buny wrote:
All you're doing is encouraging reckless plays.
You can't just "play songs that are completely out of your league", you need to build a foundation before you can reach there. Simply playing hard songs will skip nearly all the important aspects you learn early in the game and detrimental to your skill in the future.
By replaying maps (obviously to an extent) you build consistency as long as the map is challenging enough, as well as refining skills such as aim and muscle memory.
The pp gain is also an ego and morality boost. Who would want to practice for a month and not have anything to show for it, or no indicator that you've improved? By gaining that pp, you feel some sense of pride and become more enthusiastic and motivated to practice more as the results are visually appearing and appealing.
I'm not really sure what you're talking about. You don't need memorization skills to play this game. In fact, learning how to memorize maps is a very bad habit that shouldn't be done by anyone. Some of my 230ish pp scores are sight reads. That's right, I mean I played the map only once. Why should you practice memorization when you can practice sight reading? The more new maps you play, the better your sight reading abilities will get. Playing the same map over and over isn't nearly as effective.
Performance points are an ego and morality boost.. but that's why they're a trap. The best people in the world at something are not the people who got praised for their work. If anything, ego and morality boosts hinder your progress in the long term. Why did Muten Rōshi make sure that Goku wouldn't win the Budokai in Dragon Ball? Because he wanted to give him the exact opposite of a morale boost so that he can continue to train just as hard. Motivation to practice comes from defeat. Feedback from your scores improving is enough to keep you going.. you don't need a registered account to be the best at this game, let alone a good ranking.
The first day I got this game I downloaded a pack of songs which all happened to be insane difficulties. I didn't know how difficult they were because the names of the difficulties weren't anything I was used to (they weren't even labeled as insane). Disregarding the five stars in the menu screen, I decided to just jump straight from the tutorial to those songs and played them over and over again. As a result, I was playing insanes much faster than any of my friends, and I was reading them correctly. I don't see why this logic doesn't apply to any skill level. If you're a 5 star player and you play 5 star songs, you're not going to improve as quickly as you would if you played 7 star songs. I know this from over a year of experience.
It's been proven that if you want to learn a new language, the best thing you can do is absolutely submerge yourself in it. You don't want to practice only phrases that you already know over and over again. No, you want to talk to people who are native in the language and who speak all of it fluently, even if you have no clue what they're saying. You eventually will pick it up, and all those basic skills you didn't learn earlier will seem even easier. It will take much longer to learn a language if you only talk to someone who knows maybe a quarter of the language, so why would you ever do this (I'm referring to playing easier maps here)? The same logic applies to this game if you can just imagine that osu! is a language. Jumping into the harder maps may seem "reckless" and a bad idea at first (just like moving to Japan to learn Japanese) but it is in fact the best way to learn.
Pettanko wrote:
like actually learning how to read maps properly and not just reacting to the circles that show up on the screen
You don't need to play easy maps to achieve this. The more you play difficult songs, the faster you will improve your aim/speed. The more aim and speed you have, the easier it will become to read a map. Just because you can't read it at first doesn't mean the songs you are playing are too hard. You just need to have patience. This goes back to my example of my first osu! experience. Sure, I could have been playing easy and normal difficulties and following them properly, but instead I decided to work on my aim/speed. In the long run, it paid off a lot more as after that I could sightread any easy/normal map. If he plays songs that are harder than what he's doing now, he'll be able to sightread the songs he finds difficult now.. just like how I could sightread easy and normal maps after playing regular insanes.
I can't even properly identify which clears should be considered "impressive" in that matter.