osu!weekly #5

Hello, and welcome back to another week of osu!weekly! This week has been fairly quiet, but there's still plenty to talk about, so take a seat with your coffee and see what's new in the world of osu!

The Taiko World Cup grand finals are going to be underway this upcoming Sunday. Last week Taiwan won against the United States and Hong Kong in the losers bracket to make it to the losers bracket final against France, who had been beaten by Japan in the winners bracket final. Hong Kong did well on the other side of the losers bracket, beating South Korea but losing to Taiwan in the loser bracket semifinal. For those who would like a video recap of the finals, you can take a look at one here. With that, we have our 3rd and 4th place teams with France and Hong Kong, so congratulations to both of those teams! We also have our two teams for the grand finals, Japan and Taiwan. Be sure not to miss this battle between these two very impressive teams by tuning in tomorrow!

The online portion of the QCUP tournament, a tournament sponsored by QPAD will be underway this weekend, pitting players against each other for a prize pool totaling $700. If you're interested in what matches are coming up, you can take a look at the group stage schedule. You can also check out the tournament bracket to see the results of any matches you might have missed. There are a lot of very talented players participating, so be sure to check out the group stage which should be streamed over the weekend on the qpad stream.

The results for the 8th MBC, an official mapping contest held every month, have been announced! The winner of this month's contest was Damnae with a judge score of 175 points. The second place entry was from Cherry Blossom with 162 points, and finally a two way tie between Frey and Shadren with 158 points. The map will be bundled into the game, but you can download it now here if you'd like. You can also check out the results page to see maps and judge scores of all entrants, or can download a pack of the top 20 mapping contest results supplied by loopuleasa

The revamped version of the 5'th episode of osu!academy has been released. This episode goes over Taiko mode, explaining how the game mode works, different playstyles used for it, and even some scoring tips. If you're new to taiko or just want to learn some basics about it, be sure to check this out!

osu!Sync, a really cool project made by naseweis520 that allows you to generate, export and import beatmaps to osu! This is a very powerful tool, as you can share a large amount of maps quickly with friends, back up a list of all of your songs, and many more uses. Definitely be sure to check this one out!

There have been a lot of changes to osu! as of late. The co-op keymod in mania is now an unranked mod, disabling the ability to get ranked scores with the mod. The difficulty bonus of small circles in osu!standard has also been reduced, meaning songs with very small circles will award slightly less performance points. If you want to see a list of all the changes, you can see them by taking a look at the release notes in the changelog.

Wondercon 2015 took place at the Anaheim Convention Center this year, and it looks like there was some osu! fans there as well, as we had two cosplayers representing Pippi and Ryuuta attending. Looking good there you two!

A new sneak peak of osu!next shows the new and improved mod icons! Looking pretty sleek if you ask me.

That's all for this week. Remember, if you have any news you'd like to have included in osu!weekly, you can always send us an email at news@ppy.sh and we might include your news for the community to see!

—Tasha