Around two months ago, I wrote a post about a rhythm game called osu!. I wrote the post around a mere three days after I started the game and tomorrow will be around three months from when I started playing from July 6, 2018. In the past few months, I’ve learnt quite a few things which I’ll be writing about today.
If you don’t already know about the game osu! you can check the post I wrote in July. Basically, I just touched on the basics of the game and what my thoughts at the time. Back then, I was extremely new to the game and was really bad. In osu! there’s a ranking system and each player has their own number. When you start the game (at the time of this post) you’d be around rank 2-3 million. Currently, as of now, I am rank 148338 globally and rank 6171 in Canada. It’s pretty easy to get out of the seven-digit ranks. However, once you start getting to around the high six-digit ranks where I am, it’s pretty hard to climb up or even maintain your rank if you don’t play often. I only play on weekends, but I think that’s what makes me want to play the game. I can still enjoy the game and have fun, but I can also see my rank go back to what it used to be last weekend or even higher than that.
Generally, I’d say rank is a decent way of getting the grasp of a player’s skill, but it’s not always reliable. The way the ranking system works is based on how much “pp” or performance points you have. The current number one player in the world right now has around 14400 pp compared to myself having only 1800.
Performance points are awarded for playing maps and the amount you get from a single map is based on the difficulty of the map, how well you played it, and the mods used when playing the map. This would seem pretty fair considering harder songs gives you more pp, but there are some maps that are so-called “pp farming” maps. Pp farming maps are maps that usually give you more pp than they feel like they should. Most of the times they’re around one minute in length, but there are exceptions. You could play a one minute map really easily and get the same amount of pp as a more difficult longer map. Of course, everyone could be playing these pp farming maps, but they’re generally looked down upon in the community since the people that play them usually just want to get higher ranks. Personally, my top four pp plays are all pp farming maps which I’m particularly proud of. I generally try to stay away from these types of maps, but sometimes I don’t really have the time or feel like playing, so I’ll play a pp farming map. I’d pretty much be done for the week as far as maintaining my rank goes. Other time’s I might just really like the song so I’ll play it and it turns out to be a pp farming map.
That’s why you can’t always trust the rank as a measure of skill. There could be some really skilled player that doesn’t really play that much and has a low rank, and there could be a really bad player that just pp farms all day. I’d say that I myself am pretty inconsistent since I don’t play every day my aim feels different each week. I have trouble FCing (Full Comboing) maps, but I can occasionally pull out a good play every now and then. I’d like to see how using a tablet may affect my play since the computer I use when I’m not gaming has a lower sensitivity than my gaming computer. If I used a tablet that I’d only use for osu! it’d be consistent whenever I go back. For now, I’m still deciding whether or not I’d like to purchase one. Other than consistency issues, my streams (streams of single notes to be tapped in rapid succession) are quite bad as well as my jumps (notes far apart from each other). Pretty much I’m still bad at the game and have a lot to improve on.
For now, my goal for myself is to get to at least rank 99999 without playing too many pp farming maps by the end of this year. This would make me five-digits in rank and hopefully by then I’ll have improve overall.