Hello. Y'all know I'm supposed to be gone or something, but it has recently come to my attention that it's almost 2019 and people keep BSing their way into the rankings. Ranking, here, will refer to the leaderboards.

Basically there are multiple problems our rankings are facing, some people from the osu!Taiko community already know all of them, but some of you may not understand or grasp the true form of this problem.

In the light of an upcoming video I will write about it, I would like to collect opinions from pretty much everyone from all modes.

- Firstly, we have the old-age problem of dual screening. While not as severe right now, it is still present nowadays and can potentially ruin anyone's effort to get first place regardless of mods, even including legitimate HD+FL plays. I don't think anyone really agreed on whether to keep this mod combination or not, given they still get pp off of it, but in terms of rankings, they are very easy first places if you know how to do it - and nothing can really stop this to happen as it is undetectable.

I am also including sheet reading (printing or writing down the chart) in this category, as they are essentially the same: still having the information available to hit notes in stealth mode.

- Secondly, and by far the biggest issue nowadays, osu!mania players using Taikomania skin to ease up their reading. It's not wrong for osu!mania players to try out Taiko. I mean, they are similar to some degree, but Taiko really puts emphasis on reading patterns on a single lane while VSRGs puts more emphasis on patterns themselves. By separating the Taiko playfield into two lanes, players basically make their reading easier. And by doing that, players basically get themselves a free tickets to higher ranks, while people who start from scratch and put up a lot of effort to get there get punished by falling down the rankings.

To get back on the pattern emphasis, as a long-time Taiko and StepMania player (combined time is about 21 years of experience), I will confidently say that playing certain keystroke patterns in both game modes is very different. Reading Taiko, a single lane game, is pretty much processing the note information to hit the correct key. Whereas in VSRGs of any kind, you rely a lot on column reading, which is pretty much the only information you need, and processing this information doesn't take as much time for equal amounts of experience.

This leads me to...
- Players using a Mania to Taiko Converter, coupled with either a video or their favourite VSRG to read Taiko. And yes, this is surprisingly a thing. This joins the same idea as Taikomania, but puts it to a more extreme scale, as it does not only ease up the reading, but completely changes it altogether. I've said you process much more easily column based scroll, and this is what the program does. I don't have so much more to say about it without repeating my previous points since this is also based on VSRG scrolling.

These three methods are a few ways people have gone up in rankings or been at the top of leaderboards without putting the effort, and I believe this seriously affects the legitimacy of the mode as a whole. osu!mania players who don't bother may just think it's just easy, since they have the tools to do so, and given the state of the community as a whole, this may seriously have a negative impact and put the mode into a negative light, to displease the moths that we all are. And I am talking "cheater heaven" negative light.

Anyone from every mode is welcome to give their opinions, even if they are bad takes. If any of you does do anything mentioned above, I'd like to hear why you do this. This is genuinely as interesting to hear this side of the story.

I do legit HDFL plays Don't remove them from rankings

To me dual screening is a serious problem because it just simply remove the needs of extra reading/memorization needed provided by each mod. I'm not only including simply HDFL but also other mods like HR (the high SV it provides) / HD (hidden notes that needs a short term memory) / HRHD / EZ (slow SV) etc.

Tho I'm not so certain about sheet reading cuz I personally read sheets every so often and although I dont use sheet reading in HDFL sheets does help me visualize the map in a certain way and helps me memorizing. Second thing is that it still do takes some reading skills to determine in mid play which part of the sheet you're currently referring to so I'm not very opposing to that.

About that taikomania thingy I do agree it needs a fix asap. Strictly speaking taikomania is basically mania and it deviates the origin of what taiko is. Also because that skin bug which allows the existence of taikomania skins. Me being a standard player migrating to taiko understands how hard it is to read color patterns yet those mania players bypasses that process of learning how to read and this leads to severe unfairness.

Conclusion: taikomania srsly need a fix. Mods like HDFL? I don't really know.

Quality post. Please disable converts from awarding pp, fix taikomania, remove HDFL and FL (or at least make them not influence pp) and fix up the SR. Oh and reset everyone's pp.

