osu!weekly #28

Hello everyone, Tasha here! Summer is coming to a close now as Fall approaches. We still have a lot that's coming up or going on currently, so read on to find out more!

The first week of the finals for the 2015 4K Mania World Cup has concluded, with the United States coming out on top against the United Kingdom 6-0 to win the winner's bracket. Down in the loser's bracket, we had Japan beat out Malaysia 6-0 and Brazil beat out China 6-0 before Japan knocked out 4th place Brazil 6-1 in the loser bracket semifinals, followed by third place United Kingdom in the loser bracket final 6-3 . This upcoming weekend we will be hosting the last matches in the Grand Finals between the United States and Japan. Be sure to be there this weekend to watch the livestream of the Grand Finals, as you'll certainly not want to miss it! Scheduling and bracket information can be found on the wiki, so take a look at that so you know exactly when the match is starting! For those who missed the matches this weekend, you can find the VOD's on twitch (or on youtube when they are uploaded).

We've had plenty of official game mode tournaments discussed in the weekly before. This time however, there's a fun community created mode tournament hosted by InsaneToe for Dodge the Fruit! In this CTB derived mode, players compete for the lowest score by dodging all of the falling fruit. This tournament is already full, and will be starting September 26th at 10AM UTC. There is no stream for this tournament, though you can keep updated on results with the bracket in the forum thread.

Mapping contests seem to be getting a lot more popular, this time around community member Razor Sharp creating a Catch the Beat mapping contest that is aiming to be held on a monthly basis. Mappers are judged on five different factors, such as playability and creativity, being scored from 1 to 10 on each. This month's song is "STORIA" by the artist xi vs sakuzyuo. Deadlines for submissions are on September 28th, so it may be difficult for people just learning of the mapping contest now to enter, though you can still keep an eye on the topic for some fun catch the beat maps as results are made available!

The results of the first German Mapping Contest have been made available! Hosted by Yauxo, mappers were challenged to map "Wadatsumi" from DJ TOTTO. Irreversible ended up coming in first with 104 points, followed by Zetera with 98 points, third place going to Pho with 96 points. If you'd like to check out all the submissions to this beatmapping contest, you can find them here! If you're interested in the judges scores, those are also available! There was some pretty good maps made for this contest (as well as a pretty troll submission), so be sure to try some of these!

The August 2015 Ranking Charts are now available for play! Community members Sieg, Nardoxyribonucleic, diao and juankristal were the map selectors for each mode this time around, there being plenty of fun maps to try out this month! The results for the July 2015 Ranking Charts are also available with [Toy], asuasu_yura, Dusk and Cryolien being the winners for their respective modes, netting them each 1 month of supporter.

From the osu!academy, we have a 2 for 1 special this week with two different osu!talk videos being posted to the osu!academy youtube channel. The first video goes into discussion with United States player and MWC 4K 2015 finalist Halogen-. In this video there is some discussion about previous rhythm game experience (which he has a lot of!) as well as his contributions to commentary for the MWC. In the second video we have an interview with well known mania speedster Staiain. This talk goes into how Staiain got into the mania community, some of his maps that he's made available to the osu!mania community, discussion about various Japanese rhythm games and more! Both of these players are very interesting people, so be sure to set aside 2 hours to check out both these interviews!

There hasn't been too much new stuff hinted at from peppy's blog this week. The stable40 release is planned soon, with the only current issue preventing its release being some overflows that some users are experiencing. Scoreboard display has also seen some improvements since the recent font overhaul, as well as a testbed for multiplayer game simulation (Here's what it looks like for Head to Head and Team VS multiplayer simulations) to allow for easier debugging. Replacement osu!tablet pens are also now available for purchase in the store for those who might have damaged theirs, though you'll have to wait a bit longer if you're interested in the osu!keyboards, as they're not available again yet. Last but certainly not least for osu!stream users, osu!stream now supports iOS 9. There is also some discussion about the future of osu!stream, and how possibly in the future there will be a full osu! experience available on iOS. How cool would that be?

No huge reveals this time around from osu!next. We do however get a sneak peek at what the new status panels look like! These panels look to be displayed not only in game, but also on user profiles. The new panels may even have what looks to be some associations to the highly requested clan feature, as our "Commander of The Magenta Circle" flyte has so kindly showed us.

For this week we have two player highlights for exceptional achievements. CTB Champion ExGon managed to get 11000pp this week, giving him a 989pp lead over #2 player Dusk, who is the only other player over 10000pp in Catch the Beat. In standard we have a very different kind of achievement from the player Haxwell, who has recently become the player with the highest amount of first place scores in osu!standard with a whopping 2266 first place scores, surpassing WubWoofWolf, who has 2252 first place scores.

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. Hope to see you all at the grand final match this weekend for the 4K Mania World Cup! You won't want to miss it!

—Tasha