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11 May 2020
The Mappers' Report: April
The Mappers' Report: April
Third time's the charm! Another month has passed and that means it's time for another issue of the Mappers' Report — your trustworthy news post with topics all about mapping in osu! I'm sure you're excited, so let's start right away!
This month's issue of the Mappers' Report contains the following topics:
Ranking Criteria Changes
The Ranking Criteria is a set of rules and guidelines beatmaps must follow to reach ranked status. Stay up to date or help make the game more awesome by participating in open Ranking Criteria discussions!
This month we had no changes in the Ranking Criteria. But there are several open proposals in the Ranking Criteria forum. We have listed some of them below!
Open Ranking Criteria Proposals
For all modes:
For osu!:
For osu!taiko:
For osu!catch:
NAT Meetings
If you have any topics which should be discussed in future meetings, or a proposal you'd like to push to NAT, please do not hesitate to make a post about it on the NAT Meetings forum thread!
Once enough topics are gathered, future NAT meeting dates will be announced in upcoming Mappers' Report issues, in #modding on the osu!dev Discord server and on the forums!
April 11th, 2020 - Genre and Language Settings
Recent changes to the website allow mappers to set genre and language on their own beatmaps — a feature which had only been available to moderators on the old website. With these changes, the NAT decided to revisit what genres and languages are available and work out some of the kinks in the current list.
Changes have been proposed, including adding popular genres like Metal, Classical, and Folk, along with adding new categorizations like Vocaloid and Doujin. You can find the full list of suggested changes on GitHub, where discussion is still taking place.
No additional meetings have been planned so far, but the NAT will be sure to get the word out when there's new topics on the horizon!
Within the Beatmap Nominators and NAT
New Beatmap Nominators! Quick, request all your beatmaps! Jokes aside, the Beatmap Nominators are never resting. New people come, old people go. Here you can see what happened within the Beatmap Nominators this month!
BN Additions
- osu!taiko: Greenshell
- osu!catch: Dako
- osu!mania: Sun
Interested in becoming a Beatmap Nominator and deciding what maps reach ranked? Want to help new mappers to get their beatmaps ranked? Head to the Beatmap Nominator website and apply today!
BN Resignations
- osu!catch: Lacrima
NAT Additions
Our office cat Mao has returned! After stepping down from the NAT duties in December 2019, he decided to make his return. Mao is lending the other osu! NAT members a helping hand with Beatmap Nominator evaluations. Welcome back!
Mappers' Showcase
The Mappers' Showcase parades lesser-known mappers from every game mode.
This month features osu!taiko thanks to our selectors radar and Capu.
Idealism
Idealism is an osu!taiko mapper (as well as an osu! top player) from Brazil who has been around the community for a while now, though he definitely deserves more credit for his work in the mapping scene! His maps blend creativity with smooth and interesting patterning which leave a good taste in the mouths of mappers and players alike.
A map of his that truly shines is his rendition of Cyte - Command Prompt ranked at the start of the year. On the top difficulty (mind bogglingly named "C:\Program Files\Difficulties\434f525255505445442046494c45.exe"), Idealism proves that even when mapping genres out of his comfort zone he can still shine.
Some of his other notable and equally as great maps would be his renditions of Blue on Blue (TamolarM Btlg Remix) and White Eternity, where he shows off his addiction to eroge music through his solid mapping! We hope to see more of his maps coming into the ranked section in the rest of 2020, as his potential to shine even brighter clearly shows!
Yuemiao
Recently making her first appearance in the ranked section with her take on Mizutama by YUC'e and Nor, Yuemiao shows us that she knows what she's doing.
Perfect execution of different snaps and rhythms along with clean consistency throughout her difficulties makes this map one of the most interesting additions to the ranked section as of late.
Implementing her own little rhythms with intuitive yet interesting kat placement really shows how good osu!taiko can sound and how it's possible to enhance the song that is mapped when someone knows their craft!
Her ability to map faster and more chaotic songs just goes to show that she can handle multiple genres and can create something clean for everyone's taste. See what we mean for yourself with this well polished unranked set of t+pazolite vs. P*Light - IZANA, which also includes very smooth SV sections for a pleasant viewing experience.
Yuemiao definitely deserves more credit, as she is quite unknown and has surprised many with her first ranked map. From the current 28 ratings on her Mizatuma set, 27 (twenty-seven!) are 10 star votes, which speaks for itself.
We are definitely looking forward to more of her maps in the future!
The next month will feature osu!catch — but that's not all! As we want to give every player the chance to raise their voice for the Mappers' Showcase, we've created this form, where everyone can submit the names of mappers and storyboarders who in their opinion should be featured in one of the next issues of the Mappers' Report!
