Editor’s Note: This post was written by chequers, who put in a great deal of work to make this year’s tournament happen. If you played in it this year, please give him your thanks!
Congratulations to everyone who took part in the Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.18 tournament! This (slightly delayed) post will go over the results and highlights of the event.
More than 2500 players participated, with a third of players collecting a rune, and half of those going on to win.
Some stats, with comparisons to the last tournament:
Individual Winners
First place goes to Yermak, who won comfortably with 6260 points. Yermak has been a regular sight at the top of recent DCSS tournaments, placing second or third in the 0.14, 0.15 and 0.16 competitions. His wins in this tournament include at least one with every species, background and god, making him the first tournament greaterplayer and polytheist!
Second place was taken by Demise. As well as collecting 5648 points, Demise won the fastest game of crawl ever in 41:00 minutes*! As well as second individual place, his clan Distracted by YoutubeDollars** also came in second.
Rounding out the podium, third place is awarded to Ultraviolent4 with 5459 points. Also part of Demise’s clan, Ultraviolent4 had the equal second longest streak of eight wins in a row***.
Clan Winners
Top clan was AWBW – Ban Blowguns – End Needles Violence, led by WalkerBoh (#6) with members MorganLeah, Snack (#9), moose, n1000 and Lasty.
Second place was Distracted by YoutubeDollars, led by Demise (#2) with members BobtheCannibal69, Megaslime, Ultraviolent4 (#3), chequers and krfreak.
Third place goes to The Shining Kimchi, a clan hailing from the Korean crawl community. It was led by irum and made up of Dowan, SilvereR, mooon, sheltermaker01 and thrrja.
Notable Achievements
The most commonly collected banner was “Vow of Courage I: Kill Sigmund before entering the Depths”, earned by 1495 players. The least common was a tie between “The Heretic III: Over the course of the tournament, abandon and mollify nine gods excluding Beogh, Elyvilon, Ru, The Shining One, and Zin.” and “Ruthless Efficiency III: Win the game before reaching experience level 19.”, each collected by just four players.
Yermak had the longest streak of the tournament, winning 10 games in a row. His streak was broken by a d:1 shaft—see, it happens to the best of us!
The most successful ghost was Iamsock‘s, who killed 27(!) players, including themselves seven times.
Most impressive tournament stats goes to xeno23. They played just six games in the tournament and won them all, five of which were 15-rune games. Congratulations!
Finally, a massive thank you to elliptic. For the past five years he quietly coded and ran DCSS’s tournaments. He’s passed on the crown this time around, but without his help and assistance this year’s would have never come to fruition. Cheers!
Notes
* as a point of reference, the second fastest win ever took 48 minutes and the average won game is around eight and a half hours long
** full disclosure: your scribe was part of this clan, contributing a mere 7% of points. He probably won’t be invited back next year
*** it would have been nine, but Ultraviolent4 won two games with the Monk background, so the second wasn’t counted. Bad luck!
1. Comment by dpeg
3/Jun/2016 at 03:41
I wonder if the reduction in player count has to do with the loss of the CSZO server. (Curse that griefer, may he be banished for eternity!)
Many thanks to chequers and elliptic!
2. Comment by wat
3/Jun/2016 at 21:31
I had a lot of fun in this tourney. Looking forward to the next one!
There were a lot of great clan names, too. So many puns.
3. Comment by ventricule
7/Jun/2016 at 13:19
Oh wow that shaft on D:1 and then getting stuck between an adder and crazy Yiuf, what an unlucky start.
Thanks everyone for the tournament, I also enjoy these reports a lot, please keep writing them in the future!
4. Comment by mps
8/Jun/2016 at 03:17
@dpeg: Without any special effort made to promote the game, you can expect a downward trend in player base. You can see this trend between .16 and .17 as well, in spite of .17 being a better release. The more interesting question is why the number of players in the .16 tournament increased so much over the .15 tournament.
5. Comment by Disco
8/Jun/2016 at 15:48
Surprise surprise, player count is down across the board while winrate is up. More proof this game is getting worse and worse with all the “streamlining” over the past several iterations. I now only recommend this game to those first starting out with rogue-likes, due to its easy interface and simplistic play. Experienced roguelike players have moved on to richer experiences and no longer play this: just not enough depth anymore.
6. Comment by dpeg
8/Jun/2016 at 15:56
mps: Why expect downward trend? The usual behaviour is exponential growth first, then stagnation and slow decline. However, DCSS has regular updates, and I am not sure that the Asian community knows about the tournaments, for example. Perhaps this is what you mean by promoting!
Disco: I’ve just approved of your comment, even though it is extremely off the mark from my point of view. Obviously, I don’t care if you think we wimped out, but the game has more depth than ever: spells, monsters etc. are more, and more meaningfully varied, than ever.
I do wonder what those “richer experiences” are.
7. Comment by mps
8/Jun/2016 at 17:29
Interest in anything, but games especially, naturally declines over time as novelty wears off. In the long run you can’t rely on word of mouth alone. I think what you’re seeing is a slow narrowing of player base to a “hardcore” audience, for whom the novelty introduced through you guys’ update model is enough (or merely tolerated in some cases lol).
re: Disco’s comment, I too think this is off-base. If anything, .18 has a problem of not going far enough in streamlining vestigial mechanics (no progress on food, going backward on identification and curses) and instead adding questionably designed material (e.g. Pakellas, the return of spirit hounds) or addressing issues of limited interest (most of the amulet reform falls under both of these). The main improvements imo were removal of some wands, removal of most mutation resistance, and reworking some ill-considered monsters (death cobs and entropy weavers).
8. Comment by 1158511
15/Jun/2016 at 21:38
Just found this game and want to give a huge shout out to the community for making this gem. Did I mention that it was FREE? Incredible work guys I’m loving it.
9. Comment by Plutia
19/Jun/2016 at 05:06
@Disco
a lot of us don’t participate in tournaments too, I’m always running the latest development version by compiling with msysgit2, but I play local, and don’t participate in tournaments all that much because my internet is so crazy, I still bring lots of people into the game who play often but like me we all play on local versions, so tournament isn’t exactly a big measure of how many people actually play, I’d assume anyways.
10. Comment by PleasingFungus
19/Jun/2016 at 05:10
Yeah, the numbers we’ve seen have always suggested that online players are just a very noisy minority, much like console players, skilled players, devs…