Keep in mind that this is my experience with the game and progression in Osu! is not factually defined at all. Your fastest method of improvement is something YOU need to find.

Today I would like to discuss a trend in "new" players that I have seen with every single person I've gotten into the game.
Also keep in mind the countless posts of people with this problem asking for help on the forums, reddit, twitch, and in game.
I can also shamefully say that I did the exact same thing 10~ months ago.

What is the trend?
After a player starts to FC 3*-3.5* maps, they instantly jump up to 4*+ maps.
Now, I'm not going to tell you how you should play the game. However, the natural order of progression in this game is to move up in difficulty slowly as your skill moves up.

So why is it so bad?
Sure, after getting some B ranks with higher PP than your top S it feels nice, but it slows down really quickly.
So now that you aren't getting PP from these plays, the only thing you can do is improve right? Well, that would be the case if your growth in skill wasn't severely slow practicing these maps due to a number of reasons. (in my experience)

How do we fix this problem?
This really is a simple solution, and I'd be surprised if you couldn't come up with it. Just play easier songs. Play songs you know you can FC with one to three tries and get 'good' accuracy.
Go back to those 3* maps if you have to.
In this process do not retry. That will only hurt your skill progression and develop bad habits.
Slowly move up the difficulty once you feel you've 'mastered' that range. I'm talking 0.2* at a time here at most.

The result? For me, at least it was increased consistency, accuracy, rank, and progression speed. Knowing this isn't going to help you get out of a rut, but practicing this might.

Note: This is in reference to a specific rut that many players experience. This post is not meant to help everyone.
In the case of a rut aside from this one, get creative and try something different. (Although that's another topic entirely)

shortpotato wrote:

tl;dr play more

good for consistency

not so good for learning stuff you are bad at

jaaakb wrote:

good for consistency

not so good for learning stuff you are bad at

Like streaming,an example. Also the wall of text is a long way to say play maps at your levels,which is generally true but remember that if you want to get better at something you have to learn it and this imply a good number of retry and b c rank.

I hit the first wall at 5.5*+ and ~200pp nomods then 270+ pp and 6.3*+ DTs.

I really dislike the "Play maps you can easily fc" advice. Fuck that. Play maps you know you can fc and play them for fc. They're challenging for a reason, and they're not so hard that you have no chance in hell of not fcing it at the current time. After you're done with that, fc or no fc, go and play easier maps, BUT NOT EASY FUCKING MAPS, that you can improve your acc on.

Then maybe after you;ve tried that go play whatever stupid hard map seems fun because it is.

What's that? A combination of fcing maps that are challenging and push your skill boundries (or pp boundries, they're correlated whatever), fcing maps that are still somewhat challenging but for acc, and maps that are really hard for the sake of just playing them?

What do I call that? Is it playing more? Is it? Is it just playing?

Khelly wrote:

I really dislike the "Play maps you can easily fc" advice. Fuck that. Play maps you know you can fc and play them for fc. They're challenging for a reason, and they're not so hard that you have no chance in hell of not fcing it at the current time. After you're done with that, fc or no fc, go and play easier maps, BUT NOT EASY FUCKING MAPS, that you can improve your acc on.

Then maybe after you;ve tried that go play whatever stupid hard map seems fun because it is.

Exactly, I don't think it's a good idea to focus on maps you can easily fc. It's not bad to play them but you should also play maps above your comfort level. Also the star rating of a map doesn't always reflect the difficulty of a map.

Skeleton-Jelly wrote:

After a player starts to FC 3*-3.5* maps, they instantly jump up to 4*+ maps.

imo pushing your limits like that is a valid way to improve as long as you don't overdo it.

I'm assuming you're familiar with the maps you have, what star ranges you fc/play in every category, and that you ignore the ones that are outside of what's normal for that area.

Souzou forest DT at 6.03* ish is much harder than some 6.2*. Whatever. I know that. I know my map pool.

yeah im basically screwed

tl;dr play more

play more

but I can't FC anything

honestly it doesn't really matter what people play before 100k as long as they get A in their scores

also yea play more