osu!weekly #50

That's 50 weeks guys. 50 weeks of non-stop action from around the community. With March rolling in and spring just around the corner, we are celebrating the occasion with a new (yet familiar) look! Want to know what I mean? Well just open up the article and you'll see!

This week, we had two polls conclude instead of one! The first of the two asked everyone what your preferred sound set in-game was. We wanted to know in what ways you liked to customize your experience in order to suit your needs as a player, mapper, or just a spectator. Here are the results!

• A whopping 42% of voters said they preferred to use custom hitsounds that override the default ones, while leaving the map-specific hit-sounding intact. The main reason cited was to let the mapper's intention of the experience as true as possible while achieving a more responsive feedback from hitting circles.
• 30% of voters stated that they prefer to override all hit-sounding with performance enhancing versions, while 17% preferred to have the original experience of default hit-sounding with mapper additions.
• It seems that voting was mainly divisive between those who leaned towards either mapping or playing! While some have stated that they swap between the two depending on which of mapping or playing they are currently doing, it shows that there is a certain gap that the default hit sounding cannot meet without help from the community.

The other poll that concluded asked those of us who dwell in the realm of down-to-earth mouse gameplay what our preferred mousepad surface was. The purpose of this poll is totally not obvious already, so I won't go into much details on that. As for the results... well you'll see very soon!

Flyte has a different kind of update for us this week! This time, we take a tour inside the osu! office, sneaking a glance at Nanaya and Peppy at work. The photographs show the dynamic duo working on something new that's in the works. It isn't anything we've announced before, so what could it be?

*I wonder if flyte is jealous...*

Stefan is back, but only for a little while! He let me know that the anime packs have all been re-worked and re-uploaded! This is part of the previously started round of updates to pre-existing packs in hopes of bring the older ones back into relevance. He is also taking a short break from uploading Themed and Artist packs to let things settle in a bit more before coming forward with more. Revisiting all these packs is by no means a small task, so Stefan's break is more than well deserved. Thanks for your efforts up to now!

There's two new posts on Peppy's blog this week. The first post is an addendum to an earlier video demonstrating the capabilities of the improved osu! framework, helping more people understand what possibilities are opened up with this implementation. Hopefully, this should speed forward the progress on the overall implementation of what the greater community considers and brands "osu!next".

If you recall from a few weeks ago, Ephemeral made a post about hoping to improve staff/player communication, and how we are hoping to make transparent the things we are doing going forward. As the first step towards making this a reality, a meeting was held within the development team to check up on all current activities. A summary of the meeting has been made available to the public on Peppy's blog. If you are interested in knowing what kind of goals we are looking to achieve in the immediate future, you should hop on over to give that a look!

The Springtime osu!mania FFA Tournament is now underway, and the scale of this 4K tournament is absolutely massive! I wrote about the tournament a couple of weeks ago, and the competition has grown to an almost unbelievable size. Currently, the tournament is just about to start its round of 128. With so many players, and the creator of the tournament himself contributing to the map-pool, this is definitely a tournament to watch out for!

I was so excited to use the new banner this week, I could hardly wait to get started working on this ever since I saw it! The TWC registration deadline has just passed, so you can expect rosters and other information about the tournament to appear shortly. Do you have any suggestions for what you want to appear in the osu!weekly? Let us know by sending us an email at news@ppy.sh. Do you have any feedback on what you like and what you didn't like? Drop a comment below or in the r/osugame thread and I'll be sure to read it!

—Nyquill