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The reason you can (probably) never become a pro at osu

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Topic Starter
Railey2
This thread is dedicated to everyone who wants to make it to the top





These are the end times. You need 7000pp to get to the top1000, players all around the world are competing fiercely for their ranks, and you want to make it to the top too.
You play this game a lot, for sure. Maybe you are thinking things like:


"Osu is a game about hard work, the more you play, the better you get!"

"The best players in osu are also the players that worked the hardest! Hard work pays off!"

"Everyone who works hard can make it to the top! I just have to play more!"



There is a reason why people always say "play more", right? For sure you can become a pro if you really follow their advice. Well... no.
You are making a costly mistake. Improvement at osu is not only about work, and people who claim that they made it to the top only as a result of their hard work, are lying. There is a component that we hate looking at, because it is outside of our control. For this reason, it is often times overlooked completely. But it is too powerful for us to ignore it.

Talent.


__________________________________________________________________________________________________





Talent is very elusive and hard to measure, but there is a simple way to do it.
Think of talent as the thing that caused the difference in skill between two players, that put the same amount of effort into the game. If we think of it like this, we can measure it just fine, because playcount is a decent approximation for effort (hitcount is even better, to be seen on peoples profiles), and pp is a decent approximation for skill. If someone gets more skilled with less effort, we can call them talented.



Green would be an example of a talented player (lower playcount than everyone around him).
Red is an example of an untalented player (higher playcount than everyone around him).

Keep in mind that "talented" is a relative term, which means that it only becomes meaningful in comparison. We call red untalented, because he is less talented than the reference group, other people around rank 5k.
If we went back in time and checked how red was doing when he only had 1k pp, we may have found that red was a relatively talented player.


So, why is this relevant?

Simply put: As soon as you find yourself in the "untalented-bracket", it is time to bury your dream of becoming a top-player. This is particularly true if you get there early.
The top-players became top-players through hard work, but they were also very talented. You will find nobody in the top100 who isn't extremely talented, and the overwhelming majority worked very hard in addition to that. As a result, you will never catch up to them, if you are "just" hard working.
Hard work may beat talent, but it can't beat talent and hard work. The top, has both.


But if you find yourself in the "average-bracket", or possibly even in the "talented-bracket", go ahead and play more. See how long your talent lasts. As soon as it runs out, you know that you are close to approaching your limit as a competitive player.
Great effort will get you far, but if you lack talent, it will never get you to the top.


Lastly, a word for people that lack talent.

Change your goals. Osu can be an extremely fun game, especially without the pressure of playing for ranks. Discover new music, play with friends, play interesting maps. It's all about what you make of it. A more talented player once said "plz enjoy game", and this is good advice regardless of how talented you are. Settle for less, but enjoy it all the way.

Good luck to everyone! It's a rocky road that leads to the top100. Let's hope that you have the talent to make it there.



exceptions
SPOILER
There are cases where people put effort into the game in wrong ways, such as only playing for SS. In that case, their lack of success is not necessarily a result of them lacking talent, but rather a result of a misapplication of effort. It can be hard to tell the two apart sometimes, but what I wrote above still holds true either way.
Caput Mortuum
don't crush my dreams :C
chainpullz
This post is flawed because you can acquire play count etc from playing maps that wouldn't even give you pp for an SS. Not everyone goes hard every hour of every day. Some people still choose to play even on days where they are both physically and mentally exhausted and not capable of making top performance plays. Does this have anything to do with "talent"? No.

Your entire notion of talent is flawed if you are basing it off rank/pp/playcount.
Topic Starter
Railey2

chainpullz wrote:

This post is flawed because you can acquire play count etc from playing maps that wouldn't even give you pp for an SS. Not everyone goes hard every hour of every day. Some people still choose to play even on days where they are both physically and mentally exhausted and not capable of making top performance plays. Does this have anything to do with "talent"? No.

