Most of us know what halftime is, some of us are guilty of using it. It is the easymode of osu; Infamously used for songs that take a lot of effort to FC, which people do not want to apply. Thus, their saviour, HalfTime!

Commonly half-timed songs are Vivid, Marisa, Kanbu, Polka Power, Hardware Store, Agony, and the likes. If you take a look at the score board for most of these songs, 50% of the scores are half-timed.

Some people will say "Half-time is available to all to use." This is true, however some people take pride in their ability and would like to see where they fall in the rankings when compared to other players (ie. the scoreboard) However when the scoreboard is cluttered with difficulty decreasing mods, there is no accurate comparison. There's always "Hey, I'm in 7th place! First place unmodded!" But the joy of being in 7th doesn't compare to that of being in first. 7th place put in more effort to get their score, yet they stay in 7th because they did not take the easy way out.

Let's do some math:

Nofail mod: .5 multiplyer.
This is balanced. If a player needs the nofail mod, this means they cannot full combo the song. They can still claim a place on the score board since they will actually pass the song, yet they'll be nowhere near the top positions.

Easy mod: .5 multiplyer.
Similar to the nofail mod, yet with a slight advantage. Songs that cannot be FC'd without this mod can still be FCed with easy mod, to some people. This could deserve a slight nerf too, since it is not completely balanced with nofail, but that is offtopic and completely a different story. This mod does not bother me.

HalfTime mod: .6 multiplyer.
This bastard, like I've said, is the savior to many people when point farming or when wanting to claim a few #1 spots. By far the most imbalanced of all of the difficulty decreasing mods, as fast songs with a lot of beats that are nearly impossible to FC modless can EASILY be FC'd, S'd, even SS'd with this mod. However, it remains the highest multiplyer of them all.

I'll give you a few examples now:
Weird Al Yankovic - Polka Power [nearly impossible]
4:13 length. 534 hit circles, 201 sliders, 18 spinners. Max score (nomod) roughly 19mil.
Positions 1-4 of this song are all half-timed, 5th place being the highest unmodded score @ 3.2mil (tormentor_84). First place in this song is Kai with 11m, half timed of course. See the imbalance?

IOSYS - Kanbu etc etc (overdrive) [hard]
2:53 length. 200 BPM. 513 hit circles. 158 sliders. 0 spinners. Max score (nomod) roughly 21m.
Position 1, 3, 4, and 5 are half timed. First place sits at 6.8m (bia), and second 4.1m (rolled) Have you played overdrive? It's freaking nuts, even on half time. However it is still a hell of a lot easier on half time, and I've played this like 200 times to achieve my 4.1m...
/me looks
Okay, Bia has played this ~240 times. But there is just a difference in skill between us two. Not meant to offend you Bia, but regardless of how many times you've played this, a real-time score does not deserve 2nd place to a half timed score.

Anyways, on to the poll. There are three options here. One being to leave the half time mod as is, one reducing the multiplyer to .2-.3 (will be decided later), and the third being to unrank it altogether. (Back to Polka Power, if the multiplyer was .3, the highest half timed score (FC) would be ~5.7mil. If .2, 3.8 would be the highest score. Remember 3.2 is currently the highest unmodded score)

Feel free to post any comments you have about the issue, and please vote in the poll.

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This map has been deleted on the request of its creator. It is no longer available.

I think that my opinion represents people like Bia.

I see Rolled's current #2 spot on Kanbu and I think that it belongs on #2. When non-osu! players come to my house and ask me what Osu! is, and to see a hard song... I ALWAYS show Rolled's replay of Kanbu. It's far more impressive than a half-timed replay. But does it deserve the number one score ?

In my opinion... If the #1 score matters to you more than your skills, use Half Time so you can full combo it. It's clearly an incredibly difficult song. Even with Half Time, Bia was unable to full combo it. No one has been able to. I think making Half-Time unranked makes, in effect, some songs impossible to score well on. No one will play the songs anymore. Bia decided to make the song fun to play by putting Half Time AND Flashlight on. That's a tough challenge, and I feel that he deserves the score he received for that.

