History of osu! 2014

January

The entire performance points (pp) system was completely disabled for maintenance on 20 January 2014 due to miscalculations that had occurred over the previous few months.¹ This disabling was then followed by an announcement on 26 January 2014 that detailed a complete, from-the-ground-up redesign of the pp system that was set live the next day.²³ The new system was designed and implemented by Tom94 and had aimed to base pp scores off of a new "difficulty value" (separate from star rating) that was determined for every beatmap and mod combination in the game.¹ As a result of this, the old pp system was renamed to "ppv1" and the new system was named "ppv2".

March

On 1 March 2014 the performance points system redesign by Tom94 in months prior was ready to be set live for osu!taiko, osu!catch, and osu!mania as the official ranking system for those modes, along with a reminder that the current system was not yet 100% finished, and further feedback from players was still needed.⁴

As skinning elements expanded, the element, playfield.jpg was deprecated and replaced with a new generic one that is not modifiable. playfield.jpg was an element that allowed skinners to use any image as the default background of a beatmap if one was not supplied. This functionality was later brought in the form of menu-background.jpg, which changed both the main screen and default playfield backgrounds.⁵⁶

Default background for beatmaps without specified backgrounds

April

The first ever "osu! Monthly Fanart Contest" was announced on 3 April 2014. The contest was an informal contest run by LuigiHann that would run monthly and award two winners one year of osu!supporter (one picked by public and the other by osu! staff).⁷ The first contest was concluded in a newspost on 21 May 2014 with players kunny and DumplingYumYum winning first and second place respectively.⁸

June

On 18 June 2014, peppy announced that the download limitations would be removed for all users; however, there was still a, quote, "sanity limit" that would prevent bots from downloading an inhuman amount of beatmaps.⁹

August

On 21 August 2014, a newspost was released announcing a new restructuring of the Beatmap Appreciation Team (BAT), which detailed the separation of the original team into the Beatmap Appreciation Team and the Quality Assurance Team (QAT).¹⁰

October

October brought a handful of new additions to the base game, including a new sign in screen and new system for scrolling in osu!mania based off of beatmap BPM, new intro and outro sequences, and a custom theme song that was to be played on startup (as opposed to a random beatmap).

Additionally, peppy also released the "osu!test" build (now known as "Cutting Edge") to all players, as opposed to just osu!supporters in an attempt to help debugging efforts.

References