The Critic’s Guild: A Hub For Quality Mapping Feedback
Do you want to give feedback on other people’s maps? Do you want to learn to give better feedback? Do you want to be recognised for your contributions? Are you a mapper seeking experienced and detailed feedback on your own maps? For example to get verified or to get your maps ranked?
Making Beat Saber maps has a lot of science and a lot of art to it. Having a healthy community of feedback is really valuable for both of these. Moreover, understanding and giving feedback on other people’s maps is one of the best ways to improve your own mapping. Unfortunately, the feedback structures in the Beat Saber custom map community have always been quite divided, a bit hard to access for some people, and not that well recognised. Dedicated feedback givers like testplayers, ranking team members, or verifiers, often feel overwhelmed by the amount of mappers wanting feedback and little recognition for their efforts.
In the Beat Saber mapping Discord we are trying to give a boost to this through a community approach. In order to have more good feedback, we need more people giving good feedback. The Critic’s Guild aims to have incentive structures that reward and recognise people who give good feedback, and democratic opportunities for everybody to get high quality feedback, as well as discussions around what is good feedback and improving the practice of mapping across the community.
To join the Critic’s Guild you only need to have Mapper or Lighter role in the Beat Saber Mapping Discord server, obtained just by having published one manually mapped map or light show. Just show up, pick up a feedback request in the open list and share your thoughts. Everybody with a constructive attitude is welcome. With gamification elements, we recognise and reward people who give (good) feedback to others, enabling them to make more committed requests for more detailed feedback by more experienced members of the community. Moreover, upvote and star leaderboards will be shared every so often to celebrate the strongest contributors to the community. All of this is a means to the primary end of improving feedback structures, and in no way aims to displace or look down on existing feedback structures, which are also recognised within the Critic’s Guild.
Not sure that you’re giving good feedback? Feedback about feedback is also available and encouraged in the Critic’s Guild, helping less experienced feedback givers become more confident in their critiques of other people’s maps, and helping establish good standards of what constitutes good feedback.
No matter what your taste in maps is, if you are trying to make maps better, you are welcome in the Critic’s Guild.