Top play
A top play is one of the scores in your osu! best performance list — the highest-pp scores on your account, de-duplicated so that each beatmap contributes at most one entry. These are the scores that produce profile pp, and each is weighted by its position: the best counts in full, the second at 95 per cent, the third at 90.25 per cent, and so on down the list. The osu! API returns up to 100 best-performance entries, which is why "top 100" is the usual shorthand. Setting a better score on a map you have already played replaces the old entry rather than adding a second one.
How a score enters best performance
When you submit a passing score on a ranked or approved beatmap, the osu! servers compute its pp value immediately. That value is then compared against the rest of your account: the server keeps your highest-pp score for each beatmap, sorts the survivors by pp, and the entries near the front of that sorted list are what players call top plays.
Two kinds of score can never appear there. Plays on qualified and loved beatmaps have leaderboards but carry no pp whatsoever, and a play that does not complete the map is not eligible for best performance at all. Mods are folded into the pp value rather than tracked separately, so a Hidden DoubleTime score and a no-mod score on the same difficulty compete for the same single slot — only the higher pp value survives.
One entry per beatmap
Best performance is de-duplicated by beatmap. Improving on a map already in the list means the improvement replaces the old entry rather than sitting beside it; you cannot occupy two positions with the same difficulty.
The rule the aggregation applies is highest pp per beatmap, not highest raw score. Where several scores on a map exist on your account, it is the best pp value among them that is carried into your profile total, so a high-score attempt with worse accuracy or a broken combo does not displace a stronger pp result.
The practical consequence is that a map you have already played well is a poor pp target. Beating a 250 pp entry with a 260 pp entry earns you the 10 pp difference, discounted by the weight of the position it sits in — not 260 pp.
What a new top play is actually worth
A new entry is worth its pp value multiplied by the weight of the position it lands in, minus the cost of pushing everything below it down one place. Each displaced score retains 95 per cent of the weight it had, so the further down the list a change happens, the smaller the net gain.
Two illustrations, using the 0.95n−1 weighting:
- A 400 pp play entering at position 1 contributes its full 400 pp at that slot. For a player whose next hundred entries are all worth 200 pp, the shift below costs about 199 pp, leaving a net gain near 201 pp.
- The same 400 pp play entering at position 25 is weighted at 0.9524 = 0.292, so it contributes about 117 pp before the displacement cost is subtracted.
This is also why progress appears to slow. Once the list is full of strong scores, a new play has to beat entries that are already near your ceiling, and it only ever earns the difference between itself and the score it displaced.
The limits of the top-100 framing
The osu! API returns up to 100 best-performance entries per request, and profile pages show the same window, so "top 100" became the standard shorthand. The server considers more than the visible hundred, though the wiki documents only the top-100 window.
The difference is small but real. Position 101 carries a weight of 0.0059, so a 400 pp play there adds a little over 2 pp. The first hundred positions account for roughly 99.4 per cent of the maximum possible weighted total, which is why the shorthand survives contact with reality.
Separately, every new ranked beatmap you set any score on feeds the bonus term described under pp, regardless of how good the score is. A weak score on a map you have never touched is not a top play, but it is not worth nothing either — it moves the bonus term, which is worth up to 413.894 pp in total.
How TrackMyOsu detects new top plays
TrackMyOsu takes a baseline of your best-performance list at the moment you start a session, storing the osu! score id of every entry. On each refresh it fetches the list again and compares by score id: anything present now that was absent from the baseline is recorded as a new top play for that session, along with its pp, accuracy, grade, max combo, star rating and beatmap.
Matching on score ids rather than pp values keeps the detection exact. A tie in pp, a re-fetched list, or an entry that shuffles position because something else was inserted above it cannot produce a false positive. The recorded plays stay attached to that session permanently, so a session page from months ago still lists precisely which plays entered your best performance that evening and what each one was worth.
See also
- PP (performance points) — osu!'s skill rating: a decaying weighted sum of your best score on each ranked beatmap.
- Accuracy — How cleanly you hit each object, as a percentage weighted by judgement value.
- Combo — A streak of consecutive hits without a break; max combo is the longest streak.
- Global rank — Your worldwide position among ranked osu! players, ordered by weighted profile pp.
Related guides
Longer explainers that use this term: browse all osu! guides, or start with Understanding osu! pp, How to read your osu! stats and Star rating explained.
Sources
Definitions follow the official osu! wiki and the ppy/osu source. Session figures come from TrackMyOsu's own tracked-session database.
By carrot12_. Last updated 2026-08-13.
Track your own osu! sessions
TrackMyOsu snapshots your pp, rank and top plays when you start playing, then shows exactly what changed when you stop. Every session is kept permanently. Free, no install, no password — it uses osu! OAuth.