osu!weekly #70

Hello everyone, I'm back while Nyquill takes a little break. Sorry that this issue is late, but we have some cool stuff to go over today, so let's get right into it!

With a new month starting, another monthly dev meeting summary has been provided courtesy of Ephemeral. The meeting covered multiple topics such as new black osu!tablets being added to the store within this month, and a brand new contest voting system which is actually already live and being used for the current music remix contest. We also talked a bit about the increased amount of featured artists we are now working with. So far, we've got over 300 songs catalogued with nearly 100 of those fully timed. Also it's worth mentioning that this meeting was hosted in the public osu!dev discord server and was livestreamed to Twitch. The recording was saved and has been uploaded to YouTube.

The community vote for the circles! remix contest is still ongoing. Voting will end on the 15th of August. This is also the first of many contests to use the new voting system, so if you haven't already, head on over to the voting page and vote for your favorites.

With an increasing amount of community ran tournaments, the staff have decided to change the way prizes are awarded. Going forward, supporter prizes will be replaced with credits which can be exchanged for support tags. The amount of credits will be awarded based on a few factors and players will be able to keep track of their credits in the Google Sheets provided in the thread. If you'd like to learn more, head on over to the thread and read up about it in detail.

Recently, we held a second Aspire mapping contest challenging osu!standard mappers to use their full potential to create a masterpiece. However, this was only limited to osu!standard. The osu!mania community held their own Aspire contest using Camellia - Lunatic Rough Party as the song. The contest has just finished with LordRaika taking first place. Nivrad00 was close behind taking second place with third going to wizardoffail.

Continuing with the tournament theme, IamKwaN is hosting the 4th Pending Cup., an annual Chinese mapping contest that has been around since 2013. The contest encourages user creativity and is welcome to mappers of all skill levels. The mapping contest has 3 songs to pick from.

• ClariS - SECRET
• 干瓢碁 - 運命のダークサイド -Rolling Gothic mix
• Dollscythe - Flashes (Extended).

You only need to create one difficulty per map, and despite it being a Chinese contest, anyone is free to join in! Submissions end on the 31st of August.

Last month, we asked you "What do you look for in a song to map/play?" We received around 900 votes in total with over 300 people looking for songs with varying or interesting rhythm! We don't have the next community poll up just yet, however it's not too far away so be sure to keep an eye out for that.

Members of the QAT have launched a new tumblr in order to help with transparency with the mapping and modding community. The tumblr explains the different sub-teams the QAT is broken down into and who is part of which sub-team. It also goes over a bit about the new Ranking Criteria Council along with revisions to the code for conduct for mappers and modders. So if you're interested in learning more about the behind the scenes stuff that the QAT are working on, feel free to head over to the blog and send in some questions.

The osu!mania World Cup 4K 2016 Group Stage has concluded! After 43 matches and 202 maps played, the top 16 teams that will move on to the Round of 16 have emerged. Brazil, Chile, France, Japan, Malaysia, Poland, South Korea and United States taking the top place in their respective groups with Argentina, Australia, Canada, Indonesia, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom taking second place. Out of all these teams, only Japan, Poland and United States managed to go through all 3 of their matches without conceding any points.

Some of the closer matches that happened are Indonesia vs France and Sweden vs Germany. The Indonesia vs France match ended 4-2 in favour of France, however that was by no means an easy win with Refresh being settled by only 842 points followed closely by Electronic Sound Lab being settled by only 598 points!

The Sweden vs Germany match was another close one but for a whole different reason. The match seemed to going Sweden's way cruising to a nice 3-1 lead. Despite this, Germany managed to regain their chances taking back to back wins on Hours and Refresh, forcing Sweden into playing the tiebreaker. However, it was to no avail as Sweden took the point on the tiebreak by 45,963 points.

Over on the mappool front, Electronic Sound Lab and Refresh got a lot of love both getting picked up 24 times. Doutei Korose got picked 21 times with Endless Dream getting picked up 20 times. Moving on the bans, Inside and roboposition got no love at all, getting banned out 25 and 23 times respectively. That being said, roboposition was also picked 14 times during the weekend making it the most popular map of the weekend appearing in 37 of the 43 matches!

Finally, the MWC wiki has been updated with the Round of 16 match schedule and mappool. The matches will be held on Saturday the 14th starting at 11AM UTC time with Singapore vs South Korea. If you'd like learn more about the Round of 16, head on over to the wiki or head on over to the discussion thread to talk about the World Cup with everyone else!

Sincerest apologies for the delay in getting this issue released. If you have any suggestions for what you would like to see in the weekly, feel free to drop by the osu!dev discord and directly highlight myself or Nyquill in #osu-weekly. Alternatively, you can also e-mail us as usual at news@ppy.sh.

—deadbeat