39.8 points, demonstrating that they had a very good knowledge of Ranking Criteria, or know where to consult it.

Sadly, the average score for Part B was 22.2 points. Most of the test score was distributed on kind of obvious issues for people who know how osu!taiko works: wrong note snapping, inconsistent uninherited timing points (red lines), ridiculous difficulty spikes, notes being at the same place, mapping ignoring song pace, difficulty settings, kiai placement were the more notables. There were a considerable amount of candidates who missed one or two of said issues, the most common being the timing points.

The rest of the test was focused on minor issues or specific things that could be improved, like spinner placement: apparently it’s okay to end spinners on a particular beat that could fit better as the beginning of a pattern/section (hint: it’s not, check that spinner near the end in [Difficulty 2]), 1/6 pattern usage, monotonous mapping, awkward/wrong note placement or patterns, overusage of big notes and the capability of map being richer in notes (only one person got this). Unfortunately, these issues were hardly mentioned.

There were some some things based on general Ranking criteria, like unused files, metadata, difficulty naming, etc., which gave the incredible score of zero - you were supposed to get those points in Part A, right? Despite that, a small bonus was awarded for that, along with a bonus for mod quality.

Oh boy, the mod quality. Some mods were really detailed in every point improving the beatmap and fixing issues, some were brief but directly mentioned the issues and a detailed way to fix it (thanks for making the checking easier!), some more were balanced, and some more improved the beatmap but didn’t mention the issues (some were really tiring!). Very few mods lacked explanations or were confusing. This overall perception about applicants’ mod quality makes me happy, their ability to identify issues not as much, sadly.

I take the opportunity to congratulate the passing candidates, you did a good job! Those who did not, don’t be afraid to try again - the more we practice and the more we ask, the better we become. To finalize, the results of this test helped to identify one of the many issues that hinder the osu!taiko community and there will be a surprise mechanic aiming to combat this, but I’m not going to give you any spoiler, so stay tuned!

osu!catch (by JBHyperion) Total # of candidates: 5 Passing candidates: -Sh1n1-, Absolute Zero, Electoz

I had mixed-to-positive feelings about this round, which was my first in charge of test creation along with Deif. Considering 3 of our existing BNs have moved on to focus on other things in recent weeks, it was great to minimise the impact by bringing in some new guys to replace them. However, it was a bit of a shame to see that the number of candidates was quite low this round. A number of people who I expected to take the test failed to meet the required activity score, so I hope they get back to actively modding over the next few months in preparation for a test in the new year.

Most candidates demonstrated a reasonably good grasp of the Ranking Criteria, with an average score of 36.6 on Part A. Questions regarding backgrounds, hitsounds, metadata and BNG rules were generally answered particularly well, whereas candidates tended to struggle with questions related to skins, storyboards and how to handle mapsets with multiple contributors. Some common problems included confusion as to how to handle storyboard load > 5.0x, acceptable creator-to-guest mapper contributions, and also the use of widescreen support.

Candidates didn’t perform quite as well in the modding section of the test, with the average score for Part B being 28.1. Additionally, no candidate scored more on Part B than their respective score for Part A. Whilst Cup and Salad difficulties were generally handled well, candidates seemed to struggle with the higher diffs, with a number of major errors such as overmapping, broken flow and improper edge/hyperdash usage being missed or ignored. Perhaps worryingly, only one of the five candidates pointed out a 1/4 hyperdash in the Platter difficulty, which at the song’s BPM of 175 is not only an established unrankable issue, but an easily detectable one. Make sure to keep the difficulty-specific Ranking Criteria on hand in future guys! Saying that, it wasn’t all doom and gloom however, as the overwhelming majority of suggestions provided were clearly explained and well-reasoned, and [General] problems such as incorrect metadata, inconsistent timing and poor difficulty setting usage were almost all pointed out, with the only important miss being a delayed hitsound file.

All candidates who expressed interest in receiving feedback on their tests have received it, and we’ll be working closely with the new BNs over the coming weeks and months to help them settle into their new role. To those who were unsuccessful, either at the application or test stage, don’t fret! You’ll get another chance to apply in a few months, provided your modding activity and behaviour stays above board. Ask questions, strive to improve your skill, and burn the Ranking Criteria into the retina of your eye! (:

Congratulations to our passing candidates, and good luck to everyone applying next round - I look forward to working with each and every one of you, both now and in the future, to make osu!catch mapping and modding a diverse, exciting and friendly place for all!

osu!mania (by Blocko) Total # of candidates: 25 Passing candidates: Critical_Star, Dellvangel, DixonBlackwing, juankristal, Protastic101, Rivals_7, SanadaYukimura

I was really surprised when I heard that there will be 25 candidates applying for BN in osu!mania. That’s the highest number we’ve gotten so far over the last 2 tests, and I was very excited because so many people applied! With that said, for the second part of the whole test, instead of ten 10-second segments, the candidates had to mod a full mapset to fully test their modding capabilities. Part B contains issues that should be prevented when it comes to ranking a mania mapset, which can include wrongly snapped notes, absurd difficulty spikes, unpredictable slider velocities, inconsistent timing points and hitsound errors, to name a few. We’ll get to how people did on the test right about… now!

The average score is 33.6 for Part A, which is not too shabby. Based on the results, people in this round have a fairly good amount of knowledge with the Ranking Criteria. Storyboard, metadata, drain time and hitsound related questions were a bit of a bump on the road, but others, including backgrounds, skinning and handling beatmaps with multiple creators, were generally done fairly well. Not bad!

Part B’s average is 25.6 though, which isn’t up to par with Part A. A few number of applicants submitted their test but left it unfinished, so that hindered the score average by a margin. This also reduced the average for Part A to a small extent. If you’re planning to take the BN Test in the next round, be sure to take the test with enough time on your hands and with the best of your ability next time!

The majority of the candidates did pretty well on the harder difficulties, covering errors such as huge difficulty spikes and extreme slider velocities, which can be easy to detect judging by the results. The struggle can be seen in the easier difficulties, as some of the most important things missed by a number of candidates were hitsound errors, relatively high snap usage and unconventional pattern usage. Furthermore, the score average is higher for EZ than NM, which is quite worrisome considering not a lot of people did so well on that difficulty. Even with that in mind, snapping errors in the whole mapset were detected by a good number of candidates, and those can give you quite a number of points considering how the ranking system of osu!mania works.

Mod quality really depends on how the candidates explain their suggestions, and there are a few that I found outstanding in quality because those candidates provided explanations to their suggestions that were clear and concise. Some kept their suggestions short and to the point, and some only suggested to move, delete or add a note. Remember to flesh out your mod with some clarification to your suggestions so it’s clear what idea you’re trying to convey to the mapper!

A small bonus is awarded for checking metadata, timing points, giving suggestions outside of the mapset (which include HP, OD, countdown and storyboard, etc.) and generally giving good suggestions. Even reminding the mapper to check Aimod in case there are errors around the mapset would give a bonus as well. Some of these concepts may have already been graded in Part A, but it helps to show that you have the Ranking Criteria in mind for Part B and applying that knowledge to your mod.

I’ve received some responses from candidates that said it took 3~5 hours for them to finish Part B, and possibly even more than that, but fret not! From what I can tell you, the next test will not be as long as this one (I hope), so stay tuned. Also, Feerum gave me a hand with test preparations and checking, so I’d like to give him a huge thanks for helping me out!

