How to get (really) good at FFR

[LJRoX]

Originally Posted by OneHandNow

I actually don't use isolation and I do fine..

I think it's all about practice. And you have to dedicated - you have to ENJOY the game.

If you don't enjoy rhythm games, and if AAAing songs feel like a chore to you, then.. well. That sucks.

You have to enjoy it to AAA it!

Like having sex,

sex isn't a chore


YOU GOTTA ENJOY IT


sex with your keyboard in this case

[Reincarnate]

Isolation is a useful tool when you run into your limitations as a player. I had to use it personally for files like RATO, Death Piano, Kidney Stone, Crowdpleaser (which, I might add, required another play gimmick playstyle known as overlay setup), Vertex Beta vROFL, etc.

There was one night when I played Death Piano for almost 15 hours straight, and I was marking my PA breakdown with each play, and I noticed that no matter how much I practiced, my PA variance was pitiful. There were just some bounds I couldn't push through, and so I had to turn to isolation to iron out the kinks.

[ScarletSky]

Well, I don't have anything dramatic to say like Reincarnate or Halogen.
But if I'm trying to AAA something, I'll do a few attempts on the song, then go play another song. Come back and try a few more times. Rinse and repeat.
That way, I don't end up getting mindblocked from whoring it constantly.

Also, I have a list of songs I practice that are respective to issue I'm having. When I'm lacking in speed, Vertex B, Purple, and songs like that are what I work with. Jacks: counter strike gun sounds. And so on. I dedicate a few hours a day to practicing in areas that I'm lacking in (usually jacks and jumpstreams) and after a few weeks I do notice a lot of improvement in those skill sets.

[Reincarnate]

That's another good point -- sometimes people play files on Mirror because it helps kill off any bad habits you may have developed in your muscle memory when it comes to difficult portions of a file.

[3lijah]

Originally Posted by OneHandNow

You have to enjoy it to AAA it!

This. omg, this. my closest AAA to a VC was Dot Matrix Hero. 4 0 0 0. That song is my absolute favorite ffr file. and all the 'goods' that I got on the song was the first half of the song:

Love the hell out of this song lol

[ScarletSky]

Originally Posted by Reincarnate

That's another good point -- sometimes people play files on Mirror because it helps kill off any bad habits you may have developed in your muscle memory when it comes to difficult portions of a file.

I agree. Usually I'm so used to playing a song one way or the other, practicing it a few times in mirror or non-mirror will help me reset my muscle memory so I'm not playing a song how my fingers memorized it, but how I read it.. if that makes any sense.

Edit~
Another point: there's a play style called Hovering. It's basically where instead of resting your wrists on the desk/kb/whatever, you hover them above so that you use your wrists/arms more for playing than your fingers. Since they can only reverberate so fast, this helps a lot of parts with jacks or running mans, anything besides one handed trills mostly.

Edit 2~
Lol, I made Halogen's siggy. xD This is an achievement by far.

[i love you]

IMO just put effort into practicing your weaknesses and you will get better within time. Once you're decent at everything then i would think it's time to optimize your skills by viewing Rubix's post about it.

[BigBoss37]

Enjoy the game and the music. Practice lots and keep pushing yourself. If you really want to get good fast start playing stepmania a lot, after a few weeks of stepmania ffr should be a joke.

[stavie33]

I'm at a plateau right now and I don't know how to get better, a lot of it involves speed issues but that's taking forever to build up. Right now I'm slowly getting accustomed to 1.75x, and hoping that will make me better, but right now, I'm terrible at it. My high point of AAA's on FGO's and FMO's was 1.6x, but I'm trying again. I have no problem reading patterns though, just the way my fingers react to them, like, I can read the crazy white staircase in CCCP, but my hands don't staircase, if anything, they do one or two staircases in the time the entire white one goes through, it's just too fast for my hands to respond. I'm really stuck now, and I see people destroying crazy files like Jamiax Dues, and I don't know what to do to get better.

Also, my biggest problem is right handed trilling, if all the trills in Little God Channel were left handed, I would AAA, no joke, I've played it on mirror where the first 2/3 of the song is left handed trills and I AAA'd up till the first right handed one. I have no idea how to fix this trill issue, my right hand just cannot move that fast on trills for a long time, no matter how much I practice. I play DFJK, advice?

[iironiic]

Note that the type of keyboard you use and how you tap your keys are some of the big factors in determining how well you perform on the files. I know some people who would much rather use laptop keyboards and tap the keys as hard as they can to ensure that they are hitting the arrows perfectly. On the other hand, I use a very thin wireless keyboard (AJ can attest to this) that is SO sensitive that the boo-glitch in Flash Player commonly occurs for me (as shown with the FMO booflags I have attained lol). In this case, to remedy that, I had to take a different approach and begin to lightly tap my keys to primarily avoid the glitch, yet as a downside, you lose control and miss arrows. With this in mind, I am trying (and still trying) to learn how to control myself throughout the entirety of the file (not only control my fingers, but control anxiety, emotions, etc.).

