How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

This question came across my mind a lot and I figured I'd ask it here. I feel like even after AGDQ, Stepmania is still declining in terms of activity and it just seems like there's barely a reason to play anymore. For me, I've been super busy with track/school and what not but even when I get the chance to play, it just doesn't feel the same anymore.

I really wanna keep pushing boundaries for this game and having fun with it but nothing's really convincing me to do so atm

















or i'm just being a bitch lol

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

Most games played on AGDQ only temporarily get popular and get right back to where it was. Stepmania is no exception. Like only speedrunners play Super Mario 64 and it will stay that way.

Some people are quitting stepmania since it's just the same thing over and over and get stale. Others quit stepmania because fewer simfiles and scores are being made. It's a downward spiral...

It's been that way since like what 2010 so I'd say stepman community struggled good enough

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

we're getting older and busier every day and next generation probably won't care as much about stepping stuff. i mean a LOT of us that played SM/FFR since like, 2005 have moved on. like, some of us have kids, full time jobs, spouses to deal with. etc. everything just comes and goes, and SM/FFR will just be another statistic.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

Never.
Part of that being my computer harddrive broke, but if i really wanted i could have gotten a new computer by now. I work 6 days a week but thats not the reason, ffr just got boring to me. Nothing interesting ever happens, too many songs getting added, too many changes etc.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

i play and create simfiles quite frequently still!

generally i'd say it looks like about the same activity as ever as long as i've been on the site, just the sm scores thread is so beefy with godlike scores that no one bothers to post their own accomplishments anymore. i think there are a lot of people that still play this game but just don't participate as much in the forums ya know

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

there are a bunch of people who tried/are trying to pick up the game in the wake of agdq
they do not post here

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

Strangely enough, I mostly play Stepmania in airports nowadays.

I can't bring myself to purchase the airport Wifi access, and I don't like waiting idly either, so I'll usually just find some private/quiet corner, plug in my laptop + headphones, boot up SM, and play a bunch of songs until it's time to board.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I still very much enjoy this game and play here and there, not near as much as I had been for the past 3 years though due to work etc.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

Like Icy, I play pretty often and have been charting a lot as well. That being said, Badman's input should not be overlooked. When you look at the general age of those players who played when Stepmania was really thriving, they are all in their mid to late 20s now, if not even early 30s. Stepmania, and other rhythm games get the backseat when you have to deal with things that were already mentioned above. I don't think that this is the only deal breaker when it comes to SM, though. I remember people used to be a lot more supportive of others' scores, and they readily sought to be encouraging--this was the general attitude even with the best players. That simply isnt the case anymore. Also, something that should be mentioned is that when you look at groups like the d7 chat and other "elitist" type groups, SM isn't even a serious topic of discussion. When it is brought up,it is laughable at best. What do you think is going to happen if you treat the game as a running meme/joke? The general attitude of the best players has undoubtedly changed into this strange cesspool of uncaring pseudo-intellectual egomaniacs. This is of course fine, if you play the game for yourself entirely and play to attain personal goals. If that is all you do, and you simply dont want to play anymore, quit. But if you are playing for the community, this is a HUGE problem. Also, files have gotten a lot more uninteresting, with patterning AND song choice, and stepfile authors simply just try to make it so their files are easy to score on. Ive talked to Eze about this in detail. If you look toward the past, this was also NOT the case. Files were made so that you had to try extremely hard to attain a good score, and patterning was very unique (look at someone like Cetaka), which made the game a lot more fun as well. This is not just MY opinion. This is the opinion of others that I've talked to, like Isaac, who was a top tier player when the game was still going strong.

Also, this post was not made to attack or hurt anyone's feelings, I am simply trying to answer the question you posed.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

almost every day

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

Barely anymore because lollifehappened.

