practice makes perfects

Don't practice 12s for accuracy. -_-;;

Do 9s and 10s.

Hell, if you REALLY want to focus on accuracy try some 6-7 step songs with the DARK mod, or DARK & HIDDEN mod active. I know I went back and played some Standard mode for a month or so in the middle of my DDR career. That is when I really started to improve my accuracy.

hm... interesting, I never thought of doing that. mau have top try to up my star and AAA count.
But yeah, go with lower ranked songs if you want to practice accuracy.

Play IIDX to improve your timing.

We all have a performance ceiling. Don't worry if you don't improve. We all plateau after a while. Don't worry if you get the same scores.
Until you hit that though.... Just play for yourself and as if you're the only person in the world and you'll do much better.



P.S. Don't play around others, it will cramp your timing. You also tend to pickc up on others' play habits as well. Just do your own thing.

Heh, yeah. I've hit a major plateau myself.  Can't get to 11 in difficulty and my accuracy is usually just under AA grade on most easier songs.  On 9s I tend to get a mix of As and Bs.  Can't really seem to get much past that.  But I'm pretty happy with that seeing as I didn't think I'd ever be doing 10s.

i always thought playing around people that are really good usually will help because like you said will pick up others play habits.
just look at the people in california

i also believed that competition with people at your own level was a good way to bring up accuracy... well, at least its a good motive

Yeah, competition helps too. Not just with accuracy but with all aspects of playing.

Actually, my PA gets significantly better when there are other people around.  It's 'cause I'm a showoff. ;P

I first started improving my accuracy by playing really easy shit, then shouting something obscene every time I got a great.  I did that with every song on light on DDRMAX CS, then went to heavy again and improved every score except for my Shining Polaris score and my HVAM score by a full letter grade. (note that this is when I was first starting to do 9's.  My HVAM score was a B.)

This is probably the single greatest piece of advice I have seen on the internet.
IIDX has such hard timing (for me anyways) and afer playing and increasing my IIDX accuracy, my DDR/ITG accuracy went waaay up. also, try to keep you feet moving on every 1/4 note, or every other 1/8t note (depending on currents patterns) just watch accuracy players play if don't already know wut I mean.

IIDX got my timing up but killed my speedreading.  I have to barrape at 420 now.

My speed read is probably at like 450 right now, or sometimes more when I'm playing vertex, though I can't usually read 600, or at least not through a whole song. But keep ion mind, I barrape regardless .

Pothead

No that's me, sorta lol. But I agree with the IIDX thing, it helps my timing as well.

Haha, I didn't even notice that. xD

I'm back up to being able to play no-bar without sucking up to 460 again.

My reading speed is wonky.

Certain songs you can read at higher speed than others. For instance, LoM at x1.5 is essentially 500, yet that is probably WAY easier than playing My Summer Love on x5, even though that is also 500.

It's all about how dense the song is to begin with and how fast the steps are. I play My Summer Love on x3, yet I play the Max's often on x1.5 as opposed to the x1 that My Summer Love x3 would suggest.

600 is about the fastest I can do in DDR, but I can read it. Accidentally left x3 on and picked Orion.78, but I did it  =)

Yeah.  Although in my case, it's more a matter of how tense I am.  I can play up to about 1200 on StepMania on a good day 'cause there's no tension in my body.  However, I can only go up to 600 on DDR 'cause a lot of my mental energy is going into breathing, keeping my balance, and standing, and it seems like there's a weird curve for me.  I can do songs up to 200 x3 and still get passable scores, but I can't do stuff like Max 300 x2, or even The Least 100 Sec x2.  And I can't do stuff like Bag x8, even though that's only about 500.

I dunno, maybe I just need to stop bothering with speedwhoring at all and play at speeds I can actually get worthwhile scores at.

being able to increase your accuracy to me is a combination of two factors:

1) mental awareness of what you are doing to be accurate or inaccurate

2) having the physical stamina and awareness of being able to translate what you are mentally aware of to your physical actions.

yes, playing iidx will increase your mental awareness, but if you're not in shape to actually execute the harder songs on didder or itg, it doesn't do squat.

