The osu!mania 4K World Cup 2024, Semi-Complete Recap

In early October, the osu!mania 4K World Cup 2024 concluded with an electrifying showdown as the United States successfully defended their title as the World Champions. For over a month, teams around the globe clashed in thrilling matches, showcasing their skill, strategy, and endurance in this high-stakes rhythm game tournament.

Introduction to the osu!mania 4K World Cup

osu!mania is a variant of the popular rhythm game osu!, where you press four keys repeatedly in time to music. There are four columns from which notes can fall, and players must press four keys when the notes hit the bottom of the column. The score obtained on a map is on a scale of one to one million, depending on the accuracy of timing and the number of misses or breaks.

The osu!mania 4K World Cup (MWC 4K) is an annual country-based osu!mania tournament, hosted by the osu! team itself, the creators of the game. The tournament follows a standard bracket setup, starting with the Round of 32, and consists of a losers’ bracket for those eliminated in the main bracket. Due to the nature of the losers’ bracket, the competition moves on to the Grand Finals instead of ending in the Finals since the loser of the main bracket Finals needs to compete against the winner of the losers’ bracket Finals. 

In each round, the opposing nations draft maps (levels in osu!) from a select mappool to play, consisting of carefully selected maps by the osu! team. Choosing which maps to play and ban is essential to performing well; with each map’s unique gameplay and difficulty, keeping opponents on their toes is critical to outperforming them. Mappools for each stage in the tournament are released after the matches end, to prevent teams from preparing their competitors beforehand.

Teams for each country consist of six players, with three playing on every given map, chosen by the team leader. This allows countries to pick experts at specific patterns or map types, not needing every player to be a jack-of-all-trades. The three players representing a nation in each map have their scores on that map added up, with the country with a higher score winning that map.

Pre-Quarterfinals

There were forty-four registered teams for the qualifiers of MWC 4K 2024, but Puerto Rico dropped out before the Qualifiers began. In the qualifiers, each team has two attempts on eight maps chosen by the osu! team with the higher score counting towards the team’s Qualifiers average. The 32 teams with the highest averages across all eight maps qualify for the main tournament. The United States dominated the Qualifiers, outscoring the second-highest-scoring nation, South Korea, by over 8,000, a margin miles ahead of anything else in the top 10. We commend Saudi Arabia’s valiant effort, though they fell 130,000 points short of second-to-last place, Portugal.

The Round of 32, consisting of first to five matches, had its pairings composed by taking opposite ends of the Qualifiers leaderboard. Top teams were pitted against the weakest teams, in order to preserve the matches between the strongest teams for later in the tournament. The round went as expected, with the higher-seeded teams winning the matches. There were no exceptionally notable matchups due to the nature of how the bracket was formed. No teams that lost in this round were eliminated as they were moved to the losers’ bracket instead. Romania and Ukraine, however, forfeited after losing their first match.

The Round of 16, with its first to six matches, was where the competition started getting more intense. Both China and the United Kingdom were moved to the losers’ bracket after losing to Malaysia and Singapore respectively, both of whom had lower averages in Qualifiers. Many lower-ranked European nations were eliminated this round after losing two consecutive matches against the Asian powerhouses and stronger South American teams.

Quarterfinals

Here, the majority of matchups were from the losers’ brackets with only a fourth of the matches from the main bracket. The Quarterfinals also introduced a new matchup type: potential matches. These are between two winners in the losers’ brackets, meaning teams in the losers’ bracket need to play twice per round to stay in the tournament. Continuing the trend from the Round of 16, Quarterfinals had matches be first to six.

The United Kingdom was finally eliminated from the tournament after losing to Hong Kong with a final score of 5-6 in their potential match. In addition, Taiwan, after winning their losers’ bracket match against New Zealand, had their run ended by the Russian Federation. This round contained far stronger matchups between legendary teams; in a match between two of the highest-seeded teams, the Philippines and Chile, the Philippines lost 6-2 and was moved to the losers’ bracket.

Semifinals

In addition to finalizing the first to seven nature of the remaining matches of the tournament, the weaker teams were cleared in the Semifinals, leaving only the best of the best. In the main bracket, the U.S. swept Chile 7-nil, while Thailand crushed the higher-seeded South Korea 7-1. In the two potential matches, we see Malaysia and Japan fall to the Philippines and China respectively, leaving China as the lowest-seeding team remaining at eighth. 

Finals

Down to the top six teams, every single match in the Finals of MWC 4K 2024 was a close competition, with the winners of each match barely holding on to victory. After sweeping the Philippines, South Korea lost their potential match against China, which marked their first time not making it to the podium since 2014.

Thailand fought well, but ultimately lost 7-1 to the United States in the last main bracket match of the year. Their remaining hope was to beat China in the first match of the Grand Finals, in order to secure a rematch against the reigning champions

The most brilliant matchup in the Finals presented itself in the final potential match of the year: South Korea against China. South Korea possessed an extremely powerful and well-rounded lineup, seeded second to only the United States. On the other hand, China’s team, which also consisted of well-rounded competitors eager to win the country a spot in the Grand Finals, had been dominating the losers’ bracket since their loss in the Round of 16. In a battle of nerves, South Korea and China tied up to a score of 4-4, until South Korea finally lost the battle of wits and ended the matchup, losing 4-7. China’s superior pick and ban strategy carried them to victory, despite the high scores left on the leaderboards by the departing South Korean players.

Grand Finals

With the podium members determined, all that remains is the last effort attempts by the final three teams, the U.S., Thailand, and China, to secure the spot at the top. This year marks the first time both China and Thailand have made it to the podium, showing unprecedented performances by both countries against former dominant nations like South Korea.

In the match determining third place between Thailand and China, China surpassed all expectations and pushed past Thailand 7-1, demonstrating their desire to win gold as their first podium. Thailand still sits in a strong third place, partially due to misplays by a few of their competitors.

With the stage set, the United States faced China in the final match of the year. China tried their best, though were ultimately no match for their stronger opponents—the US’s impressive performances on China’s surprising picks left China in the dust. With almost perfect scores by America’s best players, China’s lineup was crushed, and so were their hopes and dreams of achieving first.

A special mention to this year’s tiebreaker map, the osu! original Fractal Vertex

A devastatingly hard map, designed to test a competitor’s endurance to the maximum, Fractal Vertex throws an unrelenting barrage of multitudes of different patterns, with little rest time for players. Although easier than last year’s Tiebreaker, Fractal Vertex is still an impressive map, demonstrating the copious amounts of effort put in by the developers of both the song and the chart. 

Summary

With the osu!mania 4K World Cup 2024 having ended, the podium stands with the United States in first, China in second, and Thailand in third. A surprising result, with masterful scores by China and Thailand to score their respective slots on the podium for the first time. With this international event finally over, the osu! team has shifted their attention to the osu! World Cup 2024, recruiting staff to monitor and test the upcoming maps.

The statistics and recordings of the matches played are all available online, with spreadsheets including every statistic known to man in a Google Drive folder shared publicly. Stream rooms of the matches are all available on osu!’s official website, so go check them out if you want to catch up on the intense matches that took place during the entirety of September and the beginning of October. 

Works Cited

OSU Team. OSU Mania 4k World Cup 2024 Statistics, 2024, drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1EhSltVCdtOWCrNPRUAa1LaCxv35idR_f. 

OSU Team. “Osu!Mania 4K World Cup 2024 · Wiki.” Osu!, 2024, osu.ppy.sh/wiki/en/Tournaments/MWC/2024_4K.