Announcing Ranking V3

After a hard month of development and long 15 hour workdays, we're proud to announce the new ranking system we've been working on.

Why

With OrangeW stepping down as head admin for ScoreSaber we didn't want to just assign a new admin to replace him, it was obvious that his workload was far too much for just one single person, realising this, it meant that we had a prime opportunity to completely rework the ranking system.

The Goal

Our goal with this system is simple, maximizing map quality, while still retaining the principles of fairness and objectivity that the ranking system was built upon.

The goal is to prioritize maps of quality in the queue, favouring songs that haven't been mapped in a short amount of time, without playtests, care for feedback or purely rankability in mind.

Hopefully, with these new principles in mind, this can influence the mapping meta to make mappers take more care in their maps.

What's new

Quality Assurance Team (QAT)

The Quality Assurance Team is a group of specialized players (see What we are looking for in a ranking member below) who play through the ranking queue and vote on maps that are of high quality. At the end of each week, the head of the QAT (oddloop) will prioritize maps in the queue based on the votes and the age of the request. Feedback should be given to the mapper if the QAT deems the map to be of "low quality", the mapper doesn't have to change the map in order for it to get ranked (unless something is unrankable), but it will have a lower priority, the map will eventually rise based on how long it has spent in the queue to prevent it from being buried.

Nomination Assessment Team (NAT)

The guys who press the buttons and keep everyone in check. They can qualify and deny rank requests and moderate the QAT as well as the Ranking Team to ensure there is no bias or abuse of the system. The NAT will also approve of the weekly restructure to the ranking queue done by the QAT admin, and approve of any changes the CAT make to the criteria.

Criteria Assurance Team (CAT)

CATs will be in charge of maintaining the criteria, and are also, essentially our writers. Any change the CAT makes to the criteria has to be approved by the NAT and the Admins.

What we are looking for in a QAT member

• There is no rank requirement, due to the fact all difficulties of a map should be judged. 
• Has a wide range of taste in music & maps.
• Willing to listen and understand the mappers' vision of how the map should be played. 
• Understands if a map has had time and effort has been put in, with attempts to innovate, then that should also be recognized and taken into account while playing and discussing. 
• Understand how to give appropriate feedback on a map's playability. 
• No bias in any form (Mapping styles, music genres, mapper, etc). 

Ranking Team (RT) 

The ranking team will now be limited to voting only on the top 3 maps in the ranking queue, this number is subject to change. Every map below the top 3  is subject to reshuffling by the QAT, but once the map reaches the ranking team, they're locked in place.

Admins

The admins are technically part of every team, press the big rank button and generally oversee everything, right now, this job is limited to Umbranox (Umby) and AFriendlyPug.

The Tech

Obviously with all of these large changes the tech had to be rewritten from the ground up, and with that means that features can be added/tweaked far easier as the ranking system has been moved to the recode of the ScoreSaber website here. Lots of new creature comforts have been added for the new teams, which will boost productivity by a huge amount.

These changes are taking effect immediately, please remember, the ranking system is always evolving, and if we find anything that doesn't work adjustments can always be made, but I'm sure this'll do nothing but improve things for the future of competitive Beat Saber.