Hey guys here's a huge misconception that I think needs to be cleared up:
"If I play easy songs my timing will improve. However, if I play difficult songs my timing will not improve but my ability to pass harder songs will."
There are only two aspects to IIDX that are noteworthy, and these are reading and timing. Reading is the ability of your brain to recognize increasingly complex patterns and execute them, which is measured by your misscount. Timing is how well you score.
Timing improves generally linearly over time, and usually is not greatly affected by how much one plays. It is affected by factors such as how high or low your GRN number is, but the general consensus here is that you want to read at comfortable speeds, and then as quickly as possible (in that order). Reading, however, is an aspect that you can improve consciously. Playing harder songs improves reading, but playing easier songs isn't going to necessarily improve your timing. While this may seem illogical, here's how I think of it. If you play a hard song and you get mostly goods, it's a lot easier to improve this by getting greats instead of goods (since you'll be getting lots of goods all over the place) rather than go to an easy song where you get mostly fgreats and change greats to fgreats. It's all a matter of proportion, i.e. an improvement from C to A is equivalent to improvement from AA to AAA.
The other thing is that reading can affect how well one times. In my experience over playing several different rhythm games, playing harder songs was the sure way to improve every aspect of my game, i.e. my timing and my passing ability. To me, going back to play easy songs is not only boring but a supreme waste of time in terms of improving my skills. Instead of agonizing about that 8 you can't AAA, how about you aim to pass another 11. Because once you get that 11 passed, you'll go back to the 8 and it'll be trivial to AAA. Trust me. |