Next competition

[nikheizen]

But Sil was very recently done as a comp, back in January. And I notice there's been no new release of Sil for over 2 years...

There was a release in January!

[ranger jeff]

Ah, right, Variants tab rarely gets updated, still says 1.2.1 in 2014, I see the competition with Sil this year was with 1.3.0. So, sorry for the confusion, but we've already had a competition with the current Sil.

But, two votes for another Sil comp is two votes more than any other *band, so...

[PowerWyrm]

Ironman MAngband competition. There was a 1.1.3 release a few days ago, first release in ages (although it's not a big one). I was amazed to see that a veteran player actually managed to kill Morgoth in Ironman MAngband, so it's actually doable. So go grab the latest client from the MAngband website, connect to the server and just play. You don't even need a starting savefile, any race/class is fine.

[MattB]

I'll always vote for Vanilla (but maybe I'm just boring...)

[debo]

Hi,

As you've noticed, there haven't been any competitions recently. Things have become markedly crazier for me, and I haven't had the time or attention to rig any new ones.

I have contacted a bunch of folks 1-1 to see if they'd be interested in taking over, but no luck yet.

If you are someone who has even an inkling of a thought that you could do this -- trust me, you can. Before I started running the competitions, I think the only variant I'd ever played was Sil. It wasn't that hard to figure out enough about the others to make a savefile for them. Most of the work goes into figuring out what might be a decent configuration for a variant I've never played before, and briefly playtesting the character.

In the interim before we find someone more responsible to take over, creating and linking savefiles will make it a lot easier for me to set up new ones. Usually when I create a savefile, I try to play it for at least a few floors to make sure there's not anything majorly broken, weird, or annoying about that particular start (e.g. the equivalent of finding Deathwreaker on 50', terrible consumables in shops, etc.)

For what it's worth, I think a Steamband comp would be neat to do again. If anyone has a savefile for one of those kicking around, would be happy to kick one off.

I'm going to be traveling a lot for the next 9 days, and after that things should stabilize for a little while.

Apologies to those who've been waiting for their next competition. If you want to help make this faster, start nominating someone to take over long term, and pressure them until they do it

[Pete Mack]

There was some talk of permacursed Deathwreaker as starting equipment?

[ranger jeff]

Would that be in 4.0.5? Interesting proposition, would make early game easy, late game tough, would have insanely low turncounts...

Also, I'm trying a Brownie Naturalist in Steamband, so far okay, though only 4 Brownies on the ladder, one Engineer winner, so untested late game. But Steamband seems very winnable, and Naturalist pretty powerful. Though I understand the last two bosses need to be fought in melee with a Naturalist with AoE's running, so given a Brownie's weak melee, skill point distribution might be tough.

[bron]

I've wanted to have a comp where the ranking criterion was something other than "fastest completion". On 26Jan2016 I posted a proposal (#422 in this thread). Nobody seemed to like it. So here is another (admittedly similar) proposal: A Sil competition. No artefacts. Any race. Any house. Any level of win (1 sil is as good as 3). The ranking criteria is "lowest maximum number of skill-points in any category".

I think that no-artefacts is important because a lucky artefact find can hugely influence a game that is restricted like this, and the competition largely reduces to "who finds the best artefact soonest", rather than the skill of the competitors.

I've done this sort of thing before, but not with no-artefacts, so I don't know what's possible. Particularly within a limited amount of real time.

[Carnivean]

Does that provide a tie-breaker if no one can win it?

[wobbly]

You could tie-break on 2nd highest skill, then 3rd etc.

[debo]

I'm cool with this idea, but the person we need to convince is probably pav. I'm assuming this is going to require some tweaking to dump-parsing to make it work.

[bron]

Does that provide a tie-breaker if no one can win it?

I hadn't really though about it, but I guess I'd propose "most experience points" as the ranking criteria among non-winners. I agree with debo that convincing pav to make the changes to the ladder ranking may be the hardest part. Maybe he can be bribed? I haven't seen any oook fund raisers in awhile ...

[Estie]

What about a "1 try" mode where you play the character till he dies and winner is the one with most advanced dump ? It has always appeared to me that this would be the more fitting competition mode for Angband (or maybe its just me not liking to minimize turncount).

The advantage of the turncount mode is that you get to play Angband no matter what, whereas here you have to wait for the next comp if you die after one hour of play.

For the 1-try mode, it is not necessary to pick tough starting conditions (ironman no-artefacts etc) to provide a challenge. Maybe just make vanilla default (but with randarts ). Also it might be good to have a short duration, maybe 1 week, and 3 days overlap with the next one or so.

Would it be possible to create a bot that maintains this mode ? A new tab on the oook page called "daily competition" (or weekly or vanilla or whatever), where a bot posts a vanilla starting file every day/week, random race class combo, and crowns the winner in the sub-ladder when time is up.
Of course someone would have to write this and I have no idea how much work it would be, but it would not require a maintainer once installed.

[debo]

We could just run a few very short comps and do it on honor system!. I kinda like that idea.

[debo]

I might try a 1-week long vanilla comp next, where (honor system) you're only allowed one attempt (that means one death total.) Highest rank as per normal Vanilla comp scoring wins.

Objections? If not I'll set it up tomorrow.