osu!weekly #33

Hello everyone! Some things I need to cover this week about the future of osu!weekly, though before we get into that, let's cover what's been going on in the world of osu!

Read in Spanish, Italian or Greek!

Rosters for the 2015 osu! World Cup are now being made available! So far the only teams who do not have a defined roster are Austria, Italy, Mexico and the Philippines. As a final reminder, the live drawings for group stage placements are taking place November 1st at 14:00 UTC, so be sure to check that out this weekend and find out which group your favourite team gets placed in! As always you can also get involved in the pre tournament discussion by checking out the tournament discussion thread!

Registrations for the USA Taiko Tournament are now open! Hosted by Backfire and Garpo, this double elimination 1v1 tournament is open to US players of all skill levels, letting them test their mettle against players from their nation! Registrations close on November 14th, so be sure to register before then if you're interested in taking part!

The Cutting Edge release stream of osu! has some new changes to sliders and hidden! The hitcircles on the slider itself now disappear after being hit, showing only the body of the slider after the initial hit. On top of this, when playing hidden, the body of the slider will now start to fade out over the slider's duration. This aims to bring sliders more in line with how hidden operates, while also improving readability of notes stacked under sliders. Fear not if you are having trouble adjusting, as they are not being pushed through to the stable release until after the osu! World Cup is over, giving you plenty of time to get used to the new feel at your own pace!

osu!skills, a website providing an alternative way of gauging player skill, is now in beta! Developed and maintained by Kert, abraker and Full Tablet, the website aims to give a rating to a player's different talents, such as stamina, tenacity, agility, precision, reading, memory and accuracy. The algorithm currently only considers top 100 scores and scores in your best performance list, but shows a lot of promise as an additional way to compare yourself to other players. If you like this project or have suggestions, be sure to check out the forum thread to show your appreciation or help them improve things even more!

This week from osu!next we have some sneak peeks for a topic that the visually creative side of the mapping community should be happy to see, storyboarding! Flyte provided us with some images of how the storyboard editor is coming along. While everything is still more than subject to change, it's looking quite sleek and possibly even more user friendly. Hopefully we'll see more storyboards for maps in the future when this is available!

Due to complaints about lack of pagination on the new osu! forums, more changes have been made to allow for easier navigation of forum topics. It is now possible to skip 10 posts to give a similar feel of navigating pages, though unfortunately this currently does not allow quickly navigating to a section of posts in the topic from the subforum itself.

Some people may be aware of cutting edge having performance issues as of late. The development staff is aware of this too and are looking for community members who are having performance issues to post about them to make it easier to find out what is causing the performance problems. If you're a player who has been taking performance hits in the most recent Cutting Edge release, make a post about it in this topic! Just make sure you provide the information being asked for in the opening post!

Two days after sales of the osu!keyboard opened again, a large surge of orders came in. Due to massive popularity of the item, purchase of the osu!keyboard is temporarily closed. For those still looking to get their hands on an osu!keyboard, they're expected to be unavailable for approximately a week until caught staff has caught up in shipping already purchased keyboards. Be sure to keep an eye out for it being available for purchase again!

Also related to osu!store merchandise, the osu!tablet is looking to get a sleeker, more professional design in the near future. A concept was posted showing a black tablet with the osu! logo on it, though the design on the tablet is likely to change in the future. The new tablet would also possibly be coming with a higher quality pen that is also rechargeable, so it will be an upgrade in some ways over the currently available tablet.

Last week there were two changes in staff that I accidentally didn't mention (sorry!) so I'll be mentioning them now. CLSW has moved on assuring quality of CTB maps, leaving the Quality Assurance Team and being moved to Alumni. Krah, a previous QAT turned Alumni, has come back! This time around they aren't assuring quality of CTB maps and are instead helping keep chats throughout osu! free of vulgar attitudes and behaviours by joining the GMT. A big thank you to both community members for their previous and ongoing contributions to the community!

Some of the top osu!standard plays for this week are quite impressive indeed. Axarious pulled off another very impressive play this week on "CHiCO with HoneyWorks - Ai no Scenario [jieusieu's Solution]" with DT, netting him a personal top 5 performance point score of 499pp [pic]. Rafis however beat out Axarious with a very strong play on "supercell - Kimi no Shiranai Monogatari -TV Edit- [Insane]" using DTHDHR, netting him a whopping 511pp.

That's all for the news, but I do have one last thing I need to cover with you all this week. This may come as a bit of a disappointment to people who have been enjoying the weekly, but I will be stepping down from writing the weekly as of this weekly article. The osu!weekly should hopefully not be coming to an end however, as we're looking for a new writer to bring you all the news you enjoy. Due to this, I'd like to apologize in advance if the next week or two have no weekly. I'd also like to thank everyone who supported the osu!weekly until this point. The community has been great and I hope to continue enjoying it alongside you all in the future.

With that said, news@ppy.sh can and should still be used for providing information, it'll help whoever ends up taking my place! You can also feel free leave suggestions for whoever replaces me in the feedback and suggestions thread, or even volunteer through the news email if you would like to be involved yourself! Thank you all once again for the fun times, it's been a blast.

—Tasha