I’m proud that there are people I know that have passed the test and are currently bubbling and qualifying maps as BNs, but for those who failed the test, it doesn’t hurt to try again to become a better modder, right? As a word of advice, keep modding. Doing that in turn will improve your modding skills and perhaps will let you see another perspective toward a mapset. Remember that there’s always a next time for these kinds of things! Once again, congratulations to the passing candidates, good luck, and remember to have fun as full-fledged Beatmap Nominators!

So, this brings our recap of the latest BN applications to a close. Hopefully you found this interesting and informative, and of course feel free to ask if you have any questions! For those of you who are planning to try again next round, or perhaps attempt the BN test for the first time, be sure to keep the test creators’ comments in mind and give it your best shot! All of us look forward to seeing even more success from taiko, catch and mania modes on the next round in a few months time, but for any of you who mod standard, your chance will be coming up very soon, so stay tuned!

—JBHyperion

[osuqat]

osu!standard BN Examination

Hey everyone!

Some of you might be wondering how we create the BN examination. If you are one of those, keep reading, because Mao and I are about to explain the whole process from coming up with possible questions up to the actual mapmaking!

We will divide the whole process into three pieces:

Collecting ideas

Creating the map

Correcting the exams

Let’s start with how we gather ideas for the exam. There’s no sorcery behind this – we simply discuss about possible issues in maps, just as they could happen in any other. We brainstorm until we’ve found a decent amount of ideas and write them down. To determine whether something is currently a hot topic, we work closely together with the QATs who are responsible for the Ranking Criteria. Going forward, we try to determine whether something is a major or minor issue, and whether it’s obvious or not obvious for the modder to detect. Each issue is assigned a score depending on how we judge it in this way. Something else that is worth mentioning is that the BN examination in September was actually the first one to feature a full difficulty spread instead of 10 difficulty “snippets”. We decided to do that because we think it’s way more realistic to mod one full spread - when you mod a map, you probably mod all of the difficulties and not 10 small parts of those difficulties,, right? Like this, you can also adjust your modding due to the given context - something that isn’t possible while modding snippets.

After having collected ideas, we proceed with the mapping. The way this is done can vary - some would map first and then insert the mistakes, or vice versa. This is actually the easy part of the story – the difficult one is to get rid of other, unintended issues, which could confuse the those taking the exam. The key is to make a spread, which represents every kind of difficulty well enough. It’s important not to forget the lower diffs! We need to make sure that prospective BNs are also able to distinguish what’s playable and what’s not for a beginner.

Then we wait until you have sent us your exams.

After everyone has finished the test, we are the ones to work again: In September, we had about 90 tests to check. We worked closely together with Loctav, who was responsible for the multiple choice Part A of the test. Regarding Part B, we decided to divide the workload between us - Irreversible and Mao were each responsible for their own difficulties. The point system was designed to award the applicants with many points for finding a major issue (e.g. they got 3 points if they found a giant jump in the Advanced difficulty level) and fewer points for finding smaller details like snapping or minor rhythm mistakes. There were a total of 40 points achievable for modding all the difficulties and finding all the hidden issues. There were a further 10 points available based on the quality of the modding. We call this section “Judge’s Impression”, and points were awarded based on the language that was used, the general content, but also whether the stuff pointed out was valid or not. For example, if the applicant found everything but their wording was either rude or without any explanations/suggestions, we only gave few points for the Judge's Impression. Obviously, if a modder’s wording was perfect but the suggestions weren’t valid, we didn’t give many points either. Last but not least, we send every person who has participated their results.

This was our first time that we have created an exam for upcoming BNs. Something that we are aware of is that the releasing of the results was not done in the best way possible. There was a lot of confusion as to where and how you could get your personal feedback. We will definitely take more care of this in future tests, as it is important that people who didn’t pass this time have a chance to improve as much as possible ready for next time. We would also like to let you know that Desperate-kun will support us in the future, as Mao and I are currently very busy with university. The next examination will happen within the next few months. We cannot say yet when it will take place exactly, but we are certainly giving our best that you will not have to wait too long before you can take the next exam.

We hope that this insight in the way how we work was enlightening for you! If you still happen to have questions, feel free to drop them in the comments or ask one of us directly.

—Irreversible & Mao 

[osuqat]

How the QAT handle Qualified Beatmaps

Hi there!

Feerum here! This is the first time you guy’s will see a blog post by your beloved osu!mania QAT. But don’t worry, it will be not the last!

I write to you today about a topic which is kinda serious, but first let me give you an update about something else! As you guys know already from previous blogs, the work of us, the mania QATs, is mainly to prepare the BN test (which will be awesome this time!) and my work is also to handle the Criteria Council United Beat Knights of the Ranking Criteria. Last weekend we had a pretty good meeting and i think we will soon be ready to share our work with you guys in the criteria forums. So stay tuned, things will happen soon!

Alright, this was the little update and now to the topic of the blog post. As you know, our work as QAT is also to disqualify beatmaps which get reported by the community in this thread, since the QAT doesn’t look into beatmaps by ourselves anymore. The idea behind this is simply to make the process of what gets ranked and what doesn’t more community orientated. You, the community, have to decide! Of course, some of us still look into beatmaps for major issues which break the Ranking Criteria, like unsnapped/shifted notes or other major issues. We don’t handle the beatmap should it simply play badly or is over/under-mapped. You decide what get’s ranked and what will stay ranked in future! osu! is a game where the community makes its own content and others should have the possibility to say “no I don’t like it because…”.

The whole process might look a little bit confusing now, which is why I prepared an awesome graphic to show you guys exactly how the beatmap get handled by us!

Additional to the graphic, let me explain to you guys what you see here:

Step 1: My beatmap is qualified! Finally!

Awesome! Congratulations from our side! The Beatmap Nominators decided that your beatmap is good enough to be ranked! I am sure the beatmap has gone a long way since the ideas first formed in your head. But what happens now?

Step 2: Oh no! Someone posted a mod on my qualified beatmap! What should i do now? It’s already ranked and i can’t update it!

Wrong! Your beatmap isn’t ranked yet so don’t panic! Yes, with the qualification your beatmap got a scoreboard, but it doesn’t mean you can’t change it now! The first thing you should do is to stay cool! No one wants something bad for your beatmap.

Qualified beatmaps get played way more often than Pending beatmaps. It will be listed below the “Ranked and Approved” beatmaps section, and also a message in the ingame IRC chat channel #announce will be posted, so it’s absolutely normal that more people see your beatmap now. What this also means is that the chance to get a mod is higher than before!

Go into the beatmap forum thread of your qualified beatmap and check out what the modder has to say. Reply to it like to a normal mod as if the beatmap was still in Pending.

Note that you should keep in mind: Always reply to a mod on your beatmap! This is very important! We QATs need to know how to handle it! Do you like the suggestions or not? Did you even go through the suggestions? Should you not reply to a mod while your beatmap is qualified, we will always disqualify the beatmap.

This is not to annoy you because we don't like you. This is simply to make sure that you see the mod! Maybe you are right now on vacation whilst the mod was posted? Or you are unable to connect to the internet? We disqualify it to ensure you have the time to look into it and to reply it! Who knows? Maybe you even like the suggestions you got there. It would be a shame when someone posted a really cool idea and you can’t apply it anymore because the beatmap got ranked.