I also have trouble pushing myself to play as well considering it's been the same thing over and over again. Occasionally I boot up SM, but the session doesn't even last longer than 10 minutes.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

that's not really anything new IMO. pretty much what ODI was in a nutshell.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I stopped playing cuz work and cuz my fingers would start hurting when I tried to play anything too difficult

still a fun game. still the same game it's always been.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

This is pretty true and I really hate it lol.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

something about weaboos and 2015 having lots of packs and nobody ever really played the game in the first place

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

to be clear, a fucking anime weaboos

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I still play and step files every so often. It's hard for me to play because of my wrists, but I still try and involve myself in the community.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I disagree with this actually! Although I tend to step geared towards stamina drain marathons, others have their own kind of way of stepping too. I think the problem we're facing is all patterns possible on 4k have been done to death, and nowadays people step files to cater to certain skillsets like jacking or jumpstream..... it's really not a problem imo, since it's easier to build skill now than ever before o.o

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

This could also be adding to the problem that I am perceiving, but to your second point, I do think that people should start moving away from single skill files to multifaceted files.

Not to say that this is entirely a "bad" thing, but most files people play nowadays are straight 16th js files for 4 minutes.

So now what we have for these newer players are people who think that files people played during this supposed golden age of stepmania are now just cancerous poorly patterned files, which I dont think is true.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

Even though Stepmania doesn't do much for me anymore, I'm still really interested in DDR/ITG. Unfortunately, the dance-game scene here in New York City is abysmal to nonexistent.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I thought there were rhythm gamers in that one arcade in Chinatown near timesquare or w/e?

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

There's a Chinatown Fair on Mott street, but the pads don't work very well. There's one machine that is decent (has a bunch of ITG + custom files, but no DDR IIRC), but either way, the arcade is always pretty empty back there whenever I've visited.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

i only have like 1 session where i push my limits once a month now. then i just play very irregularly across that month (e.g. casually playing for like 10-20 minutes a day or two, or not playing at all for a week or two, etc.).

personally i've felt like i don't belong in this community since i had started speedrunning (just over 2 years ago), and i've invested most of my time into that since then. recently i've been trying to get my life together, and it's becoming hard to find motivation for stepmania anymore.

i really want to get more into DDR/ITG though, whenever that will happen... idk.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

the rhythm gaming community as a whole doesn't approve of CTF

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I still play..

Don't post scores much anymore though.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I play almost every day, I just tend to lurk forums and never post unless it's for a tournament or something. In fact, you can catch me in MP almost everyday at around midnight server time. :P

EDIT: Also, I plan on stepping my first few files (so they may be pretty sucky) once this semester at my college ends so we'll see how that goes. :)

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I play very rarely and if I do it's just to check out new charts/songs and maybe re-visit some favorites. I lost my competitive nature in this game.

I've become more involved in other communities for games now like Tera and somewhat BnS and thus I've felt less connected with the FFR community over time.

I also just started college recently so most of the time I'm busy with that during the weekdays.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

Used to play daily, now it's rare if I can get an hour or two within the week. Uni is slowly creeping up my priorities list and FFR is slowly moving down.

Kinda like Elite, I really only play my favourite songs or new content now.

Also, on another note, the forums seem almost separate from the game now. There aren't many game related threads/posts anymore. Even as I look at the Latest Forum Posts, there is really only 3 threads that are game related, 2 of them being the Rivalry threads and the other is the Weekly Updates. Everything else is TWG, other video games, SM, artwork or other misc things. Tournaments are scarce to non-existent, brag board threads are 90% SM and general talk usually has nothing to do with FFR (not that it has to). Dunno what I'm really trying to get at but mainly just seems like the forums are being filled with a lot of unrelated FFR things.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I played a few songs like 10 months ago but other than that it's been years

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I still step because it's relaxing to me.
This summer though is probably going to be the last chance I have to really work on files. Next school year is so real life.
This is actually a really good idea lol

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

Ironically, while I don't play the game much at all anymore, some of the habits I've developed from rhythm gaming have had huge effects on my life.

I don't think, for the rest of my life, I will truly be able to listen to music without seeing arrows

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

This will never stop being a thing.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I go to the movies and wind up listening to the soundtracks and envisioning charts.

Like my friends are like "oh my god that plot twist was so crazy" and I'm just sitting in the car riding home being like "hey in that fight scene soundtrack the melody was totally runningmen patterns"

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

Anything from 2 to 12 hours a week playing the game.

The main difference I noticed since I got involved in the community back in 2014 is that the sm scores thread got progressively slower. Even then that's a transition from dead to deader.

