Rhythm Games Have An Elitism Problem

I've developed a bad habit of doomscrolling Reddit to stay up to date on the news from my various hobbies. During one of these sessions, I saw a post about the high skill floor of community-based rhythm games. Unsurprisingly, this post was downvoted to oblivion, which I think serves to prove that the OP has a point: rhythm gaming has an elitism problem that makes it difficult to get in on the ground floor.

One of my first forays into community-based mapping was with OurDream, effectively a custom server for the "BanG Dream!" game that featured community-made maps from the Bestdori site. When I jumped on, I quickly noticed a few things. First, most of the maps were far beyond my skill level. Second, the maps that were closer to where I was skill-wise had their difficulties mislabeled. At the time, I could play rank 24-25 songs, and the 25s in OurDream were easily in the 26-27 range of actual difficulty.

I've tried getting into OSU! a few times as well, and while it does have more beginner-friendly songs, there are still issues. The easy songs are mapped very boringly, the difficulty progression is way too steep, and it was difficult to find any songs I actually wanted to play at a difficulty I could actually handle. It's just not easy to get a foot in the door.

StepMania has actually been the best experience I've found. If you're willing to look, you can find some song packs that include a wide range of difficulties with a reasonable progression curve. If you want to have online leaderboards, some of those packs are even compatible with Etterna. However, finding song packs is a bit of a pain since the sites that host them aren't very user-friendly.

Several responses to the Reddit post effectively boiled down to "the maps are made by the community, so you can't complain". That's once again a very elitist way of looking at things. In order for a community to thrive, you need new people flowing in, and new players aren't going to try out rhythm games if there's no good starting point. You can say that having a small, highly skilled community is a good thing, but eventually the members of that community are going to find other interests, and the community will die. I appreciate that mapping takes time and effort, but there has to be a solution to help newbies learn the ropes if the rhythm gaming niche is going to continue to thrive.