Step 2.1: Some of the suggestions I got from the modder are cool. I want to apply them! But i can’t update my beatmap. What do I have to do now?

When you really want to change your beatmap, you have to contact a member of the QAT from your game mode to report it, either with ingame/forum PM or via this thread. Always use the thread first! You can not be sure the QAT sees your PM in time, so they can’t help you anymore. The thread gets checked by the majority of the QAT every day, so there you can be sure the beatmap will get disqualified within a few hours!

After you reach a QAT, they will disqualify your beatmap and move it back to the “Work in Progress” forums. Once this happens you are able to update your beatmap again! Now you can apply all changes you want and update it!

Step 2.2: I don’t like the suggestions I got from the mod! The modder doesn’t understand how I mapped it!

Then you have to explain why the suggestions the mapper gave you would not improve the map. Try always to explain why exactly you reject the suggestion. A simple “I don’t like” is often not enough. Modders tend to start a discussion when their suggestion got rejected and they don’t get any clear statement from the mapper. They also want to understand why and what was wrong with their suggestions. Your proper reply can help them to improve their modding skill for further modding! So please take always some time to reply it properly.

Step 3: Even when I rejected the suggestions the modder reported my beatmap to be disqualified! I don’t want that!

Don’t worry. Just because your beatmap got reported doesn’t mean we’re going to disqualify it blindly. As you can see in the graphic, here comes the time where the QAT takes a deeper look into your beatmap. The QAT checks now through every point of the report and decides if a disqualify is necessary or not. We will also check the thread if there is a discussion ongoing or not and read through it. Simply to understand both sides, to understand why the mapper doesn’t want the disqualification and the modder does.

The QAT who checks your beatmap will seldom disqualify it on his own accord. They will often first ask other QATs of their game mode for a second opinion. Four eyes see more than two!

Step 3.1: The Report is valid! After checking your map and after contacting the other QATs from their game mode, we will disqualify your beatmap. The QAT will always post a reason why the beatmap got disqualified and if the points listed by the modder are valid or not. Maybe it’s not even the whole mod you have to apply, but when your beatmap got disqualified there is mostly something wrong with it that needs to be addressed. Now comes the time where you really should consider applying at least a few things from the mod, or where the QAT advises it should be changed.

You are always free to ask us or the modder who reported your beatmap for help! Try to catch them in IRC and ask for clarification. Maybe you will find a better way then to apply the suggestions from the mod without changing too much. After contacting the QAT or modder, it happens often that an arrangement can be found which all parties are happy with!

Step 3.2: The Report is invalid! After checking your map and after contacting the other QATs from their game mode, the QAT decided to not disqualify the beatmap. Right now it is handled so that we simply do nothing and let the beatmap go further through the phase of qualification. Should things escalate in the beatmap thread (we really hope this doesn’t happen!) we will post there to clarify why the beatmap is okay how it is. We try to explain to the modder that his suggestions were unhelpful, or didn’t require a disqualification since it didn’t seriously affect the quality of the beatmap.

But keep in mind: Should your beatmap get reported again, either for the same or an entirely different reason we will check it again!

Step 4: I got no mod and no report and my beatmap is ranked now!

Congratulations! Your beatmap was good enough to pass the qualification state and after 7 days or more of painful waiting it finally got Ranked! From now on no change can be made anymore. Not by you, not by any modder and even the QAT can’t do anything for you now. That’s why we have the qualified state! To ensure you are absolutely happy with your beatmap.

From now on, every player can earn performance points from it and the beatmap will stay forever on the osu server for others to download. Nothing more to do!

Since the process of qualification is now clarified, I would like to explain why you, the community, should always try to mod qualified beatmaps you don’t like.

Like I already said before, the whole process of what gets ranked and what not should has become more community orientated. You are the community who play this game, so you should also decide what gets ranked and what not! If you guys don’t like certain parts of a beatmap and you think it could be improved, do not be afraid to say it!

Go into the editor and mod the map! Even when it’s just a little 5 second part you don’t like. If you have any idea how to make it better, write it down in the thread!

Do not be afraid that someone is maybe going to hate you for this. Stay friendly and explain why your idea would make the beatmap better. Even when the mapper rejects your suggestion, don’t be sad. You are always free to start a discussion about it! While participating in a discussion, you should also stay calm and provide good, strong points why your suggestion is better and why it would improve the beatmap. Never just say “It’s bad” “I don’t like” or “mine is better”. This doesn’t help. Why is it bad? Why don’t you like it? Why is your suggestion better? The mapper always needs to understand what you mean with your suggestions and what you want to reach with it.

But please keep one thing in mind: Never try to force the mapper.

You can post feedback in the beatmap thread, but never try to force your ideals onto a beatmap of someone else. If you really dislike the beatmap, you should consider mapping it yourself. The beatmap owner always has the right to rank the beatmap how he or she likes it. It doesn’t help you, the mapper or the community when you stubbornly try to force your ideals onto an other beatmap.

Alright! That’s it! I hope you guys understand now a little bit better how the process of Qualified beatmaps work and why we don’t disqualify everything.

Now it’s up to you!

Do you have any questions about it? Still don’t understand something? Feel free to ask in the disqus below! We the QAT will try to answer every question!

Until then, stay tuned for more blog entries in the future from your mania QAT!

—Feerum

[osuqat]

The way we do spreads is actually really weird

Hi there!

I guess I’m back with some material to think about once more. So I will once again throw a bunch of thoughts at everyone with the intention to stir up discussion about it!

This time it’s about spreads again, but seeing that the other spread discussion is still… in progress, I’ll talk about how people approach making standard spreads currently and why I think it’s quite an odd approach.

For starters, so that everyone is on the same page, a standard spread would consist of Easy - Normal - Hard - Insane - Expert difficulties, one each. Spreads are designed around the main idea of giving every kind of player a difficulty to enjoy the song on, so the progression through a spread should be linear in terms of actual difficulty. This allows a player to take on each difficulty as a challenge whilst moving through it. If the gap between two difficulties is too large, it usually means that the target audience will have to go back to a difficulty level which actually doesn’t really fit their skill, because the difficulty next up is way harder in comparison to the other difficulty gaps.

Usually in order to achieve this, it seems reasonable to have mapping techniques and complexity scale linearly throughout your difficulty spread.

Except we don’t really do that much.

Spread problems usually occur when one of the difficulties is much closer to the difficulty of the following diff than to the previous one:

As you can see above in this spread the Hard and Insane difficulty would be rather close while Hard and Normal pretty far from one another. This can be considered a spread issue.

Most commonly an imbalance like this occurs between Hard and Insane or Normal and Hard difficulties due to these relying on completely different levels of density and usually completely different spacing concepts. In order to understand this issue and why it commonly arises in this place and not anywhere else, we will have to go over each difficulty level to quickly list mapping techniques you commonly find in them (these things apply to approximately 180 bpm maps):

Easy

Rhythm usage: 1/1, 2/1 and slower rhythms, rarely ever active ½ snappings.

Most common spacing concept: as few spacing changes as possible, mostly the entire diff is distance snapped to something fixed and DS will be disregarded for objects apart more than 2/1 or higher.

