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I Fixed My Taiko Brain Cancer

Some Back Story

I like to play every gamemode on osu! and I enjoy trying to become as well rounded as I can on them. I have managed to reach a pretty decent level in each gamemode except for Taiko. I struggled for many years to get into the gamemode having a few attempts throughout the years but ultimately loosing interesting and giving up.

The main issue is that my eyes would get tired and even start hurting whenever playing combined with some nausea. It is just a lot harder to follow notes when its going across horizontally vs vertically like in a VSRG's such as Mania or Etterna. What helped fix this issue was obtaining a a new monitor with a higher refresh rate (180hz) compared to my laptop screen (120hz) that was bigger (24" vs 12"), which helped make the notes smoother and bigger, and (which by far helped the most) was adjusting the vertical size of the playfield. On osu! Lazer I set the playfield from 90% all the way down to 50% which did make the game look a bit tiny but was way easier on my eyes and made it significantly easier to follow the notes across the screen. I really like how Lazer lets you change the size of just the playfield to whatever you want rather than having to change the entire resolution of the game like in Stable.

I would also get frustrated really easily when miss-reading very simple patterns and I found the suggested TBT Beginner Practice Mapsets extremely boring and it felt like torture when I tried to grind them out. I don't find them good for actual improvement (unless you enjoy doing that) and I find creating a collection of maps with a wide range of patterns and grinding those out way more effective and enjoyable. Outside of the dedicated pattern training maps the actual milestone mapsets that they have are very good and I use them for warmup daily. OnosakiHito deserves a lot of respect for giving a good resource for Taiko improvement especially in its early days on osu!

The last thing that helped was changing my mindset. I was too focused on trying to perfect everything like I would do normally on any other gamemode such as playing everything with Sudden Death, only SSing a certain range of maps, or having all FCs in my tops. The issue is that really stiffled my improvement and motivation since I wasn't seeing consistent and gradual progression when playing and it didn't allow me to learn patterns and figure out the mistakes I was making due to me not sucking up my mistakes and just submitting scores. I want to talk about my general playstyle and the problems with my mindset in a future post for sure.

Finally Improving & Popping Off

So I downloaded some maps to practice on and worked on some maps that I had in my collections from previous Taiko sessions. Whenever I find myself struggling to find maps to farm or to improve on, especially when I am still new to a gamemode, I will look at other peoples profiles around my rank range which worked very well for me in Taiko. Although it can be a little annoying since people coming from other Taiko simulators will rise through the ranks very fast setting only a few scores and then stop playing for a bit so it made it a little hard to find maps that were actually within my skill level using this method.

I started quickly setting new top plays with a HT SS on SORRIZO RONALDO, an FC on I JUST CAN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT BALLS, and an FC on FUWANITY fixing a nearly two year old choke.

I also found out that in this rank range that there are some free maps that I can abuse with EZDT so I managed to set a 300 choke (due to shit acc) on From the New World and a near 200 on Sengoku Sangen.

Throughout the next two weeks I worked towards re-entering the top 10,000 which I did initally obtain back in osu! progress log #1 but lost after a rework and inactivity.

I continued to set more 200s on many high 3 to low 4 star maps. Star rating in Taiko is really fucked so theres just some 4*s that feel signifcantly harder than some of the scores I FCed or got close to SSing.

Final Notes

Overall, I feel very motivated to continue grinding out Taiko and it feels very nice to have a fresh start in a rhythm game and seeing rapid improvement since im still learning the basics. I hope to get out of 3-4* hell soon and I want to start branching out with mods and maybe even try to get consistent with HD but so far that feels impossible.

I am pretty happy with how this progress log turned out and I hope to release more during the summer season now that I am off from school. I unfortunately ended up accidently deleting the early drafts of the new progress logs that I was working on for 4DCI, Monodramatic World Stage, and CTB related stuff when dealing with a git merge conflict forgetting to update my backups. I have decided that I won't do this progress logs in order of events now and I will just write whatever happens whenever I want to. I plan to also focus on going back and rewriting the posts that got deleted soon.

Questions, Comments, Concerns, or Baklava? Feel free to contact me over at my guest book or my contact page.

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