I really like this game, but there are several smaller reasons keeping me from enjoying this game and I am pretty sure are the main reason for this wonderful game to not gain any kind of mainstream popularity or large user base. I am not sure if this is actually a small community here who wants it to keep it this way and keep others out! I just want to speak out as someone who accidentally found this forum, while trying a second time, after the last time failed ... around a year ago ... noticing that nothing has improved inbetween for beginners.

So what are my problems?

1. No way to play without a login. Why not having a test mode? If you require new players to register first you lose already a large portion of your possible future player base. No beginner needs this. Beginners don't have scores anybody would appreciate to have uploaded online. It should be any players' own choice to register later and have scores uploaded.
2. Playing the game is more fun to start with, when you play songs you already know. That's how Sony Playstations Singstar became so popular. When first starting osu! though, you'll see max. 5 familiar songs (One Britney Spears, and a few others) and at least 20-30 other songs nobody has ever heard about.
3. Mode switching doesn't work as expected?! When I switch modes in the bottom menu bar, then I'm still presented with maps of all modes in the 1 star difficulty group.
4. There's no option to add more beatmaps from the ingame menus.
5. Why is there absolutely no possibility to find songs people can relate to on the website? What about a rating system? Where can I find songs other players like to play? Where can I find songs a general human can relate to like "Top 100 charts 2023 Europe/America/Africa/Asia...)", "Best of Rock 2010-2015", "Easy pop songs for beginners (80's edition)", "Anime Classics 1990's" or anything like that?
6. Deep down the rabbit whole I found only one user who ever thought about something like this (see 5.)... but his beatmap packs are old and far from being somewhere featured. Shoutout to "DeathxShinigami". He did exactly what beginners are looking for with his packs "Best of 2009! - English Rock, Pop, Hip Hop" or his several "Easy Series" (Many unpopular songs in these Easy Series though, but hey, he made songs intentionally catered to noobs).

Don't get me wrong, I find everything else about this game super awesome. The user-interface is close to perfection, the website is super clean, the game mechanics are awesome, there is so much perfection done by the developers.
It just seems that the whole game caters to people who are already veeeery familiar with it. The entry barrier is soooo high and the fixes seem so simple, at least some of them. Noobs like me don't have a great chance to "get the party started" and to sum it up ...

... it all comes down to one reason: accessibility towards playing well-known and familiar songs.

I cant fix these, but for some help mitigating some of these issues for you

2. you can search for songs, genres, albums, artists, mappers, etc. in the beatmap listing.

If your favorite kinds of songs arent there it means that people just haven't wanted to map them yet, all maps are player made after all and the culture of the game means most osu players and therefore mappers are massive anime fans. Try searching the "any" category so you see all maps, not just ranked and loved ones. mapping takes a lot of effort, so people tend to only map their favorite kinds of music.

3. type mode=o in the song select screen to only see standard maps, can use m for mania, t for taiko and c for ctb

here's a full list of these keywords, which also work in the beatmap listing search bar. wiki/Client/Interface#search

4. can actually do this with a supporter tag, but I believe in the lazer client (the new open source client being worked on right now: https://github.com/ppy/osu) it will be free, it is right now at least.

5. you can at least sort by plays, favorites, and there is actually a rating system you can sort by too, though you have to scroll down in the score screen to rate a map, so not many players go out of their way to do it.

to elaborate on 3. a bit, mode selection mainly determines which mode the game will attempt to play each map in; standard mode maps can be automatically converted to any other mode, although the converted maps are generally not great, especially in taiko and mania. std -> other modes is the only conversion we have, though, so maps made for other modes aren't affected by mode selection.

also, in addition to the search filters mentioned by WitherMite, you can also use the Group option near the top right corner of the song select screen to find maps of specific modes more easily:
as for finding songs, I personally never had any issues with it when starting out because I just looked up everything I liked that came to mind, but I can see how that wouldn't work for everyone. there are actually a bunch of beatmap packs, even themed ones, but the page isn't easy to stumble upon and I don't think the packs are promoted in any way outside that page right now. making more packs and making them more easily accessible would be great


also a side note regarding your first paragraph: the game does actually have a sizable playerbase, and mainstream popularity has some other (arguably bigger) roadblocks, namely copyright issues and the fact that most tournaments are structured in a way that's kind of hard to follow as a casual viewer

This is the most acessible game on the planet wdym

Vararaup wrote:

This is the most acessible game on the planet wdym

But not everyone plays osu you know

I AM VERY SMART wrote:

Vararaup wrote:

This is the most acessible game on the planet wdym

But not everyone plays osu you know

No way

also to the first point u can play offline and why would registering be such a problem and to point 5 you could also search for collections multiple users and websites have those like https://osucollector.com/ is a very popular one... there are a lot of alredy said solutions by others to your problems so no need to be mad really

vaaylin wrote:

also to the first point u can play offline and why would registering be such a problem and to point 5 you could also search for collections multiple users and websites have those like https://osucollector.com/ is a very popular one... there are a lot of alredy said solutions by others to your problems so no need to be mad really

No beginner is going to go on osucollector and you need to pay for that. OP has a point but then again if this game explodes in popularity, theres could be DMCA problems

I wanna see where this discussion is going

gatekeep gaslight girlboss 😎💅

not related to beatmap discussion, moved from mapping discussion forum.

Osu is designed to be be a niche game and that's a good thing.

If Osu is out of the spotlight then music copyright holders are less likely to see their content and want to take down content (maps) on the platform.

