Hi

I've been hooked on this game since last year, I went from failing Normal maps to S-ranking various insane songs. Over the past year I've noticed steady improvement, maybe I'd go back to a song I couldn't complete before and suddenly I'd be finding it easy. But recently I seem to have just stopped improving.

I have 17000 plays (most likely from spamming the retry button like mad). I find that my biggest problem so far is that while my brain can follow most of the notes in insane songs, my hand decides it's had enough and refuses to click accurately. I'd get maybe 600/800 combos every time on a song and then either forget to press Z/X or miss by a millimetre, or have my heart rate jump up like crazy and miss beats randomly. Or during those really nasty slow streams which zigzag all over the screen...

Is anyone else stuck in terms of skill level? It feels like I'm just throwing myself repeatedly at a song until I S-rank it, and then I play the song again and I end up failing the song the next day..

Stop caring about FC/combo, play stuff on the peak of your reading level even if their execution is completely impossible for you, try your best on them. Spend enough time on this and once you go back to the regular stuff you played you'll once again get this effect of "hey wtf, this map used to be hard, why does it feel like an [Easy] now".

There is no skill plateau, you just need to find harder stuff to challenge yourself on to push forward at a faster rate. You were improving fast/steady earlier because you could always find harder maps in the rankings to challenge yourself on, but if you can already do well on ranked Insanes then to keep improving steadily you'll have to look for (more-)challenging unapproved maps. So take a shovel and go grave digging~

I'm guessing I should be searching the approved/pending maps? I've been playing ranked mostly.

I think I'm able to follow most songs at this point, but like you said, execution is horrifyingly impossible for me, so I'd repeatedly fail in the first 10 seconds of the song even though I know exactly what to click...

If you feel as if you can't get better, play harder maps. Halftime/nofail if you have to, just grind on harder maps and you WILL learn how to play them.

I've felt that I can't get better ever since whenever. It happens often \o\

i always feel like im stuck on a skill plateau, but then i play a map i couldnt fc earlier and i fc it without too much trouble so i realize i actually am still getting better.

play maps that you can barely pass for a couple hours a day trying your hardest and concentrating = win

Once upon a time, I played a map 200 times and I fail always. 2 weeks later, I almost FCed it.

There simply is no way around having such a learning curve:

You can always try different playstyles though and see if your plateau is going to be higher.
I profited a lot from:
Mouse + accel -> Tablet with small area and tapping -> Tablet with full area and keyboard only (except for certain parts)

Please note that "playstyles" also is about how you try to read maps or try to move your hand. It might help if you try focusing on each hitcircle seperately, dim the background, get minimalist skins and try to move in straight lines.

Reducing the DPI of my mouse helped a lot. See if you can improve your setup and posture, as well as how you hold your mouse, in a way which gives you more control. It helps.

<-- playing with 1750dpi
changing dpi is personal preference

Playing with 3600 dpi atm, feels like I lower my DPI my hands can't move fast enough

Increase it? I suggested reducing it because high DPI causes a lot of jitter and overshoot. If you want to improve, then all you can do is either continue as you are or try to change your style considerably. I thought that low DPI would be too slow for me as well, but it ended up making me much better. 500 is worth trying to adapt to.

I maintain that there is an effective upper limit to DPI, but there is no lower limit. Resolution impacts how high the upper limit presents.

I don't think that's really true. Cursor travel scales to the resolution of the window and the resolution of the monitor doesn't affect anything.

Honestly, I would spend a bit of time to play with different setups, from posture, mouse grip, sensitivity, screen position and all that stuff. Also, make sure that Windows' mouse sensitivity is set to default, "Increase mouse sensitivity" is off, osu!'s mouse settings are set to default and acceleration is disabled on your mouse in all forms.

I am talking about the resolution of the Osu! window, not the monitor. If what you mean is that the cursor moves more quickly on a smaller Osu! resolution, then you are wrong. I've tested this, and the increase or decrease in distance causes the cursor to act like it is moving more quickly or more slowly--not to mention that the size of the cursor gets larger or slower, which makes it appear to behave differently--but, in fact, the cursor still moves at the same uniform rate that it would move over your desktop with. This is, of course, assuming that your Osu! cursor settings are at 1.0, which they rightly should be. The longer distance on a higher resolution will make a higher DPI feel more comfortable, though, because you're not required to make as small a movement, and the hit circles allow more space for you to hit.

I agree that mouse grip and posture are super important for beginning players when moving up to a more intermediate level. I had to spend a lot of time considering it and researching.

Everyone reaches that point sometime in lif-...I mean osu!. Instead of worrying on how you're having problems passing your map which you could've passed several millenniums ago, just keep moving on and do your business. Or take a short break (one, two weeks).

Actually, at this point I'd like to point out something which I believe everyone has experienced least once in their osu! lifetime. It's this "form factor" which is the highest when a player say, plays the map for the first time, or suddenly stumbles on a revelation and starts playing like a Cookiezi or WhiteWolf. For this rise in form I'll call it the honeymoon period (yes, I know it's that marriage term, but heck, it works). This period is the most prominent when one starts passing Insanes for fun on a regular basis, and usually lasts the longest. How long it lasts though, depends on the player himself, but this is the time when it's best to keep playing and make sure that this form factor gets converted into class.

