Played rythm games for ~1 years, here's the bad habits I faced

[Eglaios]

That's kinda more a note for myself to remember but I guess it could help beginners.
I started with Osu Mania 5/7k, took a couple breaks, now I'm slowly cracking up into lvl 20 maps.
I'm updating that post from time to time, hope it won't be too annoying to constantly pop on the top of discussions...

There's a heck ton of content there, and you probably won't identify to everything.
If you told me to "play with my instinct", I'd just instinctively slam the keys as hard as possible and put myself into anger state because "anger is best to perform quickly" or whatever evolutionary fallacy that stuck in my DNA lol.
As a result, I'm basically prone to most of the bad habits one could think of, which I can only fix by analyzing myself and actively work on it.


[Edit] 16/03/2024
Today, I improved mainly features in the "finger optimisation" and "instinct" section (been working on fixing my problems for a bit, but today was really a good one). I also made a huge improvement about bands (in "Trying to 'process' patterns" section), which I never worked on until now.
The major difference I noticed was that I seemed to be able to read quite faster than usual, while having very relaxed and optimized finger movement. I still have work to do to prevent tension to come back while playing, but the results clearly started showing up.
That same day, I suddenly bursted into maps up to lvl24.62, while I was barely able to complete very few 20s until recently.
It certainly didn't happen in one day, because I got deep into fixing my bad habits since few days ago, and didn't try to push as far until today.

[Edit] 31/03/2024
Maybe a week ago, I realized that my reading was actually bs. I was basically trying to read notes one by one, which caused my eyes to roll all over the place when stacked clusters would appear (having trouble inputing multiple notes on the same frame was a symptom of that).
I remember that on my sudden improvement on the 16th, my eyes were frozen at about 1/3 of the screen from top, just reading only the notes that pass around this height and ignoring the rest. On top of that, I was in fact reading like that months ago. Guess my instinct took over to screw the party at some point.
I still have the reflex to follow complex patterns down with my eyes out of fear to land them correctly, which only causes chaos in my reading and usually makes me input it too late, while also having to catch up with the following notes. Trying to work on that one, although I sometimes won't realize I did it again.
I still have an issue with foreseeing patterns (see trying to process patterns). At this point, have a carved habit of analyzing the following notes and trying to build up a finger sequence to get them all at once, rather than just reading the notes as they come, resulting into high demand of "brain power", while 20% of the time, I'll miss the fingering, and 80%, I'll have a terrible timing on it because I don't consider it when building patterns on the go.

[Edit] 02/04/2024
Today, I asked myself about optimizing reading, and especially about how I process notes into fingers.
I've always been playing with default skin, which has blue for middle notes and white for others (4k). I often used to read notes by their color, although sometimes I wouldn't and it'd still work. But today I thought, since I can already identify a note with its horizontal position, paying attention to color would be information redundancy, thus maybe a factor for slower reading?
So I searched for 1-color skins. Started with Saragi Verde Menta Skin, which uses 4 circles, making me realize I hate those. Circles are really weird, kinda complex shapes, so I really have trouble recognizing their vertical position. Squares are much simpler and I find them easier to read. No scientific proof here.
I settled on The Final Version For CRZ. Simple one-color white rects. I don't really like it cuz I still sometimes wanna check how off I am, and the gauge is all the way to the bottom (Not much of an issue since I'd better pay attention to audio clues I guess). Also when I lose there's some unskippable chinese dude talking agressively for way too long stressing me af, so absolutely terrible for someone trying to improve.
So at the very beginning of my colorless transition, I noticed getting uncomfortable without color in some maps, at specific spots that I recognized as patterns I'd just do by memory rather than reading each note every time.
From that, it seems that I developped automatisms with colors.
I cannot conclude how colorless affected my performance. I noticed I had quite an easier time with maps with lots of bands , like Nueki Tolchonov - So Tired (I swear this map is 10.72, but that's the ultimate test to see whether one can handle bands. Still didn't clear it yet lmao).
I beated a couple of my highs with colorless and did overall really good, but I also did really good before, and I maybe just ignored color back then.
What I can say is that there's definitely been unoptimized pattern-building using colors, which are redundant, therefore irrelevant, so I'm definitely sticking with colorless.

