This is a snippet of my conversation with Zetera, the only person within osu! to have the "Medal Hunter" user title.
Zetera
I'm Zetera from Germany, I'm 24 years old and have been part of osu! for half my life. I am an ex-moderator, on-and-off contest judge, world cup commentator and a huge beatmapping nerd. And, I suppose, also a medal hunter. At the time of writing this, I'm in possession of roughly 90% of all medals. I hadn't really thought of going for the achievements I got until pretty recently. It must have been one of my friends who pointed out to me that I hadn't even tried getting any of the beatmap pack medals, which, back in the day, took up this huge amount of space with hand-drawn graphic designs (if you had the achievements) and otherwise there'd be equally huge boxes with question marks in them iirc. That was kind of an eye-sore, and so I made sure to get them. This must have been at a time when the new website was already a thing, but not in regular use (people back then were really attached to the old). Some time after that, new medals came in very soon and the habit of finding all the hush-hushs was built.
Zetera
So, looking back at what we did as a group, I actually have to correct you slightly. There were two halloween achievement batches, one in 2017 that contained 8 achievements, including The Girl in the Forest, and one in 2018 that contained 12 achievements, and that batch of 12 was the one that got us together as a group. However, I can't help but feel that the first batch of achievements was also some sort of group effort. It's very possible that back then I collaborated with some of the people from the original group in osu! DMs or something, because thinking back to how you actually got the achievements from the first batch, I don't think I would have figured all of them out on my own. The achievements sure stirred up some discussions in #osu as well, which meant that there was plenty of room for collaboration. Either way, only The Girl in the Forest would remain untouched for about another week.
0x84f
I was referring to only the 1st batch when talking about halloween, but good to know
Zetera
So overall, I attained the medal 6 days after the release. Obviously I didn't use every waking moment to find all of the achievements they released in 2017, but seeing as how all the other medals were found on the same day or the day after, it's safe to say that a lot more effort went into figuring out what Girl in the Forest could mean.
Nowadays, we in the osu! Medal Hunter Discord have a pretty good understanding of how medals work. They can be on consecutive beatmaps, can require certain accuracies, combos, plays on all difficulties of a set, etc. But back then, getting a new batch of achievements was basically uncharted territory and none of the work that has been put in by the very dedicated medals community was even on the board at all, which made it very hard to gauge just how precise the requirements for any achievement would be. What also didn't really help in finding the achievement in question was the fact that some other medals of that time were based on simply passing the map of a certain song, and other being so arbitrary that you could just get them without trying. Girl in the Forest was a bit opf a different story.
Zetera
Every medal has some flavour text to go along the actual title. If you hover over The Girl in the Forest, it'll display hints that make things more clear, e.g. the mention of the colours red and blue, which allude to the respective pokemon titles. However, that flavour text was changed multiple times over the years, as the first hints for each medal were originally released on the news post announcing the halloween update: https://osu.ppy.sh/home/news/2017-10-31-halloween-descends. These hints would be the first flavour texts for each of these medals, and so the hint for The Girl in the Forest was actually "First Generation in more than one ways". That... just isn't a whole lot to go off of. Sure, knowing that this medal is pokemon related should give you a pretty good clue, however, that just wasn't the case first. "First Generation" rang a lot more bells than just pokemon. It could have been related to the first generation of influential mappers, which is a pretty vague statement in itself, there was a red herring on the news post showing discord integration features being implemented for the first time, where ephemeral hosted a multiplayer lobby for the map For a Dead Girl+, and out of all the design choices for the entire batch, the name, image, and clue attached simply were not on par with concise messages such as "true torment", "classic pursuit", or "multiply those beats".
Zetera
So, where did it take the hive mind of players? A good instinct was first to check for any song that had "girl" or "forest" in its name. What also arose from observing the batch of medals was the fact that all of them were only obtainable on songs by featured artists, which was also confirmed by higher-ups to be a vital restriction to almost all of the medals, at least if they were themed after some sort of song. Maps such as Magic Girl or Forest Haze came to mind, but people quickly caught on that it could have to do with Takuya's set of S3RL's Pika Girl. Now, having a candidate for a beatmap is one thing, but finding the criteria for the actual achievement is another can of worms. Achievements mostly have you play a map with a mod, or has you FC the map in question, but none of those approaches would work, and thus you'd ask yourself what the limitations of score detection are. It is unlikely that the game checks for the exact object you didn't hit with perfect accuracy, or that it checks when exactly you lost that full combo (think chokes and reverse chokes), and so options were sort of limited to max combo, accuracy, counts of 300s, 100s, 50s and misses, playing in different game modes, and a few other things.
