Hi again! Ephemeral here, back again with more delicious development developments this month following from our promise in March to make these meetings a more regular thing. There’s some exciting stuff on the horizon, and our summary for this month will only cover a little bit of what’s actually going on behind the scenes.

This time, our conversation was held in voice over text - this meant that a lot more got discussed. That being said, there is a lot more to go through this time around, so let’s get stuck into it:

• Modding v2 development is progressing at a reasonable pace. The goals set from the last meeting were not fully met due to other distractions on the development end of things, but a lot of work has been made and the first usable prototypes of the system have entered internal testing. The system hinges on a lot of internal web changes which need to happen first, but they are getting done at a pretty quick rate, so the future looks promising. Don’t believe me? Here’s a screenshot of the current internal testing build. Yes, this all works.

• The push to move the client to open-source proceeds at a great pace. Affectionately dubbed “LAZER” by the devs working on it, this new development branch aims to bridge the gap between the current client and the refactored codebase that will ultimately support both osu!next and a “legacy” compatibility layer for the old client design. This will ultimately enable external developers to start contributing to the development of the client, and paves the way well towards full osu!next implementation.

• Due to the large number of changes slated for osu!next, a “seasons” based ranking system is being considered. While this is a fairly big thing to mention off hand, it is very much in the early consideration stage of things for now. Don’t hinge too much on it. (peppynote: this basically means everyone agreed it would be cool, not that we are actively working on it.)

• More artists need to be sought out to produce osu! exclusive tracks that are available for all beatmappers to use. There’s also a composition/remix contest in the works that should be going live within the next month. If you know of any artists who would be interested in making music for osu!, please let us know in the comment section below!

• Achievements are receiving a massive overhaul and many new ones are slated for release within the next month, with the artwork of over 40 new medallions already complete. These new achievements will be released in “packs”, hopefully each week. Each pack will probably contain 4 progression achievements (attain x performance rank, score, etc), 2 high-level achievements (attain x score on difficult map with/without mods), 2 mid-level achievements (attain x score on moderate map with/without mods). We will also no longer be enforcing a “no-discussion” rule on hush-hush achievements, but will continue to release such achievements. You guys need to work together to figure out what you need to do to attain them.

• CtB’s editor mode is not sufficient for serious mapping as it currently stands, and changes are slated for the future to fix this. This has been a known issue for a long while now, particularly regarding slider creation. While it isn’t a priority in the current development environment, it is a noted issue and will be addressed at some point in the near future. aka: Soon(tm). (peppynote: it’s not a hard thing to fix, but we’re also redesigning the editor from ground up. might as well make that happen first rather than redoing everything twice.)

• Concerns were raised about the general state of the mapping meta and strong encouragement from the community for mappers to map high-reward pp rather than fun-to-play maps. Efforts will be made to promote alternative mapping styles by showcasing unique and enjoyable beatmaps in osu!news features, hopefully encouraging more people to experiment with styles that are not made solely to produce high pp or star rating scores.

• A recent overhaul to the GMT’s leadership fronted by shARPII is proving quite fruitful. Moderators will be scheduled to cover specific timezones and forums, leading to greater overall availability and a better, more consistent coverage of chat and forum channels across the day. Additionally, osu!news features with some prominent moderators are being considered in an effort to help the community better know who is handling chat, and to dispel some common misconceptions about these people or what moderators do in general.

• A new video series on the History of osu! is slated to hit the osu!academy within the month, followed by fortnightly video releases of assorted content thereafter. The osu!academy (and YouTube presence in general) has proven very popular and there has been a wide demand for more of this content, especially considering the absence of updates made to the channel in previous months. ztrot will be adjusting his focus to align more on producing content for the osu!academy, which should hopefully yield more cool stuff for everyone to enjoy.

• Improvements in support staff internal policies is significantly cutting down the average wait on ticket response times. We hope to improve this further in the coming months further by introducing a new means of handling ban appeals and restrictions in general which will massively free up the support team to handle issues at a far greater pace than before.

On the community front, more effort is going to be made to bolster the comparatively small sizes of the non-standard gamemode teams - particularly osu!mania. The team formerly known as the “Ranking Criteria Council” has also been put to work facilitating discussion in the Ranking Criteria subforum as per their new role. They’ve still not decided on a name for themselves, so I’ve decided to officially dub them the Criteria Friends until they manage to think of one. We also hope to hold up the great work of various members of the community who write guides detailing the sometimes complex ways that osu! operates as a whole by making their work far more visible than before, possibly featuring them in a new portal on the wiki, as well as some way of giving them proper attribution and credit for their work. As you can tell, it’s been a pretty hectic month, and they’re only going to get more packed as we start moving towards osu!next in the coming months. If there was ever a time to get excited about the future of osu!, now is probably it.

On that note, that’s about all for now. See you next month!