The QAT Gazette #4

Hello everyone! After seeing that we were unable to bring up a content-packed report every single week, we decided to rather concentrate our work and bring up a news feed as soon as we have something presentable to anyone of you. Therefore, we are glad to present you The QAT Gazette! The idea behind it is quite similar to the Weekly Report, but it will be published in an undefined date as soon as there is enough to talk about.

This edition will be centered on our last QAT meeting held this week. These are the most important topics that were discussed about:

Metadata checks of qualified beatmaps will be more organised. With the help of IamKwaN, Fycho and alacat, all qualified beatmaps will be checked without exception. You can also contact us with the Report Thread if you find something that needs to be addressed!

Goodbye to some of our members! After a thoroughly discussion, our long-term QAT member and ex-MAT manager MMzz will take his more than deserved rest from activity and be moved to the Alumni group. It is not possible to express with words how much he contributed to this game and how thankful the community is for his efforts. Further changes in the team will be discussed over the next few days, and so the search for replacements cannot be discarded either.

We revisited internal organization problems in terms of leadership and task assignment. The QAT is a rather small group with currently 14 members and is auto-regulated with a clear task assignment as explained on this blog a few weeks ago. All members have a closed and trustful communication with the rest of the team. Loctav does keep an eye on the group and helps with the organisation and with some of the decisions that we need to take, so he is already the manager of the group. The QAT as a group oversees the work of the nominators and helps them whenever they need assistance, so every QAT member is also a "BN Manager" in this analogue.

The QAT Blog will receive more attention in the future. Putting IamKwaN in charge, she will manage the organisation and also the content that gets published in this blog. All members of the QAT are encouraged to contribute with articles once a while to keep it alive and interesting to read!

Nominators have been inspected about their activity. The modding activity especially of the taiko, catch and mania nominators have been revised and also some behaviour-related single cases have been investigated. We decided that there is no need for a purge at this point, but the less active members will be contacted by us to offer any possible assistance.

Ask us anything!

Some more interesting questions were posted in our blog in the past few days. Do not hesitate posting more of your concerns or questions here!

• What do you think of the lack of active taiko BNs at the moment? Nominators do not have to center their lives in modding and nominating maps in a rhythm game. That is just a volunteer task they are offering to do to help other mappers and contribute to the official osu! beatmap database. Everybody can help in this matter by modding itself and helping other mappers improve their creations. That will likely reduce the workload of the current nominators and also help you earn more experience in modding. Who knows? Maybe you can be the next nominator!
• {insert name here} does the best mods, why aren't they a BN yet? Maybe their activity score took a heavy hit from a month of grinding in mmos? Maybe they need to farm a little more kudosu to prove they are consistently active? Or maybe they really do think that 1/4 streams are a great addition to Easy diffs, and their modding prowess isn't as good as you think it is! Whatever the case may be, tell them to keep working hard and contribute regularly and they'll get there eventually!

That would be all from us by now. We are finishing the last preparations for the next BN tests which will center on the taiko, catch and mania game modes this time so expect some more news in this matter in the upcoming days. Keep using the "Ask us anything!" feature of this blog if you have some more questions about our activity.

—Deif