# Progression

The fifth major topic in mapping is spread progression.

# Definition

Spread progression can be defined as: the idea that singular difficulty increments (e.g. normal to hard or insane to extra) should scale appropriately in regards to rhythm, contrast, and emphasis.

# Spread? What is that?

This isn't a term necessarily bound to one difficulty, but a concept that takes into consideration of the bigger picture of the entire mapset. This concept has one assumption, however, that the mapset is bounded by the ranking criteria rules to have at least one difficulty.

In most cases, following the rules to create difficulties will be just fine, and so spread progression will not be in issue for a lot of mapsets. Yet, this concept is still important for every mapper to know. As defined above, each difficulty should scale at an appropriate rate from the next. One difficulty may have small jumps at 180BPM (let's say a quarter of the playfield), but the following difficulty should not feature cross screen jumps at 180BPM.

Consider a target audience that can play the easier difficulty of the jumps at 180BPM. They will play the map, maybe full combo or at least pass the map with a decent score. They might try out the next difficulty, but they also don't know that one difficulty higher has cross screen jumps that are way out of their skill level. They will play the map and most likely fail.

Scaling the difficulties should (in theory) be hard enough such that the target audience from the preceding difficulty will struggle, but not complete be out-skilled.

# Proper Difficulty Scaling

Properly scaling each difficulty depends on one main factor: context. The star rating of a map should never be taken into consideration when judging how well your mapset's spread progression. Since we don't have the star rating calculation, it will not judge many things properly.

Take a look at the difficulty in question you want to map after it (like if you want to map an insane, take a look at the hard). Understand the rhythm that the difficulty is using and understand the type of emphasis used and how much. Use your judgement to now appropriately scale the difficulty and map accordingly. Ask yourself, who is the target audience, and can they reasonably jump from the previous difficulty to the next one? If the answer is no, evaluate why and adjust.

As a last resort, try asking the target audience if they can testplay your difficulty if you aren't sure at all and gather their opinions.