Hi everyone, I’m Ephemeral! I’ve been with osu! for a while now (since 2009) and have been ambling about behind the scenes for nearly as long, helping stuff get done and the like. Some things have recently come to bear, and I’ve been asked to help bring some clarity to the matter.

As many of you are probably aware, things have been particularly rocky in the community over the past week or so. A number of fairly big changes were added, then removed, then readjusted and proposed again, then removed again.. A mess and a half, to say the least. Everything went belly-up for a little while, and we’re only now just starting to get our head wrapped around things again.

During this whole fiasco, one of the biggest issues expressed by the community is the lack of transparency in how “staff” decisions are made and affect the game. This is something that as a team, we typically struggle with. Most of our major discussions happen behind closed doors, a product of years of tradition dating back to the very first years of the game, when the community was far, far smaller.

For the longest time, the community was small enough that any concerns would trickle through the engaged user-base and ultimately end up being noticed by someone involved who could do something about it. Over the years, osu!’s community has grown above and beyond our wildest expectations, and it is entirely fair to say that we have dropped the ball on adjusting our decision-making practices to account for this.

So, going forward, we aim to be entirely transparent with our thought processes leading up to the big decisions that impact everyone in the community.

What better place to start than with the issues of the past week?

With that in mind, we have constructed a unified timeline of the decisions pre-dating the infamous “Mapset and Spread” restructure that sent the community into a furore, as well as the “Ranking Criteria Council” concept (which has been met with similar levels of disdain).

It is our hope that by placing the events leading up to the birth of these decisions into the public view, we can work together to find out the best way of moving forward from here, and to make sure that something like this does not happen again.

We have suspended all movement in the Ranking Criteria changes for (at very least) the remainder of the week, and will use this time to gather your feedback and our thoughts on how we may best proceed from now on.