We're excited as you to see which gems are still hidden in osu!
Mapping Contests
Flex your mapping muscles by voting and participating in some of this month's ongoing contests! Contest veterans, however, might find it more appropriate to release tension as they see some of this month's mapping contest results.
Monthly Beatmapping Contest
As per usual, the Monthly Beatmapping Contest (MBC) is here to provide your regular dosage of competitive mapping! Each month's contest features a different mapping limitation that entries must adhere to.
April's contest is currently in its voting stage! Visit the contest listing to vote for any 2 of the top 6 entries, and keep in mind that sliders in all entries were required to use reverses, meaning normal slider rhythms were not allowed!
If you prefer mapping to voting, May's contest will be in its beatmapping stage up through May 26th! This month's contest takes rhythm restrictions up a hundred notches from last month by requiring all submissions to use the same rhythm template. See the contest's news post if you'd like to participate!
Mapping With Rewards
Mapping With Rewards was a deadline-free mapping contest with a reputation for... well, not having a conclusion. We should've seen that one coming.
The contest required users to submit a full beatmap spread of any game mode for any of 3 specified Featured Artist songs (listed below). The submissions were judged anonymously based on their creativity, cohesion as a spread, musical expression, and general judge impressions. It's been 3 years, so let's put this contest to rest by announcing the long-overdue winners of Mapping With Rewards 2017:
Loki/Thaehan - A New King Is Born
*namirin - closing eyes
Fractal Dreamers - Fortuna Redux
Each of the winners has been awarded with the Mapping With Rewards profile badge seen below!
Late congratulations to the winners and thank you to Okoratu, Mir, Zetera, Nepuri, Yuzeyun, Maxus, and Protastic101 for judging entries over a year ago. Full judging comments and more can be found in this forum post.
With that said, Mapping With Rewards has reached its end. Closure, finally!
osu! Beatmapping World Championship 2020
The largest group mapping contest of the year has arrived! This contest pits mappers from different countries against each other in a format never before utilized for mapping. Give its news post a read if you're interested, and see the project's website for more details!
While we try to keep watch over all running contests, we might miss some. If you're aware of a mapping contest that should receive more attention, head to this forum thread to submit it for inclusion in the next issue of the Mappers' Report!
Around the Community
This section is all about interesting things which have been happening or will happen soon in the mapping and modding community! Should you have/know about something worth including, be sure to let Feerum or Noffy know about it! For this month, we have updates on the mapping podcast The osu! Map Cast, the Electoz Advanced Modding Guide, and how super long marathons can now be ranked!
The osu! Map Cast
Mentioned in last month's Mappers' Report, the osu! Map Cast is still going strong, with five new episodes! Usually once per week, this podcast hosted by Cinnabun features him talking with a wide variety of mapping community members about osu! and beyond. In the past month and a bit, the osu! Map Cast has published new episodes with the Elite Nominator Cheri, the osu!taiko Nominator incandescence, osu! NAT and former video mapping tutorial extraordinaire pishifat, the new osu! Beatmap Nominator wafer, and a group episode with Nevo, Cheri, incandsecence and Cinnabun all together! The podcast episodes cover a wide variety of topics, both within osu! such as mapping and modding experiences, and outside of osu! such as birds. Be sure to check out more details and links on the osu! Map Cast forum post if this so far has spiked your interest!
Electoz Advanced Modding Guide
Making waves in the modding community recently is the freshly published modding guide by Electoz who is a former Beatmap Nominator and long-time mentor in the Mapping Mentorship Program. The modding guide which can be found on their userpage and here goes in-depth on basically everything you would need to know about modding at a more advanced level. Electoz has fully infused the guide with his own knowledge and experiences, and the guide itself is largely based off how they would mentor successful aspiring modders! If you're into modding, or want to get into it, checking out the Electoz Advanced Modding Guide should definitely be worth your while.
Super long marathons are now rankable!
Yes, you heard that right. Until recently, extremely long maps could not be ranked due to breaking the score limit, since the scoreboards wouldn't reflect everyone's plays properly anyways. Now the developers have changed it so that super long maps which break the score limit even without mods will have score v2 force enabled. In such cases, these score v2 scores will be submittable, finally allowing super long maps to have proper leaderboards. This means we'll be seeing extremely long maps ranked in the future, which is a really exciting improvement!
And that's it for this month! Every month we try to make the Mappers' Report shorter but we simply can't because so much happens in the community. And we're very happy about that! We're excited to see what the next month has for us.
Thanks for reading and stay safe and healthy!
See you next month!
—Feerum, Noffy, yaspo, pishifat, radar & Capu
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