Last week, the osu! team released a blog post detailing the various changes they were going to start implementing to the way performance points were calculated. Most scores have already been updated by now, and lots of people’s ranks have been affected. This week, I’ll go over some of the main changes made and what I think about them as a casual player.
The first change that was made was a buff to maps that used an AR (Approach Rate) 11. The AR of a map determines how much time you have between seeing an object appear on your screen before you have to hit it. Normally, all maps that used AR 11 had the same scaling in terms of pp which meant that shorter maps would get the same AR 11 benefit that longer maps were. In this update, the new mulitplier for AR 11 maps scale so that shorter maps have a lower multiplier and longer maps that are more difficult have a greater multiplier. Personally, I don’t and can’t play that high of an AR in the first place, so this doesn’t really affect me. However, a lot of top players that played really short intense jump maps had a lot of their scores nerfed.
Another change that was made was towards the penalties for Miss Counts and how they were also adjusted depending on map length. Previously, missing three times on a 1000 combo map would have the same reduction as missing three times on a 100 combo map. In this update, there is a set reduction for the first miss, but they’ve created a new curve that reduces the impact of less misses on longer maps. This is another adjustment that makes misses on shorter maps more significant while making misses on longer maps more forgiving. For me, I personally like this change since I’m usually play longer maps now. However, this still makes all of the scores with only one miss a bit disappointing.
The last main changes that I’ll mention are the Speed and Accuracy adjustments. Previously, there have been some really fast maps that players could just mash their keyboard for combo over accuracy. Using the old pp system, the speed of the map would be worth more than the accuracy and players could get set scores above their actual skill level. The new update makes it so that while the speed of a map is still relevant, accuracy now scales exponentially with low accuracy scores being significantly nerfed. This change actually benefits me quite a lot since most of my plays usually have quite accuracy. In the first place, the way the new curve is calculated is based on the number of 50’s you get, which I usually don’t get too many of in my scoress anyways.
Overall, these new changes generally buff long accuracy scores and nerf short and low accuracy ones. After updating my profile, I gained around 1,000 rank after this update and ended up gaining a bit of pp. It wasn’t that much, but I think most of the rank came from a combination of other players losing pp and inactive accounts being removed from the leaderboards. In terms of the top players, a lot of the high pp scores were nerfed, but generally most of the leaderboard is relatively the same with only a few exceptions.