osu!weekly #18

Hello everyone! Tasha here for the 18th digest of the osu!weekly! There hasn't been a whole lot going on the last week, though there's more than enough to let you guys know about even considering that. Let's get right into it!

The osu! Last Man Standing tournament registrations are now closed and will be starting its first matches will be starting up on the 12th of July. This 3v3 team based tournament hosted by Backfire and Nwolf is a double elimination tournament similar to the official OWC, but with a modified 'knockout' system where the team that eliminates all three of the opposing team members is the winner. While there is currently not a stream link, it will be added into the weekly as soon as it is available for everyone!

The osu! North American Tournament hosted by MMzz is entering its fourth round this week, and with that we'll see the first matches of the winner's bracket semifinals! The players still remaining in the tournament are all quite good, so be sure to check out the scheduled matches at Yodasnipe's stream to see who will continue on aiming to be North America's best!

Progress is being made on the new forums as new features are implemented and put out for us to test. The first change is the early integration of profiles, where we can currently see game stats. Much more is planned for profiles so keep an eye on this! There is also another new change with the new tournaments section of the board being implemented. While it is not fully ready yet, it will be by Monday as mentioned in peppy's blog post, which means it will be ready for the upcoming 4K Mania World Cup registrations! Finally profile covers are coming soon to the new forums, though currently they are grayed out. Be on the watch for this becoming available!

This week osu!next gave us a sneak peek at the profile covers mentioned in the new forum features above. It also talks a little bit about the recent interview done with peppy and flyte. While it is currently not available, it will be posted up on the osu!next blog once it is (as well as on the osu!academy youtube channel) for everyone to see!

peppy was quite busy this week with osu!, and it shows! During the weekend peppy did his Q&A, which confirmed a few cool things such as hold notes and a new and improved version of the osu!keyboard. The following days were focused on the draw hierarchy as it is a big step towards improving osu! as a whole. It was also mentioned that this should be coming to cutting edge for testing soon, so keep an eye out for that! The next three days were focused on the new tournament registration system, which was finished on the last of the three days. It will be available for everyone to check out on Monday so make sure to take a look! During the time the new registration system was being implemented, HTML5 playback of audio previews for beatmaps was also put into place, making the osu! website 100% flash free. Awesome!

There was a staff promotion this week with osu!mania specialized [Shi-Ra] being promoted to the Quality Assurance Team. Congratulations on joining the team!

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. Hopefully everyone manages to have a good week!

—Tasha