Ok, I'll be as concise as possible, as this type of posts are very common and tend to get unthoughtful replies (PLAY MOOOOREEE. POST AGAIN WHEN YOU PLAYED 999Mill times ;D).

My situation is that I already play every time I can, and that I stopped improving a year ago even though I play regularly. Frustating, because I have so many beatmaps that I'd like to pass someday...

As many other people here, I'm having problems improving as a player, and I would like to know if I'm doing something wrong?... Maybe?

Hand posture. I've searched through the forum and found out that my posture is not that bad, elbow and wrist are resting, although not close to my body because my desk is too big for me.

Tapping. When I started I was good at sigle-tapping, high acc, stupidly bad at streams... But time passed, some pretty pad tendon ache later I decided to play alternate just because it feels more natural an relieves stress but now my tapping is even slower and less accurate. Highest consistent single tapping is around 180BPM, my best streaming is around 160BPM, but I fail a lot after 2 or 3 stream bars.

Aiming. My aim is not perfect, but consistent enough.

Reading. This is what bugs me. Although I can read and FC (with relax mod) 6+ beatmaps, It's really my left hand that is not really up to the task.

Bad habit 1. I don't want to fall into beatmap dependant muscle memory (the thing where you've player a beatmap so much that you end up hating the song and doing it in autopilot), so I don't fancy retying over and over until my hands go numb (personal preference ).

Bad habit 2. Rage quitting just to give it another try 5 min later.

I just want to know if anyone has been able to overcome this left hand bottleneck and how to hopefully do it. Is it common? Is it that big of a deal?

Do not use Relax mod to measure your reading!
Playing Relax has not much to do with reading as reading encompasses knowing where to move your cursor and WHEN your cursor has to be on the circle AND when you have to tap. Relax really only tells about the first one and that is arguably the easiest. Autopilot is the much more difficult from a reading perspective.
As reading is closely tied to accuracy on any less trivial map you likely have some corpses hidden here although that is a common thing these days.

One other thing to note is that you absolutely have to play more. I know you don't want to read this but 250 plays per month is not enough to achieve signifcant improvement.
To give you an example, this is my pp-scatter versus plays per month:

I didn't get the stretching to have the perfect match but literally at any point in time I hit less than 1000 plays per month I found myself unable to set significant pp-scores and improve. I actually have similar problems to yours with the main difference that I never singletapped and that I spent a fuckload of time on my accuracy but playing more to a sufficient degree always led to improvement.

You haven't played 999 million times, so play more.

I'm a natural alternate player that at one point realized there were benefits to a single tapping style and its been very difficult to try and adapt to it as I also found myself slower and suddenly rather simple patterns seemed a lot more difficult and would often find myself trying to alternate on certain patterns out of habit.

That said, I think if you can find yourself not defined by a certain tapping style and able to use whatever you need to because you practiced both extensively it would overall be the most flexible and consistent way to tap.

It's a muscle that has to be built. So tl;dr- play 999 million more times

Endaris wrote:

Do not use Relax mod to measure your reading!
Playing Relax has not much to do with reading as reading encompasses knowing where to move your cursor and WHEN your cursor has to be on the circle AND when you have to tap. Relax really only tells about the first one and that is arguably the easiest. Autopilot is the much more difficult from a reading perspective.

What I really wanted to say with this is that I know what to do, I "hear" the rythm is my head but when I go and try to execute it my hand is not responsive enough. The more I play, the more tired my hand gets and the less accurate it is. That's when I get frustated, my focus goes blop and everything else is for the worse. I even considered changing hands given that I'm right handed and every now and then try autopilot with the right hand and it just works...

i tire out my hand all the time, as in tire out as much as so i can't even type properly because im so tired. then i give it a three days rest. i dunno if it actually works, but that's how i believe to improve my stamina.
otherwise i know for a fact that i cant singletap 200bpm. i hope to get better but it's just really hard.

and btw that playcount and graph thingo is very interesting, wonder if mine has any correlation as well

This was actually accurate and when I have higher play counts, I get more high scores.

Endaris wrote:

Do not use Relax mod to measure your reading!
Playing Relax has not much to do with reading as reading encompasses knowing where to move your cursor and WHEN your cursor has to be on the circle AND when you have to tap. Relax really only tells about the first one and that is arguably the easiest. Autopilot is the much more difficult from a reading perspective.
As reading is closely tied to accuracy on any less trivial map you likely have some corpses hidden here although that is a common thing these days.

One other thing to note is that you absolutely have to play more. I know you don't want to read this but 250 plays per month is not enough to achieve signifcant improvement.
To give you an example, this is my pp-scatter versus plays per month:

I didn't get the stretching to have the perfect match but literally at any point in time I hit less than 1000 plays per month I found myself unable to set significant pp-scores and improve. I actually have similar problems to yours with the main difference that I never singletapped and that I spent a fuckload of time on my accuracy but playing more to a sufficient degree always led to improvement.

[google:1337]Bad habit 2. Rage quitting just to give it another try 5 min later.[/google:1337]


Actually that's not a bad idea