I doubt anyone will believe this given my rank now, but I used to hover around rank 500 back in 2013, and I considered myself very familiar with the map techniques of the time. Now I've come back to osu! just to mess around with it, and wow, the way the average map is arranged these days is just crazy!
It used to be that most maps would sort of snake around and wave across the screen alternating combos that involved a lot of different stackings of hit circles usually at the ends and starts of sliders, and then there would often be mixed streams of usually short to mid length here and there, often coming off of a slider combination or leading to the next set. Basically everything tended to lead to something else in a predictable waving line of movement.
Now it seems that practically every insane difficulty is built around the same design concept. They all have randomly placed combinations of very fast sliders, short sliders, and some complicated hit circle combinations grouped with the sliders in all different locations of the maps often forcing very fast jumps from one part of the map to an extreme other part of the map to reach each slider circle combination set and then suddenly jumping on again to other sets in random placements. Sometimes these sets mix with streams to further complicate the sequence of clicks needed, and they often force alternating rhythms (at least for me).
It's not like I hadn't seen this style of mapping before, but I recall it being somewhat uncommon back then, and it was often just the extra difficulties on high BPM maps that would do it. Kind of a final boss situation. Now it seems to be used in virtually every insane difficulty, even on slow BPM maps, and even some hard difficulties are doing simple versions of it. It's everywhere!
I'm assuming this happened as a kind of difficulty creep as players got better at dealing with the old stuff. This certainly does feel like it would be really hard to DT or even HR, so I figure it's designed to make that harder to do, and thus up the difficulty to match increasing skill in the community. Is that about what happened? It's really fascinating if it is, because it means the game has really evolved over the last seven years. I must admit that it looks and feels really cool when you play it. I remember I used to download a random new map and I'd expect to 98% HD FC the insane on the first try, and then try for perfect, try the next difficulty up, or add more mods, but with these new maps I really need to put in a lot more effort.
It used to be that most maps would sort of snake around and wave across the screen alternating combos that involved a lot of different stackings of hit circles usually at the ends and starts of sliders, and then there would often be mixed streams of usually short to mid length here and there, often coming off of a slider combination or leading to the next set. Basically everything tended to lead to something else in a predictable waving line of movement.
Now it seems that practically every insane difficulty is built around the same design concept. They all have randomly placed combinations of very fast sliders, short sliders, and some complicated hit circle combinations grouped with the sliders in all different locations of the maps often forcing very fast jumps from one part of the map to an extreme other part of the map to reach each slider circle combination set and then suddenly jumping on again to other sets in random placements. Sometimes these sets mix with streams to further complicate the sequence of clicks needed, and they often force alternating rhythms (at least for me).
It's not like I hadn't seen this style of mapping before, but I recall it being somewhat uncommon back then, and it was often just the extra difficulties on high BPM maps that would do it. Kind of a final boss situation. Now it seems to be used in virtually every insane difficulty, even on slow BPM maps, and even some hard difficulties are doing simple versions of it. It's everywhere!
I'm assuming this happened as a kind of difficulty creep as players got better at dealing with the old stuff. This certainly does feel like it would be really hard to DT or even HR, so I figure it's designed to make that harder to do, and thus up the difficulty to match increasing skill in the community. Is that about what happened? It's really fascinating if it is, because it means the game has really evolved over the last seven years. I must admit that it looks and feels really cool when you play it. I remember I used to download a random new map and I'd expect to 98% HD FC the insane on the first try, and then try for perfect, try the next difficulty up, or add more mods, but with these new maps I really need to put in a lot more effort.