osu!weekly #8

Hello everyone! This week has been filled with tons of exciting things going on in the community. There's also a lot to look forward to for next week, so lets get right into it!

Applications for the Beatmap Nominator Group are ending on Saturday! If you have been a contributing, helpful modder and want to be part of this team, be sure to check this out and apply before its too late! You can also recommend a modder with this form, so if you know someone who you feel should be part of this team, you can fill this form out for them as well.

The group stage drawings for the Catch the Beat World Cup are taking place this weekend on Saturday. Teams will be sorted by skill level into different groups for the upcoming group stage matches that will follow next week. There is also a map pool showcase that follows the drawings, so be sure to tune in to see the different maps that are going to be used in group stage! If you want to discuss the CTB World Cup or support any of your favourite teams, be sure to check out the discussion topic on the forums.

Press Start is hosting a large LAN over the 9th and 10th of May that consists of several game tournaments, including an osu! tournament with a $250 prize pool! If you're interested in attending the LAN, you can purchase your seat for it on their website. If you're planning to go exclusively for the osu! tournament, you can sign up for the osu! tournament on their competitive tournaments registration page.

Signups for the North American Tournament (NAT) 2015 have started, the registration phase lasting until May 15th. This is a 1v1 tournament consisting of 64 of the best players from USA, Canada, Mexico and other countries in the North America region. Anyone can enter, but only the 64 highest ranked players who sign up will be given a spot in the brackets.

Submissions for the Monthly Beatmapping Contest #9 closed earlier this week and now judging is underway. There were 57 total submissions for this MBC, which made MBC9 the second largest mapping contest behind MBC6, Aspire. This is especially impressive knowing this was the first contest to require 4 difficulties. Good luck to all contestants, and here's hoping we see some excellent taiko mapsets come from this contest!

We finally have our first player to reach 10,000pp in any game mode! ExGon's most recent performances on Yousei Teikoku - Kyouki Chinden (TV Size) [Lunaticy] and Nobuo Uematsu - The Fierce Battle [Omega] were just enough to push ExGon past this milestone, making him the first player ever to reach 10,000pp. Who do you think will be the first to reach this goal for standard, taiko and mania? Only time will tell!

osu!next didn't have anything new to show us for the future of osu! this week, but it did have a look at some new merchandise that fans of osu! are sure to like. We were given a preview to a new shirt which will be available this Sunday in the osu! store.

Continuing the android development theme from last week, we have a new android app in development by ga2mer called osu!info that can be used to view profiles, download beatmaps and skins for osu!droid and opsu, to view osu!'s changelog and a list of osu! livestreams. osu!info can be downloaded as an .apk or downloaded directly from google play.

While there have been a lot of changes in the change log as of late fixing various issues, there was one very important change for mania players on April 30'th. 9K was made rankable after being given proper use support in the editor. Hopefully we'll see some cool pop'n style 9K charts soon, and be able to see 1k, 2k and 3k rankable in the near future as well!

That's all for this week. I hope to see most of you at the live drawings for the CTB World Cup! If not, then hopefully see you next week with osu!weekly #9!

—Tasha