Official tournament support

The osu! team runs a program where they may opt to provide community-run tournaments that abide by a certain set of criteria and expectations with extra support, at their discretion.

Benefits

Officially supported tournaments have access to:

• Profile badge prizes for first-place winners
• Assessment for a main-menu banner during major matches (generally quarterfinals and above), subject to availability and criteria (see the FAQ section below)
• A listing in the automatic tournament registrations system
• A dedicated screening process to prevent players with serious integrity infringements (cheating, multiaccounting, tournament bans) from playing

Expectations

Tournaments

Community-run tournaments receiving this support are expected to abide by the following general ideals:

• Remain free and fair
• Be as transparent as possible
• Preserve competitive integrity
• Encourage good sportsmanship

In addition, all promotional material or any services associated with a tournament receiving official support should adhere to the osu! community rules. This includes things like Twitter accounts, Discord servers, and so on.

Players

Participants in officially supported tournaments are expected to adhere to the osu! community rules at all times, regardless of their rank, accomplishments, or other achievements.

Tournament players are also expected to treat all volunteers involved in hosting a tournament with respect, and to not deliberately attempt to waste their time or otherwise excessively complicate the undertaking of a tournament with their actions.

Organisers who find the behaviour of any player enrolled in an officially supported tournament questionable or disruptive may report such things to the osu! support team for prompt review. At the osu! team's discretion, offending players may be issued timed or permanent tournament bans depending on the severity of their behaviour. Repeat offenders may risk incurring a permanent tournament ban or a restriction.

Tournament screening

A major part of being an officially supported tournament is access to the screening process. Similar to the "security checks" undertaken by all World Cup players, screening helps prevent people with recent serious infringements or tournament bans from disrupting play.

Tournament organisers will be expected to provide the following:

• A comma-separated list (or spreadsheet) including player usernames and user IDs
• If the tournament is team-based, this list must reflect the grouping of players in their teams of play, complete with any team name or other identifying marker

The comma-separated list should look like this:

Player1, 1234567
Player2, 1234567
Player3, 1234567

Once screening concludes, the osu! Support Team will provide a list of any players from your tournament that failed screening and are not considered eligible for tournament play. No individual reasons will be given for why a player does not pass screening.

Individual players who are unhappy with their screening outcome should be told to consult accounts@ppy.sh via email.

Allowing users that have failed screening to play in your tournament will result in an immediate withdrawal of support and will result in future requests for support to be denied.

Designing your profile badge

Profile badge images must adhere to the following standards:

• The badge image file must be a PNG.
• The badge image must be 172x80px in dimension.
• The badge must clearly display the logo, motif, or name of your tournament.
• The badge must be cleanly designed and of reasonable visual quality.

Please consult the following examples of approved badges:

Badge images that do not meet these standards will be refused with given reasoning, and you may be asked to completely redesign your badge in some cases. This is fairly rare, but should be accounted for.

Designing your main-menu banner

In rare circumstances, some long-running community tournaments may qualify for in-game main-menu banner support. Such images must adhere to the following standards:

• The banner image must be a PNG.
• The banner image must be 1500x256px in dimension.

  • All banner images will be treated as 2x, meaning that they will be exported at 50% scale by us in a 1x image.
  • Design your images appropriately to ensure things are legible at half size.
• The banner must clearly display the logo, motif AND name of your tournament, plus any information about the ongoing stage or section that is being advertised.
• The banner must be cleanly designed with an emphasis on being mostly transparent and relatively unobtrusive visually.

Please do not submit a main menu banner with your original request—you will be asked and pointed to this section if you are authorized to make use of one.

Requesting support

To start with, the request for support must be made well before the tournament actually commences play.

There are no specific timelines for this, but we recommend at least two to three weeks before play commences to account for delays in the screening process.

You may be required to postpone the start of your tournament during periods of high delay, but the osu! team will make efforts to ensure this does not happen.

Please read the criteria laid out below, then send an email to tournaments@ppy.sh with the following information:

• The name of your tournament
• A brief description of your tournament, including its scoring type and any other appropriate features
• Any applicable dates for your tournament
• Any links to public off-site chatrooms or servers used for the event (Discord, etc.)
• A link to the forum thread located under the Tournaments forum that announces/details your tournament
• Any links to previous iterations of the same tournament (only where applicable)
• A list of the players involved in running the tournament
• A list of players who have registered for the tournament

Please allow at least a week for a response. We will try our best to handle all requests within a week, but we occasionally have large spikes in workload that can make this impossible.

Criteria

Community-run tournaments which abide by the following hard criteria are eligible for support:

• The tournament must have at least 64 players or 16 teams minimum into the qualifier rounds, OR operate on a Round of 16 double-elimination format at a minimum. Larger scales and formats are permitted.
• The tournament is organised and run by an experienced team of accomplished and reputable volunteers¹ , OR, the tournament has been run at least once before without receiving rewards.
• Any of the staff members involved in the managing or organisation of the tournament must not be participating in the tournament themselves at any point.

