Concerns regarding the hype system in modding v2

[Naxesss]

From what I've heard from the community, this is one of the aspects of modding v2 that are disliked for a couple of reasons. I've seen multiple discussions regarding this in various discord servers and even threads on the forum, but since no one else seems to have posted an issue regarding this here, I thought I'd give it a try.

• The first reason is that this system encourages mappers to ask others, often friends, to praise the map for the sake of the system itself, rather than for the map actually being good in their eyes. I believe this is counter intuitive since it rather requires the mapper to know 12 other people, which is something newer mappers have expressed concerns about, rather than requiring them to have a map that has gone through the modding process and/or is ready for nomination.

• This leads us to the second point, which is that anyone can hype a map for free and without regulation. Along with the first point, this essentially incentives people to spend 10 seconds of their time "helping" someone to avoid having to receive genuine praise. In worst case scenario, the system would become completely useless in the sense that all maps would pass the 12 hype requirement from people praising literally anything they see without even looking at the maps.

I can see the idea behind this, and it's good on paper if you assume that people look at the maps and genuinely praise them, but it's very unlikely to work like this with the system how it is currently, especially since that assumption doesn't seem to hold up. The hype idea would work well for quantifying how many people are aware of the map and support it's existence, thus being appropriate for the loved section, but these factors are mostly irrelevant to the ranked section due to nominations being dependent on the quality of the map itself, rather than how many people support it, even if these variables have somewhat of a correlation.

In order to improve upon this and avoid potential exploitation, I would personally try the following things:

• Only allow users with resolved points in the discussion panel to raise the priority of the respective map. This way, people would be required to be part of the discussion before being able to voice whether they, as modders or test players, approve of the map. By forcing contribution in the discussion, the priority will be much more reflective of the modding process than it is currently, allowing nominators to quickly see how much processing the map has been through.

• Since raising priority would be optional and shooting kudosu isn't possible, unlike in modding v1, the requirement would likely need to be reduced, possibly to somewhere around 6 priority to compensate for that.

Regardless of how things change, the root of the problem seems to be that it's linked to the nomination system and requires input from multiple people, without them needing or being encouraged to even look at the maps in question.

[peppy]

Thanks for the feedback. Definitely aware of these issues and thinking about how to best address them. Forcing discussion participation may be a good stop-go measure to start with.

[AyanokoRin]

I agree with lowering the threshold to 6 with the current state, but leaving modders and testplayers the choice to hype or not might turn it into another form of nomination. I feel that hype should be an automated process that naturally rises as the map receives feedback, rather than driven by people's good will.

[IOExceptionOsu]

I think rather than just having modders participate in the hype of the map, it could also be nice to involve players in the ranking process. Just like how ranked maps have a 0-10 rating, there should be an option for unranked maps to have ratings (or maybe even upvote/downvote, just some kind of indication that they've played the map and liked it), and then require a certain amount of ratings to be present (in addition to the aforementioned hype requirement from modders). Just my two cents.

[peppy]

Should hopefully be addressed in #1954. Let's continue discussion there / after implementation!