osu!weekly #59

While Nyquill's still adjusting to life overseas from a recent move, I'll be doing the osu!weekly in his place. Quite a few things have happened over the past week, so let's jump straight into it!

As a new month emerges, so does a new dev meeting recap, courtesy of Ephemeral. This time, the meeting featured discussions regarding the tournament client getting a bit of love, mapping bounties making a return, and the current forum design soon becoming obsolete as the new design edges closer and closer to completion. As a side note, it sounds the devs may have had a bit more fun at the meeting than they let on.

osu! as a community has grown a lot throughout the years, with a lot of players arranging meet-ups both privately and publicly at conventions. So for the newest poll, we're interested to see how many players from osu! you have met in person. Have you been part of any large group meet-ups or travelled large distances to visit a small group of friends? We'd love to hear from you about this!

With the osu!taiko World Cup having recently concluded, a new player-run Last Man Standing Taiko tournament is currently being organized. For those unfamiliar with this style of tournament, the matches consist of 3v3 team battles where the player with the lowest score at the end of each map is eliminated from that match.

For the achievement hunters among us, there are some new challenges out for you! Over 8 new achievements have been added, visible over on the new site. Are you good enough to achieve Absolution? What about Supremacy? Try them out and see for yourself!

Speaking of the new website design, flyte is hard at work designing the new modding v2 system, as shown in his latest blog post.

Beatmap Nominator applications are once again open for those wishing to apply. However, this time around, applications are only open to osu!taiko, osu!catch and osu!mania modders. If you primarily mod osu! maps, you'll have to wait until the next round. Applications close on the 10th of May.

The beatmapping meta has been evolving throughout the years, and has changed considerably over the years. Taking a step back into the past, we've created 4 new beatmap packs, honouring some of the classic maps that you might not have played in a long while, if at all! Some of the maps included are IOSYS - Marisa wa Taihen na Mono wo Nusunde Ikimashita by DJPop, Rhapsody - Emerald Sword by Reikin, DJ Fresh - Gold Dust by Galvenize and Trans-Siberian Orchestra - Wizards in Winter by Echo.

The osu!catch World Cup is slowly creeping up on us now that the registration phase has ended. The live drawings are now only 10 days away. Are you starting to feel the hype for seeing your favourite teams and players go head to head against each other? Or maybe you're looking forward to those sweet, juicy fruit puns? Either way, you need only wait a bit longer until things kick off. Until then, feel free to discuss away over in the discussion thread.

As a final note, we'd like to welcome a new member to the Global Moderation Team! Three cheers for Pittigbaasje, who will be keeping a vigilant eye over #dutch. The less bilingual speakers among us may affectionately refer to him as "spicyboss" to save considerable confusion.

That about covers it for this week. We've had quite the exciting week already, and yet it looks like things are just getting started. With all of that said, if you have anything you would like to see featured in the osu!weekly, let us know by sending an email to news@ppy.sh.

—deadbeat