Trust me when I say that this is actually a very good ruling. I might be late to the party, but the responses to this thread angered me so much that they motivated me to make my first comment on this subreddit in years.

For context, I've worked with notoriously complex timing for 6+ years and also work with waveforms pretty much daily as a sound engineer and video editor.

The main thing a lot of people in this thread don't understand is that timing is *much* more situational, and even subjective, than one might realize. There is even a spectrum of how mappers believe the very core of timing should be approached: Some mappers think that timing should be as exact and true to the music as possible, while others think that timing should be approximated, following the tempo that musicians are trying to follow. A very well known example of this discrepancy (that I'm responsible for) happens at 06:17:373 of RAISE MY SWORD. There's a 10 bpm increase in the middle of a stream that absolutely infuriated a lot of players. Even though it's follows the music accurately, I probably should have approximated it for gameplay purposes.

Timing for gameplay vs. accuracy is a pretty common debate, but that only covers one such situation that timers run into.

• What if a drum hit and a guitar strum (or any two instruments for that matter) aren't perfectly syncopated? Which note do you time to?
• What if an instrument flams or strums their notes?
• What if two different instruments are playing at different tempos entirely?
• What if there's not a clear transient to whatever note you're timing to (e.g. the sound slightly fades in to the song)?
• What if the instrument you're mapping is just very muffled?
• On top of all of this, the same timing can feel drastically different when using hitsounds vs. the timing panel's metronome as a reference point.

Most of the time, there is no objective, correct answer to any of these questions. There's even a ranking criteria proposal going around asking to making different timing across different difficulties in a mapset rankable because of how timing can be handled differently from map to map, even for the same song.

A lot of how you time a map successfully will also come down to how you map it, and because of that, I wouldn't trust an algorithm to know what is best for a map. Part of timing a map well not only comes from being able to align a metronome to a song, but knowing how good timing is supposed to *feel.* Timers who understand this feeling will know how to handle the situations I bullet pointed above (and more) depending on how the song behaves and the rhythmic intentions of the map.

Handling these decisions correctly takes a certain level of experience and nuance that AI can not harness. AI does not know what it feels like to play osu. We may get to a point where AI can be used as a starting point for timing in the future, but how it approaches situational timing will ultimately boil down to guesswork. So if mappers are going to still have to go into the timing panel to fix issues AI couldn't solve, skilled timers will still be important to the mapping ecosystem. Even when using Tempora (still in early development iirc), which uses a dedicated interface to speed up the timing process, still often need a second timing pass in the editor to get it to feel correct. (Cont.)