Your entire notion of talent is flawed if you are basing it off rank/pp/playcount.
To make this a bit more clear:

If you misapply your effort (never going hard, only playing for SS, depriving yourself of sleep for the sake of playing more..), this can also be a reason why you don't see results.
But what I said about talent is still true. Keep in mind that I mentioned how pp and playcount (better: hitcount), are just approximations for skill and effort, not perfect representations of it. It is just a way to estimate how talented you are. I will claim that it generally works, if you don't do some super crazy shit like only playing while blindfolded. Forming the average of the people around you and comparing yourself to it will give you a basic idea of where you fall. -/+ 2 million hitcount around the average and you are probably fine. More than that? Probably lacking talent.


Take yourself as an example. You have 9,587,322 hits and are rank 8k.

You are already in the untalented-bracket, by approximation. You will never make it to the top and should give up on it. You'll make it to top500 tops. There are other reasons to play the game.
Tamako Lumisade
And then, there was thelewa, who's never been a talented player. He repeated many times that he sucked in rhythm games. Yet, he was one of the best players in the world through insane hard work he put in.
Yolshka
im heavily offended
Topic Starter
Railey2

Husky wrote:

And then, there was thelewa, who's never been a talented player. He repeated many times that he sucked in rhythm games. Yet, he was one of the best players in the world through insane hard work he put in.
lewa is probably among the top10 most accurate players in osu, right behind bikko, HDHR, xilver and maybe a couple others.

If you want to make an example to debunk what I said, https://osu.ppy.sh/u/1208858 is probably the best counter-example.

But even then, I can almost assure you that Vettel was most likely not behind at 4k pp.


The only thing that can really debunk my argument is showing me a large amount of players that were in the untalented-bracket early on, but still made it to the top. But you won't find many examples like this, because it is generally not a thing. The overwhelming majority of top-players always did better than people close to their rank, until they joined the ranks of the top-players. If you don't count to this group, your chances of becoming a top-player are significantly reduced.
Endaris
Don't need to be a pro to be good.
winber1
useless thread

let me help all you nerds out there

tl;dr you suck
chainpullz

Railey2 wrote:

chainpullz wrote:

This post is flawed because you can acquire play count etc from playing maps that wouldn't even give you pp for an SS. Not everyone goes hard every hour of every day. Some people still choose to play even on days where they are both physically and mentally exhausted and not capable of making top performance plays. Does this have anything to do with "talent"? No.

Your entire notion of talent is flawed if you are basing it off rank/pp/playcount.
To make this a bit more clear:

If you misapply your effort (never going hard, only playing for SS, depriving yourself of sleep for the sake of playing more..), this can also be a reason why you don't see results.
But what I said about talent is still true. Keep in mind that I mentioned how pp and playcount (better: hitcount), are just approximations for skill and effort, not perfect representations of it. It is just a way to estimate how talented you are. I will claim that it generally works, if you don't do some super crazy shit like only playing while blindfolded. Forming the average of the people around you and comparing yourself to it will give you a basic idea of where you fall. -/+ 2 million hitcount around the average and you are probably fine. More than that? Probably lacking talent.


Take yourself as an example. You have 9,587,322 hits and are rank 8k.

You are already in the untalented-bracket, by approximation. You will never make it to the top and should give up on it. You'll make it to top500 tops. There are other reasons to play the game.
My actual stats are nowhere close to what is listed on my profile and the same could be said about most players which is why your argument is 100% pointless. There is no such thing as talent. Just mindset. If you live and breath circles you will be better at them then other people. That has 100% nothing to do with talent. Saying that someone is at the top because they are both talented and worked hard is stupid and is honestly an insult to those players. It had nothing to do with talent.

Talent is an excuse people make for not having the drive to succeed. It is an admittance to defeat. This doesn't just apply to circles. It applies to pretty much everything in life.
OnosakiHito
I won't say whether this is likely to be the case or not. But for someone like me who plays Taiko since a very long time, I can say, that I reached some kind of cap in the past which brought me to my nowaday's thinking, keeping playing for fun and not putting pressure on me. I found my own niche where I am good at. Though, the outcome of this was surpassing my old self later, especially since I found another way of playing for me, so the cap I reached in the past was outdated.

What I want to say with this is that I do believe there is some kind of physical cap to one which could be determined as 'talent'. But one can't really say when this cap is reached at all. There are afterall other things which influence this cap such as the way you play or even ones health.

