Changes within the Mappers' Guild

The Mappers' Guild is here to dish out some exciting news for anyone interested in mapping contests, Featured Artists, beatmap pack medals, and a bunch more!

Never heard of the Mappers' Guild?

A growing hub in the mapping world, the Mappers' Guild is a way for creators to earn rewards for mapping songs from osu!'s Featured Artists. In the last 5 years, the Mappers' Guild expanded to its own website and includes plenty of extra mapping-related opportunities!

This article covers the biggest changes to the Mappers' Guild since our last home page update. The topics are unrelated to each other, so feel free to skip around:

• New beatmap packs and medals
• Creating pre-release beatmaps for upcoming Featured Artists
• Mapping contest tools
• Guest difficulty system changes
• Major contributors to Featured Artist beatmaps

New beatmap packs and medals

It's been nearly 2 years since our last batch of beatmap packs and medals.

That's a long time.

To ensure medals are released with a bit more consistency, we've scheduled over 20 beatmap packs (with associated medals!) to be rolled out over the coming months. This includes:

• Theme packs showcasing songs that follow certain song or genre concepts (like Touhou, Vocaloid, etc.)
• Featured Artist packs showcasing beatmaps from osu!'s highly coveted talents (like xi, Aitsuki Nakuru, etc.)
• Challenge packs that require completion of each mapset's hardest difficulty without difficulty reduction mods.

We'll kick things off with 3 new packs — one from each category above.

Touhou theme beatmap pack

ginkiha artist beatmap pack

MUZZ challenge beatmap pack

Upcoming beatmap packs and medals

"What about the rest of the packs?", you might be asking.

Future beatmap packs (and some top secret hush-hush medals) will be introduced periodically starting next month. Look forward to it!

Pre-release beatmaps for upcoming Featured Artists

You know those videos on the @osugame Twitter paired with every new Featured Artist announcement?

Those are created in collaboration with members of the Mappers' Guild!

Featured Artist showcase beatmaps so far have been coordinated with a hand-selected group of mappers, but we'd like to open that opportunity to more motivated mappers (such as you!).

How to participate

Want your own maps showcased on the @osugame Twitter and our new Featured Artist news posts? Here's what you need to know:

1. Register on the Mappers' Guild website
2. Mark yourself as a FA showcase mapper via the top-right menu
   
3. Wait for a message from the mappersguild bot (these are sent in batches, so it may take a while to receive the message!)

Showcase beatmap requirements

The objective of the Featured Artist showcase beatmaps is to create hype for artist announcements and provide players a way to engage with them.

That said, there's a few things you should know before diving head first into this:

• Upcoming Featured Artists are treated as sensitive information. Participation involves knowing details of upcoming Featured Artists, so you'll be trusted with confidentiality. If you break that trust, things happen. Bad things.
• Showcase beatmaps have deadlines. You'll be expected to create and rank beatmaps by a specified date, so if you're not comfortable working with deadlines, this might not be for you.
• Not every beatmap is used in a video showcase. Sometimes multiple mappers create maps for the same artist, so not everyone gets the spotlight, but every map completed on time will still be showcased in the artist's announcement news post!

The next round of Featured Artist showcase beatmaps will be coordinated very soon, so be ready!

Mapping contest tools

How do you create a mapping contest? How do you anonymize beatmap submissions? How do you judge mapping contests without stone age spreadsheets? Where does anyone even find mapping contests?

Mapping contests have always faced systemic problems. The new Mappers' Guild contest listing aims to solve them.

This system aims to act as a central hub for mapping contests.

If you're a mapper, this helps you to...

• Find all active mapping contests
• Browse previous community mapping contests

Honestly speaking, this system is much more useful for contest creators. If you're a contest host, this helps you to...

• Make your contests more accessible (via the contest listing and the osu!dev Discord server's #mappers-guild channel)
• Automatically anonymize beatmap submissions
• Find users interested in screening/judging
• Provide a platform for screening/judging staff (It's much nicer than spreadsheets. Seriously.)
• Generate contest results for public display (example)

This system also offers Mappers' Guild points for beatmaps that exclusively use Featured Artist content:

• Hosting a contest: 10 points
• Submitting a valid entry: 5 points
• Screening a contest: 1 point
• Judging a contest: 1 point

Words suck. Explore the Mappers' Guild contest listing for yourself and see if you're interested in long-overdue mapping contest organization!

Guest difficulty system changes

A contentious part of the Mappers' Guild has always been its admission requirements. For those unfamiliar, you need 3 ranked maps to create maps and earn rewards through the guild.

This was silently changed recently!

While you still need 3 ranked maps to host mapsets in the guild, guest difficulties can come from any mappers, regardless of how many ranked maps they have. Once a user reaches 3 ranked maps, any points they've earned from guest difficulties will be retroactively applied.

This sounds like nonsense to anyone who's not familiar with the Mappers' Guild already, we know. In summary, the guild is now more accessible, and we just wanted to let you know!

Major contributors

The guild has been extremely active since our last home page update. 750+ new Mappers' Guild beatmaps have been ranked and 160+ Mappers' Guild quests have been completed.

There's absolutely no way we could highlight every beatmap/quest, but we can shout out some of the Mappers' Guild's top contributors. Each of these users contributed 5 or more ranked beatmaps since November 2020:

Thanks to everyone here (and everyone else who's done anything in the guild) for hard-carrying osu!'s steady supply of Featured Artist content.

It's crazy to think the Mappers' Guild has been around for nearly 5 years AND somehow hasn't been sent to the hall of retired-osu!-community-projects.

If you're a mapper, you've helped keep this running, and I sincerely appreciate it.

—pishifat