Hi,
I've been playing taiko for several years now, but I've never really participated much in the osu!taiko community because it always seemed really slow to me in general. Before playing taiko, I played DDR a lot. I think a lot of community problems in osu!taiko can be apparent by comparing taiko to other rhythm games. At least to me, there are three big things that seem to really discourage new players from participating:
First, taiko is kind of hard, but not in a "fun" way. Almost every rhythm game will fail the player mid-song if they can't keep up their life bar, but taiko is the reverse - unless you manually quit out, you will play through the entire song no matter what. In other rhythm games, for players just learning to pass a new song, a certain part can be a common source of death, and to finally surpass it is an immediate reward of adrenaline and satisfaction - this is missing from taiko. Personally, when I'm working on a new song and there's a big deathstream in the middle, if I fail the deathstream, I'm left with either uncertainty if I have enough health to pass or just a loss of motivation to continue to play the song (because I don't think I have enough health to pass). To me, it's certainly different from using NoFail, and I would much rather not use NoFail and persist through the difficult section than use NoFail and see the rest of the song. I think a lot of people feel the same way. On the other hand, not failing the player mid-song also makes it easy to pass. I've played a lot of songs that I've passed by just completely losing all health halfway through and then climbing back up to the pass threshold.
This isn't something that really needs to be changed, though - I think it's like that for a good reason because of how taiko has non-linear stream complexity. It just kind of sucks because it takes away a lot of the intrinsic reward for just passing a map - and getting that perfect balance of HP Drain is really hard and not many maps will have it just right. Anison Sprint, for example, was a song that frustrated me for the longest time because I could manage a 92% accuracy or better but still fail because of the HP Drain. If a potential player gets discouraged by this kind of thing, is there really anything we can do about it?
The real difficulty in taiko is that taiko has that non-linear stream complexity, by which I mean more complex streams can't just be summarize as, "Oh there's more notes." It's not just more notes faster, but it's also parsing these notes and understanding which hand presses which note at which time - whereas to compare to DDR you ultimately only have to figure out which note at which time. In DDR, I never really had the case where I saw Left and pressed Up instead because I misread it - either I could read a stream, or I couldn't; in taiko, I can see dddk d k d and misread it as ddddk d k d - and then the whole stream is off-balance from that one miss. And even at my rank where I consider such a pattern stupidly simple, it could still totally happen. I think this kind of thing turns a lot of people off because they feel the game is hard because their eyes are lying to them, rather than that they just aren't fast enough/accurate enough.
Second, osu!taiko is kind of garbage. There's a leaderboard, so players of all skill levels are encouraged to care about their rank, but the SR for taiko sucks. This is kind of beating a horse that's already dead, so I won't go too much into it - but I think a lot of players would be subconsciously aware of how bad the SR is, if they pay attention to it at all.
Third, there's not really any structure for a taiko community outside of osu!taiko. It's not a widespread enough rhythm game that it brought a community to osu!taiko like osu!mania did - most elder players are Japanese, whom if they have their own community it's already pre-established and probably won't mix with English-speakers aside from sharing osu!taiko maps and consuming 50% of the top like 500 players. From my knowledge, TnT isn't hugely widespread popular in Japan, and the whole rest of the world's upper players is barely equal to Japan's top players? It speaks a lot to how few players there are of other nationalities.
I don't mean to sound too defeatist about it, or anything, but there are certainly a lot of factors working against the community, I think. Hopefully a lot of this can be solved with osu!next, which as I understand is eating up pretty much all of osu! development time right now, but until then we're just kind of SOL.
On another note, I think the mentoring thing would be really good, because I think taiko is a ton of fun once you can play into Oni territory, but it's really hard to build the fundamentals to reach that point - although, I still worry about the players who just find the mode less fun because it's not as inherently rewarding to play.
e: I forgot to mention, as far as mapping goes, I don't really know exactly where the issues are. I think we don't have enough modders, from what I understand? What I can tell you is that I have a lot of songs that I would love to turn into a taiko map but every time I open up the editor I just instantly stop caring because the osu! editor looks so obtuse and then promptly give up.
