Poco's Growth from a Garden to a Farm

[poco0317]

I spent a long time going through all of my screenshots. I have a lot of them, and I pulled nearly 100 to show, but I’ll try to reduce the number.

So I started playing this game when it was introduced to me by my brother some time around 2007. He was, and still is, a DDR player who played index for accuracy on SM3.95. I played on and off because I didn’t have my own computer until around 2011 when I finally got my own computer with enough power to record plays. If you check my youtube channel, you can see some of my earliest plays from that time period. They aren’t great.
Skip forward to May 2016. I’m in college now, and I can dedicate all of my time to playing. From that point to mid 2017 when I found Etterna, I grew to about a 20 rating overall player.
The earliest screenshot I have is the picture below. It’s from September 2017. It’s the first time I managed to pass this particular file. This will be important later.

About a month later, I was still playing the same stuff I normally played at that point, which was index streams (on spread) and simple low 20s. Here’s a screenshot from that era:

And another to showcase that I was indeed absolutely awful at handstream and trills:

Some good came out of these early days. I managed to get one of my first AAA’s, and it happened to be on this file…

Then I discovered farming:

[poco0317]

I’ll try to avoid the farming screenshots, but here are improvements during that November to my stream skills:

Shortly thereafter, I discovered chordjacks. Yeah literally discovered, as in I’ve never seen them before.

November proved to be a good month for getting used to CCoff, as I was something like a 23 before it was disabled by default:

And I began learning chordjacks because jacks were easy to play on my membrane keyboard.

As well as simpler vibro:

But I could not for the life of me reach what I considered the holy grail of scores: The Lost Dedicated 1.0x

[poco0317]

The farming continues

Then the first Etterna Tournament comes around. One of the files in the first set was a chordjack file. It wasn’t really that difficult, but I was particularly proud of this score when I got it.

And remember the score from the beginning? Well that happened to be another one of the first files in the tournament. And I finally AA’d it for the first time, and grinded out the best score I could for what felt like hours.

[poco0317]

I started working on jumpstream and handstream skill in general once school started back up in January 2018. I impressed myself with this:

But I did not have the stamina for longer files and other files around my rating:

I got another one of my earliest AAA’s on this classic. Keep in mind my accuracy wasn’t amazing and I was surprised I got this score.

I started dipping into dumps and found out that I’m really bad at them:

But January was still a month of improvement. I managed to get Quadraphinix 1.1 within a month of getting 1.0.

February saw more improvement as expected:

Then my best ever score until months later came to me:

[poco0317]

I started to get better at chordjacks near the end of February:

Then March came around and I finally hit 27 overall on the client with this score.

And my stamina abilities were barely keeping up with my growth.

A lot of the time through April to June was spent farming scores. Here is my dump skill increase resulting from the time passed up to June.

And I could just taste TLD 1.0. (To anyone curious, I never got it. To this day the best I have is a J5->J4 converted AA.)

Nevertheless I continued to push my limits in June.

Then I finally hit 28 overall on the client in July.

And the scores (and farming) didn’t stop.

[poco0317]

July was just one of my best months ever, really:

In August, I got this score which I have not been able to re-obtain to this day:

And I revisited this old one to see how my skill has increased:

But I never stopped farming:

On a regular day in August I thought it would be funny to play with a beatmania controller that had sticky buttons. It produced some funny graphs, but also warmed me up for what was my best jack scores at that time:

But because school this year was particularly harsh I could not keep up the pace completely. By September, I began to work on accuracy on slightly easier files while occasionally trying to set more PBs. I’m happy with this FC:

And it didn’t hurt to revisit our friend NRG for another round:

October brought strong crops.

And then I finally hit 29 overall on the client with a really stupid score:

[poco0317]

From the same session as the 29.00 get, I got the score that should have pushed me to 29 instead:

December was filled with kind of weak scores and farming. Here’s the hard Lovely Bomb 1.0 AA

And my Christmas present was Quadraphinix 1.25.

More recently I’ve been working on every skillset except streams. I still play them, but primarily I focus on chordjacks. Here are some accuracy scores from the beginning of January 2019.

And finally what I consider to probably be my best jumpstream+stamina score yet. The accuracy is just too good for what I normally get on this type of file.

[poco0317]

More scores to come.

[Windoze]

high effort scoredump

[Providence]

I’m in college now, and I can dedicate all of my time to playing.

[Foxfire]

Awesome! I appreciate you being willing to take the time to really mill through all of your scores over the last year and a half, and paint me a picture of your progress as a player! You have certainly made many steps forward on all fronts, and I respect that greatly.

God I still need to get Lovely Bomb, I always get denied on that file. NRG is also a pretty wild ride, I imagine 1.2 must be quite difficult! I wish you the best of luck on TLD 1x! I imagine you should be capable if you can do lovely bomb and machine 1.05, you just need a good session and hopefully no nerves to ruin it.

[poco0317]

Over 30 attempts later

and first j5 AA on this

[Foxfire]

Hey you did it, I knew you had it in you! Pretty sure Freedom Why gives over 30 for max scale, go get that max farm because wew lad that is a ripe fucking crop ready for picking.

[poco0317]

I return with additional evidence of improvement.

I managed a re-AA on St. Scarhand 1.4 finally and completely destroyed the old pb

Here is one of my best accuracy scores yet.

Very next score in that session was some quick staminajack

Come back a few days later and I get this on my first try, not quite expecting it.

And we have some basic decent acc scores to finish it off.

I got a couple of 30s in this time period, but I’m not sure if they are worthy. I like these scores particularly.

[dez]

Your improvement rate in early 2018 was actually nuts, thank you for sharing!

[poco0317]

So apparently over 2019 I set over 10000 scores alone. Here are some highlights.

ok

[poco0317]

still playin

[temma]

fuck NRG 280 bpm streams at 18msd bullshit

[Casey2069]

without separating fingers, so in fact not bs

[poco0317]

been a bit uhhhh here u go

i dont screenshot my scores or play much anymore but this is what i did get over the past few months (i already beat the 2nd score with a 98 or somethin whatever)