[Deidara837]

So much FFRama

I remember the last OT I had barely reached D6 and thought I was gonna get clobbered by the perennially stacked division, was a fact I was one of the lowest ranked players in D6. Did the hard grind to claw my way to 12th place, and I never got AAA/BF etc. on any of those files. Even now my I'm still 3-4 levels below the people around me but I stay competitive because I keep the rust off with Etterna and don't play any worse in tourney scenarios.

Division "boundaries" are a huge part of the problem, but having a lower skill rating doesn't mean you automatically can't score well on individual files. I've been in the high 80s for a long time but I've never felt that my skill level has been plateauing. Since I'm not an acc player it doesn't show up as well on the skill rating boards, but trimming down PBs on harder files is my sign of progress. If I use AAAs, my best ones are Shatterscape and Clocked, a pair of 78s.

Then again, a tourney doesn't mandate playing at your skill rating's level, my best scores for this tourney specifically are still 4-5 levels below my current 89. You don't have to be at your absolute peak, you just have to be playing consistently well enough to not drop the ball on a particular song. If stagnation is a big issue I would recommend playing more regularly - I can't say that it will guarantee improvement but doing the opposite is definitely gonna prevent that.

Can't just show up to a tourney and say "oh man I can't play things at my level, I'm really bad everyone else is so much better than me". The way this works is you should be comfortable playing files with a difficulty quite a bit higher than your actual skill rating, since your skill rating is AAA equivalency, which is below the song's difficulty if you aren't AAAing them. The same equivalency is granted by SDGing or even getting teens or 20s on harder songs. I don't aim for playing level 89 songs because they "match my skill level", due to my rating it would be assumed I could be AAAing them, which means they should be easy enough for me to do so at that point. I'm not an acc player, I wanna play harder things that I get in the 20s-30s range on since that's where I can best see improvements instead of crapshooting for the AAA.

If you can't normally play songs of the same difficulty as your skill rating, meaning like at least SDG range, you're playing at a lower level than it says you are, and you need to get your butt in gear and not just shake off the rust but get yourself playing well again. If you've hit that level before, you can do it again. Just takes consistent effort. Before that happens, most comparisons to other people who are playing at their level and complaints about skill levels lack a foundation.