Next competition

[Nick]

I'd say leave the feature/magic branch for now - there are some tweaks I want to do to it, and some 4.1.2 bugfixes that I want incorporated too. Maybe next one or the one after, we'll see how it goes.

[Gwarl]

Apologies for the delay!

Here's the shortlist of variants for the next comp:

angband feature/magic development branch
frogcomposband
sil-Q
hellband

These are going to be the next 4 competitions, not necessarily in that order.

Anyone who would like to see one of those sooner rather than later, make a post to let it be known.

I will try and get the competition up in the next couple of days but no promises.

[HugoVirtuoso]

When the 1st official FrogComposband release arrives, make the next compo for it!

[Gwarl]

I want to apologise to everyone for being late with this month's competition. I'm busy with exams, and it's going to be a couple of days until the new competition gets posted. There are complications with updating the competition on Live, it isn't quite a five minute job. Thanks for your patience.

[Gwarl]

October competition is already decided on, it's just a secret. And I'm pretty sure what December will be. November is up for discussion though, might see a Z or Heng comp there.

[HugoVirtuoso]

Nightmare-mode compo

For the future, I propose that we should have a Nightmare mode compo from a certain variant of Zangband, whether it's Z itself, Heng, or PCB 7.0.0. What do you think?

[Ingwe Ingweron]

I always turn flavors off, anyway, and don't bother to remember which one was what. If it was something bad, like an early ?deep descent, the mangled scroll name is gone before I have the chance to memorize it. Although, I guess I could go back through the message list and see if it's there. I just never bother.

I do think it important that each comp player starts with the same town setup, shop contents, equipment and inventory, and stats. Where turncount matters, the location of home and shops relative to the stairs can make a difference. Contents of shops can certainly make a difference (e.g., a good sling).

As for the capability of having the same starting level by immediately descending the stairs, the only time I've ever used that was in the latest FA comp, but given all the blood and very few winners, I don't think it mattered at all.

[GenericPseudonym]

I agree that spending too much effort trying to curb cheating in an honor-system-based just-for-fun competition without any rewards is just silly. (And in any case people could always just edit the character dump to say whatever they want since it's just a text file.)

I will say though that (depending on how important/involved ID is in that particular variant), knowing these kinds of things can affect player enjoyment (as Gwarl said)
even if they don't make much of a difference to the integrity of the competition.

[Estie]

Im not sure its worth it to take measures to prevent some perceived cheating. Because I think if players want to cheat, they are going to cheat anyway, by hacking the code to get free identify of these randomized flavors or whatever. I remember a npp comp a few years back where someone had like 50 artifacts by clvl 20, I think I had 2 at that same point in the game. I thought dude had obviously done some hacking, and I cant really imagine how that makes it fun, but I dont think its worth getting upset about either. Theres nothing at stake, Im just here for the enjoyment of it.

I dont think anyone is trying to cheat, its just that you cant avoid noticing that that pink speckled potion is lose memories so next time you play you know not to drink it.

[murphy]

Im not sure its worth it to take measures to prevent some perceived cheating. Because I think if players want to cheat, they are going to cheat anyway, by hacking the code to get free identify of these randomized flavors or whatever. I remember a npp comp a few years back where someone had like 50 artifacts by clvl 20, I think I had 2 at that same point in the game. I thought dude had obviously done some hacking, and I cant really imagine how that makes it fun, but I dont think its worth getting upset about either. Theres nothing at stake, Im just here for the enjoyment of it.

[GenericPseudonym]

Perhaps, randomization should be on realtime turns NOT game turns. -- Probably really hard to implement.

Well the issue is that things like potion flavors are usually randomized when the save is first created, and competitions work by giving everyone a pre-created save file. The point at which the save starts is going to be AFTER the game has already decided to make CCW the gloopy green potion and heroism the speckled brown potion.

[Philip]

Outside of variants with crazy use-id systems, knowing flavors is of negligible importance.

As for setting options, I fail to see how your proposed system avoids that really.

[HugoVirtuoso]

Perhaps, randomization should be on realtime turns NOT game turns. -- Probably really hard to implement.

[debo]

Let's remove the ID game from all competition variants! That would fix the problem

[Gwarl]

I personally can't help but remember object flavours. And once I've realised I've remembered 2 or 3 correctly I get the cognitive struggling of admitting that I know them and not wanting to 'cheat'. I also find it tedious setting the options to my own preferences at the beginning of each run (not everything lives inside .prf's)