Slider Velocity changes: very rare.

Normal

Rhythm usage: 1/1 and ½ are used more, sometimes 2/1 and slower but generally people stick to a lot more 1/1 and avoid longer chains of ½ objects and ¼ at all costs.

Most common spacing concept: as few spacing changes as possible, mostly the entire diff is distance snapped to something fixed and DS will be disregarded for objects apart more than 2/1 or higher.

Slider Velocity changes: rare.

Hard

Rhythm usage: ½ and 1/1 mainly, sparse and not too long ¼ encouraged. People mostly stick to passive ½ and 1/1 and also avoid longer ½ chains.

Most common spacing concept: a mix of distance snapping and emphasis spacing are common around this level. People mostly stick to a distance for one part and use spacing to emphasize important sounds. Jumps from Passive to Active objects are more common than jumps between active objects (sliderend -> circle | circle -> circle)

Slider Velocity changes: common for entire sections, rare for single objects.

Insane

Rhythm usage: ½ and some rare 1/1, longer ¼. People stick to more active ½ than 1/1 and also do ½ chains more frequently.

Most common spacing concept: emphasis-based spacing where spacing for important things is higher than spacing for not-so-important things.

Slider Velocity changes: common.

Expert

Rhythm usage: ½ and ¼ mostly, rarer 1/1, even longer ¼ chains.

Most common spacing concept: emphasis-based spacing where spacing for important things is higher than spacing for not-so-important things.

Slider Velocity changes: common.

Everything you can think of from 5.25* to A-L-I-E-N is stuffed into this one category

On first thought, this may seem really balanced in terms of rhythm usage; it introduces the player with relatively slow rhythms and you can progress throughout the map. But spacing wise this can have huge gaps as most people strictly stick to distance snapping in Normals and start doing a bunch of jumps in Hard difficulties.

When asked why people stick to distance snapping to begin with some quote the RC Guideline that says “time-distance equality should teach beginners the relation between time and distance on the playfield”. Others may suggest that jumps in lower difficulties are too hard to read / comprehend / play for newbies and that teaching time-distance equality should take priority for a rhythm game. The point that every modder ever will bring this up as an issue if you do otherwise is also quite a convincing argument to just do this.

But actually… why do we bother teaching beginners that time equals distance? Once they have learned that time equals distance and move on to Hard difficulties or Insane difficulties they will be confronted with Time ≠ Distance all over the place. The distance part is the point where most spreads can go wrong, because the Hards are mapped with loose distance snapping while the Normals are usually enforcing one distance in the entire map. Because of this, circle jump patterns in Hards and the likes can imbalance the entire spread heavily. To me, this feels like teaching people how to add numbers and then throwing them into complex algebra without explaining any of the concepts that aren’t addition and subtraction. The entire act of doing this seems pointless and unfair; you would argue that before throwing them into algebra people need to be taught more concepts than simple addition and subtraction, or else they won’t understand what’s going on.

My thoughts on the matter are that this has likely been left untouched for quite a few years and the way higher difficulties are mapped shifted from using distance snapping for a good part and just adding a few more jumps than hard (which would make for an even spread in terms of spacing and rhythm / mapping techniques used overall) to doing emphasis based spacing and pattern-based spacing in insane difficulties whilst leaving the lower part of the spread unchanged.

To me, it would make more sense if lower diffs taught softer versions of the concepts used in higher difficulties, provided new players are not completely left in confusion while playing the lower part of the spread. Right now it seems like Normals are basically the same as an Easy difficulty with more complex snapping, which makes the spread issue between Normal and Hard which often arises to the point a new popular difficulty was introduced to deal with this more understandable for me. But do we want to deal with this that way?

To address this as a spread issue properly whilst avoiding throwing “a very easy hard called advanced” or “a very hard normal called advanced” into the set just so that that target audience has something to play, it would make more sense to allow more spacing variety in Normals. In my opinion, this would not only make these difficulties more interesting to map, but would also allow for way more creativity within them whilst balancing the way spacing is used within a beatmap.

What has to happen before this is actual testing of what people who just started 2 or 3 days ago are actually capable of, because from what I have tested so far they do read approach circles instead of looking at how far they have to move. This implies that unless the distance change is drastic, people will recognise rhythm correctly, but this will need further testing and actual exploration in order to for it to happen.

What do you think?

Should we adapt teaching more concepts into lower difficulties?

Do you think that teaching the “time equals distance” concept to people makes sense given the current spacing meta?

Did you ever consider testing this with new players? Do you still remember what threw you off when you started or how you were approaching this game in general?

I look forward to hearing a few thoughts from mappers on this topic!

—Okorin

[osuqat]

The QAT Gazette #4

Hello everyone!

After seeing that we were unable to bring up a content-packed report every single week, we decided to rather concentrate our work and bring up a news feed as soon as we have something presentable to anyone of you. Therefore, we are glad to present you The QAT Gazette! The idea behind it is quite similar to the Weekly Report, but it will be published in an undefined date as soon as there is enough to talk about.

This edition will be centered on our last QAT meeting held this week. These are the most important topics that were discussed about:

Metadata checks of qualified beatmaps will be more organised. With the help of IamKwaN, Fycho and alacat, all qualified beatmaps will be checked without exception. You can also contact us with the Report Thread if you find something that needs to be addressed!

Goodbye to some of our members! After a thoroughly discussion, our long-term QAT member and ex-MAT manager MMzz will take his more than deserved rest from activity and be moved to the Alumni group. It is not possible to express with words how much he contributed to this game and how thankful the community is for his efforts. Further changes in the team will be discussed over the next few days, and so the search for replacements cannot be discarded either.

We revisited internal organization problems in terms of leadership and task assignment. The QAT is a rather small group with currently 14 members and is auto-regulated with a clear task assignment as explained on this blog a few weeks ago. All members have a closed and trustful communication with the rest of the team. Loctav does keep an eye on the group and helps with the organisation and with some of the decisions that we need to take, so he is already the manager of the group. The QAT as a group oversees the work of the nominators and helps them whenever they need assistance, so every QAT member is also a “BN Manager” in this analogue.

The QAT Blog will receive more attention in the future. Putting IamKwaN in charge, she will manage the organisation and also the content that gets published in this blog. All members of the QAT are encouraged to contribute with articles once a while to keep it alive and interesting to read!

Nominators have been inspected about their activity. The modding activity especially of the taiko, catch and mania nominators have been revised and also some behaviour-related single cases have been investigated. We decided that there is no need for a purge at this point, but the less active members will be contacted by us to offer any possible assistance.

Ask us anything!

Some more interesting questions were posted in our blog in the past few days. Do not hesitate posting more of your concerns or questions here!

What do you think of the lack of active taiko BNs at the moment? Nominators do not have to center their lives in modding and nominating maps in a rhythm game. That is just a volunteer task they are offering to do to help other mappers and contribute to the official osu! beatmap database. Everybody can help in this matter by modding itself and helping other mappers improve their creations. That will likely reduce the workload of the current nominators and also help you earn more experience in modding. Who knows? Maybe you can be the next nominator!

<insert name here> does the best mods, why aren’t they a BN yet? Maybe their activity score took a heavy hit from a month of grinding in mmos? Maybe they need to farm a little more kudosu to prove they are consistently active? Or maybe they really do think that 1/4 streams are a great addition to Easy diffs, and their modding prowess isn't as good as you think it is! Whatever the case may be, tell them to keep working hard and contribute regularly and they'll get there eventually!

