How is the current system working? Most of you know this already. We are simulating the so-called modding v2. Currently, we have two user groups: the Beatmap Appreciation Team (you!) and the Quality Assurance Team. The Beatmap Appreciation Team consists of elevated users that showed sufficient activity to receive the abilities to nominate beatmaps (as you know it: bubbling and qualifying).



As you nominate a beatmap, you give it your "Go!" to be part of the official osu! beatmaps. Every beatmap requires two nominations to be moved into Qualified state. (the first nomination is always the bubble, the second nomination always the heart - albeit both are equally weightened). Therefore, you and your co-nominator send an application for a specific beatmap to the osu!staff to consider this beatmap as "official osu! beatmap". We call this application situation the "Qualified" state. During that state, the beatmap already receives a scoreboard. Anyways, the osu!staff receives a lot of applications and needs to check every nominated beatmap if they really suit to our designated roster we wish to have. We also want to supervise, if the way the beatmap got qualified was properly done and if the map got properly revised by the community. This is, where the QATs are joining.



The Quality Assurance Team is part of the osu!staff, delegated to check the sent applications. They look into the beatmaps and decide whether the beatmap is good to go or not. They have 7 days to check the beatmap. When the 7 days passed without anything happening, the map is Ranked (forever!). Otherwise, the map most likely got "disqualified". This is no more or less than "revoking the nominations and declining the application".

The QAT is basically moderating the system. They are not put in place to opress their opinion on the mapping community, yet they are put in place to assure, that all applications sent are valid and proper and that osu! does always provide good content to all of our players. (Majority only plays Ranked beatmaps!) Surely, the implication of a "disqualification" is a bad one, yet we are free to reject applications sent to us.



Whenever a disqualification happens, a penalty is placed on the BATs that sent an application for said beatmap. This ensures that every BAT takes over the responsibility for the nominations they place. To avoid BATs sending infinite applications, we designed the system in a way to revoke the ability to nominate beatmaps whenever too many misplaced nominations were observed. Moreover, to avoid people sticking in the BAT without doing anything, we implemented a system that may revoke your abilities whenever you decided to turn inactive. Anyways, you will only get dismissed, whenever you are more inactive than active. This means: if you were active for 2 years constantly and with a satisfying quality of your sent applications, you are free to turn inactive for 2 months. You surely may drop in the internal leaderboard for that, anyways you keep your abilities and can rejoin without any delay even after such a long time of inactivity!

Why is the Beatmap Appreciation Team not considered as part of the osu!staff? Considering the way the BAT is assembled, this is merely possible. You have to keep in mind that basically everyone can become a BAT now. For being a staff member, therefore being one of the official persons that represent osu! in public, you need to have more features than just being an active modder. While we all highly appreciate your contributions you do for this community, you have to understand that the BAT is not part of the staff.



The entire system is supposed to be community-driven and moderated. This means that we put the modding and qualifying routines completely into the hand of the community. Due to the fact that everyone can become a BAT, if they are active enough, we can say that this system is driven by the mapping and modding community itself, without being totally dependent on the osu!staff to get something into the Qualified status.



Yet, the system is moderated. This means, like in chatrooms, that even if the community is free to do whatever it pleases, the staff is supervising the happenings. The QAT moderates everything resolving around the Beatmap Management and "interferes when something goes wrong". If everything is fine, nothing will happen and everything keeps going.



This system has huge potentials, which can not be unfold due to the current restrictions the system brings with itself. This starts already with "How to become a BAT?"

Isn't the entire newBAT mechanism a huge friend-favoring and not really community-driven? I admit, it is. While we actually planned to do some sort of "small quality filter" with the votes, I admit that this severely failed, as majority of the votes are just voting due to being too nice, friends being favored, voting people from the own region (which is natural tho! it's the people they know the most!) and giving the ones not befriending and social engineering the BATs a huge disadvantage compared to the ones who are familiar and known to the BATs.



The voting system is a sole filter placed because the system is manually maintained. Actually, the system itself is designed to be applied on the entire registered userbase. This means, actually, that we would like to check every single existing user if they hit 1200 modding score and would promote them, if they have it. But since we manually maintain this calculation right now (which will be automated later at some point), we needed some filter to tell us: "Who shall we check first?"



Therefore the votings are just a filter. We are considering to change this (see below), as we deemed the voting itself as not working as intended. It was my personal wish to do it democratically and open, but it yet didn't turn out as I expected. Yet, I need to implement something due to the simple restriction of being unable to check everyone manually.

