osu!weekly #25

Hello everyone! First off I'd like to apologize for the delay on the weekly release. The weekly being on friday made some things pretty difficult to manage, so it has been moved to monday releases going forward. I'd like to thank you for your understanding as we get into what's been going on since the last weekly!

Both the Group Stage and the Round of 16 have ended for the 2015 4K Mania World Cup. Half of the teams taking part were eliminated during the group stage, whereas the teams that did make it into the Round of 16 have since been sorted into winners and losers brackets based on their performances in their first bracket matches. This upcoming weekend we will be hosting the Quarterfinals matches for the winner's bracket alongside the first set of matches in the loser's bracket. Four teams will be knocked down to the loser's and four other teams will be knocked out, so be sure to be there this weekend to watch the livestream of the event. Scheduling and bracket information can be found on the wiki, so take a look at that if you want to know just when your favourite team is playing. For those who missed the matches over the past two weeks, you can see all of them on the osu!live youtube channel.

The judges for the 11th Monthly Beatmapping Contest have been decided and the contest is now open for submissions for all participants! This contest is a mania only mapping contest done to the song "Dragon Valley (Tony Leys Remix feat. Esteban Bellucci)" from the action platforming game Freedom Planet. The deadline for the contest is September 29th, so if you're planning on entering, be sure to start early so you have enough time to finish all of your difficulties before the deadline arrives!

The Grand Finals of the osu!: Last Man Standing tournament is taking place this upcoming weekend! South Korea had advanced all the way through the winner's bracket, leaving them facing off against Poland, who on August 30th beat France A to win the loser's bracket. The match is scheduled for September 6th at 11:00PM UTC and will be streamed live on the tournament's official stream. The winning team is awarded 5 months of supporter as well as a profile badge, so be sure to show up and support your favourite team during the match!

Registrations for the first ever Ausu!Taiko tournament are underway! Run by dajayeway, this tournament is open to all Australian taiko players, with registrations closing on September 5th, so if you're interested in entering, be sure to read up on the rules and apply to play before registrations close!

This week has had a lot going on in the development team. To start with, a lot of work was done on osu!stream on August 24th, which on the 28th was completed other than going through the approval process that apple has. There was also work done to help users who are currently having issues with endless update loops. On the 25th, there was a post made addressing the current beatmap ranking process, peppy making it clear that he is aiming to increase transparency and improve the overall process for all involved. There hasn't been much information made available on these changes that are planned, so hopefully we will have more on this soon.

On the 26th, there was long discussion about licensing for the inevitable open sourcing of osu!, which should be very good news for the developers in the osu! community, as on the 31st a "bounty reward" system was put into a beta, allowing community developers to help solve issues in osu! and be rewarded for it. You can check out some of the rewards that are being made available on the bounty rewards list, as well as a list of issues that need to be addressed if you're interested in this new system for community developers.

This week there was a new post from the osu!next blog, giving us a glimpse at what appears to be an extensive update to many modding related features such as commenting on and modding maps and timeline graphs. Definitely take a look at this one as there's some really cool sneak peek images that many of you will appreciate.

Repflez, TheVileOne and Trosk- have been moved to the Global Moderation Team on the 28th and 29th of August. Many of you may know some of these community members already as support team members and one of the main osu! wiki editors. Even so, feel free to say hi as I'm sure they'd appreciate it!

Russian community member Sieg has created an unofficial alternative option to AiMod called AutoMod. This useful tool has the ability to check many of the things that AiMod can as well as a few other features that AiMod doesn't have, such as being able to calculate difficulty strain in a map, which can help mappers and modders find difficulty spikes in songs easier that might be too hard for the map. I'd definitely recommend any mappers at least take a glance at the tool as it might help quite a bit!

Many players are already familiar with bloodcat, a beatmap mirror for players who might have issues downloading maps from the official servers, though many may not be familiar with a new option that is available, altosu. This beatmap mirror has very useful sorting options, allowing you to select mode, difficulty and map status (ranked / qualified / etc.). There are even advanced options that let you find songs of specific length and other neat things which aren't available through the official site. Be sure to check it out and see if it ends up being useful for you!

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. Have a good weekend everyone!

—Tasha