That would be all from us by now. We are finishing the last preparations for the next BN tests which will center on the taiko, catch and mania game modes this time so expect some more news in this matter in the upcoming days. Keep using the “Ask us anything!” feature of this blog if you have some more questions about our activity.

—Deif

[osuqat]

osu!catch Spread Problem

Hello guys!

I'm about to speak a little about the gap between Salads and Platters. The reason behind it and a possible solution to solve this in the future. With this, I hope to give a chance to those players who have just started to learn how the hyperdashes work and can be handled to create better spreads for osu!catch.

In the past few months, I spoke to many players about the spreads and how hard it is to start playing Platters. Currently, in most cases, a player who can play Salads well enough can not even touch those so called Platters because of their high AR and most importantly their usage of hyperdashes. While we stated that Platters are to introduce these intense jumps, many of them contain a lot of these. making the difficulties much harder than they should be. While I do understand that everyone wants to play harder and harder maps, we also need to think about those who are just started to play recently. It’s easy to say "then they should play converts" or "then they should just quit", but with this kind of negative attitude thing will never change. Platters are not intended to satisfy the top 10 and or even the top 100 players. They are supposed to be easy enough to learn how to handle complex patterns and harder jumps. Many mappers make their Rains harder than necessary, so feel they must make Platters harder as well.

To provide a solution to this, I need to dig deeper into this problem. Along with it, I need to speak about how much the current Rains are overusing the resources of the song and how many Overdose difficulties are overmapped to compensate for this. During my time in the modding community as a mapper and modder, I have seen a lot of maps. Some of them were really good, even for being a mapper’s first map, whilst some were bad, even from experienced mappers. Note that by "bad", I mean that they contribute to the issues I mentioned above. For example, whilst the Salad may have a few dashes, the Platter may have as many as 30 hyperdashes in 2 minutes, averaging 1 every 4 seconds. In these kind of mapsets, the Rain may be on par with an easier Overdose, yet the map often contains an actual Overdose difficulty as well. To differentiate between the last two, some nonexistent beats often appear to give the effect of more difficulty. Where do these maps go wrong? Its easy; In my opinion, it was created to satisfy the top players so they will like it, rather than newer players that the lower difficulties should actually have been aimed at. There was no concept to follow, there was no plan for the spread, they ended up being "just mapped".

And with this, we arrived to the first possible solution. Plan how to map and how you want the difficulty spread to look like before starting to map it. Plan each difficulty, where it could be harder and where there is no need for extreme patterns. You must know if you want an Overdose level or not before actually starting to map. If you want one, Rain must not use up all available sounds from the song, which would lead to your Overdose either being the same as Rain, or overmapped by following non-existent beats. The Rain should also not be too hard. Start to map from the hardest difficulty and slowly build down the spread; go all-out on the Overdose and slowly remove in the lower difficulties. You already have an Overdose? Good. To make a Rain, you only need to decide which beats are worth keeping as hyperdashes and which can be reduced. Is the beat worth having a jump, or maybe just be a simple gap? Give time to yourself to think it through and the mapset will surelly be one of the best.

The second way involves starting from the easier level, which is fine as well. It needs more knowledge and planning than the first way, but some people find this easier. If you placed a jump on Salad, then they should be harder on Platter, or maybe even a Hyper if the sound is very strong. Do not be afraid to check back on your previous difficulties to make sure you are on the right track as this makes a huge difference.

If you do not want to have an Overdose level difficulty that’s fine, but this doesn’t mean that you can still go all-out on Platter. Listen to the song and bookmark beats where you think a hyperdash is worth adding. While in this case you can make the spread harder, do not forget that Rains are not Overdoses, Platters are not Rains, and so on. The osu!catch Ranking Criteria provides a detailed description of appropriate rhythms, patterns and so on for each level of difficulty, so be sure to familiarize yourself with it!

As a closing word, I want to reiterate that lower difficulties are not meant to challenge the top 10 or 100 players. They are meant to be enjoyable by the players on lower levels who they are aimed at and designed for. If better players are searching for some challenge, they are able to use mods. The Platter is slow? Put DoubleTime or HardRock on and I'm sure it will be challenging. You must not make either the Platter or Rain a swarm of hyperdashes just to make it challenging on it's own.

—Kurokami

[osuqat]

Tips on creating "Beginner Friendly" easies

Hello everyone!

Maps are becoming harder and harder, and 2012 mapping is very different compared to 2016 mapping. Nowadays, people tend to space their objects farther and use more complex rhythms. Currently, mappers want to impress and achieve fame by making the best hard difficulties possible for their songs and often neglect their easier difficulties. In order to ensure your maps are enjoyable to players of all abilities, here are some tips for making beginner friendly easies.

Spinners

Before you place spinners, you have to take two things into consideration: the length and the recovery time. Spinners that last very long can be just as detrimental as spinners that are too short. Long periods of spinning can be very tiring. Likewise, short spinners put beginners at a disadvantage. Ever heard about the spinner bonus? If auto can get at least a four thousand spin bonus and no more than a ten thousand spin bonus, you're good to go.

Additionally, you should keep the recovery time at a reasonable amount. Newbies need time to react after a spinner. Aim for at least a whole measure of recovery time after a spinner ends.

Rhythm Usage

Rhythms should be kept simple. Do not try to map every single sound in the song. Simplify any complicated rhythms and emphasize the important beats. Try to use mostly 1/1 rhythms and sometimes 1/2 rhythms (if the song permits). Refrain from using 1/4 rhythms in easies, as they are VERY problematic for beginners. The song’s BPM has a major impact on your rhythm usage. For example, 1/2 rhythms in a 180 BPM song are much more difficult than 1/2 rhythms in a 120 BPM song. Lastly, SLIDERS. The more sliders the merrier! Sliders have what we call “hit leniency”, meaning it is easier to click a slider correctly “on time” than a circle!

Keep the difficulty spread in mind. All players should be able to play and enjoy your map, despite their skill level. You do not want to just please the beginners, but all players in general.

Awkward Spacing

Distance snap exists for a reason and you should follow it in most (if not all) cases. Players at this level use it to help them determine when to click. In addition to following distance snap, avoid stacking notes on top of each other. Stacks make it hard for players to click to the rhythm accurately and they can be annoying to read at low approach rates . Stacks can be ESPECIALLY confusing if the clicking time frame between the stack and the next note varies between instances. Here is an example:

In the above image, each pair of notes is stacked. However, top two notes require you to click twice as fast. Players only have the approach circle to guide them when to click as shown in the image above.

Slider Shapes

Sliders are your friends, though there will also be many opportunities where you can replace a slider with a spinner. Longer sliders allow you to make beautiful slider shapes; (e.g Loop sliders , heart sliders , letter sliders etc.) When used properly, you can make some truly amazing things. Note that your sliders should still be clearly visible and the slider path should not blocked. Overlapping sliders are fine, as long as the follow path of the whole slider is clearly readable, and players can easily see where the slider begins and ends.

