June Update - (not) OT Tournament, New Batch, Update Issues

posted on June 20th, 2026 a 5:04 pm

Hello everyone, just a general update post going over the official tournament news, and opening of a new standard batch.

19th Official Tournament
Normally around this time we would be gearing up for another year of our annual Official Tournament and if everything had gone to plan then sign-ups would have just closed, but for those that have been paying attention you may have noticed quite a lack of news or any post regarding it.

Going into this year the possibility that pulling off a full tournament would be even harder as our overall buffer for new songs has dwindled over the past few years, This raised the question early into the year if we should instead run a 18.5, a tournament mixing both new and old songs and hoping for a larger pool of choices next year. Ultimately while the bounty batch once again fulfilled a lot of the holes in difficulties that we needed to cover, it still left more holes then we felt uncomfortable filling with older songs especially in the upper groups that would have felt very underwhelming.

Given the timeline that we had left, getting all the songs we wanted to use that came from the bounty batch judged, rated, and ready for release would basically have been a rush job at best assuming all the files didn't need any changes and could be used directly as is. That is why we came to a unanimous decision between those on OT committee at the end of May to postpone the Official Tournament this year.

While the news might not be entirely shocking as the Official Tournament would have been starting just next week, we still wanted to at least run some form of tournament over the summer for everyone to enjoy while we prepare hopefully for an Official Tournament next year.



(not) Official Tournament
Just because there's no Official Tournament doesn't meant there's no official tournament, but this time being run by our lovely events team.

This tournament follows the standard elimination format of week long rounds, spread across 6 weeks, with each group having their own song per round.

For those that have participated in Frozen Finger Rumble just a few months ago, it's the same only I told them to pick more normal song picks this time around.

More details can be found over on the events thread, and Sign-Ups are open!.


New Seasonal Batch
For those that have stepfiles that not don't have any slot available to them in the current bounty batch, or are just itching to submit your latest and greatest, head over to the new Summer/Autumn 2026 Seasonal Batch.

Standard submission rules apply, along with a new rule added:

2.4 No AI Policy
FFR has always been extremely grateful to the human artists who grant us permission to feature their creations in our game. Out of respect for these artists and broad community support, the judge team will make every attempt to prevent AI generated content from appearing in FFR.

Judges will reject without review any submission found to feature substantial use of generative AI. This applies to both audio and simfile components.


Site and Game Issues
For those that have experienced and issues or found something that no longer works, head over to #site-issues on our Discord, or into the forums and leave a post in the bug thread.

There's been a lot of effort and pain switching our nearly 20 year old platform over to something newer then 2006, and effort will continue until everything that needs to work goes back to working.


It's just neat,
- Velocity