Zetera
My first instinct is to always try and set a double S on a map, with at least one mod, to rule out full combo or accuracy criteria right away, but that was the wrong approach. this was something that really stuck with me though, and I extended my efforts to SSing a difficulty in every gamemode. This turned out to be too tough, and it was at around this time that I reached out to ephemeral to ask for some advice. Instead of giving me any, though, he would go on to release the elusive hunt for the medal. In his post, he revealed some things that the game checks for, which roughly matched anyone's idea of what the game could do. It did however rule out the fact that you'd have to play more than one difficulty. That revelation obviously ruined my plans of playing all gamemodes consecutively, so I had to go back to the drawing board and just work with what was said in that article.
Zetera
The fact that so many factors were in play, and with ephemeral's reassurance that some of the medals would be as difficult to obtain as "Equilibrium", which has you score equal 300s, 100s, and 50s, was pretty intimidating. But it also makes you think that you missed very obvious details. If you were looking for the medal, you would be prompted to think outside the box, and after roughly 5 hours of trial and error, and a decent descent into madness, it occured to me that you could try matching combo or accuracy with numbers that were relevant to the first generation of pokemon games. I first tried to make the accuracy match with the release date of the game, but setting a score in the 19% accuracy range doesn't work on that map, as the HP drain would be way too high. And then I asked myself how many pokemon there are in the first generation of games. Hm, 151. Sounded like I should go for this many 300s, 100s, 50s, misses, or combo. And at more than 900 full combo, only 100s and combo made sense, so I played the map a couple of times and with the help of the editor, I figured out I'd have to miss the last circle of a stacked triplet, and then maintain low combo to end up with a 151x as the final score. And sure enough, I got the achievement. I lost no time and went straight ahead to open a PM to ephemeral to tell him the criteria: https://i.imgur.com/An27P9C.png
Not long after did I receive my user title.
Zetera
User titles and I are a complicated topic. It's not really part of this interview's topic, but I did a lot of different things for the community, in the hopes of leaving a mark somehwere. I became a global moderator for 3 years, hosted a tournament, commentated in a few world cups, made custom maps for tournaments, was in the select few to help kickstart moddingv2 and the loved section, was a mapping mentor and will be returning to that this year, helped with judging mapping contests, and of course participated in a lot of those, because if there was something I wanted more than anything else, it was the Elite Mapper title. To this day I'm really envious of those that were able to achieve this prestigious title, and it's only become more and more difficult to get there. Resulting from both my efforts in the community and the many failed attempts at getting the elite mapper title, I was happy to get any user title at all. So, of course I felt elated when I actually won, but to be perfectly honest, if I had the choice, I would always elect to be an elite mapper over being a medal hunter. Besides that, there are people in this community that deserve my user title a lot more than myself, and I strongly hope that staff considers giving out more of my title to those who actually deserve it. Even if it's just through means of competition like it was done with The Girl in the Forest, it would give the title more relevance and prestige. Heck, I keep dropping out of the 90% medals club myself.
0x84f
i read all of this and these are really good answers im gonna process everything that you wrote and most likely put it together next week
Zetera
Alright! If there's anything else you need, just let me know.
UPDATE POST-PR
Zetera Hey, thanks for writing this up! Here's my feedback... You wrote influantial mappers when it should be influential mappers And I did say boxes with question marks for the unattained achievements back on the old website, but it was actually these traffic sign like restrictive graphics all the time, I don't think there ever were question marks and it just goes to show how bad my memory is hahaha
[...] Zetera If you'd like to, you can also add that I was the head of the modern standard spotlight team for the first two seasons I might have forgot to mention that Other than that I just want to voice how honoured I feel to have a news article about me, it means a lot to me
0x84f no worries, I thought it would make a good story