Hello everyone! I’m Ephemeral, and following from our previous promises to be more transparent about our vision and choices for the community going forward, I’d like to present something new to you today!

For the first time in a long, long while, the development team all sat down together for a good hour or so and hashed out a series of short-term goals for osu!’s future. To put a long story short, here’s what we came up with:

• More communication needs to happen inside #dev as a whole, instead of people conversing between themselves for individual projects. A chief issue with recent events in particular was this very problem, and by addressing this in full, we can be certain that similar problems will not happen in that same manner again.
• More support staff are needed to handle the influx of new tickets and reports. Broadening the team is essential for keeping up with community demand. In light of this, one existing support member was given a broader set of permissions to help tackle foul play offenses, and one entirely new support member was recruited to help out.
• Development focus continues to be primarily on getting the OpenGL client up to scratch performance and structure-wise. The four core active developers have pledged their efforts to this focus. Completing this overhaul will leave the codebase in a much better state, and will serve as a very important step on the way to open-sourcing the game client.
• The ranking criteria adjustments to beatmap difficulty spread will be dropped in their current format. However, later adjustments to a maximum cap on difficulties per mode will be put forward for community discussion and consideration at a later date.
• The “Ranking Criteria Council” concept will be adjusted considerably, and also renamed. The group will continue largely as they do now, but their role will be simplified to that of an advisory nature, centered on giving targeted feedback and proposals for community consideration. The new name of the group is yet to be determined, but it won’t be anything “council” related.
• Ranking criteria change proposals should be vastly simplified going forward. They must be conveyed in a single sentence, followed by a short explanation of why the change is for the best. Larger changes should be split into multiple smaller changes, and all changes will be put before the community for consideration and feedback before implementation.
• We are rapidly developing new beatmap modding tools to streamline the modding process. This is being done internally as it’s a fairly complex system, but you should see it make an appearance over the coming weeks.

On the community front, a number of proposals regarding gamemode-specific criteria changes are slated for the horizon, as well as the recruitment of more QAT, and a full-scale rework of the current Global Moderator Team.

As far as the development front goes, completion of the new drawing hierarchy and framework in the coming months will pave the way for open-sourcing the client code as a whole. Once this has been accomplished, we hope to work towards the implementation of a new, more efficient system for handling ban appeals and restrictions.

We plan to hold these meetings every month going forward. Depending on how things go, audio transcripts of our conversations may be made available, but at the very least, we will continue to have these summaries of our goals for the next month made available here.

See you next time!