29 Watch Your Own Replay
Ch. 28 asks you to record where the misses happened. This chapter is how you find out, because the results screen tells you what went wrong and only the replay tells you why.
What the results screen already gives you
- Unstable rate, the standard deviation of your hit errors times ten, available by hovering the performance graph immediately after a play or while watching the replay. It measures spread, not correctness. 51
- Average early and late error, the two numbers beside it. A large early average with a low UR is an offset or latency problem, not an accuracy problem (Ch. 7). 57
- Where in the map your accuracy fell apart, from the graph's shape. A collapse two-thirds through is stamina; scattered dips are pattern-specific.
What only the replay gives you
Drill: Replay review, ten minutes
- Play the map once without stopping, then watch that replay straight through once, doing nothing but noting the timestamps of every miss and every combo break.
- Watch it a second time and, at each timestamp, answer one question: was the cursor in the wrong place, in the right place at the wrong time, or in the right place with the wrong finger? Those are three different chapters (Ch. 10, Ch. 7, Ch. 6).
- Look at your cursor path between the misses, not at the misses. Over-aiming past the note, rounding off a square into a curve, or drifting off a stream's line all show up in the path and never show up in the score (Ch. 11).
- Write one sentence: the pattern type, the failure mode, the fix. That sentence is the goal for your next session (Ch. 28).
- Re-watch the same replay a week later against a new one on the same map. This is the cheapest progress measure in the game. 38,51
The community renders replays as video through services like ordr, which is useful for sharing a run for a second opinion but shows you nothing your own client doesn't. Tools that analyse replays statistically exist too; none was tested for this book. 37
Fact check
- Nuance. A top player of the 2014 era pushed back on replay review as general advice: he found it useful mainly when trying to full combo a specific hard section and not knowing how he was missing it. That is precisely the use this chapter describes, and it is not a substitute for playing. 72
- Research. Reviewing your own performance is feedback, and feedback is the condition that makes specific goals work at all: people shown the size and direction of their timing errors cut their early lean sharply, while goals without progress information underperform. 97,148
- Nuance. Watching yourself is not the same as watching a top player. Observation helps movement form far more than outcomes, and a replay hides the hands, which is where form lives (Ch. 37). Your own replay is for diagnosis; a handcam is for technique. 156
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