Advice on sharpening timing?

I'm not very good at timing my hits. When I play SDVX it's no uncommon thing for me for my NEAR to ERROR ratio to be around 10:1 (most of the time I get more EARLY nears than LATE nears); this is a frequent obstacle when trying to get new AAA's. Due to this particular flaw of mine in some cases I find it easier to EXC clear a level 15 than get a AAA since scoring is the least of your worries for the former. Is there any way to calibrate my timing?

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Play correctly calibrated StepMania with assist tick and bump up the judge difficulty in advanced options to 7. It's what I do.

for SDVX, adjust your timing until you get roughly the same amount of early and late nears. afterwards, study the rhythms of a chart until you get it down quite tightly (such as by tapping your fingers on a table), then try actually playing it.

of course you gotta do this a lot. you gotta play a lot too because you need your hand muscles to be able to keep up and stay consistent the whole song.

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practice
like, there is literally no other tip anyone can give you
the more you play, the more you gain

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Practice with an unforgiving game.
SDVX is super lenient when it comes to timing.

Stepmania's already been mentioned.
Lunatic Rave 2 is also very good for timing, but the learning curve is steep.

If EZ2ON was still alive it would have been a great option as well (rip )

May be a bit obvious, but listen to the music.

This tbh, I found that my timing was poor on DDR and when I tried to find the problem I realized I wasn't really listening to the music, it was just sort of accompanying my steps. Same kind of thing applies to SDVX.

@CYSYS8993: Are you asking about SDVX specifically, or Bemani games in general?

I can't comment on SDVX in particular, but I have some observations on recent DDR games, if that is helpful.

Scoring accurately in DDR does not necessarily suggest that you are playing in a synchronized fashion with the music. ICNH discusses this issue in an informed and in-depth fashion in this post. His AAA count and long-term dedication to the series is enough for me to trust. To quote:


I've also spoke personally with Little Matt on this matter. He has suggested that in DDR, the engine used for X2 and beyond does not maintain a consistent sync from game to game, song to song. ie. You could play the same song+chart five times in a row, and the sync would be very slightly different every time. He has suggested that this issue was not present in arcade Extreme or SN.

If this is indeed the case, such a system doesn't really lend itself to attaining high scores via practice-based perfection, but rather a combination of luck and rapid-adaptability of the player.

Finally, StepMania has been mentioned in posts above mine. For the reasons I've already discussed, getting Marvelouses/Perfects in DDR does not correlate 1:1 with getting W1/W2 judgments in StepMania. See this thread for a more in-depth discussion.

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Yeah I was talking about SDVX in particular. The timing thing has become a major obstacle when trying to get new high scores.

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please don't quote the post directly before yours, especially if it's a post as large as that

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If I may ask, what scroll BPM are you reading at?

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My favored lane speed setting in SDVX is 900.

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Since you're getting a lot of early nears, you should try reading a little closer to the judgement line to give yourself a little less time to react. I'm assuming you already look pretty high and time by reaction, because 900 bpm is fairly fast.

If you play IIDX (or will play), I'd suggest you check out REA's blog article on timing. It goes a bit more in depth on what methods there are to time well and how you can improve your timing, although it might be a bit confusing if you don't understand IIDX terminology.

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practise makes perfect