Best of 2016 Results

Earlier in January, the osu! community at large went to the polls for the first time since last year, coming together from far and wide to deliberate on which maps deserved to be named the "Best of 2016". Now that you have spoken, the results are in!

As a part of our mission to always be looking out for your feedback, we've made a couple of changes to weightings from last year's contest. If you recall, last year we took on the challenge of providing more accurate results for the greater part of the active community.

This year's weighted score was calculated taking into account all the scores the voter has on all the beatmaps within the given set. For each score, we use the following formula to calculate a weighting:

†The difficulty here takes into account the mods the player had active when achieving the score

We then use the highest of those weightings (up to a maximum of 3) as the vote's weighting. If the resultant weighting is below 0.2 (or if the player hasn't actually passed any of the beatmaps within the set), we use 0.2 as the weighting.

In short, the weighting takes into account the amount of times you've played a map, with it's factor increasing on a logarithmic scale (inversely exponential). The playcount component then uses a ratio of player skill over map difficulty (taking into account the mods they had active) to determine the final weighting. This means, for the first time ever, player skill and playcount was a real factor in the scoring!

Okay, that's enough math for you all. Without further ado, here are the best maps of 2016!

In total, 186077 votes were cast for osu!. Player performance and playcount were calculated on Tuesday, February 14th, 2017, at 13:44:19 UTC+9.
Despite the new formula providing a seemingly more proper distribution overall for the 5455 ranked maps in 2016, the winner for osu! can almost be considered an outlier. Monstrata's 9mm Parabellum Bullet - Inferno beat out the second place holder by almost double the weighted score. A notable mention goes out to Monstrata's BABYMETAL - Road of Resistance as well, which would have taken second place if we only looked at raw votes. An astounding 1,400,649,369 scores were sent and recorded by bancho over the course of 2016.

In total, 8580 votes were cast for osu!taiko. Player performance and playcount were calculated on Tuesday, February 14th, 2017, at 13:53:53 UTC+9.

osu!taiko achieved 29,081,989 scores submitted over the whole year and saw a fairly large amount of new maps last year, with 614 total maps ranked in 2016. With two songs from Undertale occupying the podium this year, toby fox - Spider Dance by OzzyOzrock takes away the gold medal this year, closely followed up by toby fox - Battle Against a True Hero, mapped by S a n d. Yet, the top 10 maps are relatively diverse, which can possibly be attributed to the activity of common mainstay mappers staying loyal to the community. The dedicated fanbase has been putting in extra hours to ensure their beloved game mode remains a great experience. Keep up the great work!

In total, 7629 votes were cast for osu!catch. Player performance and playcount were calculated on Tuesday, February 14th, 2017, at 13:59:01 UTC+9.

With 284 osu!catch maps ranked in 2016, osu!catch was a relatively small game mode for mapping. However, despite having the smallest pool of ranked maps, osu!catch as a mode is still widely played with 42,782,141 ranked score submissions. Ascendance's saradisk - 176 - ikazuchi takes away the first place by a very small margin against Memme - Acid Burst, a collaborative work of Spectator and Deif.

In total, 33769 votes were cast for osu!mania. Player performance and playcount were calculated on Tuesday, February 14th, 2017, at 14:02:18 UTC+9.

Despite being the newest game mode, osu!mania holds strong as the second most played game mode. Mapping in 2016 proved fruitful, with 1026 mapsets containing osu!mania difficulties. It is interesting to note that the top 3 mapsets are all 4K exclusive sets, with a much more diverse set, Blocko's xi - Happy End of the World taking 4th place. In contrast, the only 7K exclusive set was Jinjin's Cardboard Box - The Limit Does Not Exist, coming in at 6th place. 154,688,312 scores were submitted across all keymode for osu!mania in 2016.

The contest listings only display the top 50 of each game mode. If it interests you, here are the full results with raw data.

The top 10 placing mapset owners will be awarded 1 month of supporter, where the top placing maps will receive a full 6 months of supporter!

A huge thanks to smoogipooo, nekodex and Ephemeral who all contributed to having this contest run smoothly and get weighting working as expected.

Did you like what we did with the scores? Let us know in the comments! We're always looking to take your feedback into account for future contests.

—Nyquill