[Edit] 03/04/2024
After thinking about skins yesterday, tonight (well it's 3am so this morning), I thought about notes themselves.
To put it in words, for the default skin, notes are displayed as rectangles, but the rectangles themselves only convey whether I should tap or hold.
And so I thought for "tap" notes, maybe it'd require less brain power if I ignored the rectangles, and only focused on their position. This means instead of focusing on the whole rectangle like I use to do, I'd focus on the difference between the bottom of the rectangle and the background (where the rectangle ends, at its bottom).
After trying this, I got good results, beating yesterday's high scores by 1-2%. However, even though it did really good overall, I didn't beat my highs on quite a couple harder maps. This would most likely be due to the fact that I constantly have to focus on the bottom of each rectangle, and most high-speed patterns made me lose that focus.
Though, in maps where I kept up, I really did felt like I was spending quite less time to read notes.
I stuck on CRZ skin from yesterday, but I thought I could modify the key sprites so the higher in the rectangle, the more faded out, which could maybe help focusing only on the bottom part.
I also felt a good improvement in reading multi-strokes, and inputting them at the same time. I can't say precisely, but it might be that before, I'd also inconsciently process rectangles' heights, and maybe even top, which could've caused issues to read multi-keys. Meanwhile, reading only rectangles' bottoms, I can instantly see what other bottoms are aligned to it without fully processing rectangles.
I'm starting to think... Did every player who can beat lvl25+ maps (that are not fake-hard like lvl27 Linkstarzelda's Sakuya theme) went through this process of manually observing and identifying every logic process ongoing in their brain? Or is it just me who has one that tries to bind patterns to everything it sees? This would also mean that there're plenty of other peoples who gotta work real hard to improve...
In any case, I'm having a blast. I didn't search online for cases like mine, and tbh it's way more fun to find everything out by myself, craft my theories, experiment, and step up using them.

[Edit] 07/04/2024
Been trying a couple things lately.
I first wanted to develop this idea of processing notes as fast as possible in my brain. I tried reskinning keys into tiny bars, tiny dots, transparence gradients, but I didn't feel it any better, I'm sticking with good ol' rectangles for now.
I also got clearer paths of improvements : First, I often don't pull up my majors (the middle fingers), which making sure I do asap seems to really help in difficult snippets. I also have a bit of an habit to press harder on multi-keys, like my brain's "more keys, gotta shove em deeper", which I'm easily getting rid of now, just gotta avoid to fall back into it.
I also figured it sometimes help when I permanently focus on both first and last columns. I tended to have only one point of focus, so was often looking left or right and getting screwed up with that. I said "sometimes" because if I focus too much on sides, I end up not focusing enough on notes and easily miss a few.
And finally, I noticed an increase of speed if I left my palms up in the air, since resting them on my table puts my hand in a bit of a tense position. Although I think keeping my hands in mid air also drains some of my attention, still gotta toy with that.
Honestly, I tried and improved a lot since I started this post. I'm still frequently busting my high scores, especially these last 3 days, and I think writing about it is like "Well I started working on improving, might as well go fully into it".

[Edit] 21/04/2024
Been experimenting a bit less lately, and sometimes going autopilot and getting back on bad habits. Gotta be a constant fight to keep myself tight.
I focused on a couple more concepts like applying minimum pressure to the keys, pulling off fingers asap etc. I can still improve my reading technique as I think I look a bit too down on the screen and looking upper starts being tough on memory + input.
Even though I busted a lot of high scores the past week, my right hand had serious trouble catching up. It appears on harder passages, I always ended up tensing up, screwing up speed.
Now, my main priority is to make sure I only move the first phalanx (the one closest to palm), especially on my left hand, which very frequently screw up in that department.