Rolled's score shows that he is the better player because he did not play with the Half Time mod. I think that should be pleasing enough for him. Does he really need the recognition of being the number one player ? If he wanted that, he could have done Half Time himself.

Half Time allows players who are not as good as Rolled to still succeed in incredibly tough maps that are almost impossible in full time, and, for some, impossible even in Half Time.

Ever since Half Time was released as a mod, it has been 0.60x. Why was that number introduced in the first place ? I do not think it was a mistake. It was released before I joined Osu!, and has been around since the eleventh of March, this year. That is nearly seven months. Why should months of scores be changed or erased ? It is too late to change them now.

When Flashlight scores were deleted, it was different because it was over a time period of one day. Half Time has been out for far longer, and hundreds, maybe even a thousand or more scores would have to be completely destroyed.

Rolled wrote:

"Bia is fucked"

Is that fair ? To take someone's score away like that, after they worked for it ? It was not easy for Bia to do what he did to get the #1 score.

Rolled wrote:

It is the easymode of osu; Infamously used for songs that take a lot of effort to FC, which people do not want to apply.

If Half Time is unranked, why even have the mod ? I don't think it's 'fun' to play on Half Time. People will just not play the harder difficulty songs like Kanbu and Crazy Motorcycle Chase. I can't pass CMC on full time. Most people can't. But I can get some credit for doing it on Half Time. There are several songs like this. I don't consider myself a bad player, but CMC is just too difficult. So I should never play it again ?

I think a reasonable change would be a 0.5 multiplier. Half time, half score. Makes sense. Goes with the other difficulty-reducing mods (Easy, NoFail).

Deleting scores would hurt many players. I hope that it is possible to simply give them the new multiplier effect. Preferably 0.5x.

LuigiHann wrote:

I think Half-Time is a great practice mod, but I don't see why it shouldn't be unranked.

I think it's a terrible practice mod. It will just hold the player back.

For example, if you played a song on Double Time several times and repeatedly failed, and started getting further and further into the song... You would probably be able to full combo it after reducing the difficulty back to full time. That is a good way to practice.

Half Time has the opposite effect.

If you make it slower, it becomes easier to comprehend, and if you use this as practice enough, you'll be able to comprehend it better once you speed it up. Similar scenarios include Guitar Hero/Rock band practice mode. In these cases, speeding the song up will only make you faster, not help you to read it so much.

you wont learn anything in half time, youll know where circles are placed, but you still wont get to hit them precisely at normal speed. and you can learn the placement of notes in edit mode too.

imo half time is just for score-whores who like to get a high score on a really hard to FC songs.

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Half Time can only show you hit circle placement.

This map has been deleted on the request of its creator. It is no longer available.

hmm nobody seems willing to see it by point of view....

Just so you know, I in no way support leaving it as is.

I agree with Cyclone.

I'm for 0.4x multiplier.

And I was thinking that we should make something about "Easy", because it's quite unused due to the "increase" of difficulty.
In better words: lots of maps with easy are a mess of beats overlapped one on another and it's quite confusing.
Maybe it should be a little less "Easy".
Can I know what does it exactly do?

tl;dr, but i got the idea.

I'm not for unranking, but yes to decreasing multiplier.

Card N'FoRcE wrote:

I'm for 0.4x multiplier.

And I was thinking that we should make something about "Easy", because it's quite unused due to the "increase" of difficulty.
In better words: lots of maps with easy are a mess of beats overlapped one on another and it's quite confusing.
Maybe it should be a little less "Easy".
Can I know what does it exactly do?

IIRC, Easy allows one "revive" during the song, bigger hitcircles, which appear earlier than usual, and slower Ki bar drain.

And I'm for reducing the multiplier.

I support .4 multiplier

not worth an unrank

Is it possible to retroactively change scores?

If not, why not?

The score data does not store when each note was hit, so it's impossible to take the combo multiplier into account.

Also iirc not all scores have replay data saved online so you can't just run through each replay either.

I go for decrease multiplier, not unranked.

unranked, seriously.

.01

in case an impossibly hard song with low HP drain kills your accuracy

i think easy should increase to .6 and halftime to .3-.4,since easy mod is not as easy as halftime...i should kno cause im not the best player lol