osu!weekly #43

With the osu!mania 7K World Cup underway, the focus of attention surprisingly shifts to another game mode. We have a new top overall pp holder for the first time since the introduction of the current performance system! Even so, we're not skimping on details for practitioners of the art of mania. Coverage of the biggest stage in 7K osu!mania starts now. Can't wait to dig in on the clickity clackity goodness? Read on...

The Best of 2015 voting has begun! If you want to have your say on which beatmaps you thought were the paramount of the past year, you should head over and cast your vote soon. Voting ends on the 24th of this month!

Since the realization of the current performance rankings, ExGon has held the position of highest overall performance rating across all game modes. Even as the last of the game modes had players break the 10000 pp barrier, that remained unchanged until now. hvick225 has finally surpassed ExGon with a flurry of spectacular plays, raising his performance rating well above the other top ranked players in all game modes!

I already mentioned it in passing in the last weekly, but our very own Staiain (accompanied by EtienneXC) had an absolutely amazing showcase at AGDQ this past week. Despite not playing our beloved game specifically, he has brought the passion of rhythm games to the denizens of the internet all over the world! For that, he deserves a special mention in this edition of the weekly. Way to go buddy!

New community contributor badges have arrived! It feels kind of weird to have to write about that entire thing again, so just go check out the post I made earlier this week if you would like to know more. Additionally, I would like to remind everyone that we are actively looking for nominations for future recipients of the badge, so be sure to email us at news@ppy.sh if you haven't yet. We've already received a number of new nominations since the post went out, so we may see some new recipients very soon!

Peppy has come back with his first blog post of 2016, and boy is it a long one! It looks like the big man has firmly made a statement about the release of osu!next and the eventual open sourcing of the game. It'll take quite a while to go through all the content he has written there, so I'll leave it for you to really dig your teeth into when you have the time to spare.

It hasn't even been two weeks since Flyte made his return, and he has already dropped some more designs for you over at his blog! If you haven't yet noticed, Flyte has been working on complete revamps of the design for the game. It's been a while in the making, but from how awesome the screenshots look, it's definitely something to look forward to.

Do you love Japanese EDM? Pannari has put together a beatmap pack for those of us who love to headbang to some tunes from the far east. The first ever Japanese Electro Pack has been uploaded!

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with a very unorthodox player in the osu!mania 7K World Cup. Coming from the team that represents the United Kingdom, Vygatron has a bit of a reputation for his plays with the Flashlight mod. While he himself doesn't really seem to be happy about it, I don't think anyone can deny that watching anyone who plays with their field of view severely crippled is entertaining and fun. You can read about the entire encounter between me and Vygatron here!

The group stages of the osu!mania 7K world cup have concluded! We have some cool statistics to show off today, put together by Nwolf. The highest picked map on stream was amamichi, which ended up being chosen 26 times! On the other hand, it seems Funwari Fuwari wasn't very "fun" for our competitors, being banned from the map pool on 12 separate occasions.

With the opening blows traded and the dust settled, there are some very clear leaders coming out of group stage. Japan, China, and Korea have not lost a single game across all of their matches. Teams Sweden, Canada, Norway, and Italy have dropped out of the running for this tournament. The rest of the teams have advanced to the Round of 16! Congratulations to all participants on an amazing display of skill in the surgical task of pressing 7 keys in a predefined sequence to the music.

The map pool for the next round has been released alongside the new match scheduling. If you plan on watching, be sure to aside some time in your own timetables as we still have an absolutely enormous amount of matches remaining! If you would like to educate yourself further on the things to watch out for in this round's map pool, be sure to check out the Round of 16 Map Pool Showcase if you missed it live.

How's that for the first week of 7K formalities? There's way more where that came from, and we haven't even began going through the brackets yet! Loctav, the amazing manager that makes these tournaments happen, has assured me that brackets will be up soon, so be sure to check out the wiki page frequently for updates! Additionally, if you have anything you would like to see in the weekly, please email us at news@ppy.sh. I'm always hungry for new things to feature on the weekly, so feed me more of the good stuff and I'll deliver!

—Nyquill