[Edit] 24/04/2024
I been doing worse every day of this week. I don't know how to read anymore, and starting to deleting my high scores above today (which is a normal reaction in my case).
I'm pretty sure I need a routine. I'm easily losing my abilities of
- being able to read both center and border lanes
- optimized releases and press-ready position
- top phalanx only movement
- keeping my attention on fragments of a frame instead of the whole screen. This is an issue in other games like fps, my brain wants to do so much and control everything, so watches the whole screen.
I don't know what "focusing" means. To me, it's just like "watch that thing real hard", which I don't know how to, I rather aim to ignore other parts of the screen to isolate my attention by elimination, and I struggle to keeping it tight on long term.

[Edit] 03/05/2024
Kinda stuck to my best skill level (since the last improvement registered here).
However, even though I remember thinking about it a couple weeks ago, after some tests, I noticed the sfx slow me down. I seem to keep my fingers pressed until I hear the sfx, rather than instantly releasing on press even though the sfx didn't occur yet.
I removed sfx, and it's quite better. Still gotta test how good I can get from there.

[Edit] 09/05/2024
I figured I was reading notes by patterns instead of position. For example, instead of "1324", I'd read 1, 2 steps to the right, 1 to the left, 2 to the right. This is not new, I already corrected it, but on top of trying to find what's wrong in my plays, I have to remember stuff that I forget.
There's also a big problem of wiggling my finger sideways. Say, assuming your wrist is perfectly still and your fingertip is stuck to a key, you can still wiggle it left to right and that's what happens.
Still have issue with controlling push, hold and release duration. To put it in words, it's like you had to perpetually be aware of the entire activity of your subconscient. It just comes back without me even noticing and is really hard to fix.
To top it off, the dunce who coded quaver thought it was a good idea to put auto-focus on the search box, so if I wanna try practicing my finger movement optimization in the menu, it types "ejiefjiefjiefj" and I have to ctrl-a + del, plus it screws up the position I'm currently at in my playlist. With all the due respect, start actually playing games before thinking you can make one. It's really that bad and I'd be long gone from Quaver if it wasn't for the ease to get new tracks. No rythm game has decent tracks anyways (Mr. Asyu? Mizore? Fearofdark? Yousuke Yasui? Yura Hatsuki? Nah. Luffy naruto kamehameha pantsu onii chan? yeeee), so I have to force down my throat that flood of weeb songs with 4k pedo wallpapers. I'm tilted but I found it funny so I let it there, plus I bet no one will ever read this lmao.


[Edit]19/05/2024
Few days ago, I decided to stick into wristless playstyle and see how far I can push it.
The point is basically to keep wrists entirely still and have only fingers moving. Needless to say THIS CAN BE DANGEROUS AND LEAD TO SERIOUS INJURIES. I played classical guitar for about 10 years, so my fingers might already be stronger than the average player/u].
In guitar, having a still wrist helps strongly for precision and speed. If I push with the wrist to play a note, I will then have to pull it back in place, globally requiring more muscular usage, which is very inefficient. For example, in this video, achieving such high speed would be very hard and tiring by involving the wrist : https://youtu.be/F4rGQ7gKYx0?si=jtjycyj5HPwuuv6N
The downside is that the wrist is a lot stronger than fingers. This isn't really a problem in guitar where you very rarely need that much, so overall, I'd try to always keep the wrist in place. However, it's definitely potent in rythm games to compensate for finger speed.

A key to "wristless" in guitar is that the instrument allows to have the hand at its rest state. This means when I pluck a string, instead of pulling the finger up, only removing the tension in it will be enough to get back in place, along with gravity. Think of it as a cheat that automatically pulls the finger back, so you only have to "push more - push less" rather than "push - pull".
The problem is, regular keyboards aren't designed for hands' rest position, so the average rythm game layout keeps the hand rather far from a fully-rested state. Not only that, but the trajectory of the keypresses (unless really tiny) might force the finger more or less in an unnatural direction.
Long story short, wristless seems quite restricted by hardware in rythm games compared to guitar, and since the hand position is rather awkward, using wrist might also really decrease the odds of injuries.

For the following, my keyboard is a "Lenovo Preferred Pro II 00XH702". The one with the [Enter] key that's on 2 rows.
Just yesterday, I thought my key trajectory might really slow me down (I always had a lot of unwanted movements on keydown, like tilting my fingers), so I thought, and screw it, tried turning the keyboard upside-down.
It was actually quite more comfortable. Before, the trajectory would go slightly towards my palm, and now it'd go slightly backwards. The wrist position would be a bit more awkward, but since I wouldn't move it at all, as long as it's not tense, it should be fine.