When you first start to play hard things, the goal is usually about passing.  Maybe there's a general sense of PA/FA involved, but it's not to the same level of detail as doing a 1 or a 2 block/foot song.  As you gain more stamina and endurance, your ability to grasp how you're executing is what changes about it.

the easiest personal example i can come up with has to do with things like the "big five" from DDR Extreme, and Paranoia Survivor in particular.  I remember when i first played it and tried to pass it, get good at it, i was flailing both physically and mentally.  "holy shit this is so fast.  Oh my god there are so many arrows.  What the fuck is this run all about?  what the fuck tempo changes?  my legs are turning to jelly, i don't think i'm going to make it."

As my general stamina increased and my ability increased, the first thing i noticed about my perception of PS was that it moved from being an incredibly fast song to one that felt amazingly slow.  Now when i play the song, i feel like i have all the time in the world to execute the individual arrows and the individual patterns, so much that i usually rush and have to consciously slow down my feet .  I have time to process when i get greats whether they are late or early greats and sometimes even have the ability to process if i'm getting early or late perfects.  And i can translate that to how i actually move my feet, what little muscle movement adjustments i have to make, what i do with my upper body, etc. etc.

the bottom line for me is that it's a balance.  you have to play the harder stuff to get the stamina to be able to PA/FA the easier stuff, and you have to be able to AAA or **** the easier stuff to be able to have the mental awareness enough to be able to PA/FA the harder stuff.


whoever suggested playing on Dark is a little insane like i used to be.  In a perfect world, playing on Dark and executing perfectly in sync with what it is that you hear would give you a AAA or a ****, but the amount of variance between where you're actually supposed to hit the arrow to get a Perfect or a Fantastic is so high that trying to learn accuracy as a General Rule by hearing alone is near impossible, especially for songs like Telephone Operator, Sexy Planet Oni, on DDR Extreme whose sync changes throughout the song and a *bunch* of songs from SN that change sync during a song because SN is crappy.  I learned from the likes of Tyler - use aural stuff as a frame of reference to know what you have to do, but for the songs in which aural stuff isn't solid and even for those that are, understand and utlise the strength of playing visually.  in the case of DDR, tracking the difference between a white perfect versus a yellow perfect and where your stepped arrow is in relation to the casing arrow when you get anything other than a white.  ITG and ITG2 are the same thing, but the ability to get a fantastic visually is slightly later than that of DDR.

i've hit a point only now where i can track a good deal of flashes for 7s through 9s all the time if i wanted to, though typically it's not exactly how i play or what i feel is necessary.  I definitely use the flashes to keep me in line for easy eighth note runs, looking either out of the corner of my eye or actually fixing my vision slightly below the casings and reading the arrows out of the corner of my eye for tougher out of sync things or if i'm just not feeling secure in my timing.  I glue my eyes to the casings and even physically move my body as close as possible to the machine for things like the middle of Insertion or for that one part of Ecstacy.

Yup.  That's about all that needs to be said on this subject.

I'll second that, Darknote full on hit it.

i'll put on a quick addendum that for the most part i'm an aural player in reality - i use flashes as a frame of reference for "fine tuning."  the level of whichi i use it varies depending on how much i can rely upon the aural - i always track the occasional flash when i can, but i'll track a lot more on Little Bitch or Telephone Operator or the other above mentions, and i'll completely ignore the music for things like the first note of trip machine survivor or the last note of era, instead watching the little... umm... *ponders how to explain*.  The four flashy parts of the DDR arrow ticks in 16th notes, and for that stuff it's slow enough that i can use that for a visual subdivision.

Yeah, I can only hit the first note of HVAM Perfect if I bob my head at 196bpm from the second the song starts to when that note hits.
Fun fact, every time I've hit the first jump on HVAM perfect, I've FC'd it.

Lol, I do the same thing, only I kinda bob my whole torso a little.