Thoughts on Vetoes & Quality Control
I’ve been following the situation surrounding deetz’ worldenddominator veto with considerable interest ever since I was made aware of it.
I like deetz’ maps. He’s an early MG member and I’ve had the unique privilege of watching a lot of his work develop, and he seems to be the complete opposite type of creator to the one I’d expect to get nicked by a veto.
With that out of the way, here’s a break down of what was so surprising about it to me personally:
The absence of nuance
Vetoes exist to allow the Nominators to exert a hard stop on maps that are communally believed to be “not suitable” as decided by the mapping/modding scene.
In the best case scenario, this manifests as vetoes on maps like My Movie, where the flaunting of these unspoken standards is obvious and its outcome destructive if left unchecked. In the worst case scenario, we end up with worldenddominator, where a relatively trivial disagreement over design has brought an otherwise complete set to a halt.
Indeed, vetoes are reskinned nukes supported by random votes. As proven by the presence of the now-infamous Eighth Nominator’s comments published by the mediation process, this is patently unreliable and worse still, subject to no attempt at collation or refinement by the NAT before it is published.
This means that mediation essentially drops a mishmash of feedback at a mapper’s feet, sometimes with each person in mediation addressing completely different points with entirely different solutions. The system currently makes zero effort to tie all that feedback together into something usable.
To put this in GitHub terms, it is akin to being given a review for a pull-request with eight suggestions on the same paragraph. Three of them are saying the same thing, one is somewhere else entirely, another is aghast that anyone would write a paragraph like this to begin with and the rest of them don’t even know why they’re here in the first place.
If vetoes are so bad, why keep them around?
Because they need to be around.
Despite what happened to worldenddominator, vetoes are an important tool in the BN/NAT’s arsenal to defend the “unspoken” standards that exist in parallel to the Ranking Criteria that keep things sane. Without them, the gates are wide open for Ranked to be filled with mapper in-jokes that are neither fun or interesting to play.
And as some less savoury elements of the osu!taiko community has widely demonstrated in recent months, if you give people enough leeway to do this even once, they will do it over and over again just for the sake of it.
The Ranking Criteria can’t deal with these flagrant abuses of such unspoken standards fairly. We already have people argue against their own 20 minute creations being considered as “low effort” under the false veneer of “I spent a really long time on mapping these 31 seconds of Harumachi Clover and it is offensive that you call it low effort”, so clearly tying up the BN and NAT in more RC-based tangles is not the way to go.
Some “executive oversight” has to exist in this capacity, and it has to be unbound by rigid rules in order to function fluidly. That’s just a compromise we have to live with.
Okay, well, vetoes are here to stay, so what’s the problem?
The chief problem in all of this is the “softening” of vetoes for general use.
Cheri’s dislike of the hitsounding design in worldenddominator should have been left precisely there - as a personal qualm and not a “flaw that must be addressed”.
Vetoes should be exercised only in the most blatant shortfalls or game-breaking design problems in a map, and in this author’s humble opinion, the issues laid out in worldenddomination were neither of those things.
It is okay to dislike maps and the techniques they use to achieve their given outcome, and this is a perfectly ordinary part of osu! having an extremely broad swathe of artistic creators and creations in its midst. It is not okay to wield one’s entrusted privilege as a tool to penalize these dislikes. This distinction is fairly obvious, but one that the mapping/modding scene seems to struggle with in general.
I think it should go without saying, but it is also okay for maps to deviate from the established “modern” mapping standards as well, so long as they remain broadly in line with the Ranking Criteria as a whole.
Beatmap Nominators exist to assess a map’s adherence to said criteria and at best, to offer bits of their own expertise as suggestions to improve a given set at the mapper’s discretion. They do NOT exist to enforce their personal standards of what is and isn’t quality upon the broader playerbase by wielding the tools given to them like a judge bearing their gavel.
Mediation was an attempt to prevent the singular wielding of said gavel by forcing a bunch of BNs to hold it all together, but as evidenced by worldenddominator, that hasn’t really worked out due to a grave misunderstanding of what vetoes are supposed to represent.
So where do we go from here?
The solutions (in my eyes) are thus:
- Vetoes should not be used unless not doing so poses grave, irreconcilable issues to gameplay or the general standards of what is expected from the Ranked category. Vetoes are the nuclear option, albeit an important one. They should be reserved for situations where there are untenable issues that severely degrade the gameplay experience are present in a map. The merit of individual mapping design elements should be left to the people playing the maps.
- Rework mediation to produce meaningful feedback. Mediation as it currently stands, is essentially worthless. The NAT must take up a place in the process as the group that parses the feedback given by the attending nominators into a cohesive, singular whole that can be addressed in order to proceed with the set. If a singular unit of feedback cannot be made from the mediation consensus, it must be discarded and the map allowed to continue.