History of osu! 2010

January

The Wai-con anime convention in Perth had osu!arcade, a fully self-contained arcade machine running a touch-based version of osu!. Although playing too much on it could lead to sore fingers as some people had criticised, the prototype containing custom-made hardware and a built-in touchscreen was well received by the community.¹

The osu!arcade machine at 2010's Wai-con

March

Through February to March, peppy organised an art competition dedicated to banners for in-game challenges, with the prize being the art's official recognition and a year of osu!supporter or physical goods. After a community voting round, the osu! team made the final choice.²

On March 8, an osu! update brought considerable performance and audio improvements to the game.³

April

Due to infrastructure changes, the IRC server was moved to the address irc.ppy.sh.⁴

This month, peppy introduced a new star rating difficulty algorithm in an osu! update.⁵

August

On August 2, all users were granted a single username change. To change username, they had to have received an osu!supporter tag at least once, either through purchase or as a gift.⁶

The !report chat command was added to Bancho, which allowed people to notify chat moderators about users misbehaving in the chat.⁷

nardii gave peppy access to their Twitter account @osugame which was used for general osu! news from then on.⁸

September

On September 2, osu! received several mapping updates, including:⁹

• The SB load indicator, reflecting drawing efficiency of storyboard and background elements.
• The introduction of approach rate for configuring the speed of approach circles independently of overall difficulty.
• Custom slider velocity multipliers ranging from 0.5x to 2x.

60 difficulties were affected by a Taiko¹⁰ bug causing drum rolls to be incorrectly displayed and thus, all scores on them were deleted.¹¹

October

Members of the Mapping Assistance Team (MAT) gained the ability to bubble beatmaps deemed to be of good quality.¹²

The Flashlight mod became unranked for one day until a patch was distributed because players were able to gain an unfair advantage.¹³¹⁴

November

An osu! update added new sprites for the Taiko¹⁰ mode.¹⁵

From 20 November to 28 November, the Flashlight mod became disabled in online rankings once again after heavy discussion due to players still being able to cheat with the mod.¹⁶¹⁷

Notes and references