OHN also sums my other point. Don't make FFR a chore. You want to actually enjoy the game. I know some people who are so frustrated with the game because they cannot AAA a single FMO/FGO, yet has the potential to do so. Over the past few days, I have been obtaining FMO AAAs that I didn't expect to get, just because I wanted to have fun. It is also okay to take a day break or two (I'm doing that right now) just to avoid ruining the fun of FFR. If you don't feel like playing it, no one is stopping you.

Lastly, don't even care about your level ranks. As iironiic (rofl) as this sounds, it definitely helped me out in the long run. Be happy to post scores that you worked extremely hard for and be proud of other people's accomplishments in the FFR Scores thread. Don't feel obliged to try and compete for ranks or try and beat other people's scores because a) you will look like a dick, and b) you are forcing yourself to beat someone. Just play the game for fun!

[SocoNhydro420]

Yeah I feel that a laptop keyboard would do me a lot better since its easier to press the keys, and therefore increase my speed, but my laptop is way too laggy to get SDGs/AAAs on FMOs like I do normally. Maybe ill go keyboard shopping one day

[fullmetal_alchemist027]

Ive hit this sort of...bleh spot in my FFR playing after coming back where it felt like I wasnt able to do anything. I tried several different setups, but they never felt right. I was always an index player till about 3 years in and then i needed to switch to spread because I was severely limited.

But even now, spread felt unnatural, but then Marcus (if I may), you made the point of standard spread being suboptimal and it got me thinking again. So this time I tried FV BH for the keysetup, and I can already feel that this is the way I needed to go to start the road of improvement. So thank you

OT:I dont remember if its been said or not, but unless it works for you, DONT BEAT YOUR HEAD AGAINST THE WALL. If the song isnt clicking, play something else for a while, take a break, then come back to it. Or if that fails, as it was stated, Mirror Mode!

[DossarLX ODI]

Isolation hasn't helped me worth shit in most cases. Sorry, but that anchoring jack pattern in Revo is just impossible no matter what I do - there's just no way to cut through it.

The only time isolation has really helped me was the ending of Death Piano and the roll transitions near the beginning of RATO. Usually what happens is that I record my run and look at a certain pattern, and then do it from there. Isolation focuses too much on one part that I actually wind up forgetting about the other parts and they just come back and bite me in the ass.

For example, by "observing patterns" I mean something like this:



This made the transition much smoother. Something like Revo's [34][14][34][14] however is something that can't be viewed differently, it's an anchoring pattern I've never been able to do.

Pattern flexibility is most important. You can have insane speed and jacking, but still do shit on certain patterns.

My tips? Use 1.75x and the setup DFJK or M,./ (really tight spread to switch to index on certain files, like AIM Anthem). Also get a flat keyboard and have fun on stepmania with fast files. I didn't even have to "practice" on certain files, I just wound up playing a wide variety of "dumpfiles" and just got better. It should be important to note that I didn't even get into playing FFR competitively until recently (avrank mission, etc. before I didn't even have half the songs in the game FC'd because I didn't really care about the game haha).

[Sweagen]

The main problem imo is lag
If you have lag of any sort you will always be inconsistent and improving will be a lot slower .... >:O

I bet a lot of people have way more lag affecting their PA than they think.

[DossarLX ODI]

Yes. Lag can be a huge problem too. Usually when I play FFR all I have is AIM open and then the standalone for the game .swf, more processes could eat up a lot of CPU usage (other factors can affect lag as well, of course). For me Velocity's engine gets really laggy sometimes so I usually use the normal .swf (1220, legacy engine)

[OneHandNow]

When I play FFR, I turn off EVERYTHING else to ensure I get no lag spikes or anything to mess up my runs. :P

[smartdude1212]

I still favour my sdef/2468 setup. You can get away with spread, index, four finger, etc., without having a finger orgy.

[kmay]

i think plateau's are all mental, but i will let you know if i ever get that dam elusive FMO AAA.

[XCV]

Oh my god Dossar style spread works so well on AIM Anthem. Just dropped 1,500 ranks on it. Thank you so much - I'd been playing it for a long time, then switched back to ASKL.

[YoshL]

Originally Posted by XCV

Oh my god Dossar style spread works so well on AIM Anthem. Just dropped 1,500 ranks on it. Thank you so much - I'd been playing it for a long time, then switched back to ASKL.

tell the truth, i did something strange with AIM. I'm not sure how it worked out for me... but with the [34][14][34][14] pattern, i did a sort of jumptrill with my right hand, hitting [34] then [145] the 5 coming from the key to the right of the [4] key. just... kinda weird :P

Originally Posted by kmay

i think plateau's are all mental, but i will let you know if i ever get that dam elusive FMO AAA.

speaking of which...