Hi everybody! About 3 weeks ago I left osu!standard because I began to be bored of it and then I discovered osu!mania. I've been with sound effects put on 0% since the second day I downloaded osu because playing them were annoying to me, I tried with some skins with different sounds but they were annoying too, I think it's because I played the drums at High School's band and I was the person who decided when to do "drum rolls" or similar decorations to the rhythm. When I heard other people playing the drums on videos or other schools, I was thinking every time when I think I should put "decorations" for make rhythm more enjoyable for me and maybe other people. And then, I met osu sound effects and always when I play I can't concentrate with sounds where I think they shouldn't be in my opinion and I can't stop that thinking on my mind and that's why I play without them. A week ago, my friends noticed on my first osu video I've uploaded to YT I had sound effects off and they talked to me of too many reasons of why should I play with them, "Sound effects help you to have a sound reference when you fail on a note" or similar reasons of how sound effects help you become better. Then I gave sound effects another opportunity with the sounds from one of my friend's skin and it was annoying again. I'm making this post because I want to know your opinions about sound effects or if anybody plays without them too on osu!standard or osu!mania. Thanks for reading and please, comment your opinion about.

PD: If my English isn't very understandable, I'm sorry but I'm Spanish and the English lessons level here is very low on High Schools.
PD2: I've tried putting sound effects on 5% or similars too, but the results were the same

hitsounds are good in osu!standard because the rhythm isn't always as clear to read.
in osu!mania the rhythm is much easier to read because of the vertical scroll. also the maps tend to get so dense that using hitsounds usually becomes a distraction unless you're playing perfectly.

some people use them in mania, but mostly people play without hitsounds.

I'm one of the relatively few people that actually play mania with hitsounds louder than music. I do this because I play with flashlight and it helps to have the audio cue from my hitsounds to give me more feedback on my timing (flashlight actually hides my judgement images, so the only way I can tell how I'm doing is combo and the timing bar on the bottom of the screen).

Funny thing is, until I switched to playing FL, I hated using hitsounds and usually played with them off.

Talking about harder maps such as >4*:

Personally think that sound effects are beneficial for maps with simpler rhythms but more complex patterns so maps that are more chord-oriented in nature. So like 150 BPM 1/4 drum rhythms are very distinguishable, the hitsounds helps heaps in timing these drum rhythms if the offset is correct on the map of course.

However it gets quite confusing and obstructive if you have lets say stairs that come at 300 BPM 1/4s (basically really fast), hitsounds don't really help at that point for me as it is just a mess, unless I am able to somehow distinguish that I'm hitting like 10ms late or early etc. Feedback to the player at this point is more of obstruction that that of beneficial.

PS: Your English is fine, however, try to paragraph them so as to make it less painful to the eyes to look at. So paragraph it whenever you feel like you're changing topic or making a different argument

As many others said, hitsounds can get pretty annoying when going to dense maps. Where appropriate, like in a purely hitsounded map or patterns that do little overmapping, I would almost always use hitsounds. When going to denser maps, I actually have a skin which only has an audible hitsound for drums. This makes hearing the meter easier and allows me to stay on track in terms of how fast to press and when to expect the chords. Not all maps have hitsound mapped chords/drums, so it helps if there is.