I've been playing taiko for several years now, but I've never really participated much in the osu!taiko community because it always seemed really slow to me in general. Before playing taiko, I played DDR a lot. I think a lot of community problems in osu!taiko can be apparent by comparing taiko to other rhythm games. At least to me, there are three big things that seem to really discourage new players from participating:
First, taiko is kind of hard, but not in a "fun" way. Almost every rhythm game will fail the player mid-song if they can't keep up their life bar, but taiko is the reverse - unless you manually quit out, you will play through the entire song no matter what. In other rhythm games, for players just learning to pass a new song, a certain part can be a common source of death, and to finally surpass it is an immediate reward of adrenaline and satisfaction - this is missing from taiko. Personally, when I'm working on a new song and there's a big deathstream in the middle, if I fail the deathstream, I'm left with either uncertainty if I have enough health to pass or just a loss of motivation to continue to play the song (because I don't think I have enough health to pass). To me, it's certainly different from using NoFail, and I would much rather not use NoFail and persist through the difficult section than use NoFail and see the rest of the song. I think a lot of people feel the same way. On the other hand, not failing the player mid-song also makes it easy to pass. I've played a lot of songs that I've passed by just completely losing all health halfway through and then climbing back up to the pass threshold.
This isn't something that really needs to be changed, though - I think it's like that for a good reason because of how taiko has non-linear stream complexity. It just kind of sucks because it takes away a lot of the intrinsic reward for just passing a map - and getting that perfect balance of HP Drain is really hard and not many maps will have it just right. Anison Sprint, for example, was a song that frustrated me for the longest time because I could manage a 92% accuracy or better but still fail because of the HP Drain. If a potential player gets discouraged by this kind of thing, is there really anything we can do about it?
The real difficulty in taiko is that taiko has that non-linear stream complexity, by which I mean more complex streams can't just be summarize as, "Oh there's more notes." It's not just more notes faster, but it's also parsing these notes and understanding which hand presses which note at which time - whereas to compare to DDR you ultimately only have to figure out which note at which time. In DDR, I never really had the case where I saw Left and pressed Up instead because I misread it - either I could read a stream, or I couldn't; in taiko, I can see dddk d k d and misread it as ddddk d k d - and then the whole stream is off-balance from that one miss. And even at my rank where I consider such a pattern stupidly simple, it could still totally happen. I think this kind of thing turns a lot of people off because they feel the game is hard because their eyes are lying to them, rather than that they just aren't fast enough/accurate enough.
Second, osu!taiko is kind of garbage. There's a leaderboard, so players of all skill levels are encouraged to care about their rank, but the SR for taiko sucks. This is kind of beating a horse that's already dead, so I won't go too much into it - but I think a lot of players would be subconsciously aware of how bad the SR is, if they pay attention to it at all.
Third, there's not really any structure for a taiko community outside of osu!taiko. It's not a widespread enough rhythm game that it brought a community to osu!taiko like osu!mania did - most elder players are Japanese, whom if they have their own community it's already pre-established and probably won't mix with English-speakers aside from sharing osu!taiko maps and consuming 50% of the top like 500 players. From my knowledge, TnT isn't hugely widespread popular in Japan, and the whole rest of the world's upper players is barely equal to Japan's top players? It speaks a lot to how few players there are of other nationalities.
I don't mean to sound too defeatist about it, or anything, but there are certainly a lot of factors working against the community, I think. Hopefully a lot of this can be solved with osu!next, which as I understand is eating up pretty much all of osu! development time right now, but until then we're just kind of SOL.
On another note, I think the mentoring thing would be really good, because I think taiko is a ton of fun once you can play into Oni territory, but it's really hard to build the fundamentals to reach that point - although, I still worry about the players who just find the mode less fun because it's not as inherently rewarding to play.
e: I forgot to mention, as far as mapping goes, I don't really know exactly where the issues are. I think we don't have enough modders, from what I understand? What I can tell you is that I have a lot of songs that I would love to turn into a taiko map but every time I open up the editor I just instantly stop caring because the osu! editor looks so obtuse and then promptly give up.