Crawl "Sudden Death" Challenges Season 3 - SIGNUPS CLOSED

[Moose]

Does scoring script count games played on Xtahua server?

It should. If it's not, please let me know.

[Tedronai]

It should. If it's not, please let me know.

My GhWr on Xtahua still does not show up.

[Moose]

got your game, though the milestones on cxc seem to bein a different format, so the score is messed up...

I'll look into it this weekend probably

[XuaXua]

Man, the constant "sudden deaths" of Tavern are killing the "Sudden Death" challenges this season.

[Tedronai]

Why? All information you need can be found on http://rob.pecknology.net/csdc/

[XuaXua]

Why? All information you need can be found on http://rob.pecknology.net/csdc/

It helps to have had that bookmarked, no?

[WalkerBoh]

I wouldn't say it's killing the competition, but between the Tavern and CLAN being down, it has been a little frustrating.

[lrvs]

Will my GhWr count? It counted before CDO went down last week, but now it's not there. Maybe there are other characters affected, too. http://crawl.develz.org/morgues/trunk/l ... 232822.txt

[Moose]

FYI Week 7 scoreboard update will not happen until Sunday night (PDT) at some point.

Even though the competition will start in a little over a day, I'm not going to be around to update the scoreboard. On a normal week, I'd just have it publish automatically, but with the changes in scoring that are required for week seven, I'd rather not fire it out, and miss being around to fix any problems in scoring that might arise.

[Moose]

Will my GhWr count? It counted before CDO went down last week, but now it's not there. Maybe there are other characters affected, too. http://crawl.develz.org/morgues/trunk/l ... 232822.txt

Fixed it.

Servers going offline, or new ones coming online will always cause abberations in the scoring since I don't re-pull all data each time I calculate scores. I pull the data every 15 minutes, and cache it locally on disk. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. All games should be reported correctly now, let me know if they aren't.

[XuaXua]

Week 7?

[Tedronai]

  Code:

Char: DsMo
Gods: Makhleb, Yredelemnul, Cheibriados, Dithmenos
Tier 1 bonus: Enter 4 branches before reaching XL 15 (1 pt).
Tier 2 bonus: Enter 6 branches before reaching XL 15 (2 pts).
Tier 3 bonus: Reach the end of 4 branches before reaching XL 15 (4 pts).
Tier 4 bonus: Collect your first rune without leaving that rune's branch. (6 pts).

This information is supplied without liability.

[Sandman25]

Are the bonuses cumulative? I mean it is possible to get 13 points for all of them, right? Otherwise tier 4 is too easy, it is what most players do in their games.

[WalkerBoh]

And with that, CSDC Season 3 comes to a close. Thanks to everyone who played along all season, you guys are all the best. And to everyone else, well everyone makes mistakes. Special thanks to Moose and Kramin for their hard work and contributions that combined to make CSDC approximately 8.5x cooler than I could ever make it on my own.

Congrats to Zooty, who claimed the Division 1 title with his incredible upset of DrKe in the final days of the competition. And congrats as well to mopl, Ahrin, and cribozai for winning Divisions 2, 3, and 5 respectively. A special tip of the hat goes to the Division 4 champion, Dynast, who made me look like a huge asshole for putting him in Division 4 at all.

I am planning on running a 4th season of CSDC, but it won't be until after the holidays blow over - and depending on what the timing is like for the 0.16 tournament it might wait until after that, as well. I'm considering several rule changes (most notably abolishing divisions), so if you have any suggestions for rules/format changes please feel free to pitch in now before any decisions are made.

Hope everyone enjoyed playing, see you guys next year.

[ldf]

WalkerBoh, thank you for organizing this and for all your hard work, it was cool and fun.
My suggestions, very briefly:
1) Remove divisions. We are not playing against each other, so I don't see particular reason to divide people in groups.
2) Announce combos and bonuses before start of the season. It can help to plan your strategy. Don't think it will majorly change or spoil something.
2b) Let players to play any combos from the start. Just keep different end dates like it's done now. Players lose interest when they die in early game and need to wait for the whole week to maybe just die again. Also easier to play if you are busy IRL in a specific weeks.

[dpeg]

ldf: Good points. On the other hand, calling for attention once a week on a new combo can also be a strong motivator to give it another go. I know this from Brogue's weekly competitions which, admittedly, are not chained into a tournament. With your mode, you can play your part of the whole tournament in a single evening (if you're not a very good player, perhaps), sort of spoiling the intention, I believe.

I agree about the divisions, that's probably more work to set up (and really hard to get right) than what it gains (shorter lists to look at for comparison).

Disclosing all challenges at tournament start is double-edged: yes, it allows players to plan ahead. But it also takes away from the surprise (I understand that it works well with your other suggestion).


