osu!weekly #47

The first week of February saw a lot of the new year's sentiments from early January come around again for round 2. For our friends over in Asia, it's literally the Lunar New Year! With all the updates and information being thrown around the game, there isn't any time to be "monkeying" around. Read on for the latest in circle clicking news!

A feature we have sorely missed has made a return to the options menu. You are now able to see live previews of the selected skin in skin selection! This was a feature that was temporarily removed with the introduction of the new options menu almost a year ago, and has now made its glorious return to the cutting-edge build. If you, like me, prefer to see a skin in action as opposed to seeing a static hit burst preview when selecting a skin, you will be able to do that if you are a supporter!

The returning skin-preview feature in action

For those of you who don't already actively follow peppy's development blog, there has been a couple of new updates on the status of the development of the game. For the most part, it is a recap of what we got done in January. A couple of neat new pages are live in the preview of the new website, and osu! has received massive server upgrades to help cope with the increasing number of users. Additionally, major infrastructure improvements have been put in place thanks to the efforts of smoogipoo, TheVileOne, and peppy. Remember to show your appreciation to our development team over at the blog if you like what you see!

It looks like it's double the trouble for polls this month! In a happy turn of events, we now have two polls run to the end of the month instead of one. The new poll asks you guys what your favorite mouse pad surfaces feel like. This totally isn't foreshadowing new things coming your way in the future, so definitely do not give your input while you still can!

The osu! Solo Queue Ladder, conceptualized by Ascendance, is now in testing! After some aid from peppy, they seem to have reworked their bot and are now looking to get the first ever ladder season in full swing. Things may seem to be rocky for this first week, but I was assured by the staff working on the system that they are working as best as they can to get the current issues fixed. If you would like to try something new, hop on over and sign up with their bot in-game!

Live rankings for the expert pool on the osu!SQL website

There is a new set of sound effects available on the cutting-edge build for our supporters! The new sound effects are carefully put together by cYsmix and feature some entities that sport completely new sounds. I've always dreamed of being able to hear clicking in-game alongside my normal keyboard clacking! If you are like me, you should definitely give those a run if you have the time.

IamKwaN stole my fire and wrote about the new top players of China video before I did. It's not like I'm angry about that or anything, but you should probably check out the post about the Lunar New Year generously contributed by various multi-lingual members of the moderation team!

The best of 2015 voting has concluded! The bulk of the information is available on the actual post regarding the voting, but Stefan has also now thrown together the appropriate beatmap pack containing all the maps that were in the winner's circle. Additionally, there is a new Lapfox Trax Pack created in part with Blue Dragon!

Flyte has posted some new shots of what seems to be the design for the new web-based multiplayer history. If you're interested in some tastefully blurred images of what promises to be an intense match between reigning champion TapaoKing duking it out against rising star KenWin1, head on over to his blog!

Legendary player SibehCircles strikes fear into his opponents, who promptly forfeit to avoid a shameful defeat.

It looks like Team China will get one more shot at taking down the South Korean super team! With China successfully taking out both Malaysia AND Japan this passing weekend, they brace for one last rematch in the osu!mania 7K World Cup of 2016. These two teams have a lot of history going into the grand finals, with China being defeated by Korea in the 2014 osu!mania 7K world cup, and again in the Semi-Finals of this tournament. Can China finally take home a victory against this formidable opponent on the biggest stage of 7 Key osu!mania? Tune in this weekend to find out! Detailed schedules and information are available on the wiki page should you need them.

Picks and bans for Finals Week 1

We've toned down some parts of the weekly this time, and hopefully now the post will be a lot less scary to look at for everyone. If you have any newsworthy things to tell us about, or want to see something cool appear in the weekly, please toss us an e-mail at news@ppy.sh! If you have any feedback, please let us know in the comments on Disqus or on the r/osugame subreddit link. I hope you've all had a great weekend, and I'll see you guys again after the Grand Finals of the osu!mania 7K World cup!

—Nyquill