24 Rank, pp, and Comparison
- pp is not skill. Farm maps pay more than harder, broader maps; rank goals are fine, but improvement shows up in smaller ways first. 14
- There's no single right path. osu! has no matchmaking and no shared objective, so everyone's journey is different, and there's no step-by-step guide that fits everyone. 14
- Don't compare yourself to everyone. Friendly rivalries help; measuring yourself against the whole player base doesn't. Aim to be better than yesterday. 14
- Remember what you're seeing. People share their full combos and hide their chokes, so everyone else's progress looks smoother than it was. 41
- Build consistency below your peak. Korilak targeted plays worth about 80% of his best pp score while working on consistency. 31
What the 2026 system actually measures
The July 2026 update is worth knowing in outline, because it changed which skills pp rewards and it moved the model closer to the chart this book is built on. 79
- Reading is now its own skill. The old static bonuses for high AR and Hidden were replaced by a Reading skill that scales with note density and angles. Very high-ranked players lost pp that high AR had been handing them for free, while low-AR scores were buffed substantially. A model that pays for reading density rather than for the AR number is closer to what Ch. 8 argues reading actually is.
- Aim is split into snap and flow. Flow aim used to be a distance bonus attached to the tapping skill; it is now evaluated inside Aim, using velocity and angle changes. The chart made that distinction years earlier (Ch. 10).
- Spacing and BPM count more equally. Aim evaluation used to favour high BPM with small spacing over slow, wide jumps. That gap was narrowed, so wide spacing and slower jumps gained while tight fast patterns lost. It isn't a full fix, and the update says so.
- Speed uses a harmonic sum, so every note contributes and the old length bonus is gone. Padding a map with easy notes now pays less than the same object count of hard ones.
- Difficulty chunks follow the objects. Star rating no longer shifts when a map's offset or a rate change moves notes across fixed 400 ms windows.
Fact check
- Confirmed. All five changes above come from the official update post, along with a warning worth repeating: individual players' totals could move sharply in either direction, because a score losing pp means it had been overweighted until now. 79
- Nuance. This is the fifth reworking of the system since 2021 (Ch. 22). Train the skills; the numbers will keep moving underneath them. 75,76,77,78,79
Take: Tonehh and bloo
- pp and rank don't reflect skill. Partly supported. pp models aim, speed, and accuracy, and since July 2026 reading, per third-party summaries, but the osu! team's own 2021 notes show it favored maps with short difficulty spikes. 59,75,166,167
- Stop asking whether you're good for your rank. Experience-based. No one's expectations matter but yours.
Korilak’s take
- Never seriously practice what you know you can't do. Partly supported. Practice beyond your level teaches little (challenge point), but Tonehh and bloo recommend occasional attempts above your level. Both fit if you separate practice from exploration. 14,31,108
- If it's not working today, switch: Hard Rock when single-tapping won't come, lower-BPM Double Time when aim or high-OD accuracy won't, streams when neither mod works, and nothing at all on the worst days. Experience-based. 31
Take: r/osugame guide
- Take a month off pp farming to train, because once you start farming it's hard to stop. Agrees with Tonehh. Farming can train consistency depending on what you farm, but it crowds out everything else; the top players' version of the same point is that farming works in moderation, alongside other skill sets (Ch. 32). 39,40
- Improvement is slow, invisible while it happens, and felt later. Supported. Practice curves flatten as you get better, which is exactly what makes real progress hard to perceive from the inside. 124,126
- Don't compare yourself to others; be good rather than highly ranked. Agrees with everyone. The oldest source in this book and the newest make the same point a decade apart. 14,40
- Play new maps you've never seen rather than the same one repeatedly (Zinkon's tip). Agrees with the hyperfocus video. Sightreading unfamiliar patterns is what the chart calls pattern processing, and variety is the one thing every source in this book recommends. 1,44
Take: Top players
- Push from where you are today, not from your peak. Supported. One of them streams 210 on a good day and 200 on an ordinary one, and on ordinary days practises at 200 rather than 215. Performance varies with sleep, recent practice, and everything else; the challenge point sits relative to today's level, not your best week. 40,108
- Quitting before you submit anything is how players stay stuck. Agrees with Tonehh. If you restart every run that isn't perfect, you never get a score to measure against, so there's nothing to beat next session and no evidence about where you actually are. 16,40
- Breaking the ego loop starts with deciding what you actually want. Partly supported. Their question is whether you want to keep B-ranking a map far above you or to full combo something you can master; one of them dropped to 2-star maps to relearn the game on a mouse after playing at World Cup level. Mastery experiences are the strongest source of the confidence that keeps people practising, which is the mechanism behind their advice. 40,147
- Comparing yourself to other players is a choice you can drop. Experience-based. The player who was his country's number one before being overtaken says the fix was simply ceasing to care, and he can't teach it; what he can point to is that the player who passed him did it by drilling basics from the ground up. It fits the book's evidence on intrinsic motivation, but nobody has shown how to install that attitude. 40,123
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