Now, I searched a proper 4k layout for upside-down.
On normal side, "J-I" really fits the spacing between my 2 right fingers, so I kept it upside-down ("I-J" instead)
The left hand was a bit harder. I used E-F symmetrically to J-I, but the distance between E-F is a bit too large for my fingers, and there was seemingly no position to have the same spacing as JI for the left hand.
I ended up temporarily settling on "ENTER-Ç" (Ç is next to ENTER, and right under the numbers row). Enter is a bit heavier, but its unique spacing allows me to get my left fingers close to each other.
So my current 4k layout is ENTER-Ç-I-J, keyboard upside-down. Don't laugh. Also this is for my hands, each player will have its preferred layout.

With this keybind, I could have my fingers quite close to their resting position, their trajectory is more comfortable to me, and I'll still have to find out how I put my wrist to be as relaxed as possible.


[Edit] 24/05/2024
/!\ WARNING /!\ During my session yesterday, I went through a bunch of 20-25s and found a rather good wrist position for my right hand, to have only my fingers moving (still have to find one for the left). Both fingers were very relaxed and had a rather optimized press trajectory.
HOWEVER, a couple hours after the session, I started to feel something in my left pinky. Doesn't hurt, doesn't sting, it's more like it's inflated inside. The morning after, I still feel it, and only for this one finger.
I will stop playing for about a week. I can go crazy with trying stuff, but won't take the risk to mess with such. I can also afford to keep my hand relaxed during this time.

If you read up to there, I HIGHLY disadvise to try wristless.
Once at least 7 days will have passed, I'll get back into experimenting with wristless, but will now pay close attention to keeping my pinky relaxed. If this happen again and I can't find a way to play while avoiding it, I'll completely give up on wristless.
I can't tell whether I caught this because the pinky was tense specifically or just weaker than my other fingers, since guitar frequently involve all the fingers but this one. I also didn't get it on my left hand, since it's quite hard to find a relaxed position for it so I end up using my wrist.


[Edit] 27/05/2024 (1:00 am)
Small update, my right hand is about done... healing?
I think I also felt a tiny bit of inflation in my other right fingers, but barely noticeable, plus I avoided to use this hand anyways so I don't know how bad these went.

I can still feel my pinky finishing up healing, but I can use my hand normally again.
I will still wait 3 or 4 days before getting back into the game. Not joking with that. Also I hope it's clear that I'm lucky it was that short. If pushing too hard or not resting properly, this might get far worse than just a week off some game.
I'm also considering adding stretches to my Quaver routine.



OK on with the bad habits...

Starting with 5k/7k

More of a (debatable) tip, but I wish I started only on either 5k or 4k.
Focusing on a single layout would allow to focus more on what I'm doing, take notes on how I improve, and once I'd be far enough, I could just apply my knowledge to learn 7k and others much easier than if I started with them as well.

Skins with multiple colors

I can't say how my brain works, but I observed that I seemed to build automatisms with these colors, which might indirectly waste brain power.
It's at least certain that color is a redundant information, since one can still identify notes without it. Therefore, it should be safer in any case to switch to a skin with only one color for all notes (at least for 4k).
I also really have an easier time reading rectangles rather than circles.

Giveup filter

Sometimes when my brain says "crap that's too hard, I give up". It can happen in long fast strings, or on specific parts, like in Hydra (James Landino X Akira Complex) - 17.03.
I still have to keep in mind that there's no point giving up in that context. It's like I somehow fear that I'd break a bone if I go too hard, or "need a break" even though I don't need it at all.
It's just brain power, so any holding back is unnecessary.

Another form of giveup is when I encounter a short and hard burst of notes, which often causes me to follow it down with my eyes, probably because I'm feared to miss, pretty much destroying my momentum. I'll usually miss the burst and even input it too late due to the change in my eyes position, and I have to catch up with the following notes that I stopped considering meanwhile.

