I feel as though I am hardstuck somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5 stars without much prospect of improving. Sadly the relationship of stars to "difficulty" seems to be very loose indeed as I know some low 2 star high bpm maps that are far harder than a map 1-1.5 stars higher. In this respect it is very difficult to measure progress using stars.

I'm able to read notes that go back on themselves or are out of order better than I could I guess, but they still feel like a cheap trick and if notes appear out of order close together I can't see what order they appeared in. Jumps aren't too bad and I can do jumps on maps harder than I can clear. High bpm (~190+) definitely an issue. some maps even within the 2.5-3.5 range I class an unplayable, either because of being simply unreadable, or having no/questionable beat.

Is there anything specific I can do that would help with breaking through this barrier?

60 hours and some top plays are only from a few days ago.
You're not stuck at all, just play and you'll improve.
Download 5000 beatmap, sort them by difficulty, and play them all starting from easy, don't skip stuff, don't retry more than 2 or 3 times the same map in a row.

Irrespective of the best plays or not, that's simply a function of some songs being (effectively) ranked incorrectly relative to their actual difficulty level. At this point I've even played 4 star songs that are easier than mid to low 2 star songs.

I feel like I have hardcore stalled out in terms of actual progression. I'n not really going anywhere at this point. I've got a tablet coming soon which will eliminate the phenomenon of missing notes that I have actually aimed at or breaking chains from sliders mysteriously getting dragged out... will also allow me to be a lot faster which will help. Mouse aiming and speed is definitely limiting me at this point and screwing me out of chains that I should be holding, but I know it's not exclusively the issue.

play more

dude ur not stuck lmao and you mentioned that you are getting a tablet.
once u get ur tablet just play more

You are definitely arent getting worse dont worry. If you need some help you can add my discord on my profile, i suggest when you get your tablet you practice and spend time and you'll be great in no time!

so.... back after the tablet adjustment... wasted 6+ hours playing with area and getting used to it.. saw an improvement generally all around and now I'm hard-stuck again albeit slightly higher but not much different to where I was just with more consistency and less stupid breaks... some 3.5's some a bit higher, some a bit lower. Jumps I can do well above my level.... streams above 5 are complete bullshit, literal nonsense. After maybe 20-30 hours I still can't spin as fast with tablet as I could with mouse which is a great disappointment since that is one area I thought it would trivialise. Kind of feel as though you must hit your peak around the time I have in game (subtract 24h from my game time... mouse only... then kb mouse... then tablet kb... total waste of time) or at least be well on the way to 5-6 star... I going fucking nowhere as it stands

anything ~180 bpm on mid 3* is a problem for a variety of reasons, quick/short multi slider segements follwed by hits or other sliders are a problem (that is to say, basically impossible). spinning would require an entirely different grip vs having total screen mobility for jumps (ant area btw) and even then my fingers are virtually paralysed from gripping the pen, so short spinners can sometime 100/50/or fail. Streams above 5 are RNG in the extreme (literally I don't even know what you are meant to do except guess and watch a wall of fucking 100's/50's pop up.) other random shit.



I'm back to feeling as though the game is one big troll intended to bait people into wasting their time on the unattainable... which is a shame because in December (for the most part, and after I got my tablet as well) I was really loving it.

My desire to play is really suppressed now though because it just doesn't feel like there's any more progress to be made.

Stop caring too much about improvement, play for fun/music and,
you're improving, your top plays are not that old,

DrTrouserPlank wrote:

anything ~180 bpm on mid 3* is a problem

180, you're Lucky, i start to struggle around 160bpm...
Streams are one of the hardest stuff to do in this game, people who can hit them perfectly are playing since years ago !
Remember to not play tired, or pick relaxing/slow songs.

DrTrouserPlank wrote:

I'm back to feeling as though the game is one big troll intended to bait people into wasting their time on the unattainable

Thi game, like all games, is for entertainment, Entertainment is basically the fact of wasting time on something fun.
Stop complaining about the difficulty and start to enjoy the game.

Do you mind uploading some replays of you playing songs/patterns you have trouble with, or maybe PMing me with links if you don't want to post them publicly? Sometimes it helps to have other people look at your gameplay because they may be able to pick up on bad habits or give advice on how to improve certain skills.

thewhitewhale wrote:

Do you mind uploading some replays of you playing songs/patterns you have trouble with, or maybe PMing me with links if you don't want to post them publicly? Sometimes it helps to have other people look at your gameplay because they may be able to pick up on bad habits or give advice on how to improve certain skills.

it's just streams above 5 and faster stuff in the upper end of 3* ... spinners are also a massive problem (especially after playing for a while and my fingers are kind of crippled from holding the pen, and it seems as though they are just free points for most people whereas I' even struggling to not lose acc on them).. about 250-300rpm over a practice map with a long spinner... on real spinners I sometimes 100 and even fail ridiculously short ones. It's not possible to spin with the standard writing grip I use, although I can't suggest a grip that would solve the spinner issue in isolation; all variations of grip I have tried destroy my screen mobility, and my area is very small already.

I assume a shit-ton of people use spinning macros at this point. no-one is spinning 350+ on short spinners for sure. You'd never manage to both center and hold the cursor still for long enough to get the spins in when you account for reaction time and the startup time of your spin. In the real world and on really short spinners, the spinner is over before you would even have generated maximum spin speed. People who are spinning in the 400's on very short spinners are very obvious cheaters and some of them stream, so power to them for the enormous con they are pulling in front of people's eyes and getting away with.

