osu!weekly #21

Hey everyone! Hope you've all been having a good week! There's a few different events that are coming up soon, as well as a few possible changes for maps. Curious? Read on to find out more!

Registrations for the 2015 4K Mania World Cup end this Sunday! Keep in mind that registrations are individual now and not team based, so if you're interested in playing, are within the top 5000 and haven't broken the osu! community rules in the past year, be sure to head over to the registration page and sign up! If you'd like to discuss this tournament, be sure to head over to the discussion topic on the forums, where plenty of new information will be posted up as it becomes available. You can also check out the wiki for any additional information you might need.

Registrations for the osu!mania International Tournament are opening August 1st. This is a team based mania tournament hosted by Ingen1334, each team consisting of 5 players and 3 potential substitutes, with each player representing the team for 4k through 8k modes. Registrations will be closing August 30th, so you have plenty of time to register your team for participation!

Do you like to sing? Do you want to woo and impress your fellow osu! players with your talent? Perhaps you'd just like to make a fool of yourself for fun? Well look no further as the 2015 osu!idol signups are now available! The osu!idol is a singing contest where contestants solo or duet sing their way through the contest, the osu!idol judges deciding the best singers to move on through the contest. There has been plenty of very talented members of the community participating in this before, so we hope to see some amazing entries again this year! If you'd like to discuss the contest, be sure to hop on over to the discussion thread on the forums!

Last week we had five new members joining the Beatmap Nominators. Please give a warm welcome to Mako Sakata, OzzyOzrock, Baraatje123, Milan- and monstrata! Oinari-sama was also moved to the Alumni this week, having been quite an active member of the community in the Development and Feature Requests forums.

Using a recent Community Voice poll that asked players what their favourite beatmap duration was, a new rule idea was proposed where the minimum drain time for a map would have to be 1 minute minimum. Do you think maps under 1 minute in drain length shouldn't be rankable? If you'd like to be part of discussion for this possible rule change, be sure to take a look at the linked thread and provide your input!

The latest Community Voice poll addresses the issue of qualified maps where many players get upset when qualified maps get disqualified, asking the community an important question: Should we remove scoreboards from qualified beatmaps? For players who play qualified maps this could be an important change to the game, so be sure to voice your opinion in the topic and vote in the poll!

A new announcements archive page has been added to the wiki so players can quickly access any old website announcements made, including skin showcases, monthly chart rankings, fan art contests, and much more! Be sure to check this out, you can even see what the old osu!news from 2013 used to be like!

This week peppy was a little inactive on his blog through the weekend, but it's very apparent from the very scenic pictures posted up on tuesday that there was a good reason for it! Everything returned to normal on the 30th, peppy explaining more about the next public release goal as osu! moves closer and closer to removing DirectX and moving to openGL for cross-compatibility between operating systems. There is data being collected from players to help speed this process up. For those worried about privacy, be sure to read the blog post to see what information is being collected, it is very non-intrusive. This data has already been used to help the developers better understand how many players will be able to run the next release and is available for players to see in the blog post made on the 31st.

Are you big on streams of osu? _index may possibly not be an avid stream watcher themselves, but they are most certainly an active streamer, having recently gotten partnership with twitch.tv! Be sure to check out _index's stream some time to witness some very impressive live plays!

That's all 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. Sorry that it wasn't as much as usual. Hopefully things will pick up next week! Until then have a good weekend everyone!

—Tasha