[s1rnight]

@devonin this makes sense! i didn't know about the level ranks thing. thank you for explaining it

i actually made the thread because i was playing with my friend gus today on multiplayer, and he was finding the difficulty "2" songs very difficult and hit the wrong notes with many boos and misses (usually when there were consistent eighth note streams, or jumps). i assume you mean "mash" in the sense of "hitting every note as fast as possible", but in this situation i meant, "he did not know what button to hit, and hit them all continuously, without trying to find the correct note". i find that you don't have to mash very quickly in any case... the difficulty "1" songs seemed easy enough to not get any averages or misses, so i assumed he both could see the notes and hit them exactly (and was unafraid enough to try to hit them in that way)... so in this case it seemed very much an issue of the songs being too difficult, rather than not being difficult enough, though i understand the issue you're describing, and i'm not sure what the exact reason for it is. it's possible that he would improve given a few days as well... i just wonder if there is an easier way to introduce people...