osu!weekly #99

April is off to a strong start. We're not even a week in and we have results for both Aspire and MBC #15, not to mention new loved maps, a public dev meeting and some early information about a osu!taiko Aspire contest?

Table of Contents

• Weekly News
• Around the community
• Scorewatch
• Taiko World Cup

Weekly News

The first stage of Aspire 2017 finally concluded, and a winner was declared. Dominating the conversation surrounding the contest from the start, ProfessionalBox (aka Somber Ibis) won explosively with top scores from all of the Honorable Mentions judges, as well as a massive, dominating lead in the overall public voting. MinG3012 (as Versatile Mallard) and Emilia (as Tranquil Chipmunk) trailed further behind, just barely scraping past Sonnyc (as Forlorn Thrasher) to nab an Honorable Mention. Read more about it and find links to the ranked/loved maps here! Otherwise, take a look at the winning entry below:

After holding our first ever music remix contest (featuring the main osu! theme, circles) last year, MBC#15 went ahead and tasked mappers with the trial of creating a fully-fledged set around BilliumMoto's's titular HDHR. The results are finally out, and RyoKazuka (as Wary Skunk) snagged victory with a respectable 37.5/50 score. He walks away crowned as one of osu!'s Elite Mappers, and if recent rumours are to be believed, the last person to ever win an Elite title off a single MBC alone. You can play his winning entry here, ranked and all!

It seems like Ephemeral has some big plans for mapping contests this year. Firstly, during the results for the Monthly beatmapping contest results, Ephemeral talked about a new Elite Mapper ranking system that will replace the current reward for those contests. He also let it slip that there will be another three Aspire contests this year, but this time it will be for osu!taiko - and what's more, it'll be happening towards the end of this month!

The Spring Fan Art Contest is nearing its end, with only 4 days left for people to submit their spring-themed works for a shot at the main-menu! 4 days isn't much, but if you're slow on the uptake and haven't heard about the contest yet, you've still got a chance at getting an entry in on time!

February might be the month of love, but the dawn of April saw a whopping 120+ new maps make their way into the Loved category. More love than your body has room for.

We've also hit a brand new milestone reaching 6 billion ranked plays! A true testament to the community's growth over the years, this not-at-all-small milestone represents a colossal amount of time spent playing osu!. Assuming an average beatmap duration of 150s, that's over 900 BILLION seconds spent playing osu!, or 15bil minutes, or 250mil hours, which is nearly 29000~ collective years. Purely of osu!. Astonishing. 10 million users isn't far away, either!

Around the community

Last week, we got some insight by pishifat about how to pick the right song to map, but then what? You now have your very own map, but how do you get it noticed? How do you get people to take the time to look at your map and provide feedback. Well, pishifat's newest video covers different ways to get your map noticed and then looks at the pros and cons of each method.

A lot of songs have gained a certain level of fame in osu!. To commemorate some of these songs, SakiZ released a 10 minute video highlighting some of the more famous songs from past to present. While some of these songs are still new and fresh such as Road of Resistance and Defenders, SakiZ pays respect to some of the older classics such as Gold Dust and Rubik's Cube. Although I can't help be a little sad at the lack of Don't Say "Lazy".. Also if you find yourself unable to check out the YouTube video, you can check it out here instead.

Raveille has started up a new beatmap project for this compendium of favorites looking to try create a massive multimode mapset. The beatmap project will be a first come first server with the aim to have anywhere between 4-12 mappers taking part per gamemode. So if you'd like to take a crack at mapping any of these infamous songs, now might just be as good a time as any.

Scorewatch: April Week 1 (With Scorewatch Patrol)

Once upon a time, long long ago, 800pp couldn't have even been thought of. Now, one man stands with 2 such scores in his hands. Yes, you heard it right, Cookiezi has set the 2nd 800pp osu!std play and the highest osu!std play of all time, with a 99.55% HDDT FC on kradness&Reol - Remote Control to earn himself 817pp.

Guess what, another boy decided to follow the footsteps! Vaxei took to the skies to steal the first spot on kradness&Reol - Remote Control with a 99.49% HDDT FC to give him 813pp. What a week. What a day it was.

Cookiezi has been sniped! Sound the trumpets! dabovo strolled his way to steal the No. 1 spot on xi - Blue Zenith with a 98.24% HD FC to give him 541pp. Who is this guy, you may ask? Well, he has a couple of Dragonforce HD FCs as well. Check it out!

Heard of Flask? Well, the captain of Taiwan OWC 2016 pulled off a stunning beatMARIO - Night of Knights 99.28% HDHR FC (same as CXu), earning 559pp (same as CXu exactly!). This isn't about CXu today, no, this score marks Flask's 2nd 500pp score, and his 2nd this month! A memorable one at that!

