History of osu! 2015

February

On 16 February 2015, storyboard rules were updated to allow image sizes larger than 854x640. As suggested by Xgor, the new maximum rankable image size for storyboards was updated to 1366x768.¹²

March

The first ever edition of osu!weekly was released on 13 March 2015. Written by Tasha, osu!weekly positioned itself as "a weekly news digest covering the latest happenings of the game and its community".¹

The first ever osu! Beatmap Blueprint stickers were added to the osu!store on 20 March 2015. The stickers came in two packs of 8.5" x 11" custom sticker sheets featuring such elements as hit circles, combo counters, sliders, and much more.³ In celebration of the launch, a contest was run to see who could make the best beatmap using the stickers, with a first place prize of an osu! tablet and osu! sticker sets 1 and 2. Despite this, the contest was cancelled due to a lack of submissions, and no follow-up regarding this was ever publicly stated at the time.³⁴

Wii Remote support was added for osu!taiko on 26 March 2015.⁵

On 31 March 2015, osu!coins were added as a joke in-game currency for osu! as a part of an April Fools' day joke. The coins were made to parody free-to-play mobile games' common use of in-game currencies and microtransactions. The osu!coins were quickly removed the following day.

April

The #balkan channel was re-added to the game as per a feature request on 2 April 2015.⁶⁷

The Co-op mod became an unranked mod on 6 April 2015.⁸

9K was made rankable after being given proper use support in the editor on 30 April 2015.⁹

May

Notice: The forum post that announced news of the new ranking system was released on 4 June 2015, although the old system was actually fully deprecated on 1 May 2015, and full implementation of the new system was still yet to be available to the public by the end of 2015.

The old Beatmap Nominator (BN) ranking was fully deprecated on 1 May 2015, and replaced with a new, real-time ranking. This new ranking retained the original goal of the previous one, although it focused on challenge and collaboration as opposed to individual performance over a set timeframe. Public reception towards this new change was overall mostly positive, although many users did remark that the new system was confusing.¹⁰¹¹

Among the changes and announcements made surrounding beatmap ranking, a change was made to the ranking process on 5 May 2015 that allowed players to dispute disqualifications made by the Quality Assurance Team (QAT), due to the lack of any way to dispute issues that the QAT may bring up. The new change made it possible to submit a form if there was a dispute, where a final decision could be made regarding a beatmap and whether it is ready to be ranked.¹²

The osu!news YouTube channel uploaded its first video to the public on 8 May 2015. The channel was run by various members of the community and aimed to create videos on skin showcases, tournaments, mapping, contests, and other news from the community.¹²¹³

The osu!keyboard (also known as the "osu! 'nono' keyboard") was added to the osu!store on 30 May 2015, retailing for about $40 at launch. Initially announced in a tweet by peppy on 28 May 2015, there were only 100 keyboards available at launch, and were more akin to a keypad than a full-sized keyboard.¹⁴¹⁵

The osu! keyboard teased in a tweet by peppy

June

Implementation of the username change system in the osu!store was set live on 16 June 2015, although full functionality of the system was not available until 18 June 2015. The changes made it so that players had to pay $4 USD for their first name change, after which the price would double with each succeeding purchase with a cap at $100 USD; however, if a user bought an osu!supporter tag, then their first change would be free. ^16171819

The ability to see what a replay would look like without mods was added on 23 June 2015 as per a feature request, although the change only made the mods Double Time, Half Time, and Flashlight togglable.²⁰

July

On 15 July 2015, it was announced that a new public Slack team was created for the purpose of better communicating with public contributors. peppy initially made the announcement on his blog and had explained that anyone who was willing to help test cutting-edge features, contribute graphical/sound resources, or get help working with osu! services could come and join the team and talk to the people from different osu! teams directly.²¹

Note: There was still a private Slack team that the osu! team used for internal communications, which was not accessible or viewable to outside users; these two teams were independent of each other.

Notwithstanding, the new team was completely public and available for anyone to join, which caused many unwanted users to flood the channels. This forced peppy into "locking down" the new team the very next day. Despite this, peppy continued to make use of the team throughout the rest of the year, and often invited users to come and join when they were testing new features or implementations.²²²³

August

The Chat Moderators were officially merged into the Global Moderation Team (GMT) on 20 August 2015.²⁴²⁵

September

The old FPS counter was replaced with a new "refresh and latency display" on 2 September 2015. This new display would still display the current FPS (frames per second), but the new change caused it to hide from view if it exceeded 500 FPS. In addition, a new counter was added below the FPS counter that would display exactly how much latency was being introduced during frame rendering (measured in milliseconds). "Stuttered" or "dropped" frames would be shown as coloured rectangles to the left of the counter to better visualise exactly how much frame render latency a user was experiencing.²⁶²⁷

On 26 September 2015, cYsmix became one of the first official osu! artists. This partnership entailed the creation of three tracks made specifically for osu!, along with the creation of a mapping contest using those tracks. The aforementioned four tracks were as follows:

• "Manic"
• "House with Legs"
• "Dovregubben's Hall (New Ver.)"

