osu! Simple Terms Simplified

Song setup, where you can find difficulty factors in the song editor.

osu!, as explained earlier, has multiple difficulties. How is the difficulty of these songs calculated though? We will not being going in depth, bur rather looking at simple factors. Each of these factors have a rating from 1-10.

• OD-Overall difficulty. When a higher number, the hit window is smaller and the difficulty of spinners is increased. This means, its harder to hit a beat perfectly, and it's harder to "clear" a spinner.
• AR-Approach rate. The circles around the beats appear and get smaller and smaller towards when and where you're supposed to hit the note. A higher number of this tells us that the approaching circles will appear and gather in more swiftly, so it requires faster reaction.
• CS-Circle size. This is the size of the beats. A higher number means the beats are harder to hit, because they are then smaller.
• HP-Health point drain rate. While you're playing, do you see a bar on the top left? That is your health bar. It constantly gets lower and lower if you don't do anything, and if you miss something, it drops even lower faster. This is then, obviously, the rate of how fast it drains. A higher HP means a faster-draining bar, which is typically used for faster songs with more beats, because hitting a beat correctly keeps you alive.

Fun Fact~Most present-day osu! insane-difficulty songs have around an OD of 7-8, an AR of 8-9, a CS of 4-5, and an HP of 7-8. In the past, the insane difficulties were ridiculously timed and had around an OD of 10, an AR of 10, a CS of 10, and an HP of 10. It seems as if they never really did any analysis of how fun the song would be to play if everything was not 10 until now. It seems like they just assumed that 10=super hard, so it should be 10 everything for something=super hard.

Sorry for no post yesterday! For that, +fun fact!

Fun Fact~Unlike many beatgames other than osu!, the community chooses what songs they like and independently work on them to make their own beatmap (or do collaborations, which are projects that more than one person works on)!! In the beginning, it was relatively easy to get your map ranked (more info here) because not that many people were playing the game as they are now. Nowadays, it's really hard to get your beatmap ranked as there are a lot of people trying to get their maps ranked. 

The current process to getting your map ranked! So complicated!! (Just kidding, if you can understand it)

Once again, and I can't stress this enough, make sure to ask me as much questions as if I was accused of murder and you were interrogating me. It's fun to answer 'em! YES, PLEASE GIVE ME THE ENJOYMENT OF ANSWERING YOUR QUESTIONS!!!!