Difficulty Settings

The difficulty settings should be appropriate to the map, meaning high settings should be avoided AT ALL COSTS. A very high AR will make the map unreadable and unplayable. A very high HP will make players fail before they’ve even hit the 1st note. Common sense and intuition come a long way. Ask beginners to test play the map! Most settings issues are easily recognizable simply by playing the map.

Hopefully this gives you some ideas for creating your own awesome easy difficulties for beginners to play and enjoy. They may not seem that important to you, but there are lots of players out there who do enjoy and even require playing easies in order to learn the basics of the game. Always remember that you were a new player once too!

—Tari

[osuqat]

Weekly Report #3

Hello! These last days have been relatively calmed for us after the new additions to the Beatmap Nominators. On the other hand, the report thread has been rather active lately with the feedback of the community on qualified beatmaps. Keep up the good job!

Further additions to the osu!standard nominators: With the last accepted invitations from ezek, sahuang, Zero__wind, Pentori and Sieg to join the BNG, we conclude the batch of additions to the usergroup. For those modders who missed this opportunity there will be a new application process in the near future, so make sure you keep your activity and quality high enough to be able to participate in the next test!

The Criteria Council has been refreshed with a name change: The newly renamed United Beat-Knights of Ranking Criteria (or UBKRC) is still working on revamping the old ruleset of all game modes. The members of the osu!standard section have come up with the first draft of the general ruleset. You can find it at this thread, so make sure you give your feedback before it gets officially approved! There is still some time until the 11th September at 23:59 UTC, where the draft will be revised by the members for further refinement. Elsewhere, the osu!taiko members have thought out criteria for layer improvisation in their attempts to define how layering in general needs to be handled.

BNG Rules will be updated in a short period of time: Some of the current rules are unclear, or they lead to misunderstandings. There will be a thorough revision to help nominators on every question they might have, and probably some forgetful members of the QAT as well!

Ask us anything!

In the absence of “serious” questions over the past few days, JBHyperion decided to humour you with some of the less-serious ones. Do not hesitate posting more of your concerns or questions here!

For JBHyperion - What was Pangaea like? Ah, fond memories. It was a wonderful place, where a moderator’s job was easy. Memes and shitposts had not yet been invented, people didn’t rage over disqualifications, and the beatmap forum was alive with vibrant and diverse mapping. And Nightcore. Lots of Nightcore.

Why do you keep crushing mapper spirit with your DQs, my 100* map should get ranked because I'm using a new special style that's fun and challenging for everyone? Your “new special style”, as you referred to, is actually neither new, nor special. In fact it’s a time-honoured tradition called shitmapping. In this way, you can by all means make fun and challenging maps for people to enjoy, but these maps do not belong in the ranked section. If you attempt to rank such a map, I will impale you on a rusty pitchfork to make an example of you to the rest of the community. You have been warned.

Who would win in a fight between JBHyperion, Deif and Hulk Hogan? I would be taken out of the fight first, since my lazors take time to charge, and they would be a nuisance later. Deif would endure Hulk Hogan’s blows, but as a Level 70 Nurse, his healing ability would outmatch Hogan’s damage output. Eventually Hogan would tire, and Deif would land a broken heart icon to take Hogan out of the fight with a single blow.

That would be all from us for this week. Keep using the “Ask us anything!” feature of this blog if you have some more questions about our activity. We will be looking forward to answer them!

—Deif

[osuqat]

Code of Conduct

Hello!

As some of you may be aware, recently I have been working on a Code of Conduct for mapping and modding, intended to apply across the entire community. The aim of this was to ensure a productive and enjoyable experience for everyone, from those who are just starting out and looking for help and advice, all the way through to experienced members looking to polish their skills. Despite a large proportion of the work being “common sense”, I felt it was necessary to have a clear point of reference for people to use as an example to when necessary. Over the internet, it is often easy to forget that mappers and modders are real people, with feelings just like you and I have. To help this, we want the mapping and modding community to be a civil and accessible place which its members are happy to be a part of.

Since this idea fell under the umbrella of the osu! Community Rules to some degree, it was decided that once finished, the Code of Conduct should be featured in the General Ranking Criteria, clearly visible to all. From an initial concept of “How to Behave in the Beatmap Subforums”, the guide was gradually expanded to include advice and guidance on a number of additional topics, such as how to word suggestions effectively, responding to criticism, as well as dealing with qualified maps.

In order to get straight to the point, over time and with input from the community, the “informal” guide slowly transformed into a more concise, formal style befitting a Ranking Criteria entry. Now covering a wider scope applicable to the entire community, it was necessary to simplify things into a “bullet-point list” style. However I did receive some requests for the original document to be made available, so for anyone curious about the initial concept, or wanting to see things presented in a little more detail, you may read that here. Remember, however, that the Ranking Criteria version linked previously is the most up-to-date and as such, takes priority over this version.

One of the most important sections in the Code of Conduct (in my opinion, of course) is “Dealing with Qualified Maps”. With the QAT now checking maps reactively, responsibility for reporting issues with Qualified beatmaps falls to the community. Clearly, Qualified maps need to be handled slightly differently to those in Pending due to the increase in exposure Qualification brings - including players who would otherwise have little to no involvement in the mapping and modding community. In case you missed these changes, refer to this thread where you can report Qualified beatmaps you deem to be not yet ready for Ranked status.

The draft itself has been through several rounds of community feedback already, for which I am very thankful. The response I received was overwhelmingly positive and a lot of great suggestions made their way into the finished article, reinforcing the belief that the community is far stronger when working together than alone. Following approval by the management, the final draft was recently added into the Ranking Criteria and can be seen here, so have a read through it and be sure to spread the word!

Hopefully this gives some insight into the necessity of the Code of Conduct as a valuable resource for shaping the future of the mapping and modding community. Of course, there is always room for improvement, so don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions or suggestions. Anyone can make positive change happen, so get out there and put these ideas into practice, make new friends, and ensure the community remains a safe and enjoyable place for all!

—JBHyperion

[osuqat]

Are huge sets a problem?

Hi there!

I would like to use this blog to throw a few thoughts about difficulty spreads in general at the community. Please keep in mind that this is my personal opinion on things and I intend to stir discussion about it, so some things may be provocatively worded or tinted by what I deem to be more important (as in, yes, that is intended). As many may have noticed, the amount of difficulties within the same set varies from very simple ENH to difficulty spreads to things like DJ Ozawa - Tokyo (Innovaderz Remix) or xi - Happy End of the World which top at over 20 difficulties in total. This article will take big sets with multiple difficulties per level as an example to discuss the pros and cons of even having them in the first place.

But first things first: many of you will probably remember the community outrage generated by a difficulty spread limitation rule proposed by ztrot a few months back (in case this went over your head, read up on what it was about here). The core ideas of it are as follows:

Align sets in a linear and progressive ENHIX spread, where an additional Extra could be added under the placeholder term Ultra and be excluded from linear spread progression

Difficulties were proposed to be limited to one per difficulty level per gamemode, so one Insane, one Extra, one Hard etc.

People with not-bubbled sets were asked to restructure their sets to obey these rules initially, which lead to massive community backlash due to the changes this would require for most contemporary sets, which e.g. commonly use for example 2 Hards (the more or less popular difficulty name Advanced comes to mind) or multiple difficulties of everything like Tokyo has. Structure-wise I will throw a few statements as hypotheses and arguments in here and then try to discuss these. Starting with:

When a difficulty is not necessarily required for a spread, all difficulties on around the same level will receive less plays overall.