Some other ideas:

a) What about rewarding not just some randomly chosen gods, but also/instead particularly unpopular gods? Could even increase the bonus as time goes on.
This is a bit like the release tournaments market-style bonus points for species/backgrounds/backgrounds, which I think works very well.

b) When dispensing with divisions (which, as I said, I consider an improvement), then you display current standings not (just) as a long list, but also provide three shorter lists:
Winners, Rune Collectors (who did not win yet), Runeless Players.
My goal is to make it easier for players to find a reasonable small-ish set of other players to compare themselves with. (This is like divisions, only intrinsically defined.) Obviously, this could be expanded into more categories, if needed. Equally obviously, this separation becomes more and more meaningful only as the tournament goes on.

[DrKe]

a) What about rewarding not just some randomly chosen gods, but also/instead particularly unpopular gods? Could even increase the bonus as time goes on.
This is a bit like the release tournaments market-style bonus points for species/backgrounds/backgrounds, which I think works very well.

I was under the impression that that was what wboh was going for already, but last few weeks featured some pretty standard options (HuFE^Ash, DsMo^Makh/Yred), so IDK. It was a more interesting point possibility than sub-75k turn win even with that, though.

[dynast]

Dynast, who made me look like a huge asshole for putting him in Division 4 at all.

You are not an asshole, you put me in the division i knew most of the people in webtiles who also told me about the csdc, so i was glad to be there.

My only suggestion is that next time a combo like TeEE appears we get to have bonuses inclined towards it, like reaching specific level in earth before other things, making we play the actual(bad) combo for the max points.

[WalkerBoh]

1) Remove divisions. We are not playing against each other, so I don't see particular reason to divide people in groups.

Thanks for the feedback! I agree - the only reason to have divisions at all was to allow less experienced players to compete with players of similar skill. But from what I've seen, this is not so important to most players so I'm not worried about abolishing it.

2) Announce combos and bonuses before start of the season. It can help to plan your strategy. Don't think it will majorly change or spoil something.

This has been suggested before, and I don't think I'll do it. Dpeg summed up the reasons why quite nicely. However I might do something like divide the season into 2 rounds, and release 3 or 4 combos at the start of each round (perhaps each player's best 3 games out of the 4 would count). That seems like it would take the best of both worlds.

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a) What about rewarding not just some randomly chosen gods, but also/instead particularly unpopular gods? Could even increase the bonus as time goes on.

DrKe is right, this was somewhat the intent last season. Although I never said it specifically, I selected the gods from a pool of unwon gods for that character (except for Week 7). Then I tried to tweak them around so there wouldn't be one obvious choice and so the gods would provide different options/strategies for completing the bonuses.

b) When dispensing with divisions (which, as I said, I consider an improvement), then you display current standings not (just) as a long list, but also provide three shorter lists:
Winners, Rune Collectors (who did not win yet), Runeless Players.

Good idea! I like the idea of setting "divisions" intrinsically and leaving them flexible. I think that captures the intent of the divisions with a much improved implementation.

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My only suggestion is that next time a combo like TeEE appears we get to have bonuses inclined towards it, like reaching specific level in earth before other things, making we play the actual(bad) combo for the max points.

Yeah this is tougher to achieve than it seems. One of my big goals with the bonuses is to not force players into a certain playstyle (for example, play as an earth mage). However, usually there are certain ways of playing that make getting the bonuses much easier, and that's about as far as I'm willing to take it. Making fair/interesting bonuses is definitely the trickiest part of setting up these events.

[Brain]

I'm wondering if there will be a season 4 soon. I missed the signups last time and this looks fun.

[XuaXua]

I'm wondering if there will be a season 4 soon.

I am planning on running a 4th season of CSDC, but it won't be until after the holidays blow over - and depending on what the timing is like for the 0.16 tournament it might wait until after that, as well.

... see you guys next year.

[WalkerBoh]

Looking right now like it will probably wait until after the 0.16 tournament.

[WalkerBoh]

Quick update: As of right now, I do not plan on organizing a 4th season of CSDC.

That isn't to say that one can't be run - most of the needed tools are managed by Moose and Kramin and function perfectly fine regardless of whether I'm involved or not. But someone would have to do the clerical work of organizing threads and rules and bonus ideas and such. If anyone desires to pick up where I left off, you are more than welcome to do so (in fact, I encourage it!), and I'm always available as a resource in case advice or help is needed. But I don't have the necessary time or desire to commit to CSDC at the moment.

[and into]

Quick update: As of right now, I do not plan on organizing a 4th season of CSDC.

That isn't to say that one can't be run - most of the needed tools are managed by Moose and Kramin and function perfectly fine regardless of whether I'm involved or not. But someone would have to do the clerical work of organizing threads and rules and bonus ideas and such. If anyone desires to pick up where I left off, you are more than welcome to do so (in fact, I encourage it!), and I'm always available as a resource in case advice or help is needed. But I don't have the necessary time or desire to commit to CSDC at the moment.

Completely understandable—but still sad. You, moose, and kramin did some awesome work. (And you shouldn't be so modest as to downplay the effort that goes into organizing!)

[twist]

Sign me up, please. Sounds like fun!
http://crawl.akrasiac.org/scoring/players/twist.html