_yu68 didn't make a fool out of himself on April Fools as he pulled off an amazing 99.82% DT FC on Camellia - Exit This Earth's Atomosphere to earn himself 704pp. He'd be glad the score actually submitted.

Pope Gadget pulled off a fascinating 99.58% 4 miss play on sun3 - Morgenglut 2012, a very fast and dense LN oriented map. This is really something amazing coming from one of the best European players in osu!mania. Give it a watch!

NOTABLE MENTIONS:

Not content with dab sliders alone, Emilia soared into the top 20 like a bullet as he pulled off a 98.05% HDDT FC on Kanae Asaba - Endless Starlight Inochi no Kirameki (OP ver.) to earn himself 639pp.

Vaxei gladly took the No. 2 spot on Ito Kanako - Skyclad no Kansokusha with a casual 99.34% HDDT FC, giving him 673pp.

SillyFangirl got the co-co-co-co-combo breaker breaking as he broke his way through a 94.70% DT score on Blitz Lunar - Mathsma Attack mapped by Shoegazer.

jakads stole the No. 1 spot in osu!mania by performing an amazing 94.66% DT play on xi - Ascension to Heaven to earn 2165pp.

Next week, for the 100th osu!weekly edition, we got something neat in store for the Scorewatch section. Make sure to return next week!

TWC 2017 Week 4 Summary: Onwards toward Finals glory

The Semi Finals saw 12 amazing teams take up arms with a ticket to the finals on the line. While some of the teams started to really struggle with the ever increasing difficulty of each new mappool, other teams breezed right through it. If you missed any of the action, you can always watch the VOD's here, or settle of the brief recap below.

The weekend matches were split up over 2 days, with 4 matches each day. Our 4 matches for Saturday were all lower bracket encounters starting off with a very familiar match, France vs South Korea. Since their encounter in group stage, both teams have performed exceptionally well throughout the tournament. While France did manage to take an early point on CYBER Sparks by a very close 16k points, it was all downhill from there, as South Korea proved too strong. It was not until the very end of the match did France manage to take another point on to luv me i *** for you, but by then it was far too late. With a 6-3 victory, South Korea was only one step away from their seat at the finals, but who would be their opponent, Poland or Hong Kong?

It was Hong Kong. After the amazing comeback Poland pulled off against Malaysia, people were eager to see if Poland could create another miracle this weekend. Despite facing roster issues, Hong Kong gave Poland no mercy and swept them 6-0. With this win, they would be in direct competition against South Korea for the same seat in Finals.

The next 2 matches were almost a mirror image of the previous 2. We saw Chile take an impressive 6-3 win over Australia in one of the closer matches of the weekend followed closely by Spain vs Germany which ended in a very similar manner to the Hong Kong vs Poland match. With this, we were down to 4 Lower bracket teams, with only 2 moving on to the Finals. South Korea vs Hong Kong and Chile vs Germany.

On Sunday, we saw some match ups that held a lot of promise. Initially, we had Canada go up against the team to beat, Japan. We all know by this point that Japan is an incredibly strong team, who had yet to concede a single point throughout the tournament. As Canada stepped up to the plate to try their luck, we were all hoping that they could be the team to do it, but alas it was not meant to be. While some of the results were very close, even Canada was unable to lay a finger on Japan. In the other winner's bracket match, facing off against Japan next week and guaranteeing them a top 3 finish would either be Taiwan or the United States. While the match looked good on pen and paper, Taiwan came out on top taking a comfy 6-2, sending the United States to the loser's bracket.

Finishing off the week, we then had the remainder of the two loser's bracket matches. The eyes of many moved on to what had the potential to be an extremely close match, Hong Kong vs South Korea. However that fairytale match quickly turned its head as Hong Kong stormed ahead to an early lead taking decisive wins on maps such as Veritas and Caliburne. On the other end of the loser's bracket, despite putting up a valiant effort against the Germans, all Chile could manage to do was take a single point on Freja, conceding the match 6-1. Germany will move on to the finals where, like the other 3 countries, will fight their way to the top of the loser's bracket next week.

Next week in Finals Week 1, we begin with Hong Kong facing off against the United States. The match is scheduled to take place on Saturday 8th April, 02:00 UTC (Friday evening for viewers in the US). There will be a total of 6 intense matches to come, so be sure to drop by the osu!live twitch channel this weekend as it may well be the most exciting one yet!

That was quite the week we had and next week should be just as eventful! If you have any suggestions for what you would like to see in the weekly (and have some spare time), 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