Trying to "process" patterns

Idk about very advanced players, but analyzing patterns heavily held me back

As an example, in Terminal Missa (laur) - 14.24, there're a lot of successive swipe patterns (1-2-3-4, 4-3-2-1), and after playing it for a while, instead of thinking "1-2-3-4", I'd instead think "swipe right".
This absolutely killed my progression in many maps for a while because it made be simply ignore the timing of notes, only relying on muscle memory.

The biggest thing there is of course bands / held notes.
For a while, when starting a band, I'd look forward to see when the end would be because I was feared to not recognize the end of the band as it passes.
This obviously seems like very brain-demanding for nothing, and in fact, I finally started to fix that today (16/03/2024) and absolutely obliterated my hi-scores on many band-heavy maps.
Turns out I can read releases as they come.

Hands position

That one's obviously a very important one. A bunch of bad habits that I bundled here :

- Tensing hands up : Was kind of a reflex for me, like my body tensing up when a tough task is coming up. I guess it doesn't help, and I often end up getting more and more stiff as the song goes on, making it even harder to control.

- Moving wrists / palms : It's kinda instinctive to do it to "help" in the fingers movement, especially since that's exactly what piano is about.
This also implies the hand will have to get back in place to play another note (or play it in an awkward position), which easily screws up fast strings.
Since fingers only move up and down, I guess that only phalanxes should be moving, and anything else doing so would screw up performance.

- Better have a support for the palms to lay on. If I'm unable to press all 4 keys at the same time with nothing else moving than my finger, I'm guaranteed to perform poorly.

- Tip phalanx : I noticed that when I press a key, if my tip phalanxes (the one with the nail on) bend up in response to pressure, that requires more distance to be covered for a key down.
Rather easy to fix by staying sure there's enough tonus so the phalanx doesn't bend (tonus, not tension)

Finger optimisation

I guess over time, I picked up the habit to tilt my index a bit when played shortly before/after the anular of the same hand, causing the former to be pressed in an angle instead of straight down, massively impacting the speed.
Not only this modifies the motion required to press a key, but it also seems to involve brain power to "adjust" them in the wrong way.
At least for now, I frequently make sure each 4 of my fingers are as perpendicular as possible to the keys.

I also tended to exaggerate press-release movement. I think it would logically help for speed to have the press motion just enough to trigger the input, and release so the finger is stuck to the key when it's back up.

I was worried at first by the release speed of fingers, but after beating some lvl22-23 maps, having fingers as relaxed as possible doesn't make release an issue.
Tho, I think if I worried about releasing faster, it would eat brain power. Just making sure fingers are in the right position should be enough

- It seems that I have trouble "resetting" my fingers as soon as I press without actively thinking about it, which it seems that the faster I do, the more time my brain has to process what's next (and ready to press again earlier). I still have trouble doing it without tensing up or even bouncing my whole palm for it.

- I have more trouble "spamming" my annulars, and when I don't actively think about it, they stay pressed way too long which screws things up if they have to strike again right after.
I don't know if my EFJI layout makes it worse. DFJK doesn't seem to give better results. Guess it's gonna be exercise...

Tension

This would include some parts previously mentioned, but overall, rythm games ultimately being about speed, it was natural to me to get tense and... "pour my emotions" into the music, which is... exactly what I should avoid.
From playing, I feel like letting myself getting tense eats my brain power, and diminishes my reading speed.

Relying on instinct

Sometimes, I'd start being less attentive and let my instinct do the job, which still works but I'm more prone to miss notes. I regularly have to remind myself to "read" each note.
I don't really know how this impacts efficiency. Maybe reading simply makes me more focused on the track and that's it...

Autopilot / tilt / denial

Obviously biggest bad habit to keep away.
With all the above, if I don't question myself as I play (I mean between maps), I'm only delaying my progress and potentially building bad habits.
There are plenty of psychological fallacies in such games. "No way I'm worse than this kid", "No way I'm worse than a week ago", "I play for 1 year so I have to be that good", "Nah I'm better, just sleepy". I used to delete my scores because "aint no way I suck like that".

