Alright. So I've been playing Osu off and on for awhile now, downloaded the game for the first time about 2 years ago, never got into it until about a year ago, and fell off until just a couple weeks ago and I've been playing very diligently and trying to improve. I never really go outside of playing solo except for the ocassional game with a couple of friends, and I don't check the forums much.

The question I have is sort of about the performance points system and it regarding skill. I've finally broken into the territory of 5 star maps and I can do them pretty consistently with a 80-95% accuracy without too much trouble. The maps are generally VERY difficult for me and push me pretty far in terms of what I can and can't do. However, I've been noticing despite the fact that I feel like I'm doing very well and beating quite difficult scores with decent accuracys, I gain around 1-5 points per map.

I got a little bored today and decided to go back and revisit some old maps, around 4 stars. At first I sort of had an ADHD thing where I could hardly keep time because I was constantly wanting to go faster, but I got over that after about 30 minutes of practice and immediately S ranked 4 or 5 maps consecutively. I noticed during this time that my performance points shot up immensely and I was doing really really well in terms of rating, however the maps felt a lot easier, just slightly more time consuming to make sure I had that full-combo or S rank. Curious as to how the performance points worked, I went and checked the Wiki.

Now the Wiki states that performance points are designed to determine your rating based off of skill. This is a little confusing to me because I've heard before from a specific friend of mine that accuracy = skill and that being able to full combo maps is more important than being able to complete more difficult maps. I personally didn't really think too much of it, I was perfectly content in doing what made me feel like I was improving, but now I'm wondering what people consider more skillful, seeing as the rating system is based off being able to S rank and full combo things.

Is being able to complete slower maps with a very high accuracy considered skillful, or being able to beat harder and faster maps? The PP system seems to lean towards the former, however I want to lean towards the latter - I feel like if I can do harder and faster songs, then it shouldn't be too difficult for me to slow down and fullcombo the slower maps. I also feel like if I played a ton, I would get a lot better pushing myself on more difficult maps then grinding out the 5-10 replays of a song to try and S rank it then moving on.

Seeing as I'm so out of touch with the Osu community in general, I really have NO clue what people consider to be better. Which one should I work on more? Am I learning slower by using my method? Is there any merit to the PP system, and should I really work on getting my rating up?

Thanks for any answers.

Go FC hard songs. You'll get too much PP.

Also, don't stress out. The song might turn into a traumatic song. And the BIGGEST mistake is that you play on and off. :3

Yeah, I really don't help you a lot.

Edit: I saw your hit accuracy and your maximum combo. Doesn't seems like you're trying to FC a lot.

AdamMZ wrote:

Go FC hard songs. You'll get too much PP.

Also, don't stress out. The song might turn into a traumatic song. And the BIGGEST mistake is that you play on and off. :3

Yeah, I really don't help you a lot.

That's okay, I still appreciate any advice. Although, I'm more concerned with getting better than my rating (rating is cool I guess because it does show me where I am in relation to other people) but my post is more bringing into question should I worry about performance points? Or should I worry about doing harder songs which seem to not give me as much performance points?

Hmmm, it's more of easier/harder songs than slow/fast ones.

But the way you're practicing is fine. Push yourself above your limits, get better, and at the same time play stuff you can full combo.

The *ranking* system is based off full comboing things, but the perception of a player's skill is not only about that (there are some really impressive passes on really hard songs.)

Basically if what you want is to rank up just full combo stuff and watch your pp increase. If you just want to get better then keep playing the hard maps, don't forget to also play what you actually can play perfectly. You're doing well.

El Koko wrote:

Hmmm, it's more of easier/harder songs than slow/fast ones.

But the way you're practicing is fine. Push yourself above your limits, get better, and at the same time play stuff you can full combo.

The *ranking* system is based off full comboing things, but the perception of a player's skill is not only about that (there are some really impressive passes on really hard songs.)

Basically if what you want is to rank up just full combo stuff and watch your pp increase. If you just want to get better then keep playing the hard maps, don't forget to also play what you actually can play perfectly. You're doing well.

Awesome! This basically answers all of my questions. Thank you very much for the advice.

Edit: Actually this brings up a couple more questions that I have. Is there a general accepted skill that players should be fore their rank? I've heard it's possible to go up to around rank 10,000 or so just off full combo-ing hard-insane level maps. Ii'm not planning on it because I'm more concerned with getting better, but hypothetically: If someone did, and went and played multiplayer, and couldn't keep up with certain maps that might be expected of a rank 10k~ or so, would their rank be considered artificial or bad?

Also, is the easy/hard instead of fast/slow argument because slow maps could say, be very hard to read and thus very difficult? Well, I'm sure it is, I would just like some clarity.

Thanks again!

