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