Tortdoise wrote:

I really like this game, but there are several smaller reasons keeping me from enjoying this game and I am pretty sure are the main reason for this wonderful game to not gain any kind of mainstream popularity or large user base. I am not sure if this is actually a small community here who wants it to keep it this way and keep others out! I just want to speak out as someone who accidentally found this forum, while trying a second time, after the last time failed ... around a year ago ... noticing that nothing has improved inbetween for beginners.

So what are my problems?

1. No way to play without a login. Why not having a test mode? If you require new players to register first you lose already a large portion of your possible future player base. No beginner needs this. Beginners don't have scores anybody would appreciate to have uploaded online. It should be any players' own choice to register later and have scores uploaded.
2. Playing the game is more fun to start with, when you play songs you already know. That's how Sony Playstations Singstar became so popular. When first starting osu! though, you'll see max. 5 familiar songs (One Britney Spears, and a few others) and at least 20-30 other songs nobody has ever heard about.
3. Mode switching doesn't work as expected?! When I switch modes in the bottom menu bar, then I'm still presented with maps of all modes in the 1 star difficulty group.
4. There's no option to add more beatmaps from the ingame menus.
5. Why is there absolutely no possibility to find songs people can relate to on the website? What about a rating system? Where can I find songs other players like to play? Where can I find songs a general human can relate to like "Top 100 charts 2023 Europe/America/Africa/Asia...)", "Best of Rock 2010-2015", "Easy pop songs for beginners (80's edition)", "Anime Classics 1990's" or anything like that?
6. Deep down the rabbit whole I found only one user who ever thought about something like this (see 5.)... but his beatmap packs are old and far from being somewhere featured. Shoutout to "DeathxShinigami". He did exactly what beginners are looking for with his packs "Best of 2009! - English Rock, Pop, Hip Hop" or his several "Easy Series" (Many unpopular songs in these Easy Series though, but hey, he made songs intentionally catered to noobs).

Don't get me wrong, I find everything else about this game super awesome. The user-interface is close to perfection, the website is super clean, the game mechanics are awesome, there is so much perfection done by the developers.
It just seems that the whole game caters to people who are already veeeery familiar with it. The entry barrier is soooo high and the fixes seem so simple, at least some of them. Noobs like me don't have a great chance to "get the party started" and to sum it up ...

... it all comes down to one reason: accessibility towards playing well-known and familiar songs.

1. You can play offline. Just logout. You need to be online for scores to submit (unless you really want some way to manually submit scores which just sounds tedious), and many other sites and games require you to sign in to play or submit scores, so this is a non-issue. Anyone who falters here is literally just too lazy.
2. As WitherMite said, all maps are made by players of the game, so if nobody likes the popular songs in the charts that are coming out (reasonable take, that), they aren't going to be made, or at least made quickly.

Y'all could do with experimenting with the more anime-style maps and expand your horizons. There's no need to stick purely to just what would be popular in America and what-not. Plus, if you are that picky, there are ways to filter by genre, artits, etc. that are free to use.

3. The mode at the bottom next to Random and Beatmap Options is to convert to each of the four modes: Standard, Mania, Taiko and Catch. Any Standard maps played on the other three verions are converted to that version, so none of them are actually removed. As Wither said, just mode=o to filter out non-std maps.

4. Currently a supporter-only option. Still, it's not that cumbersome to add them as you go from the beatmap listings. Or just have your downloads folder and the songs folder open at the same time, mass-d/l the maps you want, then move them over. Could be tedious if your computer runs slow doing that, but imo it's not that big a timesink.

5/6. To be frank, you're either not trying hard enough, or you're so focused on finding the "popular" songs that you apparently have no intention of trying out what the game provides you with.

You also need to remember that Osu is primarily a game for gamers and anime fans, and thus primarily caters to that kind of audience. Hence a lot of anime intros/outros, a lot of Japanese/Korean-based songs, or dnb-like instrumentals. Coming in here and expecting everyone in the community to cater to the "general human" is a ridiculous ask when we've grown and stayed alive for 15 years without having to focus on that. It's not on us to kowtow and change who we are to invite you in; it's more on you to be willing to accept where our preferences lie and expand your own horizons to meet them. It sounds harsh but that's still the truth. If you REALLY want that kind of general appeal, there's Singstar's or whatever other rhythm games that are popular nowadays.

mouc wrote:

vaaylin wrote:

also to the first point u can play offline and why would registering be such a problem and to point 5 you could also search for collections multiple users and websites have those like https://osucollector.com/ is a very popular one... there are a lot of alredy said solutions by others to your problems so no need to be mad really

No beginner is going to go on osucollector and you need to pay for that. OP has a point but then again if this game explodes in popularity, theres could be DMCA problems

ohyeah DMCA. Forgot about that.

Yeah that's also why.

mouc wrote:

vaaylin wrote:

also to the first point u can play offline and why would registering be such a problem and to point 5 you could also search for collections multiple users and websites have those like https://osucollector.com/ is a very popular one... there are a lot of alredy said solutions by others to your problems so no need to be mad really

No beginner is going to go on osucollector and you need to pay for that. OP has a point but then again if this game explodes in popularity, theres could be DMCA problems

idk if im doing smth wrong but i never paid for osucollector lmao and im sure theres a lotta options for the dmca problems that theyre already trying to fix it but yeah i agree

Sadu wrote:

gatekeep gaslight girlboss 😎💅

YOU'RE NICHE FOREVER