What I mean with this is the following: Unless you are a really known mapper or your difficulty is a fundamentally different approach to the song, these Extras around the same difficulty level will be played based on popularity of the mapper and a few of them will get relatively low exposure in comparison to others.

Having multiple Extras/Insanes which are about equally difficult gives people no real incentive to play / choose either depending on their skill level, but rather on which of these mappers is the most known / popular / creative. Examples:

A few of these Extra or Insane level difficulties may have been better off if they were put into a spread where they are actually a necessary element for progression throughout the set.

A different incentive to play a diff among higher difficulty levels (such as Insane/Extra or higher) may be that the difficulties are rhythmically or conceptually completely different approaches to the song and thus create an incentive for each of the difficulties to be actually played. Examples:

Both of these examples feature difficulties which are vastly different takes on the song, while still being similarly difficult gameplay-wise. One of the sets is frequently at the top of most played so all difficulties are played a lot and approximately evenly, while the other set doesn’t seem to get much attention. The differences between both of them are pretty apparent as the amount of plays is more balanced between the difficulties on No title while the Extras on TSUBAKI are also balanced, but each of them does not really get that much attention compared to the hardest Extra and the easiest one.

The point of choosing one difficulty to play based on a spread still stands, because the difficulties being vastly different is not really visible from the map selection ingame, even if you write that on the thread / map description on the forums. However, once you figure out that each of the Extra or Insane difficulties are vastly different from each other, you may go back to choosing to play the difficulty which you like the most (this assumes your first choice does not depend on what SR skill level you are at). This is highly situational, but different approaches which are equally difficult might end up at different SR, mostly because one of the difficulties is using more jumps and the other one maps more streams, or other similar reasons which distort the SR-algorithm a bit.

So… is having multiple similarly difficult difficulties to choose from a good or a bad thing for players? It probably is not too bad for players, since they can just ignore the additional diffs which they do not like and carry on with playing one of the difficulties which they like instead.

So… is this a good or a bad thing from a map-design standpoint? It probably is posing a problem, since you end up giving people no real incentive to play any of the difficulties based on their individual skill level and progression through the spread. Basically design-wise these additional difficulties seem obsolete and could be moved to a set that actually would need them.

So… are there other problems with having multiple difficulties of the same level? The next problem that can arise with these difficulties is not entirely related to the “same difficulty level” argument already discussed above, but rather to the total amount of difficulties.

Sets with a lot of difficulties heavily distort the worth of a nomination.

While getting a set bubbled is by no means a right, but rather a privilege, the worth of a bubble is varying vastly. An Easy/Normal spread on a 30 second song will require two people to nominate it, while on the other end of the spectrum Happy End of the World and Tokyo also require two nominations in order to get ranked. So the worth of one nomination varies anywhere between 30 difficulties of 6 minutes length to 2 difficulties of 30 seconds length. And a single difficulty of 5 minutes length needs three people to nominate it for it to be ranked.

The basic idea of a “marathon” set is, that it usually turns out to be too much to check for two people. Much more can “go wrong” on a set with this drain time as opposed to shorter difficulties where errors are easier to spot because there are less things you can screw up in a shorter song.

Except that essentially a marathon set with a full spread such as Happy End of the World can get ranked with only two people nominating it, which goes against the entire point of needing 3 people to check longer sets in the first place. A way to balance this further would be disallowing difficulties that are not necessary for a difficulty spread, where the attempt caused more or less community outrage. Taking “marathon sets need more people to nominate it” as an example it would make sense to determine how many people need to nominate a set based on total drain time of the set. With the general lack of 4 minutes or longer difficulty spreads in comparison to relatively short songs, determining such a limit can be really difficult.

It would impose further obstacles on people who are mapping 4 minute songs with an ENHIX spread in comparison to people who map just 2 minutes with the same spread. The general unhappiness about the enforced spread argument, combined with further obstacles will probably make 4 minute spreads more or less disappear. I am sceptical if this is the correct way to go about this, as the side effect seems to limit people who want to map longer songs. The main problems mappers seem to have with mapping longer songs for spreads are more or less the following:

They take longer to make

Less people are motivated to mod these

Less people are motivated to nominate these

While no rules can fix any of those complaints (the argument of omitting parts of spread was being discussed on reddit, but that really is a weird option as it assumes your set does not have to stand on its own and beginners can just go and play other sets - which makes barely any sense from a map-design standpoint). Adding another restriction seems to only further discourage people from mapping more longer songs.

So… increase the amount of nominations based on amount of difficulties? This is the same thing as the last argument, except that it ignores the drain time of a difficulty. While it would limit sets that have lots of similar difficulties, it would also impact mapsets that have a proper spread from Easy to - let’s say - something around 7.5 stars and sets with generally small difficulty gaps but linear progression.

So… limit the amount of difficulties, similar to what ztrot suggested? While that would get rid of “similar difficulty level”-spam-sets completely, it would force an inappropriately large spread on difficult songs in the way ztrot suggested it. In my opinion the main flaw in the initial draft of it is, that it assumes that Expert = Expert.

Everything above 5.25 Star difficulty is labeled as Expert as its own difficulty range, but 5.25 star difficulties and - let’s say - 6.3 star difficulties are for the majority of cases largely different. So are 6.3 star and 7.4 star difficulties and 7.4 star and let’s say 8.4 star difficulties. For this reason, a strict limit on the number of difficulties seems to impact the upper level of difficulty for really intense songs. For songs that require highly difficult maps, this assumption that Expert = Expert screws up the entire proposal. Also, a strict limitation like this seems to cause major community backlash. Currently there is an existing discussion about this in the Feature Request subforum (which has been originally denied 9 months ago), so if you are interested in this topic, join there.

A possible soft limitation version of this would be that linear spread is enforced, and additional difficulties that fall out of linear spread would require more nominations. However, such a limitation could be potentially too vague and has potential to create a ton of edge cases to consider in order to make this suggestion work anywhere near properly. The main thing that could confuse mappers about this would be the question “how many BNs do I need in order to get my creation ranked?!”.

What do you think?

Does having multiple difficulties around the same difficulty level cause any of the problems I see with them for you? Do you even think these are problems?

Do you think the worth of a nomination needs further balancing? And which of the described ways would be favorable? Do you have a completely different approach from mine on this?

Do we need more difficulty icons for the steadily growing difficulty of maps? What would be reasonable ranges if so?

I think this sums the things I intended to discuss with people up, while giving my opinion on all of the aforementioned. I discussed this with a few modders, mappers and players in private messages already, and each of these discussions went in slightly different directions so I look forward to what others think about this in a more public setting.

—Okorin

[osuqat]

Weekly Report #2

Hello! New additions to the Beatmap Nomination Group are always an interesting topic amongst the modding and mapping community, mostly because that is generally a synonym for more qualified mapsets in the next days. Be sure to check out the results!

New osu!standard nominators have been added: After correcting all the tests, we finally have the official results of the users that passed. Please give a warm welcome to Lasse, Spaghetti, Stjpa, Len, Ayyri, Kagetsu, Cryptic, Strategas, Electoz, Kencho, Xexxar, ezek, sahuang, Zero__wind, Pentori and MrSergio! Also do not forget to say 'Hi!' to pishifat and Sieg, who has rejoined the group. There were a total number of 17 candidates that managed to reach the required pass threshold, although not all of them have accepted the invitations to join the nominators yet. Expect more people to join the Beatmap Nomination Group in the next days!

