osu!weekly #26

Hello everyone! Tasha here with plenty of news for you all and no time to waste, so let's get right into it!

The Quarterfinals have concluded for the 2015 4K Mania World Cup! China, the United Kingdom, Japan and the United States continued to advance through the winner's bracket, sending the Philippines, Argentina, France and South Korea down to the loser's bracket. Taiwan, Poland, the Netherlands and Australia weren't as fortunate however, losing their matches against Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia and Canada, being knocked out of the tournament. This upcoming weekend we will be hosting the Semifinals matches for the winner's bracket alongside the second set of matches in the loser's bracket. Four more teams will be knocked out of the tournament next week, 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 this weekend, I'd highly recommend checking out the VOD's on twitch as there was some exceptional skill demonstrated during them (see: US vs South Korea), so be sure to take a look!

The 2nd Global Tournament registrations are opening on September 11th. Hosted by - Nozomi -, Lazer and - Kotori -, this double elimination tournament allows players ranked between 1k to 20k to participate. Seeing as it's a 3v3 tournament, you'll have to find two other players to participate with, so don't waste any time looking for teammates as registrations close on September 22nd!

The Australia and New Zealand CtB tournament is coming to a close. The finals start at 6:00AM UTC on September 12th with Grayswandir taking on Demo to decide who takes on Zeverage for the Grand Final match. This is followed by an event match of the winner playing against the staff of the tournament at 9:00AM UTC, so be sure to check this o\ut as it looks like there's going to be some exciting matches!

To continue the theme of osu!mania with the world cup going on, osu!talk has released a new interview, this time with the Argentinian player juankristal. On top of him helping out commentary with the Mania World Cup, he's been pretty busy helping out with community tournaments, such as hosting and doing commentary for smaller spanish tournaments while still finding time to practice for the Mania World Cup. If you'd like to learn more about him, just check out the interview!

Registration entries for the osu!idol have been judged and the top 50 entries have advanced into the first round of the contest! If you're curious about how people were scored during the qualifying round, you can check out the judge's scores here. All 50 contestants who made it through the qualifying round are now being judged on singing pop songs and have until September 13th to submit their entries. For the latest information on this contest, be sure to check out the osu!idol twitter.

Many community members involved with the modding and mapping part of the game are often curious about the state of the Beatmap Nominators as last August applications were not opened for the Beatmap Nominator position. Community manager Loctav responded to an ask.fm question dealing with this issue, which encited a forum response from community member Reditum (previously known as CDFA). This discussion came to a conclusion pretty fast, though some community members may like to express their thoughts on how to fairly deal with adding new BN and removing the inactive ones. Keep in mind that a purge is planned for Wednesday, so the issue is not being ignored.

There's been some movement in the top rankings of osu!standard! #2 ranked player Rafis from Poland managed to break into the 10k performance point club on top of getting the new highest recorded performance point score of 666pp with an incredibly impressive DTHRHD score on the map Fujijo Seitokai Shikkou-bu - Best FriendS [Insane] during a livestream. A video of the score can be seen from Rafis' youtube channel. If this play impressed you, be sure to check out Rafis' stream, as many impressive plays like this are done on his stream.

It's been a pretty active week for the osu! team with lots going on. On the 1st of September peppy posted up a new Q&A, answering questions about an original osu! soundtrack, the osu!keyboard, and supporter features. The next day a brand new change was implemented, removing the old FPS counter and replacing it with a (much more useful) refresh and latency display. With this players can now tell exactly how much delay they have with their set frame rate. This could potentially make things a lot easier for players to get help troubleshooting those dreaded lag spikes that some players experience (This has already solved one cause of dropped frames!). Lastly on the 4th of September there the new release branch 'stable40' was made available, players being moved to it automatically based on system power to allow for easier testing. Don't worry though, the old stable release will still be maintained and you can switch back to it if you have big issues with it (just be sure to report any bugs you have before you do!).

Looking at the community side of things, there was more large bounties posted on the 4th of September for community developers to take a shot at, giving them a chance to earn rewards from the new bounty system talked about last week. The merchandise store was also restocked the osu! triangles t-shirts and had a new addition with the pippi t-shirts that the community helped select in a previous community voice poll being added to the store.

There was some changes in staff this week, with Spy and [Shi-Ra] being moved to the osu! Alumni on September 5th. Lust was also added back to the Quality Assurance Team on September 6th. Welcome back!

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