Section Popular in Quick Access
When you enter Quick Access in the Music Library, there is now a section Popular, right on top, with three collections of beatmaps:
Played by Most Players
The beatmaps played by most other players. Those are the ones you want to go to to compete on the leaderboards. But be sure to pick one with a difficulty that will be entertaining for you. The first few are very easy and might be quite boring for more advanced players. But there are few around difficulty 5 to 6 that should still be fun for most.
Best Challenge for You
This one may not give you any maps, yet. It uses the ratings for gameplay, to avoid maps that just don't have fun gameplay, but also filters with a very rough heuristic based on your current skill level, and the skill level of other players multiplied with their challenge ratings. This will become more useful the more people actually play different beatmaps with varying difficulty levels and rate them.
Also, eventually, it will filter by the weapon and play style. It doesn't do that, yet, so you may get maps for shooting that aren't really that great for shooting.
Best Gameplay
This one just filters by the gameplay rating, so it should give you a larger variety of different maps with different difficulty levels.
Both, Best Challenge for You and Best Gameplay currently also filter by players that have actually played the map. The minimum there is three, so if you are the only person that played and rated a map, it won't show up, here ... yet. This whole area will improve over time.
Photosensitivity Comfort Setting
Arena Selection Area: Made the bright yellow snare dark orange, and also increased the minimum distance of all these items to reduce stress when there is photosensitivity. You can disable the particle effects altogether but in order to be able to do that, you first have to active the settings (via pause, by pressing the A/X/Menu key for a second), enter "Comfort" and disable flashing. This also disables quite a few other things that were flashing in the game - but I'm not sure I caught everything. But this should already make a huge difference. If you are photosensitive (i.e. if you get headaches or worse from flashing lights), you should also disable the particle effects in the performance settings because these effects also tend to "flash".
Patch Notes in Detail
- Major Refactoring and Cleanup on the Server. In fact, the server just moved to a different provider with this update.
- Beatmap Info: Fixed issue that sometimes, both the leaderboard and the web-based beatmap info would show up ... at the same time.
- Fixed Bug: Procedural Maps would cause trouble when saving the Beatmap to the Server
- Finetune Gameplay: Finally added option "Allow Catching Orbs with your Head" that you can disable if you'd rather not accidentally catch orbs or drops with your head. This is on by default because that was the behaviour we had all along. But now, you can also switch it off. But keep in mind that catching orbs with your head can also give you a decent bonus.
- Photosensitivity Comfort Setting ("likes flashes disabled"): Arena Selection Area: Made the bright yellow snare dark orange, and also increased the minimum distance of all these items to reduce stress when there is photosensitivity. You can disable the particle effects altogether but in order to be able to do that, you first have to active the settings (via pause, by pressing the A/X/Menu key for a second), enter "Comfort" and disable flashing. This also disables quite a few other things that were flashing in the game - but I'm not sure I caught everything. But this should already make a huge difference. If you are photosensitive (i.e. if you get headaches or worse from flashing lights), you should also disable the particle effects in the performance settings because these effects also tend to "flash".
- Quick Access: New section Popular, with lets you browser the most played beatmaps, as well as a very early prototype of rating-based recommendations. These do not take into account your playstyle, yet, so especially the gameplay ratings might be very off. But it's a start. This currently gets updated when you click the "Quick Access" button, and due to the system not having a lot of ratings, yet, songs that you have just rated may shop up immediately - if they were played by a minimum of three players.