The pp system is here to tell you how well you are improving, not to tell you to play X map to get X pp and climb the ranks (or at least that's how I always saw it). Why? Because generally the maps that gives you pp aren't necessarily the ones that will help you improve overall, but are the ones that will require you to be already good at what they're hard for.

If you focus on improving as a player, improving on the different aspects (aim, streams, accuracy, etc..) you will get pp (given you actually play ranked maps of course), unlike "playing for pp" where you're only trying to grow your arbitrary number. Of course you will still get better even if you only try to get pp, because you're actually playing the game instead of posting on forums (hohoho) but probably (much) slower than actually trying to improve, you might also get stuck at some point because what gives a lot of pp are mainly jumps heavy maps, and if you only play these you don't improve in the other aspects, etc etc...

Being able to play everything decently is considered skillful, altough I see more and more people with the mindset of playing faster and faster maps, spamming AR10+ and 200+ BPM all day, and then when they realize (too late) they can't play anything below that anymore, they ragequit or spend months trying to fix it.. Because yeah, you can actually forget how to slowdown and read lower AR over time if you haven't properly build your skill foundation. It's a common mistake to think you'll get better at slower stuff if you can play faster ones. On the contrary though, being able to play slow stuff can allow you to play faster stuff better. Why is that? Because if you can play slow, you can also control your fingers better than if you just spam fast stuff all day, where you'd only learn to mash as fast as you can if you haven't learned how to slow down properly first.

Overall, if you want to get good at this game, play everything at least once in a while, don't only go for pp. Also going on and off isn't the best to improve either, as you can actually decay/stop improving if you don't play enough.

GoldenWolf wrote:

The pp system is here to tell you how well you are improving, not to tell you to play X map to get X pp and climb the ranks (or at least that's how I always saw it). Why? Because generally the maps that gives you pp aren't necessarily the ones that will help you improve overall, but are the ones that will require you to be already good at what they're hard for.

If you focus on improving as a player, improving on the different aspects (aim, streams, accuracy, etc..) you will get pp (given you actually play ranked maps of course), unlike "playing for pp" where you're only trying to grow your arbitrary number. Of course you will still get better even if you only try to get pp, because you're actually playing the game instead of posting on forums (hohoho) but probably (much) slower than actually trying to improve, you might also get stuck at some point because what gives a lot of pp are mainly jumps heavy maps, and if you only play these you don't improve in the other aspects, etc etc...

Being able to play everything decently is considered skillful, altough I see more and more people with the mindset of playing faster and faster maps, spamming AR10+ and 200+ BPM all day, and then when they realize (too late) they can't play anything below that anymore, they ragequit or spend months trying to fix it.. Because yeah, you can actually forget how to slowdown and read lower AR over time if you haven't properly build your skill foundation. It's a common mistake to think you'll get better at slower stuff if you can play faster ones. On the contrary though, being able to play slow stuff can allow you to play faster stuff better. Why is that? Because if you can play slow, you can also control your fingers better than if you just spam fast stuff all day, where you'd only learn to mash as fast as you can if you haven't learned how to slow down properly first.

Overall, if you want to get good at this game, play everything at least once in a while, don't only go for pp. Also going on and off isn't the best to improve either, as you can actually decay/stop improving if you don't play enough.

I haven't been playing on and off trying to improve, I just got bored and stopped playing T~T

Anyways, thank you again for more advice. It's very appreciative and helpful.

Awesome! This basically answers all of my questions. Thank you very much for the advice.

Edit: Actually this brings up a couple more questions that I have. Is there a general accepted skill that players should be fore their rank? I've heard it's possible to go up to around rank 10,000 or so just off full combo-ing hard-insane level maps. Ii'm not planning on it because I'm more concerned with getting better, but hypothetically: If someone did, and went and played multiplayer, and couldn't keep up with certain maps that might be expected of a rank 10k~ or so, would their rank be considered artificial or bad?

Also, is the easy/hard instead of fast/slow argument because slow maps could say, be very hard to read and thus very difficult? Well, I'm sure it is, I would just like some clarity.

Thanks again!

Even in the higher ranks (1k~ for me, to give an example) there's people with "artificial" rank, who can only do so much and there's others around that rank who can do even harder stuff. Can be for a lot of reasons, some just don't feel like ranking up a lot and fall in ranks, things like that. But it's still a pretty good indicator of your skill since you still need to get better to get to a certain rank.

Some maps can be slower than really fast maps and still be harder, yes. Not necessarily because of reading, it really just depends on how the map is made.

This was much more of a problem with the older ranking system, now that you mention it... but these days, not so much. Still, if you're in multi for fun you probably shouldn't expect people to play at their absolute best. Wouldn't be surprising if they can't keep up with hard maps if they're not trying really hard.

