osu!weekly #12

Hello everyone! Last week there was quite a bit of hype regarding the osu!next video posted, and this week we have even more awesome stuff coming up, this time with merchandise. Read on to learn more!

The Catch the Beat World Cup semifinals start this weekend! Last week the teams for Australia, Hong Kong, Russian Federation and Italy were eliminated in the loser's bracket, bringing the tournament down to 12 teams remaining. For a general recap, the CWC commentators have provided a recap video going over the results and map pool. The first match of the weekend will be on Saturday at 1pm UTC, going until 4pm UTC the same day. Sunday will feature four more matches, starting at 11am UTC and going until 2pm UTC. If you'd like to see the more detailed schedule for the matches or even the map pool for the quarterfinals, you can see them on the wiki page under Match Schedule or Map pools. Be sure to tune in to watch the winner's bracket teams compete to stay in the bracket, and the loser's bracket teams fight to stay in CWC!

Applications for Beatmap Nominator Group are now open! If you have been a contributing, helpful modder and want to be part of this team, be sure to check this out and apply! You can also recommend a modder with this form, so if you know someone who you feel should be part of this team, you can fill this form out for them as well. Applications close June 5th, so be sure to get your applications in before then!

Interested in having a keyboard just for playing osu! with? Well if you're quick enough, you can be one of the first players to own an osu!keyboard! The first batch of keyboards is going to be arriving this weekend and will be selling for $40 on the osu!store. Be sure to keep an eye on peppy's twitter to know exactly when the keyboards are available for purchase from the osu! merchandise store.

The first matches of the osu! Community Tournament II will be getting underway this Saturday! There are 256 different players participating in this tournament, making it one of the larger community run tournaments hosted on the website. If you're curious about who is playing who, you can check out the bracket for the tournament. If you just want to tune in and watch the tournament as it goes on, you can check their tournament stream which should be live this weekend. Be sure to show some support for this as a lot of effort was put in to make this tournament happen!

osu! continues to grow every day meeting newer and bigger milestones. This week was no exception as osu! has reached a staggering 3 billion ranked plays! What do you think the next milestone will be? 20,000 concurrent players or 4 billion ranked plays? Only time may tell.

For those who may use custom CSS on various websites to customize their website experience, user -Tochi has created an unofficial dark style CSS for osu! (Example 1 / Example 2 / Example 3). For those holding off for the new web design that just want something different for now, this could be what you're looking for.

Last week's osu!next post generated quite a bit of hype for the new version of osu! that should be coming hopefully before the end of 2015 (Check out the video if you haven't already!). This week however we're getting off the hype train a little bit, Flyte posting up some very cool drafts showing the planning process for design to bring all these wonderful new changes to the game.

That's all for this week. Hope some of you end up being one of the lucky few to nab one of those awesome osu!keyboards!

—Tasha