For osu players: how much of your playtime is devoted to practice?

[Arch0wl]

By 'practice', I don't mean just playing songs. I mean slowing down a song in particular to practice a hard part or doing something else intended to increase your skill level.

If, say, you play for 2 hours a week, how much (if any) of that would be practicing and how much would it be just playing songs at whim?

[Zyphoror]

I would say that (after the update which messes and crashes my osu! after around 20 minutes) I play around 5-6 hours per week.

Literally 95% of that time is just playing songs for fun. I play pretty hard files to challenge myself and get better most of the time, but I rarely ever whore a single section of a file to perfection.

I've noticed that I tend to skillboost slightly after taking very short breaks (2-3 days of not playing).

Also, rivaling with other people might motivate me to get better as well. Atm I'm rivaling with Rebound because he is very close to my skill level (imo at least xD) and any insane score that he gets pushes me to get something even more insane :3.

[.Layne.]

lol xd i dont know how to answer this rofl



a lot

[Staiain]

these days I'm at like a few songs a week if that, I did play like 12+ hours one day but never again

[Gundam-Dude]

Layne is the prime example of how much playtime and practice goes in relevance to skill—this motherfucker literally got better than me within less than 2 months of playing every single day for hours on end compared to me as a casual player that played on and off for a little over 2 years. 8 weeks vs. 96 weeks uhhhh yeah

Compare our statistics:
http://osu.ppy.sh/u/layne
http://osu.ppy.sh/u/130748

Canada's overall rankings (which is somewhat loosely comparable to average rank on FFR except with much more complex factors): http://osu.ppy.sh/p/pp/?m=0&c=CA
I used to be 14th/15th on this board before I stopped playing, meanwhile Layne climbed all the way to 3rd and he hasn't even been playing for a full year yet.

For me personally, I was a casual player from mid 2009 to early 2012 and only played on and off whenever I felt like it. Wasn't until mid to late 2012 that I seriously invested playtime to osu! for the pure goal of getting better (and also because I had nothing better to do after my SM hiatus, lol). When I think about it, I probably on average spent somewhere between 3~5 hours per day playing from April to August—roughly a 5 month period of playing osu! nearly every single day.

Where did that get me? I'll put it this way: I was unable to full combo let alone score well on about 95% of the average [Insane] difficulty maps, which are relatively easy for the typical osu! regular. After all my playing, I was able to S or FC and even near SS a lot of [Insane] maps with long 16th streams with hidden consistently. I guess I'll dump these video examples here to look like a total douchebag for your visual reference of what I was capable of doing before and after.

Way before I started playing regularly:

Peak of my skill:

[Zekramcross]

Graph answers question.

[PROGUY]

Hi arch. Practicing continuously in a day by playing harder maps each time is my method of increasing my skills in O2Jam, osu!, and any other rhythm games. Taking small steps at a time will make my skill increase consistent and strong (so that when I take long breaks over a week, I won't lose it easily when I start playing again). Zek's graph ^ is a good example.