Anyone remember the first osu! world cup? Yeah, me neither for the most part. Here’s the original thread about it. I certainly remember my part in it, at least; how I got a ragtag bunch of random friends and players from the UK and put together a team at the last minute, messed around a bit, and then got mauled in the first round by the US team in a 3v4. Was short lived, but oh damn, was it fun.

I mention this because at the time, it was just a casual thing that we had fun with. “Hey, Lunah’s got this tourney going. seems like a laugh”. And that’s what it was, just a casual fun thing that we had between ourselves and the other teams, none of us cared what happened, not many people watching on cared about the result. it came and went as a little, fun aside to grinding out solo as we do.

Now, compare that to the last world cup. It’s like comparing a Sunday League football pub tournament to the Champion’s League.

Everyone wants to be part of it, players train festidiously just to take part in it, people fawn over the map pools just to have the edge in a single match, and people dedicate their play just for a hope that they might get picked for their team in what has become the annual circle-clicking festival. I recall that at multiple points on one of the weekends, the viewer numbers on the twitch stream of the tournament eclipsed that of a DreamHack StarCraft II tournament. That fact alone has made this tournament a bit more serious. Not something I’m a fan of, but when something gets this big, I must concede that that cannot be helped. Many UK players came to me looking to get into our team for that tournament with an almost worrying desperation.

That said, despite all this hysteria around the tournament, and all the nerves that surrounded many of the player’s psyches going into their matches, my team could have easily succumbed to this fate too. Fortunately, that was not the case. Our team felt just like that motley crew that I played with in the first tournament, wading into battle wearing silly hats and spinning bow ties. There was no apprehension, no panic attacks, and no serious faces. We just went in, picked silly warm-ups maps to lighten our opponent’s moods and kill their nerves, and had a rollicking good time. Of course, we gave it a good go when we played, but we didn’t care whether we lost or won. Hell, most of the time we didn’t even know the maps we were playing until the day before a match, if that. Of course, considering our enigmatic captain was Jesse (jesus1412), we had the perfect captain for this vision. The fact that we managed to reach the Semi-Finals, inexplicably knocking out the powerhouses of Thailand and Germany along the way, was a nice aside to an absolute blast of a tournament. In the midst of lots of seriousness and hype that wouldn’t shame an LCS season, we just said “fuck that”, and went on our merry way not knowing that it was even there.

If another OWC happens, would we do anything differently?

Not a damn thing.