osu!weekly #14

Hey everyone, Tasha here! Been feeling a little under the weather lately so I apologize that I haven't been around as much, but I've still got plenty of osu! ongoings to tell you all about, so lets get right to that!

The Catch the Beat World Cup Grand Finals take place this weekend! Last week the teams for Indonesia, Poland, and Chile were eliminated before China vs Germany took place, China winning and moving to the Grand Final while Germany takes third place. The Grand Final match will be at 12pm UTC on Saturday. If you'd like to see the map pool for the quarterfinals, you can see it on the wiki page under Map pools. Be sure to tune in to see which team wins it all, South Korea or China!

The Grand Finals for Taiko World Cup: Last Man Standing 2 will be happening this weekend! Only France, Taiwan A and Japan A remain. Schedule information can be found on the google doc provided. Be sure to check out the stream to see which team is the last one standing!

For those looking to get a quick osu!standard tournament fix, the 4th Chee-Z 1v1 Mini-Tourney hosted by Pogge may be exactly what you're looking for this weekend. The tournament is for players ranked 5,000 to 35,000 and will be taking place on Saturday starting at 6PM UTC. Be sure to check out their stream and cheer on your favourite players!

A while back QPAD sponsored an online QCUP tournament. Now the LAN portion of this series of tournaments will be taking place over this weekend at Dreamhack. The top four from the online tournament are given spots in the quarterfinals, so if you followed the online tournament, expect to see the top players from that appearing here. Recently the map pool has been released so if you're interested in seeing what songs tournament players will be playing, be sure to take a look at that. This tournament is going to have results updated in the thread, so if you want to follow this, be sure to keep updated there!

The old BNG Ranking has been deprecated and replaced with the new real time BNG ranking. A BN's contribution towards a successful rank is now tracked through mapcycles, and mods are given a score bonus based on when your last mod was, meaning BN who disappear for a bit may get penalized on their next mod, but can make up for it with extra mods following the penalized one. I highly recommend checking the thread itself as there is too much information that can't go into one weekly section. This is a must read for anyone looking to join the BNG or is part of the BNG currently.

Flyte went all out this week for osu!next, giving us a high definition photo that showcases the new look of the main gameplay window (as well as his trusty nendroid collection). This new look is quite sleek and has come quite a long way in comparison to osu!'s original look.

Last week, Doomsday, a popular high ranking player in standard announced that they would be streaming full time, 5 days a week at a minimum of 6 hours per day. The announcement was made June 5'th during a live stream, meaning he has already started his full time streaming. His stream schedule can be found here.

As of June 3rd, peppy has begun using his blog again to talk about various topics relating to osu! or just development in general. So far a wide range of topics have been covered, but the interesting one for this week is that name changing being purchasable from the store. There was a mention of it last week but the framework for making this a reality was recently finished by peppy, meaning if you've already used your name change from supporter you may be able to change your name through the store soon!

Yandere Simulator did a small easter egg in the game in which players can find osu!'s mascot Pippi playing osu! on a computer in a computer lab (Poor Pippi never stood a chance). If you're interested in the game this originated from, be sure to check out their development blog, where you can also find a download of the debug build.

The first batch of osu!keyboards sold out rather quickly, but community member Thnikk has recently put their own mini keyboard on sale. If you can't wait for the second batch of osu!keyboards, or just prefer the design of this keyboard, you can take a look at the options available for purchase in their shop. More information about these particular mini keyboards can be found in the original topic created by Thnikk.

The skin showcases continue this week with Neo Street, created by OsuMe65. This skin celebrates 3 years since the first NeOsu skin was released. As this skin isn't part of the main "series", it only covers osu!standard and osu!mania.

That's all the news for this week everyone. As always you can send any news you'd like to be represented in the osu!weekly to news@ppy.sh and I will do my best to include that information. Hope to see you guys during the CWC Grand Finals!

—Tasha