Why do we get kicked when we do errors? We are just humans. Sure you are. You also do not get kicked when you do errors. Everyone being kicked is able to rejoin the BAT after a cooldown. You may want to see it more like unlocking an ability in this game. You are free to join or leave, to do whatever you want. You pay with BAT score for your failures and you earn BAT score for successful attempts. Whenever you breached through a critical amount of score, you unlock your abilities. Whenever you drop below it, the abilities get locked again - but you can unlock again, whenever the cooldown is over (currently 3 months - quite long, I know).



Moreover, your payment for failures is higher when you just joined the BAT. This is sort of a trial phase and applies to rejoiners and newcomers. We want to assure that people do not constantly drop out by doing obvious wrong things and then rejoin and keep doing it - as in disturbing the entire mechanism to work properly.



I see this entire issue more like a payment and betting your score on beatmaps. You earn more whenever being successful with your bets (nominations), but you also lose something whenever failing here. Anyways, you can surely mod the maps you nominate to avoid blind bets. Yet you have to maintain a certain activity, as we implemented a score decay in case of inactivity. Inactivity is way more punished than doing errors, so whenever you risk something, you probably lose less than doing nothing at all.



Surely you can decide to not bother with this entire business - and just stay a normal user that mods every now and then. It's up to you to decide if you want to pick up that challenge!

But we do not know what is good or what is bad! The QAT actions are way too arbitrary and hard to predict! Honestly, we are working on this. We already started to design clear and transparent criteria that shows you as member of this challenge, what the QATs are checking, what they consider as absolute no-go (usually Ranking Criteria things) and what they may let pass and may not (and especially: from what is that dependent).



Currently the Ranking Criteria only consists of hard rules and outdated guidelines. As most of the reasons behind the guidelines and rules got lost over the years, we plan to revamp all current guidelines to be more explanative and showing, why the guideline exists and what cases are "okay", what are "not okay". We will try to explain and elaborate, when the QAT will judge manually and what they will pay attention to. Surely some guideline violations may be seen as "subjective", but at least we try to tell you, with which probability this guideline violation may become an issue and especially when and why it can become an issue. We try to make it easier for you to understand what to pay attention to when a map violates a guideline and what to check in order to assure, that everything is alright. For that, we need to revamp the current Ranking Criteria and extend it a lot - and maybe add more "vague" statements into it, yet showing you on which spots the QATs are starting to judge and consult each other to find an agreement whether this beatmap is okay or not.



Please have a bit more patience here. There are so many construction sites and I wish to resolve this big issue, too.

But the QATs are disqualifying things twice, resulting in higher penalities for more people! This is an internal workflow flaw. As the QAT focuses to resolve beatmaps in the shortest time possible (as we want to avoid last-minute disqualifications), some of them started to disqualify over a metadata issue and stopped checking the beatmap for other issues. We actually planned to aim for one disqualification which files all issues that are supposed to be fixed with the current beatmap version. Surely a beatmap can be disqualified again if the requalified version has new issues which the originally qualified version did not have. But we also focus now on avoiding multiple disqualifications over issues that were all present on the originally qualified version - even across all game modes!

Where are the misunderstandings about the current system coming from? They are mostly result of two different things: the current restrictions resulting from the manual maintenance and the usage of old terms for the sake of legacy.

Honestly, naming the BAT "BAT" was a huge mistake. It was implying that the BAT is still what used to be (osu!staff, moderators, elevated people that have an opinion with higher impact, etc.) and we just started to opress the established BAT with a higher QAT, causing a huge misunderstanding. To avoid further confusion, we are also planning to changing this (see below). Moreover, using the terms "bubble" and "heart" and "bubble pop" was mostly planned to be used in order to make everyone feel way quicker familiar with the new system. Actually, it implied too much of the old system, covering the actual changes and what is connected to them.

Due to the restrictions of the manual maintenance and the lack of a proper ranking and quality criteria (which is under development for transparency), everything felt arbitrary and the BAT just felt opressed, abused, enslaved and disposable. All we try to do is open the entire qualification process to the whole community, letting everyone decide what should be nominated and what not. Anyways, you need to pass the quality revision of the QAT - which is also widely unknown - which we plan to change now. We want everyone to clearly see the path they are walking on, so nothing appears arbitrary or random.