The album cover for cYsmix's first release of official osu! songs

Each track had its own pre-timed .osz file included with it and were released on cYsmix's SoundCloud on 28 September 2015.

In addition to this, an "open bounty" named "Mapping With Rewards" was created for this event, that allowed anyone to map one of the aforementioned tracks, get it into a rankable state, and if it was impressive enough, that person would receive a bounty for it. The bounty reward offered at the time was as follows: one song bundled with client (for a limited period of time), $50 osu!store credit, 6 months supporter tag, and a unique profile badge. This open bounty was reportedly created due to a need to reward players for quality beatmaps and to celebrate the new tracks without having to go through the hassle that comes with running traditional mapping contests.²⁶

Despite promises from peppy on his blog, however, the results for Mapping With Rewards were not posted by the end of the year.

October

After months of work, a full migration from DirectX to OpenGL graphics rendering was completed and pushed out to all users on the Stable release stream on 16 October 2015. However, users who were not able to run the new update due to compatibility issues were switched to a new release stream named "Stable (Fallback)", which used the old DirectX graphics rendering. It was meant to be continuously supported alongside the Stable release until the osu! team felt confident enough in the compatibility of the OpenGL rendering for all users.^2829303132

Another batch of official osu! songs were released by cYsmix on 27 October 2015, with a similar "open-bounty–style" contest being opened for it as well. The three songs were "Fright March", "Moonlight Sonata", and "Classic Pursuit".³³³⁴

The album cover for cYsmix's second release of official osu! songs

Just like the previous month's Mapping with Rewards contest, the results were not posted before the end of the year.

The URL for the testing subdomain of the new osu! forums (jizz.ppy.sh) was replaced with new.ppy.sh on 26 October 2015 due to the explicit connotations that the old URL may have implied.³⁴³⁵

The first and only batch of portable osu! install USB sticks (shown below) were first announced on 30 October 2015 on peppy's blog, showcasing the first images of their completely metal body design. At the time of announcement, they were slated for a December 2015 release.³⁴³⁶

Front and back side of an osu! USB stick

November

OWC profile banners were added to the osu!store on 7–8 November 2015.³⁷³⁸

Required email verification for certain account actions began rolling out on 16 November 2015 in response to recent events at the time involving the compromisation of numerous osu! streamers' accounts.³⁹⁴⁰⁴¹ The following day, peppy posted to his blog, where he initially announced the change in account security:

It has come to my attention that over the last few days a lot of osu! livestreamers have been hacked. The common link seems to be that they all had active xsplit accounts (which was hacked in 2013, leaking all passwords). This means that the said users were using the same password across twitch, twitter, osu! and more. First and foremost, if you are doing something like this, LEAVE RIGHT NOW AND CHANGE YOUR PASSWORDS. Get a password manager and set one password per service!
Even though I am confident that osu! was not involved in the leaking of any details, I am making sure further such attempts will not result in osu! accounts being compromised. Starting yesterday I began rolling out email verification for certain account actions. Going forward, we will also be adding email verification to the game client, but this will require a touch more implementation. Expect it in the near future.

— peppy, "20151117"⁴¹

A few days later (19 November 2015), peppy updated users on the situation in another blog post, in which he elaborated on the situation and kept his stance the same:

Some updates on account security:

• I am confident that osu! has not been compromised.
• All users which were targeted so far have used the same password for 3+ years.
• Many used a very simple password, or shared the password across other services.
• All users compromised have had at least one other account compromised in the past.

Nonetheless, I am still taking further action:

• I’ve expanded the list of common passwords, and am forcefully resetting passwords of users which have these.
• We are on high alert and ready to help users out which are experiencing troubles.
• We’ve made procedures for users which have invalid email addresses so they can recover their account successfully.
• Working on adding two-factor support (email for now) to the osu! client. Should surface very soon.

We have a lot of accounts to forcefully reset due to weak passwords, and due to limited support staff, will be staggering the “rollout” of these resets over the coming weeks.

— peppy, "20151119"⁴⁰

References