I'm new and need some help

[aguy77]

Hi everybody, I'm new to stepmania online, I used to play stepmania a long while back but I have decided to revisit it after I found out there is online, But I am having a hard time playing even medium difficulty songs and I have to spam my keyboard to death just to get some points in hard songs. I was wondering what some things I can do/change to get better at playing songs aside from practicing them over and over.

[foxfire667]

There is no way to circumvent lots of practice to improve, but I have a couple of questions.

First, what is your play style? There are many styles, most of which aren't the best for keyboard oriented players. Typically keyboard packs are geared towards the spread play style (using two hands, generally the index and middle fingers, with each being assigned to a key). Trying to say, play one handed when an onslaught of JS hits the screen, isn't going to end well for you. If you're playing with a device aside from a keyboard, I'm not really sure there are different styles to use for an increased improvement rate.

Second, what packs are you playing? Every pack is different when it comes to difficulties, and can be completely arbitrary. A hard 11 from one pack could be WAY different in difficulty from a hard 11 in another. It may just be that you have downloaded packs which are too difficult for you to enjoy at the moment, and you may just need easier ones to start off with. You aren't going to improve if you are just spamming the keyboard, you need content which actually pushes you to your limits, without throwing you overboard. Try downloading packs from with a blue star (★) next to the title. Those ones in particular should help you out with understanding what the heck is going on in harder content, and make practicing an actually enjoyable experience. You'd just be having fun, as opposed to mashing away in hopes that you'll improve one day.

Hope that helps!

[aguy77]

thank you very much! and to answer your questions, I play on a spread style with a keyboard, using q and p for middle fingers and s and l for index, I also use all the mainstream super popular packs the community keyboard megapacks