osu!weekly #46

Hello everyone! Tasha here covering for Nyquill this week to bring you the first osu!weekly of February. Let's take a look into what's been going on in the osu! community!

The group stage for the 2016 osu! Singapore Summer Tournament finished up over the weekend other than a few rescheduled matches to take place later in the week. The winners from the group stage move onto the round of 32 in this 1v1 tournament. There are a decent amount of high level players participating from various countries, so for those looking for more to watch other than the ongoing 7K Mania World Cup you should check this out! The round of 32 will be taking place February 6th and 7th and will be live streamed, so keep an eye on the tournament's forum topic to see when the matches are scheduled that you want to watch!

Axarious is yet another player to join the 10,000 performance points club+ in the default osu! game mode, ending the week off with 10,229pp total after getting a very impressive DTHDHR play on WEAVER - Kuchizuke Diamond [Lemur], netting him 696pp for the performance. Bonus mentions to Angelsim and WubWoofWolf who are also incredibly close to this exclusive 5 digit club, ending the week at 9,993pp and 9,973pp respectively.

osu!'s resident music artist cYsmix has released two new songs in a new album titled "Oracle" on bandcamp! This album features the songs "Babaroque" and "Oracle", two trance songs with heavy electro influence that really brings out the EDM feel. While these songs are available for purchase on bandcamp, they are fully allowed for use with osu! if you choose to!

Another month, another new poll! This time, we want to know how you modify your aural feedback in the game. Yes, I'm talking about hit-sounding. Specifically, we want to know how you change the hit-sounds you hear across all maps, and whether or not you like to override all hitsounding, or just the default ones. No matter what choice you pick, be sure to let us know the specifics in the thread! The results of the poll will once again be featured in the last weekly of the month.

Last week we missed out a little bit on showing some of the osu!next design drops, which is all the more reason to let you all know about it this week! First off we had what looked to be new multiplayer designs shown with the usual sleek and clean design we've come to expect from Flyte.

So shiny if not for the blur

Team games!

That's not all however, as we also might have new merchandise coming to the osu!store in the future. Despite Flyte being fairly adamant that it might be coming, the design drops definitely showed promise.

Now what could this possibly be?

Or perhaps the white design is more your taste?

After a fairly long hiatus, the osu!talk has returned! On the 14th of January they posted up an interview with osu!'s soundtrack artists, nekodex and cYsmix.

This video was long overdue, though if you're not aware of what caused the extended break to begin with, I recommend checking out the most recent video, osu!talk welcome back!, as it goes into detail explaining just what's been going on the last month... and trust me, there's been a quite a lot going on!

For all of you taiko players out there, you know quite well that playing with keyboard is quite different from the real thing. For those who would like to get as close to a home experience you can get bar buying the console taiko games, user montymintypie has been hard at work on a Wii Tatacon to USB converter for the last year. The board is now complete, but are estimated to not be available until late February, so you'll have to hold out until then if you want one of these!

Having a hard time finding a Beatmap Nominator to look at your map? Well good news! If you've been keeping an eye on the staff promotion and retirement log, you'll know we have 6 new Beatmap Nominators joining the team! Please give a warm welcome to Sey, - Magic Bomb -, koliron, -Kamikaze-, Feerum and newyams99, our newest additions to the Beatmap Nominators!

The new website is starting to come together piece by piece as new additions are made over time. This week we have the beatmap listing, the livestreaming tab, or 'live' under the community section, and even more profile features! It appears that we're getting closer to the new site becoming the standard, with only a few key features missing now. Be sure to leave your comments about the new website and forum for the development team so they can see them!

It looks like it's round two for the Utaite Pack! Stefan has thrown together yet another collection of maps feateuring the vocal talent of the artists over at niconico. If you haven't quite had enough of them yet, you know where to look!

You didn't think I'd forgot, did you?

The semifinals have concluded with Poland, Indonesia, Australia, Brazil, Philippines and the United States all being knocked out. The wiki has also been updated with the finals mappool and the schedule for the matches, so be sure to check that out!

The matches seen over the weekend were very intense for both Poland vs Philippines and Singapore vs Brazil, both matches going to 6-4, while some other matches were rather one sided with United States going 6-0 against Australia and Malaysia going 6-1 against Taiwan. We also saw both China and South Korea conceding points with South Korea winning 6-1, meaning that there are no longer any teams left in the tournament with a clean victory record. There was also sadly two wins by default, with the Philippines lacking the players to participate this week. Tough break for them.

Team China appearing strong in warm-ups.

This week for picks and bans we had every map excluding the tiebreaker picked or banned at least once, leading to quite a versatile week for world cup viewers and players alike. If you're interested in the specifics for each match, we've got you covered right here!

Picks and bans in the Semi-Finals

The outliers for the banned maps this time around were Phantom Ensemble and Garyou Tensei. Phantom ensemble may perhaps have some of the most long notes in any map we've seen this tournament, and was thus the possibility of it being picked was taken out by team captains. Similarily, the complex patterns in Garyuu Tensei was a lot to ask out of the competitors to practice for.

The consensus amongst most of the players, however, seems to be that this pool had a lot more comfortable maps to choose from. ApolloN, squartatrice, starlog, and Oceanus were all comfortable enough for the players to pick at least 6 times.

As usual, here are some interesting trivia for you guys from the Semi-Finals!

• History is repeating itself, as China is having difficulties dealing with their long-time rivals in South Korea. In the osu!mania 7K World Cup of 2014, China also lost to Korea taking only one game off of them in the entire round.
• jakads (South Korea), once again, was the only player to achieve an SS rank in the entire round. He did this in his match against China on ApolloN.
• At the same time, the South Korean team was the only team to achieve full-combos across the board in a match. This was also done while playing ApolloN against China.
• For the first time in the tournament, [MY]Idiot (Malaysia) played a match without Flashlight. Starlog has some SV changes that make it difficult to read using flashlight.

That's all for this week. If you see anything you think should be included for future issues, please send us an email at news@ppy.sh and we'll be sure to have a look! I hope you all had a good weekend and hopefully we'll see you this weekend for the 7K Mania World Cup finals (and soon Taiko World Cup)!

—Tasha