Test results of the nominators who participated are also out: From the 21 nominators that participated in the test, 13 of them showed that they improved since the last months and managed to successfully pass it! The nominators that failed the test or declined to participate have been removed from the group already. Nevertheless, we would like to see you active again in the near future, and we would also like to thank you for your participation in the beatmap ranking process in the past months!

Further changes in the Ranking Criteria have been discussed recently: Especially in the area of osu!standard, where the responsible members were centering their attention to the lower difficulties of a mapset. As an example, there will be clear instructions on how to handle overlapping structures, eventually mild jumps and short sliders.

Ask us anything!

Some more interesting questions were posted in our blog in the past few days. Do not hesitate posting more of your concerns or questions here!

There is awesome work on "Code of Conduct: Modding and Mapping" do you have or plan making something similar for the public teams like QAT, GMT? For community managers? There is already something similar to the Code of Conduct for the members of the GMT and also for the QAT. Those are just simple guidelines on how to proceed with most of the known cases, but they will stay private mostly due to data protection. Community Managers do not need such guidelines as the number of members is quite small compared to the other groups and all of them have specific and concrete tasks in osu!. Nevertheless they communicate to each other before taking any relevant decision.

Hello there! Sieg here. Interesting to know if there any sort of communication besides the monthly meeting between the qat, rc team and the devs? Don't you think it would be nice to promote some requests from the mapping community directly to the devs? Most of the communication between the teams was ported to our Discord servers. The mapping and modding community along with the nominators and the QATs are lurking in the osu! Modding Association server hosted by OnosakiHito. You should contact any nominator or QAT if you are interested in joining in there. Apart from that, anyone can join the public dev Discord server to have a direct communication with the team, directions can be found by following the link to the ppy blog.

That would be all from us for this week. Keep using the “Ask us anything!” feature of this blog if you have some more questions about our activity. We will be looking forward to answer them!

—Deif

[osuqat]

Weekly Report #1

Hello! We will be bringing you the latest internal topics that came up inside the Quality Assurance Team. We would like to keep this in a regular basis (and weekly if possible) to let you stay tuned about our whereabouts!

osu!standard nominators tests are ongoing. We received about 100 applications from dedicated modders who are willing to become part of the Beatmap Nomination Group in the coming days. The number of applications looks overwhelming, but our test creators Irreversible and Mao are working hard on correcting all the received tests until now. The process can still last a few more days than we initially planned, so stay tuned when the results come out to meet the new nominators!

Nominators that failed the previous osu!standard test will be tested again along with the new applicants. All the current nominators and QATs took the same test as the applicants a few months ago. The ones that didn’t manage to pass the test need to apply what they’ve learned in the past few months if they want to stay in the Beatmap Nomination Group! Good luck to you guys!

Inactive nominators have been removed from the group. After discussion within the team, individual cases were brought up and decided if they were still active in the nomination and modding scene. We would like to thank them for all their effort and hard work they have contributed and we wish them the best for the future - maybe we will see them active again someday!

Changes within the Criteria Council are still being developed. The members of the Criteria Council are working hard to remake the current ruleset of the Ranking Criteria. Whereas osu!catch finished their workload a few weeks ago, the team members of osu!, osu!taiko and osu!mania are still making progress with the newly added members. The team responsible for osu!taiko are reconsidering rules regarding finishers and 1/8 snapped notes. Meanwhile the people in charge of osu!mania have brought up proposals revolving around the usage of Slider Velocity changes, as well as the rankability of dumps and semi-dumps and where to draw the line. Council members for osu! sunk their time into defining controversial terms and finding a common ground of understanding, and also approached complicated topics such as difficulty-specific regulations that would only affect beatmaps of a specific difficulty level.

Ask us anything!

On this little section we want to answer your questions in a regular basis. Do not hesitate posting more of your concerns or questions here!

Outside of their specific team roles, what do QATs do now that the community is more involved in map disqualification? Most of the workload of the QAT is behind the scenes, preparing new tests, for example. Some of us also help with the chat and forum moderation together with the GMT, and all of us check the report thread in a regular basis. There are almost daily discussions about qualified maps, whose threads may also need moderation.

Can you explain to us in detail the selection process for QAT members? I don't think it's been explained anywhere publicly for other's knowledge. The QAT selection process is managed by the Community Managers mainly. The new additions are generally dedicated members who contribute to the modding and mapping community, whose character could be defined as reliable, self-confident and open-minded. You have to realise that the new members will also need to moderate the beatmap section, which is quite often a conflictive area. To answer the question “when does a nominator get promoted”, I would answer with the motto “do not look for us, we will find you!”.

That would be all from us for this week. Do not forget using the “Ask us anything!” feature of this blog if you have some more questions about our activity, or whatever you can think about.

—Deif

[osuqat]

Explore the QAT!

Hello everyone!

Recently, we heard voices urging from the community calling for transparent release of information about the Quality Assurance Team. Responding to your curiosity, this blog is here to deliver the progress of things we are working on and reveal (fun) facts for you!

Changes to the Quality Assurance Team make the QAT one of the most mysterious teams again! After the implementation of the changes, many of you may be unsure what the QAT actually does apart from checking reports and metadata on qualified beatmaps. As the very first entry, let me introduce the working field assigned to each of us!

The group consists of 4 sub-teams in total, being responsible for metadata checking, the Ranking Criteria Council, monthly ranking charts and Beatmap Nominator test creation. Members of each team are shown below:

Beatmap Nominator Tests:

osu!: Irreversible, Mao

osu!taiko: DakeDekaane, MMzz

osu!catch: Deif, JBHyperion

osu!mania: Blocko, Feerum

Metadata & Reports: alacat, Fycho, IamKwaN

Ranking Charts: Kurokami, OnosakiHito, Tari

Ranking Criteria: Desperate-kun, Okorin

Surprisingly, some of us started to be responsible for making up the BN test exam paper not long ago. Huge efforts are needed to brainstorm questions to examine the significant people for the mapping community in the future. Much appreciated their works!

After a long hiatus, the Ranking Criteria Council has been reformed. The aim remains to is revise the ranking criteria for the modern game, and progress of proposals will be publicly visible as soon as they are ready. As mentioned by Desperate-kun the standard-specific council is currently revising difficulty-specific rules and guidelines. The mania-specific draft seems to be taking form as well and the taiko council will have some fresh air with OnosakiHito focusing more on charts and letting Raiden organise the Taiko rewording on his own. If you have something to contribute, do not hesitate to contact them or any of their council members!

Final revisions are being made to the new Code of Conduct for mapping and modding. This guide aims to outline the key skills and qualities necessary for ensuring a productive and enjoyable community, from the basics of how to write a mod post, to dealing with constructive criticism and importantly, how to handle qualified maps. This should be of interest to anyone involved in the mapping and modding community, so if you have suggestions for change or improvement, head on over and make yourself heard!

Keep an eye on the blog! More refreshing information and topic are going to be released in the near future. If you have anything want to know about the QAT, please submit your question or comment below!

—IamKwaN