osu!weekly #45

The osu!mania 7K World Cup has nearly crossed the halfway mark as we inch towards the end of January. With the coming end of the month, we have the results of our 28th community poll! Additionally, we already have new contributor badges given out after just 3 weeks ago when we last gave them out. I'm starting to take up too much space on the front page here, so you'll just have to read on to find out more!

Over the years, osu! has picked up a lot of amazing residents of the community that really changed the outlook of the game. This wave of Community Contributor Badges goes to those who have used their technical expertise to create tools that change the way we play. You've probably heard of some of these tools, but it's more likely that you saw them in action and didn't know what it was or how it was done. For those who fall under the latter scenario, today you will wonder no more. Here are the new recipients of the Community Contributor Badge, alongside the tools they have made that earned them the prestigious award!

• Moonshade - Storyboard code, to say the least, isn't pretty. Sequential execution of transformation commands based on keyframe data is something neither you or I wish to read more than a couple of lines of, much less bother with to make complicated storyboard animations. Pioneering the idea of storyboard code generation is SGL: the Storyboard Generation Language. SGL looks to bring storyboard creation closer to home to modern high-level programming languages. The latest iteration of SGL was written in C# in hopes of eventual integration with the client. Sadly, that never came to be. However, that is not to say someone can't take up the initiative and work on it for that purpose (wink wink)!
• Tillerino - I'm not sure if I'm the only one that has this impression of Tillerino, but he is an almost enigmatic character. This might partially be because the average user sending him a private message is not looking to reach him, but to use TillerinoBot. TillerinoBot is a beatmap recommendation service that looks to provide a fair suggestion for a map to play based on your performance rating. Needless to say, TillerinoBot has been very popular with the community and has become something of a staple; "Just Tillerino for pp!", my friends would inform me as I painfully crawl my way back to a 4 digit rank. Currently, Tillerino is also working on what I consider a neat social experiment. It's already making waves in parts of the community, so be sure to check it out!
• Hatsu - Ah, here's a name you may perhaps be less acquainted with, unless you are familiar with streams of course! Besides Piotrekol (who, unsurprisingly, also has a Community Contributor Badge), Hatsu may have influenced the way people stream osu! the most. Mikuia.tv is a twitch bot that gives incentives for people to become regular viewers of streams, and adds a twist to the way streamers interact with viewers. While Mikuia.tv is not developd for osu! specifically, having one of our own go out and do something big like this deserves to be the pride of our community! Thank you Hatsu!

There's a cool new perpetual ladder system in testing created by Ascendance! Have you ever wanted to have a match based ranking system to see how well you do when you face off against someone of a similar rank? You can now do that by signing up for the ladder with the bot that they have set up. If you want a break from the rice fields of rank farming, you should definitely go give that a look when you can!

The first monthly community poll has concluded! Earlier this month, I reached out to you guys in hopes of finding out where our players hail from, and what kind of sources influences our growth the most. While most of these things can likely be found in referral statistics server-side, I think that it's the best to hear it from the horse's mouth. At the conclusion of the poll, over 1200 of you have responded to our inquiry! Here are some neat things we have learned over the course of this poll:

• Over 44% of you said that you were referred by a friend to trek the long, winding road that is circle clicking. With so many of you brought here by someone you are close to, it's no wonder that the osu! community has some of the tightest groups of people around!
• Coming nowhere close to the winner, in second place, 23% of you guys said that you stumbled upon a video of the game. In third place, 12% of you said you watched a celebrity/streamer play the game.
• It would seem a lot more of you guys come from other rhythm games than I expected! A fair number of posts in the poll thread said that quite a few people come from playing the game "Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!" or "Elite Beat Agents", the games that osu! was originally based on. It's good to see that the fire of the precursors have not died out yet!

Results of the first monthly poll!

Stefan has brought us two packs in one week this time around. What is this, Christmas? The Metal Pack Vol.2 and the Korean Pack Vol.4 has been uploaded!

I am once again joined by -KousakaHonoka- for this week's section on the osu!mania 7K World Cup! I'm looking to get him on board for a longer period of time, so you can expect to see more of these great details on the matches in the future!

The Quarterfinals have now concluded. Be sure to check out the current brackets and schedule on the wiki page. Want to join in on the hype? Head over to the discussion thread! We have lots of cool things to show you this week, so let's dive right into the action.

Loctav caught an iJinjin

The Quarterfinals of the osu!mania 7K World Cup saw an even more vetoed map than in the Round of 16! Fryzura Konika [deceit] was banned in 7 of 8 matches, making it even more banned than the Italian Crack Job. At the end of the day though, the reason why the map was banned out so much was similar to that of the Italian Crack Job. The unpredictable nature of the patterns made it a less than worthwhile investment to practice for, and was thus avoided excessively.

Schur's Theorem [Another] was not picked at all despite not being completely banned out. Even with the shorter song length in comparison with some other maps in the pool, the stamina intensive jackhammer patterns and the accuracy tanking staircases made it an undesirable pick in such a high stakes competition. Even the Korean players, who excel at playing maps with less long notes like in BMS charts, avoided the map in their games.

However, it would seem that the complexity of patterns for this round didn't scare away our competitors! Chik Habit [they'll be spitting in your eye] was picked in 6 matches out of 8, despite having very confusing and complex patterns alongside a lot of speed changes. It would seem that players picked this map to really bring out the difference between the more technical players and the rest, and was the weapon of choice against opponents who wanted an easygoing round.

The United Kingdom lost their match by default when they couldn't secure a starting roster for their match, and thus forfeited the tournament. Though Japan also lost their match by default in the last round, they were still fine since they were only dropping from the winner's bracket. This also happened in 2015 when Argentina couldn't secure a starting lineup in the osu!mania 4K World Cup of 2015, but in that case it was because one of the players fell ill.

Teams South Korea and China are both still undefeated, but there can only be one of them left in the Winner's Bracket after the next round! These two monsterous teams will face-off against each-other in next week's semifinals! The last time these two teams met each-other was in osu!mania 7K World Cup of 2014, where South Korea defeated China with a strong 5-1 finish during the Quarterfinals.

Apparently, this is the first time Sern888 has played this map.

To finish off, here are some more interesting trivia coming out of the Quarterfinals:

• Not a single player managed to achieve an SS rank this time around, and not a single player managed to FC every song in a match. This can be blamed on the fact that Chik Habit was a really popular pick, with even the best of players being confused at some of the patterns!
• Poland is the last European team standing. Teams France, Germany, and Russian Federation have all fallen in battle while playing in the loser's bracket.
• BjornGV (Philippines) scored the highest on Souzou Forest [Lv. 34]. Souzou Forest is a particularily difficult map due to its high long note to note ratio, with 1146 long notes and 1401 normal notes.
• There was only one game where not a single player on both teams missed. This was achieved when Indonesia squared off against South Korea on OVERDRIVERS [INFINITE].

spoonguy being reminded that he is, in fact, a spoon.

The length of these articles are starting to get a little intimidating, even for me! It may be wise to split some of these up in the future, so I'll take some time to think this through until the next weekly. Until then, let me know how you felt about this week's article in the comments! Or, if you are from r/osugame, feel free to leave a comment on the link I post as well. If you have any suggestions for the news, or if you see something newsworthy in the future, please send us an email at news@ppy.sh. I'm also looking for something to ask for the new poll, so send in suggestions for that if you have any too!

—Nyquill