If you focus on improving as a player, improving on the different aspects (aim, streams, accuracy, etc..) you will get pp (given you actually play ranked maps of course), unlike "playing for pp" where you're only trying to grow your arbitrary number. Of course you will still get better even if you only try to get pp, because you're actually playing the game instead of posting on forums (hohoho) but probably (much) slower than actually trying to improve, you might also get stuck at some point because what gives a lot of pp are mainly jumps heavy maps, and if you only play these you don't improve in the other aspects, etc etc...

Being able to play everything decently is considered skillful, altough I see more and more people with the mindset of playing faster and faster maps, spamming AR10+ and 200+ BPM all day, and then when they realize (too late) they can't play anything below that anymore, they ragequit or spend months trying to fix it.. Because yeah, you can actually forget how to slowdown and read lower AR over time if you haven't properly build your skill foundation. It's a common mistake to think you'll get better at slower stuff if you can play faster ones. On the contrary though, being able to play slow stuff can allow you to play faster stuff better. Why is that? Because if you can play slow, you can also control your fingers better than if you just spam fast stuff all day, where you'd only learn to mash as fast as you can if you haven't learned how to slow down properly first.

Overall, if you want to get good at this game, play everything at least once in a while, don't only go for pp. Also going on and off isn't the best to improve either, as you can actually decay/stop improving if you don't play enough.

This is also a very good answer.

if I could go back in time I would learn how to consistently FC things instead of 'pushing' (lol) myself.


http://puu.sh/d07dh/2d729e4208.jpg
http://puu.sh/cQu1R/43666e3ffa.jpg
http://puu.sh/d07ss/168a12a55e.jpg
http://puu.sh/d07z1/984194ec62.jpg
http://puu.sh/d07Cj/718b158c05.jpg
http://puu.sh/d07Zb/a08509fb4c.jpg
http://puu.sh/d08aa/da343514cb.jpg

This shit gets really old and soul crushing after a while

DJPuzzle wrote:

I've heard it's possible to go up to around rank 10,000 or so just off full combo-ing hard-insane level maps.

You definitely can, I would know

DJPuzzle wrote:

Ii'm not planning on it because I'm more concerned with getting better, but hypothetically: If someone did, and went and played multiplayer, and couldn't keep up with certain maps that might be expected of a rank 10k~ or so, would their rank be considered artificial or bad?

I don't think anyone will straight up say something like that, as the osu community is super nice for some reason. Still, I guess I do feel bad when I get absolutely destroyed by people with half my pp in multi.

Going back to your original post, there's nothing wrong with ignoring pp and focusing on passing harder and harder maps. Still, I'd say a more balanced approach is better. If you run into a map that you like, try to FC it with good accuracy (>98%). In my opinion, the game is dramatically different when you are more concerned with getting 300s than avoiding misses. Speed is a big deal in osu, but rhythm is also an essential part of the game.

See, I had the same question you have. First of all, you must have fun. I think FCing easier songs helps you to improve more than playing harder maps getting A/B ranks, but sometimes you can get bored of playing easy songs, or get annoyed because you missed a note when you were almost FCing a slow 2000+ notes song, at this moment it is ok to stop and play harder songs without that pressure of FCing, just have FUN.

Try to maintain the balance, to do some FCs, to play harder songs and you'll see your improvement

About PP, the quantity of FCs is not everything, I have less FCs than you (much more A ranks too), but have just a bit more PPs than you, and probably a really good player can pass both with about 10/20 FCs in really hard songs. When you start FCing easy songs, they'll give you some PPs, even more than A ranks in harder songs. But when you start FCing harder songs, you'll notice that the ones you FCed firstly (the easier songs) are not contributing with PPs for your rank anymore, because of the weight they have in your rank list. I can't explain exactly how this weight is measured, but maybe the more experienced guys can, or maybe you can find out by yourself reading the wiki.

So, just have fun while playing.

Alisson Siri wrote:

So, just have fun while playing.

I feel like out of all the things I should do, I should do this the most.

^^ Thank you for the advice!

DJPuzzle wrote:

Alisson Siri wrote:

So, just have fun while playing.

I feel like out of all the things I should do, I should do this the most.

^^ Thank you for the advice!

Fun is the key to not lose your motivation for the game, so yes. It's the most important aspect of the game. Just keep playing and pay attention to things you're doing wrong. Try to fix them and take your time. You need to be patient, never forget that.

DJPuzzle wrote:

Alisson Siri wrote:

So, just have fun while playing.

I feel like out of all the things I should do, I should do this the most.

^^ Thank you for the advice!

i play osu to get pp

buny wrote:

i play osu to get pp

I play and I get 0 pp ^_^ DOWNWARD SPIRAL SINCE JULY 2014!