  • To clarify further, if you play in a given tournament at all, you are unable to later assist as a referee, mappool selector or anything similar until that instance of the tournament concludes. You either play or help run, not both.
• The tournament must be run only four or fewer times per year.
• The tournament must have all players screened by the account support team before play commences.
• The tournament must not be "self-reffed". A dedicated referee must be present during every match.
• The tournament must not prevent players, who pass the screening, from participation without both ample evidence presented publicly against them and the approval of the account support team.

  • This only applies in circumstances where they would otherwise meet the sign-up criteria for the tournament.
  • This includes preventing users who are perceived to be "sandbagging" from play.

    • Should an organizer have valid concerns about the presence of such players affecting the competitive integrity of their tournament, they may raise the issue to the Tournament Committee for a case-by-case review using the link listed below.
• The forum thread for the tournament must contain a clearly visible link in a normal-sized font to this reporting form as the very last content of the original post.

  • https://pif.ephemeral.ink/tournament-reports

¹: An "experienced" team member is loosely defined as someone who has contributed significantly to the successful running of at least three badge-receiving tournaments beforehand, or has been a part of the osu! World Cup team. This may vary at the discretion of the account support team.

During the tournament

If a tournament satisfies the criteria outlined above, it must also abide by the following practices during play:

• Tournament organisers will be expected to monitor the matches of their tournament for toxic behaviour or anything that goes against the expectations laid out above, and report it to the account support team.
• Tournament organisers who spot potentially suspicious play during their tournament are single-handedly responsible for reporting such incidents to the account support team via tournaments@ppy.sh.
• All multiplayer games relevant to the tournament must be created with the !mp make command, so that they do not expire.
• All matches undertaken for the tournament must be recorded and their history made publicly available on the original forum post for the tournament as a clearly marked link in a normal-sized font or larger.
• In the event that a player becomes restricted during the course of the tournament, you may need to replay certain matches where they were involved in order to preserve the competitive integrity of the tournament.

  • Organisers should contact the account support team to receive information and guidance on these (hopefully rare) cases.

After the tournament

Once the tournament has concluded, the organisers will need to submit the following to the account support team:

• A list of applicable badge recipients (a.k.a. the winners of your tournament)
• A link to the publicly viewable catalogue of your tournament's match history

LAN tournaments are also required to add links to VODs and a copy of the bracket of the entire tournament in order to be considered for a badge prize.

Frequently asked questions

Why does a tournament have to run at least twice or more in order to qualify for profile badges without experienced staff present?

The second iteration of a tournament is often free of a lot of the organisational issues of the first tournament, and has established a solid workflow and staff involved in its production. They are far less likely to peter out or be subject to questionable choices. The tournament is also far more identifiable if it runs more than just once.

For all of these reasons (and more), we ask that profile badge prizes are only awarded to tournaments that have successfully run at least once before, unless a sizeable majority of the team is experienced and accomplished at running tournaments in the past.

What is considered "staff" as far as tournament management goes?

We consider referees, mappool selectors, judges, team organisers, or any other form of managerial position directly involved in the maintenance and operation of a tournament to be a part of its staff.

Commentators and streamers are not considered by us as staff, and may play or interact in tournaments freely so long as they are not directly involved in any managerial aspect of running the tournament or violate anything mentioned above.

We have historically had issues where unscrupulous organisers have geared tournaments specifically (i.e. picked maps they're familiar with, adjusted seeds/brackets, etc.) to farm profile badges for themselves and their friends. While we understand that most groups will not do this, we must enforce this restriction to keep things fair for everyone.

Can a player who has been eliminated from play in my tournament join the staff after the fact and not cause problems?

Generally no, unless the role they are assuming is not one that could conceivably alter the outcome of the tournament.

A player may conclude play in your tournament and join as a commentator, for example, but not as a referee, organiser, or anything further.

Why can't badges be awarded to recurring monthly (or weekly) tournaments?

Flooding the game with profile badges dilutes the prestige of the prize for everybody else. We do not want profile badges to be something that people 'farm' from a few sets of regular, recurring tournaments.

Can I request a badge for a beatmap contest or other type of competition?

For beatmap contests, yes, just follow the same rules as above. We highly recommend using Featured Artists for such contests and will flagrantly give preferential treatment to those who do.

For other contests, email us and ask personally. We'll try to work something out.

Can a team-based tournament match be played if a team is missing a player?

Yes, a match can still be played even if one of the teams is missing one or more players.

Can I request to advertise my tournament on the main menu?

Yes, you can. It's at the osu! team's discretion to decide if your tournament can be advertised in-game, as there are many factors to consider.

The minimum requirements to request in-game advertising are as follows:

• Your tournament meets the criteria for applicable tournaments that can be found at the top of this article
• You have successfully run at least two tournaments in the past
• The live streams of your current tournament average over 100 concurrent viewers
• You are able to provide the schedule of the matches and live streams ahead of time