I find the OP interesting which is why I am here.
winber1
talent is an excuse but also a reason. completely denying talent is just showing ignorance as well tbh. just in osu alone, you can see examples of kids who reach top ranks within like 2 or 3 years, which you can attribute partially to more maps to train particular skills and more maps in general to just practice in addition to the higher cleanliness/quality of maps, but mostly to both having the right mindset and the right set of skills to begin with.

you seriously can't say some 130 pound asian kid who never works out or plays sport is gonna be a good bodybuilder. you can't say some diagnosed mentally retarded or autistic kid is gonna be the next genius physicist by pure hard work. i know these are completely random extreme cases, but you can apply them on smaller scale. Some people are just bad at math, some people are just plain stupid. These kids aren't gonna win a noble prize by studying science all day. They probably will never be able to do pretty much anything. people have strengths and weaknesses and almost always in their life end up following their strengths instead of their weaknesses, although they might have the heart to mitigate their lack of skill in certain subjects.

i'd like to think of myself as somewhat talented in intellect, or at least lucky to not be shitfaced retarded. Most of school I would never study, or at most 1-2 hour for only things like final exams at the end of a semester, yet although other kids spend more than 3 or more times the amount of time i spend studying, they often still get worse grades and worse gpa. that's also one of the only reasons i was able to balance my somewhat busy schedule while still playing league errday bruh. Hell, I even probably paid less attention in class, but I just retained information more easily. I really don't think you can just chalk that up to hard work.
Topic Starter
Railey2

chainpullz wrote:

There is no such thing as talent. Just mindset. If you live and breath circles you will be better at them then other people. That has 100% nothing to do with talent. Saying that someone is at the top because they are both talented and worked hard is stupid and is honestly an insult to those players. It had nothing to do with talent.

Talent is an excuse people make for not having the drive to succeed. It is an admittance to defeat. This doesn't just apply to circles. It applies to pretty much everything in life.
You are one of the people that hate admitting to themselves that there are forces outside of their control that affect what they can reasonably achieve.

People are born with certain predispositions. I can play as much chess as I want, but I will never beat Magnus Carlsen. I can study as hard as I want, but I'll never be as smart as someone with IQ 165 who studies half as much as me.

I can play as much osu as I want, but I'll never be even close to the top 100. And the same applies to you.

This is an undeniable reality. You can accept it, or you can call talent an excuse in an effort to justify your naive view of a world where talent is evenly distributed and effort gets rewarded fairly.

Denying the existence of talent is childish.

Read the original post again. I made this thread for people that think like you too. I don't want to insult anyone, I'm just don't want anyone to have unrealistic expectations of themselves.
PriestMVP
Very good post.

The grim reality is, you may pass someone with talent if you put in insane amounts of work while they sit idle.

But if they put in the same amount of work, they will inevitably pass you.

That's all there is to it.
chainpullz

winber1 wrote:

completely random extreme cases

chainpullz wrote:

pretty much everything in life.
Dw fam I know how to quantify my arguments to avoid extreme cases. :^)

winber1 wrote:

i'd like to think of myself as somewhat talented in intellect, or at least lucky to not be shitfaced retarded. Most of school I would never study, or at most 1-2 hour for only things like final exams at the end of a semester, yet although other kids spend more than 3 or more times the amount of time i spend studying, they often still get worse grades and worse gpa. that's also one of the only reasons i was able to balance my somewhat busy schedule while still playing league errday bruh. Hell, I even probably paid less attention in class, but I just retained information more easily. I really don't think you can just chalk that up to hard work.
As I said, mindset. When it comes to matters of knowledge/intellect "work" doesn't simply apply to like actually doing problems and shit. Both conscious and subconscious thinking apply here as well. People who are good at math are good at math because they see and think about everything in the world in a very mathematical way. They are in essence "working" just by living their life. If you want to go as far as to call things like that talent I would still say that is just disrespectful to those people, at least to use it in this sort of context. Most of these "talented" people have difficulty living normal lives because they are incapable of seeing/thinking about the world in a normal way.