These are often barely conscient and requires awareness to be noticed, understood and fixed. On the flip side, dealing with these absolutely made myself a better person (even though I still have to work on that). Being able to spot fallacies and not letting myself into shame, pride or sadness applies in literally every domain.

Another thing is, I took no chances and never went multiplayer in rythm games, not even interacting with community.
In other games, there're metas, playstyles, strats, outplays, but in mania-like rythm games, it's pretty much "train ur speed and fix bad habits".

It's too easy to compare with others based on performance score, and if I ever wanna know how good I am, I'll obviously always be bad because I'll always see plenty of dudes above me. So I just keep the game for me and only have fun improving by myself, regardless of my level.



...Guess that wraps it up,

[shadowdiestwice]

this is truly the quaver post of all time


but it is cool you wrote all of this down though, was a bit of help for me

[Eglaios]

Originally posted by shadowdiestwice:

this is truly the quaver post of all time


but it is cool you wrote all of this down though, was a bit of help for me

Dang you just reminded me I wrote that.

I still play to this day, tho more as a "game" than a "mental study". I don't think nearly as much, and kinda hop on when I feel like playing something nervous rather than thinking deeply. Though I still try to analyze and improve myself, but am really sloppy on journalling at this point.

---

(That's not especially directed towards you, more like a retrospective. Date : 28/04/2025)


Ngl as the author, that post kinda sucks. Lots of pertinent informations indeed, but I also didn't seem to give a crap about conciseness and understandability, and the journal format really doesn't help with it.

That's ok tho, I'll take that as a lesson.
I'm especially thankful to myself to have kept moments where I lose it, like the 09/05/2024 entry (which by the way, my apologies to Quaver dev and players). While it's always tempting to censor those, looking back and see that I sometimes fked up feels comforting, and I think contribute to a more genuine mood. Like just now, I feel like I progressed a lot since then (about 1 year ago) in terms of writing and organising thoughts
I was also quite dramatic about injuries and stuff, but it's fair I guess.


There's also irrelevant stuff in there.
Typically, the map level in Quaver means nothing without details on the challenge of the map itself (In online lobbies, I'd usually get demolished by others in terms of input-per-second, but would stand on top in maps focused on long notes).
There're also "I changed this, then got better scores", which are not relevant as I didn't come close to make proper studies over multiple days.
At least, I kept a humble and conditional tone.


Tho that kinda reminds me how much I thought about it, and I guess kinda encourages me to keep thinking, as there's still a bunch of stuff that I know I should question more in my gameplay.



--- ABOUT WRISTLESS

In short, I found out about 2 months ago that my gameplay still relies a lot on my wrists.

Since it's kinda hard to play Quaver without looking at the screen, and I'm not yet to the point of handcam or learning maps by heart, I had to focus on it to find out that I was still involving more of my hands than just the root phalanx of each finger.
Notably keyups, and notably for the middle finger (4k).

While I might not be aware of it, my phalanx movement alone would in fact push the key about halfway to the keypress distance, then I'd compensate with my wrist to push al the way down, and mostly use wrist for keyup as well.
It's not bad per say (that might even be the most common method), but when I want to use phalanx for the entirety of my movements, moving the wrist like that causes a variation in the position of the phalanx's axis, which I'd then have to unefficiently adjust to.


As for my keybinds ("Lenovo Preferred Pro II 00XH702". The one with the [Enter] key that's on 2 rows.) uuh so :
- Rotate the keyboard upside down (vertically, so the Func keys are in place of the Space key)
- Keybind : ç=5R (5R for the right hand, and synmetrically for the left)
- Jam both thumbs under the keyboard frame about right under their respective index fingers (I thought that would help to stop using my wrist inconsciently. It does not prevent it at all, but with the way thumbs touch the keyboard and desk, I find it easier to feel when I'm using my wrists that way). Despite how it sounds, I don't find the hand position uncomfortable (might depend on desk height and such)

Also I remember raging and insulting the dev complaining about the Func keys (F3, F4, etc) being perma-bound to functions like "open chat", which is not the case anymore. Thanks for that :D



I guess that didn't help much to develop speed in my fingers (not my wrist), as when I noticed it, my "phalanx only" speed was still pitiful.