Kinda directed at Neon, there isn't really that much to talk about the game itself so it isn't surprising that related chats and communities tend to diverge to other topics. Sharing scores, talking about events, discussing techniques, getting stepping feedback and debating difficulty ratings only gives you so much conversation fodder.

Almost unfair to bring Cetaka up considering how good he was at that. And honestly, patterning and song choice were always bad (i.e. unoriginal or uninteresting) for the most part aside from a select few stepartists or specific charts. Naturally, you'll tend to remember more the better charts from yore which accentuates the feeling that recent files are garbage.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I keep coming back here because I keep beating games and running out of potential content to distract myself.

FFR is easy to access to, it can be started or stopped at any point without worries, it's free, I can play to challenge myself and ignore the competition if I can't handle it and the community is fine considering the state of the game. I learned to play for fun and I'm still enjoying myself. (when im not raging at lag and broken keyboards~)

FFR is not dying imo, you're just starting to see players priorize different things in their lives and that's completely normal.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I played everyday until I quit because of depression.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

#RIPStepMania

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I love stepmania itself. I love jacks. I love trills. I love streams. I love minedodging. I love to stepchart challenging files and to watch ppl play my files. I love to target AAs on hard files. I love sm5 theme song, bit countrified tho.

So I still play the game. Even the community is declining and thus it's hard to do such competitive things and I should set my own goals.

Even though I feel bit lonely nowadays but it's just okay for me at least because I know that there are still unaccomplished goals forward me and there are still possibility of new styles of patterns.

It's just my story but 'm posting it to remove despair in here.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I took about a 3 year break and got back into it last summer, for what it's worth. Maybe other people will float back into too?

I play somewhat frequently, I tend to fluctuate how much I play though. One week I'll play 6-8 hours, the next I might not play at all. For me though, I've been finding the most enjoyment stepping. I've been stepping more or less since I started playing, but only since I recently got back into it have my simfiles been of any real quality.

As for goals, I'm just constantly trying to push what I can read! The Yolomania packs have brought me a lot of fun these past few months.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

lost interest, prioritising real-life, chipmusic and speedrunning instead

ITG scene is now kinda dormant in this small part of Australia, and my ITG mood got killed 2 years ago because of a fuck-up I did that I'd rather not go into further detail (I've kinda gotten over it but it has still discouraged me to get back into ITG)

occasionally I still step because it's good rhythmic dictation practice, or if I need to decipher one's composition techniques (see ._Pulse and Powerflux)

edit: it's also astonishing to see most of you guys in your mid-20s already since I last joined in 2009 l0l

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I play new packs, but most files only once
Sometimes I play during breaks in college
Also I have to playtest my own files
So eh
Once a week

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I'm playing whichever game I am stepping for. This means I am still heavily invested in Stepmania (hell, last summer I had the biggest skillboost of my life). I have stepped 13-14 songs, and counting, for the upcoming vgmp4. I feel like I'm one of the few people still excited about what this game has to offer. However, I'm playing FFR less and less, due to the mess that the batch queue has become. There are a few songs I really want to step before calling it quits. We'll see what happens. I suspect I won't be able to ever stop playing this game somehow.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

How do you mean?

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I think a lot of it also has to do with the fact that there's other games that are just more desirable to play right now, such as Osu! Plus it's not like there's that many people even playing rhythm games anymore (at least compared to 2006-2009).

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I probably stopped playing and making new files around 3 or 4 months ago now. Not sure if I'll be back or not, but at the moment I just don't have much drive to improve at 4k anymore. I've been playing about an hour/day of osu standard, but thats about it.

IMO - the reason this game doesn't stand a chance in this day and age is a total lack of online/community features built into the client. At this point its probably too late to start when osu already did it right. Forums don't do it anymore.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I don't know how many people play this game, but a fair number of people have dowloaded the last few releases.
Raw data
I believe the actual number of linux users is substantially higher than the download count, many probably build from source, which is not in this count.

I play 2-3 hours per week on pad, and 6-10 on keyboard. I've gone for months without playing on pad though, and spent a couple years only playing 1-2 hours per month on pad. Overall, stepmania doesn't have the same "play until my feet hurt and I can barely walk, every day" draw that it had when I first started.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

speaking of osu what does osumania lack compared to stepmania? Is osu truly the nextgen stepmania with decent online ranking system?

