I made some graphs covering every ranked beatmap ever.

On one day in 2008 2007, Peppy descended and gave to us the game of clicking circles.

I was looking through the osu! API, and I noticed that information on ranked and approved beatmaps were publicly available. 81 API calls later, I had the entire history of ranked beatmaps at my disposal.

Then I made some graphs.

NOTE: This dataset includes all RANKED beatmaps from the beginning of time until July 30th. This does not include approved or converted beatmaps. Where counts are concerned, each difficulty is treated as a seperate beatmap.

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The first thing we can look at is the total volume of approved beatmaps per month:

http://i.imgur.com/jOStEdJ.png

Each game mode is indicated with a different color; you can see the times when Taiko, CtB, and Mania were first introduced. There's also some interesting lulls where there was a significant drop in people making maps (Summer 2011, Winter 2013). osu!std still dominates the beatmap rankings to this day, but mania seems to be the up-and-coming mode.

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Here is the difficulty distribution of all beatmaps.

http://i.imgur.com/EeAE6lh.png

There's a significant dip around 2.5 stars, which is understandable; ranking requires a difficulty under 2.25 stars, and the next highest difficulty (Hard, or your regional equivalent) usually lands around 2.75 - 3.5 stars. If you're looking for high PP plays, your options start tapering off past 5 stars.

I've also made a density plot of the difficulty distributions seperated by game mode.

http://i.imgur.com/j0fv2hl.png

Interestingly, Taiko has a much more evenly distributed set of beatmaps, with the clear peak landing around 3.7 stars (somewhere between Muzukashii and Oni). The other game modes follow similar curves to osu!std.

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We can also look at the distribution of beatmap lengths.

http://i.imgur.com/7i7QOkk.png

To nobody's surprise, one time length reigns supreme: 80-90 seconds, the land of anime openings and (TV-size ver.) beatmaps. It's so staggeringly populated that none of the other time ranges even come close. There were a few maps that were longer than 480 seconds, but I've limited the time axis so the graph is more easily readable.

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Here we have a plot of circle size (CS) over time, vertically jittered slightly for readability.

http://i.imgur.com/vstguAj.png

If you've played a mix of old and new beatmaps, you've probably noticed the (kind of) new trend of using larger circles even on higher difficulties. This plot more or less confirms this; the higher difficulty beatmaps, represented in red, are clustered at different points as time passes. 2008-2009 see primarily CS=6 with a hint of CS=5. By mid-2010, CS=6 usage has significantly dropped, and using CS=4 has become more popular. Nowadays the majority of >4 star difficulty maps sit between CS=4 and CS=5. There's also a few outlier red dots down in CS=2, which are funny to notice but statistically insignificant.

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This chart shows the 20 most prolific mappers of all time, with osuplayer111 (now Andrea, who is also on this graph) taking #1 with an incredible 566 ranked difficulties (really 738).

http://i.imgur.com/i9jmZJR.png

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Finally, here are the 15 songs with the most ranked difficulties.

http://i.imgur.com/M2vvoYT.png

These beatmaps have a pretty たとえ high number of difficulties, usually たとえ of multiple beatmap sets and たとえ popularity of their たとえ material. The たとえ outlier is of course たとえ, by たとえ from たとえ, which dominates the たとえ with たとえ たとえ and たとえ, たとえ たとえ たとえ たとえ.

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I hope you enjoyed LOOKing AT THESE GRAPHS as much as I enjoyed making them. Go forth with this knowledge and do something. I don't really know. If you have any more suggestions of stats you want to see, go ahead and leave them in the comments and I'll cook up more graphs. You know you love them.