The QAT Gazette: May 2018

An upcoming public Quality Assurance Team meeting, the arrival of Beatmap Nominator Badges, and a brand new QAT Leader are in the focus this month! Another month’s worth of your osu! mapping and modding news is right here!

Opening

by JBHyperion

Welcome everyone once again to another month of news and reviews!

After a hectic few months to kick off the year, May has bucked the 2018 trend and offered us a little calm and respite within the mapping and modding communities. While this doesn’t exactly make for a gripping headline, it’s nice to occasionally relax a little and enjoy what else life has to offer!

That said, I would like to draw attention to one major attraction from last month, that being the Mapper’s Choice Awards, where mappers and modders across all four of osu!’s game modes voted for their favourite and most notable beatmaps of 2017.

Myself and some of my colleagues had the pleasure of commentating during the results showcase, and the whole event was both well-organised and great fun all-around. If you missed the proceedings, results for each mode and category can be found in the thread linked above, but I highly recommend reliving the action as it happened over at the corsace Twitch channel if you have the time to do so.

With that said, let’s get stuck in with the rest of last month’s news!

Within the Beatmap Nominators

by Protastic101

The community has been fairly quiet this month, with no new members to introduce and Beatmap Nominator badges quietly received, but as always, there are still exciting things happening within the Beatmap Nominators. Read on to find out more details about badges, progress on the current osu!taiko, osu!catch, and osu!mania Beatmap Nominator applications, and departures from old friends!

Beatmap Nominator Badges

Beatmap Nominator badges have arrived! Some of you may have already seen these adorning the profiles of some of our longest serving members, but more are sure to come as people reach the two year mark of their tenure within the Beatmap Nominators.

These are given in levels, each denoting the number of years a Beatmap Nominator or member of the Beatmap Appreciation Team pre-2014 have served, up to 5 years. The minimum time required to qualify for one of these badges is 2 years total, consecutive or nonconsecutive. As we progress through the year, we are sure to see more and more people receive badges!

This isn’t limited only to Beatmap Nominators though. Quality Assurance Team members will receive a badge as well after three years of service to recognize their contribution.

Already, 46 outstanding members in our community have received profile badges, and we only hope to see this number grow in the future!

New Beatmap Nominator Promotions

While the hustle and bustle of the last couple months would normally be a time to rest, there are always new modders looking to advance their own journey. This time around, we're being joined by seven new Nominator aspirants for osu!taiko, osu!catch, and osu!mania! Please give a warm welcome to Nifty, Yumeno Himiko, Fii, Lenfried-, Unpredictable, _Stan and DoNotMess!

Also please welcome the return of two veterans: qoot8123 and DE-CADE!

We’re running things with a bit more clarity this time too. Applicants should have received a PM regarding whether or not they passed the activity check and have moved onto the evaluation phase. Applicants are, of course, encouraged to double check their activity if they believe they met the minimum mod score threshold.

Beatmap Nominator applications for the osu! game mode will be heading your way in early July - make sure to brush up on your skills and have your modding history up to date if you'd like to join their ranks!

Beatmap Nominator Retirements

While applications are underway to welcome new members to the Beatmap Nominators, some of our hardworking members have departed to explore new horizons and pursue new opportunities. Please give thanks to the following for their contribution to the quality of the ranked section and accessibility to mappers:

Arrival, Chromoxx, Chewin, dsco, frukoyurdakul, juankristal, Julie, MBomb, Nwolf and Weber.

Within the Quality Assurance Team

by JBHyperion

While last month may have been a more relaxed one in general, June is shaping up to be a return to the hustle and bustle of previous months. This includes some eagerly anticipated events on the horizon, including team member interviews and the next public meeting of the Quality Assurance Team. Continue onwards for a recap of our comings, goings, and plans for the future!

Public QAT Meeting

As some of you may remember, back in April we held our first ever publicly accessible meeting of the Quality Assurance Team in the osu!dev Discord. If you missed out on the details, a summary of the meeting can be found in the Beatmap Management forum.

One of the major criticisms of this was the lack of advertising beforehand, which meant that many interested parties in the mapping and modding communities were unaware of the meeting, and were unable to raise their own concerns and suggestions. Not too helpful when the aim is greater engagement and transparency!

Therefore, I would like to announce that the next public meeting of the Quality Assurance Team will begin at 14:00 UTC+0 on Sunday the 17th of June. The location will once again be the osu!dev Discord’s #modding channel. Topics being discussed will include changes to Beatmap Nominator subdivisions, a review of the beatmap veto and mediation processes, and upcoming QAT interviews — please join us on the day to follow and/or participate in the discussion!

QAT Interviews

by Feerum

In the last post of the QAT Gazette, we asked you to vote in a poll to determine if there was interest for QAT Interviews. The poll ended with a favourable reception, so expect to see these rolling off the blocks in the following months! If everything works out well, we should be able to release the first interview alongside the next issue of the QAT Gazette.

I have both osu! related and personal questions prepared for the QAT members who elect to be interviewed, but we also want to give you, the community, the chance to discover! À la the “Ask Me Anything” feature present in the original QAT blogs, you can leave your questions into the Disqus comments below and I will pick some of them to use in the interviews.

I hope you are excited for it as I am, because I have many more plans should the QAT interviews be a success!

QAT Leader Elections

by Asherz007

With the loss of Okoratu a couple of months back, JBHyperion was left to lead the QAT by himself for a while. With JBH soon to get his hands tied down with the 2018 osu!catch World Cup, he took it upon himself to hold a re-election for the position of QAT Leader, in which any member of the QAT was able to run, similar to the election following the Upheaval discussion almost a year ago.

Just short of three weeks ago, the election results were released, and a new QAT leader was born! Alongside JBH, offer your congratulations to Mao, who will join in captaining the team and push us forward into new and uncharted territories!

New Quality Assurance Team Additions

This month saw one addition amongst our ranks, so say hello to Chaoslitz, who joins the disqualification branch for the osu! game mode in order to help keep those circles and sliders in tip-top condition! Chaoslitz will also participate in the evaluation of osu! Beatmap Nominator applications when the next cycle begins towards the end of this month.

Quality Assurance Team Retirements

As with anything in life, circumstances change and people must move on and adapt. This month we bid a second farewell to Myxomatosis, who has helped us tremendously in maintaining the quality of osu! maps and evaluating Beatmap Nominator applications since his return in January. We once again wish you the best in your future endeavours!

Summary

by JBHyperion

So once again we reach the end of another month’s update, knowing that tomorrow brings both new challenges and new opportunities. The outlook of next month’s article may vary depending on my commitments to the 2018 osu!catch World Cup, so don’t be surprised if you see someone else leading the charge in June’s edition!

One thing you can bet your hat on though, is that it’ll be chock-full of all the latest and greatest news just as always, so please look forward to it! Until next time!

—JBHyperion, Protastic101, Asherz007 & Feerum