My progress had just totally stalled out, and the spinner issue is really fucking annoying me since it ought to be 10x easier with a pen than a mouse but it isn't, and I can either be able to hits screen-wide jumps, or cripple my grip in the hope that I can spin better but lose 50% of my screen mobility/speed.

Pretty pissed off with how I've just hit a brick wall in terms of progression since the stuff I can't do is basically bordering on the absurd.

DrTrouserPlank wrote:

I assume a shit-ton of people use spinning macros at this point. no-one is spinning 350+ on short spinners for sure.

Just because you can't do it doesn't mean it's impossible lol

lewski wrote:

DrTrouserPlank wrote:

I assume a shit-ton of people use spinning macros at this point. no-one is spinning 350+ on short spinners for sure.

Just because you can't do it doesn't mean it's impossible lol

OK buddy.

Leave it to the village idiot though to pick the critical part of my post and offer nothing constructive at all.

The key for spinners is the reaction time (that's why i play with spun-out mod, mine is very crap)
try to find a skin, or at least, a spinner's skin that is easily readable, to react faster,
try both rotating clockwise or counter-clockwise, keep the better,
try to spin the closest to the center.

Negative mentality aside, I'd like to know what you specifically find hard about bursts of 5+ notes and faster stuff. Do you find yourself tapping too slowly? Are you having trouble with notes placed in certain regions of the screen? Are you having trouble with alternating finger control? At what BPM do you typically find yourself struggling to keep up with singletapping?

Also, spinners are easy with the proper technique. It's much easier to spin fast if you spin in really small circles. If you look at the way top players do spinners, nearly all of them spin really tight circles within a region with twice the radius of a CS4 circle.

It may also be worth considering that your sensitivity is too high or too low for you. Try messing with your sensitivity if you consistently find yourself over/under-aiming.

when your top ranks look like mine you can say you are stuck

DrTrouserPlank wrote:

Leave it to the village idiot though to pick the critical part of my post and offer nothing constructive at all.

Here's some constructive criticism: insulting people isn't a good thing to do in a conversation. I don't really have any advice other than "play more" which isn't really helpful so I thought I'd just correct an odd misconception. There's no need for most players to cheat on spinners.

thewhitewhale wrote:

Negative mentality aside, I'd like to know what you specifically find hard about bursts of 5+ notes and faster stuff. Do you find yourself tapping too slowly? Are you having trouble with notes placed in certain regions of the screen? Are you having trouble with alternating finger control? At what BPM do you typically find yourself struggling to keep up with singletapping?

Also, spinners are easy with the proper technique. It's much easier to spin fast if you spin in really small circles. If you look at the way top players do spinners, nearly all of them spin really tight circles within a region with twice the radius of a CS4 circle.

It may also be worth considering that your sensitivity is too high or too low for you. Try messing with your sensitivity if you consistently find yourself over/under-aiming.

Anything over 5 notes I just can't tell how fast to click .... The closer the notes the more guess work it is. I stream too fast or too slow so it's not one of the other. I can maintain a relatively consistent tapping speed, but it's total luck if it happens to be the one required for the stream. BPM for streams isn't really the problem (bpm in general is a massive problem close to my difficulty limit) because as I say, I can tap faster than pretty much everything I have seen so far.

The spinners are probably my biggest problem right now since they are so common, streams are bad but come in second since I assume those can be improved but I don't see anyway to get small circles, fast and actually keep the pen tip in the same spot. Either you end up cutting through the centre of the dot, or your spin drifts across the surface. I don't honestly think it's possible to do spinners fast enough with my grip, which has led me to start using other grips, which is making me worse overall and still not solving the spinner issue anyway. It's totally killing my enjoyment of the game and making me not want to play anywhere near as much since every session feels like a waste of time if I am practising with a fundamentally flawed technique that I need to change at some point.

Anything over 5 notes I just can't tell how fast to click .... The closer the notes the more guess work it is

The spacing rule is required only to certain star level in ranking criteria. Higher AR is easier to read in this case, there's "less guessing to do" I think AR9 should be comfortable enough for you at this point.

Also if AR is 9 or higher try playing HD, as it teaches you the correct way of reading maps - buffering circles appearing on the screen to your memory, and removing them from buffer when you click them. The brain does it kind of automatically, you don't need any focus to remember the buffer, and when you'll get better you'll automatically remember the delay between circles. Hidden is probably the fastest way to learn this, as it prevents you from reading the "buffer" in real time, by looking at approach circles, and forces you to remember the order in which the circles appear.

If you really think you are stuck, just grind for like 6-10 hours a day for a week straight, come back to this forum and if you haven't improved one bit, then you're actually stuck. If you manage to put a colossal amount of time into this game in a short span without improvement, then I don't know what to tell you.

Also 99% of players aren't cheaters in this game, the only ways to cheat in this game (that I know of) are ReplayEdit (replicating someone else's play exactly) and Auto (there is a way to modify your client to make Auto plays ranked in your name, don't know how tho because not a cheater).

DrTrouserPlank wrote:

I don't honestly think it's possible to do spinners fast enough with my grip, which has led me to start using other grips, which is making me worse overall and still not solving the spinner issue anyway. It's totally killing my enjoyment of the game and making me not want to play anywhere near as much since every session feels like a waste of time if I am practising with a fundamentally flawed technique that I need to change at some point.

Playing with a tablet will feel odd for awhile but give it a couple of months before things feel like second nature. You should definitely stop changing how you do things (grip, tablet area, etc.). This will surely hinder your ability to improve since you're not providing time for your muscles to get comfortable to a certain style (it's mostly muscle memory). If you feel every session is just a waste of time then its your mindset that you have to change. No technique if fundamentally wrong, it's all up to personal preference and you should use what feels most comfortable.