I mean sure, there are the obvious extreme cases. Micheal Phelps is double jointed and that gives him a massive evolutionary advantage against most other people when it comes to Olympic Swimming. I still wouldn't call that talent.

I argue that talent doesn't exist and that you are simply using the wrong metric with which to measure effort. It's also a difficult thing to discuss due to how little we understand about the early developmental phase for humans from a research standpoint. Whether talent actually exists from a mental capacity standpoint (barring actual mental diseases) is still a contested topic.

But yeah, for a game where you literally just click circles you probably aren't ever going to hit your true limits as onosaki has pointed out and those are the only things that are really worth debating as far as "talent" is concerned.
B1rd
now for some more red pills:
-in addition to circle clicking, some people are just better than others in pretty much every way
-it applies to everything in life and if you lose the genetic lottery you're fucked
-race/gender has a big effect on IQ/intelligence
-jews control America

etc etc
Endaris
socialisation is more important than genes though
too bad that society sucks in most places
B1rd
Oh yeah statistically if you was raised by a single mother you're fucked too

sad life
Topic Starter
Railey2
chainpullz, this is insane. The existence of talent is not a contested topic. The blank slate-theory has been exhaustively refuted, there are about nobody left in professional fields who claims that all people could theoretically work themselves anywhere they want.

Reaction time is already moderately genetic.
Working memory is influenced by genetics.
IQ is influenced by genetics.


Your argument is demonstrably false. I've seen many people claim that hard work is more important than talent, but I've never seen anyone say that talent doesn't exist.
winber1

chainpullz wrote:

People who are good at math are good at math because they see and think about everything in the world in a very mathematical way.
not really. I didn't really want to go into this topic since there is not quantitative evidence truly, but what do you even quantify as "a very mathematical way?" I'd say doing basic math and solving basic algebraic equations for work or just curiosity isn't not really that mathematical, but that's what most people would do. And to be fair, a good portion of mathematically inclined people (asians lul) are not thinking about group theory or matrix transformations or some crap like that, they only use it when they need to. Otherwise, they'd only think about more complex problems if that is their job. Every once in a while people will just solve problems for fun or do it to help someone. I know most of my friends haven't even taken a math class in 4 to 5 years and only use basic math skills nowadays, but would be bounds better at relearning calculus than most people our age (who also have not taken or done advanced math in years). This is all just hypothesizing and no evidence, but that's all I have for that.

But when it comes to hardwork and mindset, even that is a talent in and of itself. Our brains are a physical entity that can be almost completely hardwired to think a certain way. Perhaps there's no absolute conclusion on the malleability of the human brain, but just evolutionarily speaking, certain animals have been "proven" to act a certain way under certain stimuli regardless of any environment. Of course, we don't see that specifically in humans, but the idea is that tendencies to retain a certain behavior exist in all animal, and especially for humans, regardless of whether it's "hardwired" or not. This is why personalities exist, because we have a tendency to always be a certain way. You can argue that people can push through if they work "hard enough" to change their identity and personality, but can't it also be said that that particular is much harder and time-consuming to accomlpish? And in that way, wouldn't that mean that for someone who has a behaviorally negative tendency to require more time and effort to fix it and improve themselves in a particular area? If you don't consider this a kind of talent, then there still seems to be a discrepancy between the amount of time one person takes to learn a skill and the time it takes for another, and that time discrepancy itself is like a pseudo-talent. If not measurable in mental capacity, we can still measure talent in the amount of time it takes people to learn particular sets of skills, although not numerically per se.
7ambda
Being good at osu! doesn't mean much in real life, so it doesn't matter.

Also, the fact that you're judging someone's skill by their play count is pretty sad.
Topic Starter
Railey2

F1r3tar wrote:

Being good at osu! doesn't mean much in real life, so it doesn't matter.

Also, the fact that you're judging someone's skill by their play count is pretty sad.
You don't get to decide what matters to anyone but yourself, don't be so presumptuous.

I don't judge skill by play count, I consider hitcount and skill to estimate talent.
KupcaH
ok

Just believe in yourself, and stay positive.
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