Ability to use any difficulty in multiplayer

[awesomecuber]

Timeshift currently has the player select a single difficulty when creating a timeshift. This arbitrarily limits the skill range of players which can enjoy the match. For example, if someone creates a timeshift with an easy/normal difficulty, only low rank players will want to compete. If some picks an expert difficulty, only skilled players will be able to compete. In addition, for easy difficulties, it can be possible for players to SS the map with all difficulty increasing mods activated, leading to a spinning competition.

Describe the new feature:
Here's what would be different if this were implemented:

• Rather than picking a difficulty in the "Select beatmap" screen when creating a new timeshift room, you would pick a mapset. There's still value in displaying each difficulty under the mapset, as you could see the star rating and who mapped what difficulty. But rather than clicking on the difficulty to pick the map, the user would click on the mapset. The ruleset would obviously be decided by the ruleset selected (in the top toolbar).
• In the room, there would be some way to pick the difficulty. I'm not decided on the best way to do this, maybe open a song select screen with only the one mapset when pressing the "Start" button.
• Scoring! Obviously with a fixed one million cap, players interested in winning would simply pick the easiest difficulty, which is quite boring. To fix this, the leaderboards in the timeshift rooms should be ordered by PP (which ideally is just star rating multiplied by score).

For the record, I also think being able to select any difficulty is a good idea for a more traditional multi like in stable.

[peppy]

Definitely something we hope to add.

[iSimpFor]

i suggest instead of using pp, we divide the score by star rating of difficulty played and divide star rating of difficulty played by highest difficulty played in the room so we get a representation of skill level of the mapset so the person who get a perfect on the highest diff gets a 1,000,000 and the other person who played the lower diff gets a lower score

[bdach]

Expanding this issue in scope to include the duplicate.

[anastasia-v-r]

Any update as to what would need to be added to make this happen?

[peppy]

It requires someone to implement it.

[kimjosephdo]

Discussing a bit with peppy on Discord, there's a lot of considerations that need to be sorted out before implementing this feature:

1. How would the multiplayer UI/UX change?
   a. How do the players select the "free-difficulty option"?
   b. How does this show up on the selected map?
   c. How do players choose their difficulties?
   d. How do we add the setting for the host to enable/disable this feature?
2. How are start/end time discrepancies addressed?
3. How does the client-server communication protocol change?
4. What spectator logic changes need to be made?

[mazinouruk]

Really feel like this is important to implement because this is a way for older players to bring newer players into the game. If someone plays a 5 star with a new player, they are going to be demotivated.

1: For the UI / UX, I just feel like before entering a song, you choose a difficulty when readying up. You could also move the freemod menu there too as people can choose mods while readying up. This should allow for people to delete the map before starting if that level does not have a lower difficulty or matching difficulty, etc. For where you could select it, add it to the menu where you make the lobby and have it on by default. Speaking of, why is freemod not on by default?

1b: It doesn't really have to show up on the selected map in my opinion. Even if the leaderboard shows the higher difficulty have a lower score, people playing together would know that someone would be doing something harder. If really necessary, you could put the star difficulty next to the score.

2: This, I am not sure of but having a little bit of dead time could be okay. Even other multiplayer rhythm arcade games like maimai have some dead times where one player just does a slider while the other person does a trill or some harder pattern. If really severe, it would just be like someone queuing up a troll map (like the whole shrek movie) in multiplayer. People just exit and requeue.

Not sure about the rest but I feel like this issue is really important to bring up. Especially since (in my opinion) osu!lazer has a more modern look, having multiplayer with different difficulties could really attract newer players to play and make multiplayer more open to everybody. Instead of having 5-6* only lobbies, people with lower or higher skill level could still join.

[peppy]

This is coming soon, see #31260.