osu!weekly #79

This week's been lively, with a new round of Community Contributors, the OWC Live Drawings and the return of something dating back to the ancient era of the osu!monthly. Whatever could it be? Read on to find out!

A big thanks to the following contributors for helping out with this week's issue: Raveille, Evrien and Starrodkirby86.

Weekly News

A new round of Community Contributors has been announced, including a brand new Elite Storyboarder! Receiving their honors this time around we have pishifat, Okorin, IamKwaN, Marcin, LiquidPL, Nyquill, Derekku, Trosk- and Shiro. We also saw the birth of a new Elite Storyboarder after Exile's world.execute(me); storyboard left the staff speechless.

Our list of Featured Artists continues to expand, and shows no signs of stopping any time soon!. This week we saw Helblinde's listing filled out with 4 new tracks - check the listing out to hear previews of them! We look forward to seeing what people can do with his work.

But it doesn't stop there - a brand new featured artist has revealed himself. Give a warm welcome to dark cat! We absolutely loved his distinctive sound, and we hope that mappers will enjoy experimenting with his signature catstep and making loads of cool things with it.

The osu!academy channel continues to deliver with two new osu!talks. We have one featuring our current rank 3 osu!standard player, Rafis. The second is with Spare, another one of our top 10 osu!standard overlords. There are still more to come in the near future, so make sure to keep an eye out for them!

After a long time in the making, the first episode of a history of osu! has finally been released. This new mini-series will take a look at a wide variety of areas within osu!'s development over the years, such as the game's visual design to the development of the mascots, and much, much more. While this series won't delve too far into details, it should give everyone a good understanding of how much osu! has changed over the years.

osu!mania mentorship applications have closed, and we're now taking applicants for enthusiastic mentees! If you want to learn from some of the best osu!mania modders around, there's no time like the present! Head on over to the thread and send in your application today. Applications close on the 19th of November at 00:00 UTC, so be quick about it!

A new set of Loved map voting is out and ready for your votes!. Voting won't be open for very long, so if you want your vote to count, head on over to the Community Voice subforum to have your say and let us know what maps you truly love.

Scorewatch: November Week 1

As always, we've got tons to cover, so let's stop the dilly dally and get right into it!

[ Emillia ], the current Number 1 standard player in Singapore and Southeast Asia, has claimed the very first 600pp score in that region. Their play of Ayase Rie - Yuima-ru*World TVver [Ultimate] reigned supreme with an HDDT 92.25% B Rank 623pp score. This is also the highest B rank in terms of pp that we've ever seen.

n1doking's HDNCFL 738pp score has ALMOST been matched by the no.1 global osu!taiko)) player _yu68 with an HDDTFL 98.56% score on DJ S3RL - T-T-Techno (feat. Jesskah) [Technonationalism]. While Japan still dominates the top 10 rankings, it looks like the United States will hold on to the high pp score.. for now.

Cookiezi set an impressive HDHR 3 miss 93.37% run on DM Ashura - deltaMAX [Challenge], showing some serious love to a cherished Loved map! If you think this is some kind of play to be shrugged off by, check it out yourself. Words fail me for this one.

Four mods! Count them! LukerMaster set a 4 mod (HDHRDTFL) 98.58% FC on Mike Greene - Bill Nye the Science Guy Theme Song (Chinese Intro) and earned 557pp. A rare sight indeed! Four might be an unlucky number to the Chinese, but there's no way that anything but pure skill nabbed him this tasty score.

With that out of the way, let's hand things over to Evrien to check out what went down during the opening of the OWC's zero week.

OWC Week 0 Summary with Evrien

After much anticipation, we have finally arrived at the doorstep of OWC 2016! The live drawings and mappool showcase this past Friday have generated much hype within the osu! community – fret not if you missed it! You can watch the VoD here. Otherwise, here is what you may have missed:

As with previous years, we are about to see 32 teams representing countries and regions around the world duking it out in this most crammed weekend of the tournament. These teams are divided into 4 tiers based on performance point averages, and randomly split into 8 groups.

Some of the groups produced are quite unique and worthy of attention. For instance, Group H (Sweden, Hong Kong, Brazil, United Kingdom) features rosters that are strong overall, and therefore having the highest uncertainty among all groups. On the other hand, you also have an interesting mix in Group C (Spain, Argentina, Mexico, Taiwan), forming the "Taco Trio (ft. Asians)" squad, and not to mention how all countries beginning with 'C' somehow got put into Group H (Israel, Chile, Canada, China). While there are a lot of things yet undecided, one thing is for sure – this OWC will be an exciting and memorable one for years to come.

In addition, the Group Stage mappool was also released, featuring Skystar, Asahina Momoko and Okorin as the map-selectors.. Considering how much the osu! community has progressed in skills over the years, we're seeing the highest average star difficulty rating Group Stage pool in OWC history, even featuring a 5.96 star No Mod upfront!

At the same time, it is apparent that the selectors are trying their best to present a challenge to even the finest players on each team. Maps such as Yuru Fuwa Jukai Girl (2012 style mapping) and Blumenkranz (AR8OD9 Hidden) can surely make the "New Generation" players shiver a little. But the real question is: how will they all perform in the real matches? Only time will tell, and you can be there to find out! Be sure to tune in this coming weekend over on the osu!live twitch channel.

And finally, we're very happy to announce that Starrodkirby86 has agreed to help out with the osu!weekly by providing us with some puzzling monthly puzzles. Each month, the puzzle type and theme will be different, but for the first month we've decided to go with a simple word search. The theme is Loved maps - so it could be an artist, a song name, or maybe even a mapper featured in the Loved map listing. Proceed with caution, that answer you just found might not be the one you need!

(Click for full size!)

With OWC now upon us, it looks like a lot of here will be very busy indeed. As per usual, if you have any suggestions for what you would like to see in the weekly, feel free to drop by the osu!dev discord and directly highlight Nyquill or myself (deadbeat) in the #osu-weekly channel. Alternatively, you can also e-mail as usual at news@ppy.sh.

See you next week!

—deadbeat