Best of 2015: Results

The osu! community never ceases to break new ground in polling turnouts! Per tradition, we asked you guys what YOU thought were the greatest maps of 2015. 44,653 players from around the world responded to the call, casting a record-breaking 401,028 votes on what they thought stood out above all others in the maps ranked in 2015. No amount of words I can fit in this opening paragraph can express our gratitude to everyone who participated!

After hearing your feedback from the best of 2014 voting, we have seperated voting by game modes! This allowed more accurate and representitive results for all the modes in the game. As usual, players were limited to voting for songs they have actually played, so everyone has to know what they are voting for before throwing in the ballot.

That's not the end of the things we changed this year, though. Rather than simply tallying the votes, we're trying a new method of scoring the maps that should better represent the voters' consensus. This is the first time we're trying something like this, so let us know what you think!

The votes are modelled as maps playing a series of head-to-head matches against each other. Maps you voted for count as a "win" against maps that you could have voted for but didn't. From there, all maps that the user voted for "tie" with each other in weighting, and all of the "losing" maps tie with each other. This model is then resolved using maximum likelihood estimation to find the final rankings that have the highest probability of being correct.

The result of this system is that (a) maps with higher play counts do not have an unfair advantage and (b) votes are considered in the context of the other maps that user has played.

The full results are available here.

Congratulations to Fort for having the highest voted, played, and scoring map of the contest. No other osu!standard map could boast coming even close to a third of its players calling it top 10 material.

A special mention is warranted for Soleily - Renatus by Gamu. Despite amounting a respectable 1106 votes, the MBC winner came in 2nd to last place. This can be attributed to it having over 25,000 plays out of the people that voted, so it looks like a grim fate awaited the pre-packaged maps right from the start!

The mappers for the first, second, and third place winners of each game mode will recieve 6, 3, and 1 month of supporter respectively. Congratulations to not only all the winners, but everyone who had their submissions enjoyed by another. We hope to see more of your works in the coming year!

2015 was definitely a big year for mappers and players alike. The sheer amount of people who participated this time makes me excited to see what 2016 holds for us. A special thanks goes out to Blaizer and cthor for their work on the scoring algorithm, as well as writing parts of this post. If you have any feedback, don't hesitate to leave it in the comments!

—Nyquill