You, hylianloach, probably just ended your honeymoon period and now you're suffering from the drawbacks of reduced form and whatnot. That at least, if you've been playing Insanes since forever and haven't been going back to the Normals and easier difficulties for goodness knows what reason related to rank whoring and stuff. Having been through that honeymoon period, your sub-conciousness will remember how it feels to pass Insanes regularly, but obviously your body won't, so it's up to you to make sure your body remembers what your sub-conciousness does. To do that, please play more Insanes, and fuck the Hards and the Normals and the Easys. And I'm not talking about repeating plays until you pass/FC the map, but playing several different Insanes until you get the feel back.

(I just feel I've bullshitted my way through, but I'm keeping this here)

Also, by looking at your plays and high scores, I'll say that you're actually very far from reaching your limit. Once you start passing Jehovah's Yahveh (Lunatic) and then Emotional Skyscraper (Extra, approved), then you can safely say that you're about near the limit for a regular osu! player.

Made it halfway through Jehovah's on my third play, hopefully I'll pass this in a few more tries.. The hardest I've played so far was either masterpiece (http://osu.ppy.sh/b/47152&m=0) and some hyadain song. The former I can't pass the jumps halfway through the song and the latter has ridiculous health drain :/

Do I just browse around the approved beatmaps for harder songs?

Stick to what you have now, if you have a lot, and stop just passing them. Start FCing them.

I only have that feeling of being stuck if i keep trying stuff that's to hard, or just "badly mapped" (to slow AR or to big circles and stuff). I found that whenever i progress to a higher level, the easier maps get harder because i'm forced into "waiting". I just love the speed

That changes at a certain point. I had that same feeling until my accuracy went up. Still, though, some slow maps can get me.

nanashiRei wrote:

I found that whenever i progress to a higher level, the easier maps get harder because i'm forced into "waiting".

If you're having trouble with *timing* on low ARs start playing with hidden. HD teaches you to read timings of notes earlier as they appear and then you get used to think about the timing of your clicks relative to previous clicks instead of relative to the approach circle (you'll end up just ignoring approach circles), which means that regardless of AR you'll be able to keep your tempo (and then easier stuff will stay easier instead of becoming harder, unless the AR is low enough to make objects very stacked which is the real problem with low ARs, but EasyMod is fun owo).

Aqo wrote:

nanashiRei wrote:

I found that whenever i progress to a higher level, the easier maps get harder because i'm forced into "waiting".

If you're having trouble with *timing* on low ARs start playing with hidden. HD teaches you to read timings of notes earlier as they appear and then you get used to think about the timing of your clicks relative to previous clicks instead of relative to the approach circle (you'll end up just ignoring approach circles), which means that regardless of AR you'll be able to keep your tempo (and then easier stuff will stay easier instead of becoming harder, unless the AR is low enough to make objects very stacked which is the real problem with low ARs, but EasyMod is fun owo).

This. Quoted for truth.

honestly ive found that ignoring hit circles gets me 99%~ but paying close attention to the beat AND the hit circles very closely gets me an SS. I don't think you should ignore the hit circles until you're white wolf and play this game with hidden on by default.

I agree that paying attention to the hit circles can help when you have them, but I feel that when I play they give me very little help. The majority of my timing is internal. Usually if a hit circle clearly helps me, it is one of the first few beats on the map where the rhythm hasn't been established yet, or sometimes after a long break.

Sup A Noob wrote:

Once you start passing Jehovah's Yahveh (Lunatic) and then Emotional Skyscraper (Extra, approved), then you can safely say that you're about near the limit for a regular osu! player.

This is silly. Anyone who actually plays the game a decent amount at all will become far, far better than that. Definitely.

Tom69 wrote:

SPOILER

All this graph will do is psychologically imprison you, the "plateau" is nothing more than a dumb illusion.

Kyou-kun wrote:

Sup A Noob wrote:

Once you start passing Jehovah's Yahveh (Lunatic) and then Emotional Skyscraper (Extra, approved), then you can safely say that you're about near the limit for a regular osu! player.

This is silly. Anyone who actually plays the game a decent amount at all will become far, far better than that. Definitely.

^This. There are no "normal" and "above average" osu! players, there are simply those who are new to the game or who don't play actively, and those who decided to invest a lot of their time into it and who became "pro". Unless you have some kind of disease, there really is nothing that stops one from becoming as good as Cookiezi or w.e (undergoing the exact same playing experience and having the same kind of thinking pattern is a whole different story though)

I think I have a disease. 63k plays, I have just recently been able to pass world's end.

Xafnia wrote:

I think I have a disease. 63k plays, I have just recently been able to pass world's end.

World's End just needs stamina which is hard to build imo

I'm sure you can stream 180 bpm and jump decently well at 63k plays

idk, i can fc worlds end.
and my stamina is the worst ever

That map isn't hard to FC it has like almost no jumps the hard part is getting decent acc on it D:

Aqo wrote:

That map isn't hard to FC it has like almost no jumps the hard part is getting decent acc on it D:

Thanks for sharing your opinion.

Kanye West wrote:

Xafnia wrote:

I think I have a disease. 63k plays, I have just recently been able to pass world's end.

World's End just needs stamina which is hard to build imo

I'm sure you can stream 180 bpm and jump decently well at 63k plays

It needs focus. I can't FC it even though I have a really good stamina

a real stamina map is o'er the flood
and you can clearly see i have no stamina there because i 100% untill like 400-500 combo and then it starts dropping to 90%ish

Solar sect is a real stamina map. Insane accuracy required as well.