It can also provide a way for seeding players into groups before the main portion of a tournament starts, for instance.
This should allow for a new generation of tournaments (well, competitions) which don’t need to be run in real-time. We plan on adding the tools to limit the scope of who can participate (private, friends only, limiting by rank, by country etc.) Making tournaments easier to run This will allow for leaderboards to be made by users. Let me touch on the concepts (and my personal goals) behind this system and how things will be developed going forward.Ĭreating more ways for people to enjoy osu! I’m sure many of you are already imagining the possibilities of how this can be used. History of rooms will be kept indefinitely, and chat will be available for discussion after the results are finalised. During this specified time range, players will be able to join the room and compete in a localised leaderboard instance.Įach room gains an overall leaderboard and a chat room which persist even after the room has expired. The room owner will be able to set the specifications for the room, along with a duration. “timeshift” brings multiplayer rooms that can run over a longer period of time and involve large numbers of players.
Huge props to smoogipoo, nanaya, notbakaneko, nekodex who all came together to make this happen in a relatively short period! Therefore we have developed a MVP (minimum viable product) that you can enjoy from today, but will continue to build on it more openly going forward. I have been working on the logistics of this for several months on paper, and the team has spent the month of December focusing on this internally in relative secrecy.Īs lazer is a very open development project, we don’t want to develop the whole system behind a curtain. Let me introduce my plans for expanding osu! horizons via multiplayer.įrom today, a new multiplayer system is live in lazer. The leaderboards and pp will always have their place in this community, but I don’t think it is healthy to focus exclusively on them. Things are in good hands and you will likely see changes applied over the next month. Over the last month we have seen a huge increase in activity over at the dev discord aiming to improve the calculations while maintaining this overall goal. The performance point (v2) system was made with the aim of objectively calculating difficulty and it did a pretty good job of that. I’m not about to go into the topic of PP calculation. But it also does lead to unavoidable stagnation. It really lets users feel like they have achieved something solid, in my opinion – set a record and it’s there in stone (unless you beat it yourself!). Scores remain for years and history is retained forever. This is one area which is quite unique in osu! – we don’t have the concept of seasons where leaderboards are reset. Through all the complaints and criticisms of the system and its method of calculation, people of all skill levels are still striving for the highest pp they can achieve (quite often focusing on beatmaps which specifically reward more pp for less effort, known as “farm” maps). Even so, I think we can all agree that the ecosystem created around Performance Points (or PP) and the global rankings are the focus for most.
On any given day there are up to 800 concurrent multiplayer games, creating localised competition and enjoyment for their participants. Some players lean towards the competitive side while others play more casually, but I think everyone finds motivation from being around others striving hard to perform their best. Osu! is a heavily community focused online game.
The reasoning behind not covering this topic until now is that I don’t like to dream about a future and all the cool things it could be, making big promises without being able to deliver soon enough for people in the present to enjoy. While I’ve described my thoughts and intentions in private to people I’ve met up with, this will be the first time discussing this publicly. As 2018 draws to a close, I want to touch on something which I’ve felt strongly about for a while now.