osu!weekly #52

We had our live drawings for the osu!taiko World Cup of 2016 this passing weekend! With a brief moment of respite before starting off the group stage, some community members are making a splash elsewhere in the game. Read on for more information!

It looks like our friends over in the German language community are holding another language-region-based mapping contest! If you guys follow the various international communities as much as I do, you may remember that various other similar region-based contests have also taken placed in the past. Feerum has went and gathered a panel of judges featuring various prominent people within the German community. It seems like this contest is going to be focused on osu!mania, so head on over if you think you have what it takes to make the best keyboard decimating patterns (and speak German)!

Peppy has revealed a new addition to the osu! product line, as well as kicked off his new career as a fashion model! The new osu!Hoodie is having its first run in the osu! Store next week, so be sure to pick it up if you want to be a part of the first batch! This first batch of hoodies will only be available in style shown in the photo, but there will be more colours to choose from in the future. Additionally, new button designs have also been revealed. There's certainly a lot of new store items coming out, so be sure to check back frequently for updates!

For the third week in a row, Flyte has given us a photo of what goes on inside the osu! office. This time, it seems that Nanaya is particularly frustrated at something. If you've been following the development of the new osu! website, you may recognize that he's looking at a pull request on the public repository! As pointed out in the comments, the work shown is by LiquidPL, who has recently completed the new Slack Invitation Page. With the introduction of the bounty system, work on the new website has accelerated greatly with the help of various members of the community. If you want to contribute your own expertise, you should definitely check out the currently available bounties as well as what the rewards are!

Our community reddit, r/osugame, has a new header image! With the restored presence of the osu! staff within the board, the community as whole is now tighter than ever. Hopefully, we will get to see more of the community in action with these changes, as well as improved communication and understanding between the management as well as the players.

Interestingly, this gives us an idea of the relative positions of Nanaya and Flyte's desks.

There are quite a few cool plays this week across a variety of game modes! -KousakaHonoka- is here again to bring us some incredible feats from around the community.

• _yu68 (Taiko) achieved a DOUBLETIME full combo (285 BPM) on Raiden's Dragonforce - Defenders [Tatsujin]. _yu68 is currently globally ranked #1 in Taiko performance.
• Bumpinho (osu!mania) set a new record on Tidek's goreshit - burn this moment into the retina of my eye [fear]. Despite the map being recently ranked, he has already set a score with a crazy accuracy of 99.64%.
• Glitter Goose (osu!Standard) set a new high score on Flask's Fujijo Seitokai Shikkou-bu - Best FriendS -TV Size- with an incredible HD HR DT full combo! This marks the first time anyone has broken the 98% accuracy barrier on the map for this mod combination, and was worth a total of 605 pp.
• Halogen- (osu!mania) achieved an impressive SS on SanadaYukimura's Seiryu - Critical Crystal [Zan's Blue Another]. The final result amounted a total of only 21 non-rainbow 300s!

The live drawings for the osu!taiko World Cup 2016 has concluded, and we now have our groups! It looks like we have a couple of matches to look out for, with teams France and China facing off right from the get-go. These two teams are extremely well matched, along with teams Australia with the United Kingdom and teams Malaysia against Indonesia. For a complete list of the new groups, be sure to check out the wiki page!

Next week, we should have a couple of more features for the osu!taiko World Cup for you in the form of interviews and statistics, so be sure to look out for those! Remember to tune in on Saturday and Sunday for the Group Stage. The full schedule is also available on the wiki now, so if you plan on watching, you should head over there and be prepared to set aside some time.

That about wraps up this week's news! Are you excited for what's coming your way? The osu! Store will be seeing a lot of new products soon, so keep checking back in the weekly and follow our official twitter accounts for updates. As usual, if you have any suggestions for what you'd like to see in the news, be sure to write to news@ppy.sh. If you have any feedback or thoughts on this week's issue, leave us a comment below in Disqus or in the r/osugame thread.

—Nyquill