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

Super Mario 64 speedrunning became my new thing, so I dropped rhythm games completely. However, I've recently picked up SM again due to seeing how well it went at AGDQ and I'm having a lot of fun with it, even though I only play a couple hours once in a while.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I hardly touch SM anymore over o!m and BMS since around a year ago.
Only reason I start up SM now is just for theming.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I still playing online and making files , Matra (Leo137) still do it too :) i have a group of friends who sometimes still playing online

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

well gee who's fault is that
community that wanted to stay on older versions forever

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

If SM5 had integrated online scoreboards, minimal configuration required, live chat, social features such as a friends list, online multiplayer ready to play out of the box, spectator mode, and a curated centralized database of files, I can personally guarantee you 99% of people who were holding out on older versions would switch.
Obviously these things are possible because I literally just listed some of the features osu!mania has over SM.


I'd love to see them implemented!


*crickets*

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I can assure you that this is the complete opposite, but lots of things happened and none of them were explained in details. It's really just a matter of getting projects done.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

Hopefully activity will pick back up when the summer starts? A large portion of the community consists of students so hopefully many people will have a bit more free time.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

add rng
everyone loves rng right?

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

It worked for survival mode in Street Fighter V




Just fucking kidding that shit is abysmal

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

Not sure if serious, but this would be pretty backwards if thats how you really felt, right?

Why do you think people stayed on old versions? Because of a lack of features that would make people want to upgrade. Just echoing what hi19 said - if you had given people community features people would be way more interested in upgrading.

Since I started playing the game zero effort has ever been made for online features. The effort that has been made has been some moderate effort (which died off recently) from the SMO team - but they're only doing what they can with a really weak text/command based online client. A couple themes have basic support for online features, but nothing that actually encourages online play.

And the thing is, its not even the current players that you should be caring that much about. Its new players - and attracting new players in 2010 or later requires a strong online client with good community features. The fact that its now well into 2016 and no effort has been made on this front is really unfortunate IMO. I saw a fair amount of flak on this from new players on r/stepmania shortly after the AGDQ showcase, and I know a lot of them gave up after seeing how archaic SMO was.


Look, if it wasn't the devs goal to make SM a popular, community driven VSRG, then so be it, totally their prerogative, because its not like they're getting paid for it. But you can't really expect to turn around and blame the community for it after the fact.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

As one of the current devs, I don't have any personal desire for online mode. But if someone else wants to improve online mode, I'll help with the knowledge I have of other parts of the engine.
I don't know if people realize this, but I essentially earned my position by walking in and doing stuff. Nobody came to me to ask me to start working on stepmania. I saw stuff I wanted to fix and started doing it. So if you have some thing you think is important and the skills to carry it out, go right ahead and do it.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

ive always played for the music, if theres a new song i want to play i play it, if not made i make a chart and enjoy alone.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I play like once or twice a week, and mostly FFRmania because I'm so tired to play the same old FFR songs over and over again. Also, FFRmania has A VAST AMOUNT of challenges to offer, unlike FFR the way it currently is.

I still have some goals but at the moment I am balancing between trying to keep my skill level up and letting this go. At this personal skill growth rate I will never reach the top; I just started too late to begin with and not I'm just getting old.

The community is quieting down and also reducing the level of interest. Updates/development are not happening fast enough to keep users interested. (The raw scoring system has been implemented over a year ago, and still the post-game rank shows the combo scoring rank.)

But I am still looking forward to the OT and I think it might be the last one.

E: Etienne, I would still like to see more of your epic scores!

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I'm currently using StepMania for exercise. So I use it a lot, almost every day! In terms of StepMania with keyboard files, unfortunately, it is declining. I think the reason why it's declining is because of one simple reason: Interest.


My YouTube video that has 5.9 million views won't ever reach 6 million. Why? Because it's lost interest with the public eye. Nobody wants to play with magnets anymore. That was 2012. In the same respect, back in 2010 - 2013, SM was popular. Now, people are moving on with their lives and are spending less time with the game. This is just because the world is moving on, and objects that were once shiny now lose their luster. If this makes any sense, then tell me but that's the way I see this situation.

