Every day I'm getting worse, no matter how hard I try. I passed Mario Paint 96%, now I can't even pass on A. Galaxy collapse 95%, now I can't pass on S. I specifically played a lot more than usual, played levels beyond my comfort zone, took a break, I changed something for the first time in principle. Nothing changed, I continued to fall in skill. I already simply do not know what to do, for the first time I ask for help on the forum, please help!

You're probably just hitting a plateau period. Don't take it too hard or else it'll mess with your mindset going in and make your performance even worse. Tbh, these are the worst times to play because it feels like you can't do anything, but if you stop, then you'll also get nowhere. To that extent, just keep playing; practice your skillsets and work on techniques that you aren't so good at. If it feels like you're not setting good scores, at least use it to practice and come back stronger!

Yes, it's common to hit times where you either simply aren't improving, or are even losing a bit of skill.

This article, seems to do a good job explaining learning plateaus.

Since mania is a skill which involves a hierarchy of complex skills and practice based habits, it's particularly susceptible to learning plateaus.

The key to getting through a plateau is persistence. If you just keep playing, eventually you will surpass the plateau.

Another thing to consider is that while you are experiencing this plateau, this would be a good time to make an effort to really identify where your strengths and weaknesses are, and try to formulate a practice approach to improve those weaknesses in a targeted way rather than just playing whatever random maps you feel like.

I found that sometimes making a big change that forces you to need to make some adjustments to how you play can help start you improving again. So you can try learning to play with vision mods, a different sort of skin, learn a new key mode, completely rearrange your key layout, etc.

welcome to the club

To me it looks like you're just being too hard on yourself, you recently had a big jump in ranks so you could still be lingering on that, try to just have fun with the game for a bit and explore different skillsets. But what I do see happening to me a lot when I "stagnate" is that I'm just not trying to play like I used to, try playing maps that push your limits to the max (preferably extremely draining stamina maps) and then try to play what you used to be able to at your peak. You might not be able to beat your top scores right away but it's better than to continue rusting.

Side note: Plateauing imo is highly influenced by mindset, if you pin the blame on something you can't change then you'll probably be left with a sense of hopelessness so if you want to blame something as the reason for stagnating, blame it on something about the game you can change by practicing.

Bobbias wrote:

If you just keep playing, eventually you will surpass the plateau.

How long do I have to keep playing to get back to normal? I changed the way fingers of my left hand are laid. it helped, but only for a day.

There's not a set amount of time really, it's more like there's something subconscious stopping you from progressing. By continuing to play, you'll slowly start to realize different things, whether it's a technique, some kind of mindset issue, or just not playing when you're feeling good; all of it can help you overcome the plateau. Sometimes though, it's actually a physical issue, while that's more uncommon. In that case, you're just gonna have to practice your skillsets more, since you've probably hit the peak of your current physical level. It sucks, but there's no estimate on the timeframe, but I will say that it'll be great when you overcome. Every time I've overcome a plateau, I've always just gotten a huge skill boost afterwards and it feels great. Also a lot of pp if that's what you're interested in.

the article I posted wrote:

A flat place in a learning curve, indicating a period of little or no progress (Fig. 33).The occurrence and persistence of a plateau depend on the nature of the task, the motivation, the approach of the learner, and the amount of previous experience he has had.

As it points out here, mindset is quite important. By allowing yourself to be frustrated or bothered in some way by the skill plateau, you are likely making it harder for yourself to actually overcome it.

the article I posted wrote:

There are several reasons for plateaus. First, the skill being acquired may have several distinct stages, each of which must be completed before the next begins. This is particularly true where a “hierarchy of habits” must be mastered, as in studying a musical instrument. The fundamentals of piano- playing are easily learned, but after that a discouragingly long period of little or no progress (the plateau) may be encountered. Once the student gets over this period, he enters a new stage of learning where hands and fingers are integrated and he has the satisfaction of playing actual pieces. A whole series of plateaus occurs in learning to type, since the student must acquire different habits for individual letters, words, phrases, and sentences. There is usually a period of no apparent improvement during the transition from one of these levels to another. Second, fatigue or distraction may temporarily slow up the learning process. The two often work together because tired students are easily distracted or lapse into daydreaming. Third, a previously learned skill may interfere with the one now being practiced; for example, reading teachers find that children who are used to reading aloud often find it hard to switch to silent.

Emphasis mine. I'm sure that is not an exhaustive list of why plateaus may occur. Osumania is fairly comparable to either learning an instrument or learning to type, so these examples are pretty good. The separate habits mentioned for words/letters/phrases is essentially the exact same thing as learning how to hit different kinds of patterns. But there's also the additional element of accuracy which isn't even covered by that comparison.

By far the most common problem people encounter is actually reading problems. Most of the time, when someone describes their problem with the game, it almost always comes in the form of "my fingers are too slow" or something to that effect. The reality is that in almost all cases, it has nothing to do with the physical speed that you can move your fingers at. It's almost always related to reading.

Reading a pattern is not something which either works or doesn't. Reading a pattern takes time. First, you must identify which parts of what you are seeing are important, then you must figure out exactly what the information you consider important is actually telling you, and then finally you need to translate that information into a series of motions that your body can carry out. All of this must happen before you even begin to move your finger. If this process takes just a BIT too long, you often have enough time to begin to move your fingers, but not enough to really properly coordinate that movement. It may also be that your brain struggles with a specific part of this process.

The article points out that other things may interfere with your learning, and it's quite possible that something external to the learning process itself is contributing to the plateau. As Delta386 mentioned, physical condition (and mental condition... how well you slept, etc.), specific technique or setup (wrist up vs wrist down, hand spacing, keyboard angle/distance from your chair and many other things) all may have an impact on things here.

Changing one thing, such as finger position, and expecting the plateau to just immediately go away is not a helpful way to look at things. Experiment with lots of things. If something helps, maybe stick with it. If it doesn't help, feel free to go back to the way things were before. But before you decide whether something is helping I suggest sticking with it for something like a week to make sure that you have actually adjusted to the change before trying to figure out whether it helped or not.