Why can't I retire from the Beatmap Appreciation Team? This is not how the system is designed. Modding v2 implies that you unlock your abilities and lose them again in case of either inactivity or not performing sufficiently quality-wise. As you can not retire from the osu! Standard rankings and give back all your performance points, you can also not retire from the BAT and give back your BAT score and kudosu and start from 0 again. Surely, you can retire by turning inactive. You are free to stop nominating beatmaps and you can also stop modding whenever you want. You will drop out of the BAT automatically due to the loss of the BAT score. Sure, we send out warnings before that happen, but these are mostly automated and just a last reminder, so people do not forget it and are surprised whenever they suddenly lose their abilities.

But we are not accepting retirement requests as they can get easily abused. Moreover, due to the manual maintainance of the system, it increases the workload exorbitantly if we start to accept retirement requests - especially when we have more and more and more and more BATs.

What do you plan to change now? First of all, to avoid all the confusion, we will remove the red username from the BAT in forums. This surely appears like a revoke of rewards for your hard doings. Unfortunately, the red color caused too many misunderstandings about the BATs being part of the osu!staff, the BATs feeling opressed and still seperated from the userbase. We remove the color to reintegrate the BAT into the normal modding community and userbase and to make clear that you, the BATs, are normal users and that the entire system is community-driven. We will apply this changes a few days after opening this thread. Anyways, you guys will keep a forum title as reward and distinct difference within the forums. But yet the BAT is not designed as a "Team", we are removing the T from the group name, renaming you into the "Beatmap Appreciators" and everyone being named a "Beatmap Appreciator". This is to move away from old legacy terms and to make clear, that the Beatmap Appreciators are nowhere what the old BAT used to be! We will apply this changes a few days after opening this thread. We will look into rewarding the Beatmap Appreciators in other ways. A user color has been deemed as only suitable for osu!staff - and it also confuses new players. We want to communicate clearly who is an official instance of osu! and who is a volunteer helper but yet a normal user. This is very important to us, as we prefer to reward helpers with user titles and label staff members with colors, splitted into different colors for their different task fields. As we do not definitely can say what rewards we can give out, I won't make false promises - but we are definitely working on that! We will revamp the Ranking Criteria and establish a Quality Criteria that comes from the QAT. This is to ensure that every Beatmap Appreciator is aware of what the QAT is looking at and what they pay attention to. It needs to be predictable what you should pay more attention to and what is more up to your own decision. Surely, you are supposed to keep your personal standards high! Therefore, we can only give out guidelines in different grey shades for you to put into your consideration before nominating any beatmap. We will add articles for every Ranking Criteria rule and guideline and will deeply elaborate every rule and guideline with "Why is this existing?" and "Why are other cases not working?". Moreover, we want to explain the guidelines for quality and rankability in-depth with "how does this guideline work?" and "When does a map work even if a guideline got violated?". This is a bigger project and we surely will need your help for this, too. Every input for that is highly appreciated! We will change over from BAT nominations to BAT applications. We will most likely open BAT applications at the last week of every month for 7 days. This may result in a higher amount of people to check - and we will most likely implement a pre-filter in this method. But we want to remove the voting procedure entirely, as the disadvantage of not-so-social people or people with language barriers is too big. We will announce the BAT applications whenever the time has come and everything is prepared. For the current month, we will consider the newBAT votings for the last time and then switch over. We will revise the BAT rules and rewrite the documentary for you. It's outdated and rules are confusing. We also want to clarify unwritten rules that are actually wrong (e.g.: "if a map got disqualfiied, not the same Beatmap Appreciators can requalify it" - this is wrong. Everyone can requalify everything. No one cares. You just risk a payment with your BAT score yet again in case it gets disqualified again - and that is up to you to decide!)



Everything else will stay the same. Everything else will stay the same.

Hello everyone,as I noticed lately, there is a lot of misunderstandings and overall confusion of how this system is designed. I can understand that the confusion caused so far is quite severe, especially due to the fact that we moved over from a staff-driven to a community-driven modding system (I will explain this more detailed, later).I want to note that this thread, with very detailed explanations, will be translated into several languages to avoid language barrier issues. I really want you guys to fully understand the system and its current standing and why it is a bit different as it is actually designed for.Let's start:I hope I was able to explain everything properly. Now it's time to gather translations for several language communities! If you wish to help or fix my flawed English grammar, feel free to contact me and I try my best to fix it for you!Also feel free to post questions here directly into the thread or via forum PM!