Also one thing you didn’t mention is that HDFL skin that shifts the spawn location of notes so that HDFL doesn’t require any memorization (and this is without people needing to DS)

my stand on FL is so that if you attempt to skin the taikohitcircle.png and the taikohitcircle@2x.png to a size greater than 128x128 and 256x256, each respectively, it will switch back to those aspects of the default skin. for HDFL, i say just make the notes not be rendered in the first place, and only do appear when they are added to your HP. hope we can fix the taikomania skin issue, and manage to keep FL/HDFL somehow.

Edgar_Figaro wrote:

Also one thing you didn’t mention is that HDFL skin that shifts the spawn location of notes so that HDFL doesn’t require any memorization (and this is without people needing to DS)

This got patched already.

Very well said

can't really agree more with the mania stuff.

top VSRG players have more speed and skill than top taiko players because VSRGs have more complexity in playing patterns, due to having 2, 3, 4 keys required at a time. in taiko, you're never required to press more than one key at a time (except finishers but you can ignore them and pp isn't affected). so it's objectively more simple to play a hard taiko map converted to mania than a hard 4k mania map.

i believe that if they wanted to, and if they were given an adequate amount of time to farm to the same extent that top taiko players have, top mania players could occupy 90 of the top 100 positions on global taiko rankings using the methods here. (and if you use the converter and dualscreen with it, you can add HDFL to every map for even more pp since you're dualscreening anyway.)

since there's not a real fix for dualscreening, i don't think there's much of a fix for this problem, but it's something that needs to be worked on.

Taiko is, and has been dying for a while right now.
Yeah sure people can remove pp from converts, and theres HDFL, but I am pretty darn sure it wont work because they can just use the same mod combinations as top players (HDDT), so if they could (pretty sure its "can" at this point), theyre able to do it, and how would one notice a taiko player from a taikomania player? Its undetectable! since theres KKDD players as well, which only changes how does one read a map...

For those who brought up HDFL skin: I did not include it as the time between mass discovery and the devs patching, so I don't think a shit ton of people got hold of it and thus the effect of the thingy was limited to a few people at best. DS is a very old problem and is sadly difficult to detect without human investigation (so are taikomania and m2t converter)

Taikomania can just be patched out of the game. People can use other converters but then it falls into the same category of dualscreening. If we remove the accessibility of these exploits less people will use them

I'm not familiar with the original versions, but in TnT, were there any game modifiers that granted bonus points? If not, we could as well consider mods as being unranked or no-multiplier (fun mods), then reset PP or the entire leaderboard + community outrage. As we are moving into Lazer, at this point I'm wondering what happens with the ranking if there will actually be an implied score v2.

By the way, I guess you did not consider macro recording for nomod->HR/HD/FL plays, because it's detectable, right? Not throwing any names, but I have seen these in the past. Not mentioning a literal replay parser/bot, but a human replay.

I got some mixed feelings about taikomania skins. It's like putting someone new in front of a taiko gameplay and slapping a 1-year experience on him, just like that. Sure, it might be unfair to legit new people to taiko, but what can you do? Like, force a default skin? Or even better, remove skinning, let osu! draw hitobjects - it eliminates the majority of people.

Leaderboard is the problem /s

The only "mod" in original Taiko games that granted a potential difference in score with the current way is Shin-Uchi mode, which is literally comboless scoring. As in, every note yields the exact same amount of points for a perfect/good hit.

About macros, it didn't really cross my mind but this is a good point to bring in the OP whenever I get comfortable with pinpointing the exact problems, and I guess actual replay parsers are detected? Not 100% sure, although I've seen scores that were the exact same as the #1 player stay for a bit of time. Tied to that is replay uploader, I guess.

All in all, there are so many ways to ruin the rankings and deligitimize taiko as a clean and fair mode (people with experience beforehand such as Taikojiro and Owatatsujin players are playing fair, so they're out of the question)

About Taikomania:

You're correct with this analogy that it could also mean we have someone with a year of experience playing the game, however most (95+%) osu!mania players have never played osu!taiko in their life, and if they did start, there is such a stark difference in performance that they are on par with beginners.

I'd personally ask some people who have experience in both modes but main osu!mania to see what's their stance on it, however I don't know many of them since I'm a bit removed from the KBSM/osu!mania community to know enough to collect their opinions.