To be perfectly honest, I've given up FFR/SM now. It's just something that happens overtime. It's not that we want it to happen, or that we can control that it happens...it just happens.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

nothing is motivating on here anymore. also seems like we only have 100 active players

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I took a notion for it last year and played pretty religiously between October - December, then stopped again. I'd rather play other video games now instead.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

yo gaiz how can we get new players into the Quake community

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

whenever alkaizer plays quake with stream buddies there's always a surge of new players

but other than that it's rare

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

??????
What lol

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

He time traveled

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

He could mean he gave up on the community and/or the keyboard scene, but uses Stepmania to play pad files for exercise.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

As for me?

Uh... think the last time I touched any form of arrow mashing was a month ago?

Or was it two?

I had a short burst beginning of the year, I know that much.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

Ah.


@Charu,

I know. You've been making them gains in sm4sh.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

^This


sorry can't english correctly lol.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I can't even remember the last time I actually played.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I play daily on smo, and i think all of you that are worried about the future activity of the sm comunity should at least play online, because even if you want to play alone, it makes other users percieve a sense of activity, and is cool to track scores. Twitch streams also help if you have a decent hardware.

Regarding stepmania subforums on ffr, it is true they are getting more inactive everyday, but i can see that because the forum format is maybe too oldfashioned, the activity was been splited into a great ammount to the discord chat i guess

And +1 to wafles and hi19hi19, the main problem is the online play, and to be fair, wafles did sml, which was a great thing for the community, even if it wasn't directly related to sm development.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

*cringe*

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I stopped playing years ago because it wasn't fun

I stopped stepping two years ago because it lost meaning

I can't pick either back up because everyone I knew is gone or doesn't play and the new people that took over I have nothing in common with

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

This game is great for music aficionados, but other than that, you won't see many casual players. If any. Osu! has that on lock. It's either people who are familiar with this scene and have a strong affinity towards music games in general, or people who are hardcore and actually give a damn about getting insane scores, CTS, and paying for expensive keyboards.

Me personally, I've reached a desirable skill level that I don't really have a drive to get better. Plus, playing with my finger style (ring+middle) puts a cap on that. If I played with normal spread, I'd lost interest even sooner. Not to say I don't get that "damn that was a nice score" feeling, it's moreso that I no longer get that "damn I could've done better" feeling. Sucks all motivation and dedication from the game when you don't even care if your score is trash. Once the incentive salience dissipates, you can pretty much uninstall the game at that point. Risks outweigh the rewards.

The only reason I still have it installed is because I still enjoy some older files that I like to experience again every once in a while. Xoon 5, couple of those FFRCPs, ODIPack 2+3, Red Fraction, Dark Chancellor, and PMPoE are the packs I consistently go back to, just to experience it again. No recent pack has done this for me aside from the Untitled pack, that was pretty dope. I feel even the steppers don't have much of a desire or motivation to create dope files to dope music anymore tho, and that's a tough pill to swallow when quality files are the backbone of this game. Also I sense a loss of creative spark in the files that I come across recently.

For example. (not trying to diss or anything) I think the last Yolomania had like, what, 200 submitters or something crazy like that? The reason being is that it's very broad of a pack. you can submit anything. Let your mind fly. depsite that, there ends up being a central commonality in the song choices and file structures. In a pack with no limits on what you can submit, very few files really stand out. Makes you wonder..

Also, 6key > 4key. but unfortunately no real contributions for that mode anymore. I just play my usual suspects and dip out for a few months.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I play stepmania 6key on and off on a semi-weekly basis. I have absolutely no interest in playing 4key anymore because in order to relate to ANYONE currently you're pretty much forced to play exclusively speed and stamina files—both skill sets I've never had to begin with, or had the motivational drive to improve. I could play for my own enjoyment, but I would only do so for X amount of time before I'm bored out of my mind and just switch back to 6key.

If I want to play 4key, I'd rather just play K-Shoot Mania or Sound Voltex instead.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

my interest level went down significantly once i realized (and painfully accepted the fact) that hakulyte will probably always have the #1 GT.

Re: How often does anyone play this game anymore?
 

I stopped when combo scoring was no longer a thing.

Ruined mediocre scores. AAA or die is so disheartening. Theres no rush of "Ooh maybe I have a good FC this time!"

Now every bad pass looks the same, or its X goods from AAA.