osu!weekly #106

With the osu!catch World Cup blasting off to a thunderous start, we have an action packed line-up for you in the glorious form of a full blown recap, and more! Read on to find out!

• Weekly news
• Around the community
• CWC Group Stage Recap (by JBHyperion)

Monthly community polls are making a return starting this month! This time, in light of the imminent arrival of Anime Expo 2017, we want to know what kind of things you expect from us at public events. If you aren't able to make it this time, let us know as well. The poll closes at the start of the month (and the event), and results/conversation will be featured at a special AX edition of the osu!weekly!

A special new showcase will be showing up in the news in the near future. It's no fun if we spoil everything from the get-go, but it might prove interesting for some of our content creators in the game. Keep your eyes peeled for this in the coming days!

Here's what's happened on the community side of things as of late:

• After months of behind-the-scenes work, Mocha, the new osu!Taiko mascot has finally been revealed! This is the culmination of the work between Flyte and Crowie, beginning as a design contest back in 2016.
• Function Phantom / Rin and the Fractal Dreamers have joined the roster of osu! featured artists. Both of these new artists are excellent resources for mappers looking to explore complex rhythm and ideas.
• The all-new and much-improved Spotlights are up for the month of April! Did your favorite maps make the list?
• Voting is now open for both the osu!catch and osu!mania monthly beatmapping contests! With less than 10 days left in voting, now is your last chance to get in and have your say.
• The Scorewatch has broken free from the weekly and now has its own news slot! If you haven't checked it out yet, you can find the former osu!weekly exclusive block here. We're excited to see what the team puts out, and we're happy to see them become something big enough all on their own.

Just as we have one massive osu!weekly post for you guys this week, the osu!development blog has one ready for us as well. With preparations for Anime Expo in full swing, peppy has taken a slight breather from development stuff in order to keep everything running smoothly. Despite this, we are definitely not in short supply of updates! If you haven't yet, be sure to follow the blog for more frequent updates than we are able to cover here!

An example of the new 'Daycore' mod from osu!lazer

Our very own HappyStick had a chance to sit down with Dr. Levi Harrison to talk about how to keep yourself physically sound while playing osu! Dr. Levi is well known for his videos on staying healthy while playing strenuous video games, as well as sound, professional advice for people with wrist pain.

A new issue of the QAT Gazette is bounding around the beatmapping and modding communities. From a few new QAT joining the team, to the recent ranking criteria proposals, the new wave of Beatmap Nominators and much more, the Gazette is getting fat. Chase it down and catch up on things!

The arrival of summer heralds the bearing of fruit, and it can only be in the world of osu! where that fruit falls from on high in a dizzying array of patterns to be caught by players for our entertainment.

This year sees 189 brave fruit-catchers from 32 countries squaring off in a battle of reading, speed and precision to crown the 2017 osu!catch champions.

With the Group Stage of the tournament reaching its conclusion this past Sunday, which teams have endured the initial exchanges to enter next week's Round of 16 knockout stage, and which will be watching on from the sidelines?

Whilst there was no radical elevation in difficulty compared to the previous year (as we saw in the recent osu!taiko World Cup), there were some noticeable changes to the mappool, featuring many longer beatmaps that rewarded consistency and team performance.

This was in keeping with amendments to the ScoreV2, with score now calculated as a logarithmic function of combo instead of exponential, making it much harder for individuals to carry their team alone.

Additionally, osu!catch specific difficulties featured in all mod brackets for the first time, and saw a return of converted osu!standard difficulties to the NoMod and Hidden pools, meaning there really was "something for everyone". A particular favourite was Camellia's Chirality (HardRock), being picked in 26 of the 45 matches, whilst AR8 Hidden was definitely not a desired item on the menu for most teams, with Oskar Schuster - Fjarlaegur (Cypix Remix) being banned a whopping 35 times (though it was picked in 7 of the remaining 10 matches).

The opening match on stream was a hotly anticipated encounter between two titans, Hong Kong and Japan, and was much closer than the final scoreline of 4-1 suggested. The first three games went to Japan in a series of narrow margins, before Hong Kong stole a game back on wa. vs celas - Vajuranda . There were immediate cries for a potential tiebreaker and reverse sweep from the Twitch chat, but Japan made no further mistakes and closed out the match with a triple SS on the HardRock pick, Eiko Shimamiya - Higurashi no Naku Koro ni (TV size) to claim the first match of the tournament.

Surprisingly, it wasn't long before the tiebreaker hype was realised in the fourth streamed match between the Russian Federation and Poland, who both had strong ambitions for reaching the latter stages and were looking to put in a strong performance to steady the nerves.

After pulling out a 3-1 lead, the Russian team were looking dominant, but Poland held their nerve and managed to level the score at 3-3. The tiebreaker swung back and forth throughout, but some late misses brought a fateful curse upon the Russian side, losing out by just 24k points. Their woes would continue into Sunday, as the high-seeded team suffered a further 4-2 loss to the impressive low-seed Sweden, sending their hopes of progression up in smoke.

They were quickly followed by the departure of top-seed France, who despite a spirited comeback on Sunday, fell inexplicably 4-0 to the low-seeded Argentina, who were initially considered a shadow of 2016's Finals Week participants. With the impressive Romania, participating at their first ever World Cup in any game mode, beating Argentina 4-1, yet then immediately falling to France in similar fashion, their fate in Group H was sealed by the narrow margin of just two games on Win:Loss ratio.

One of the most notable highlights saw low-seeded Australia impressively holding one of the pre-tournament favourites South Korea to a series of exceptionally close games, including a loss of only 241 points on the 4-minute long NoMod pick, DOGFIGHT.

This was followed by Germany becoming embroiled in two separate tug-of-war slugfests against Chile and Norway, with both matches heading all the way to the tiebreaker. Whilst the German side barely overcame the former with a mere 3.4k points difference, Norway put on a resilient performance to threaten a shock knockout appearance, only just falling short on Win:Loss ratio.

The most dramatic of all however was a heart-breaking turn of fortune for Malaysia, seeing their dreams of making the knockout stages go down in flames after a tragic disconnect whilst leading 2-1 against close rivals The Netherlands. A pick they had a real chance of winning was followed up by another point that would have brought them the victory. The Netherlands did not let their lifeline slip away however, and managed to force the match into a tiebreaker situation, which they comfortably won to seal Malaysia's fate.

With the dust settled on the hectic opening week, 16 teams will continue their attempts to reach the top of the tree this weekend, with the first set of double elimination matches scheduled to kick off on Sunday the 11th of June at 10:00 UTC, with old rivals Hong Kong and South Korea exchanging blows from the get-go.

You can keep up with all the action on the osu!live Twitch channel to show support for all the teams competing, so I hope to see you all there!

JBHyperion really pulled out all the stops this week with his coverage of osu!catch World Cup. If you get to see him around, be sure to let him know how great he is at dramatizing every moment of the biggest fruit catching competition of the year!

As usual, if you have any ideas you'd like to share with us for the osu!weekly, join us in the osu!dev discord to have your say! Otherwise, news@ppy.sh is still here in case you don't quite have access yet.

Until next time!

—Nyquill