Tournament Week 1 Reflections

[edgefigaro]

Today marks the end of the first week. I've been busy, but success has often slipped from my grasp. I've been doing lots of fun challenges though. I'm looking forward to the week ahead.

I've been working on a lot of the challenge banners this week. Today I got my nemelex choice win (SpIE) after two mishaps (nemelex choice was cleared as I was in zot both times >.<) I spent significant time on the Lord of Darkness --> Avarice combo, my best run splatted in Dis 7 with Maxwell's plate on, decided to move on from that. I lost a winnable No-God run, got cocky at TRJ and figured I'd kill him and than quaff the !curemut that I had stashed in D somewhere, died to blurry vision blinking away from the TRJ hordelings.

By far, the most disappointing run was my HOAM. I was ~30 minutes off of having the Nemelex choice. I was in zot 5 when it closed. So, I decide to go kiku and tool around in vaults/clear crypts and go for the orb --> golden rune challenge. I used all my moxxie/potions/everything to get to tomb 3, and get lucky on a teleport. There is one greater mummy between me and the rune. The mummy immediately summons 3 scorpions. I'm clearing them out while I am taking some agro from behind. Then my ring of tele I had been invoking to tele around randomly procs and sends me away next to a pan lord. Thus ends the run. Avoidable mistake. Also, I had appropriation on the character. I get that rune if I take my ring off or just cast the spell. Lessons learned. The frustration remains though. I really was underpowered for that challenge anyway, and I learned alot about tomb, and what happens when you have the orb. Axes >> swords in this case.

Today picked up my second win, on a Nemlex Challenge SpIE. Double bonus, I got the Ru abandonment along the way. Triple bonus, I finished with a yred title, Grim Reaper, for 2/3 invocations title wins, first being luguno (found the corrupted temple on my first run). It is nice to catch a break.

I've had a blast working on these challenges, but for this upcoming week, I'm moving away from these intense/limiting challenges and focusing on full clearing extended, zig, and getting six runes before depths. I'm looking forward to playing a strong, straightforward combo after all these challenge runs. Also, I miss Qaz and jiv, so I'll play them next. I have a decent idea for the ascetic challenge, and and I want to get back around to trying for the lord of Darkness banner, but I don't know if there will be time.

Anyone else have any tournament reflections?

Edit: Looking through the ghost killer pages, I see this:

1 ew's ghost 431 ew (416), firemonkey (3), hermitwo (3), iafm (2), Kellhus (2), Xenophon, Fungee, Gandelf, Soadreqm, soul
2 gw's ghost 70 gw (33), Artificial (3), Soupchild (3), Glitz (2), axaxaxas (2), Nychthemeron (2), getdunked, Jark, Salasann, ASSMAN, Kiir, Shambuh, Gregian, lawman0, SlowGraham, ayayaya, gressup, Matholomew, Demosins, greynaab, mrpyro, Squat495, derpyturtle, Nieral, UncommonGray, exodus, Ironfoot, Arctor, feodoric, jackrogers, RepHenryClay

Ew's ghost has kille ew 416 times. GW's ghost has killed gw 33 times. wtf?

[ldf]

Also, I had appropriation on the character.

This is not appropriate.

Ew's ghost has kille ew 416 times. GW's ghost has killed gw 33 times. wtf?

They are bots and play a lot. And die a lot. First floors are flooded by their ghosts, nothing surprising in this statistics.

[Sandman25]

Due to step down for combo points it looks like having an endless streak is the best strategy, especially for clans. Just look at WalkerBoh if you doubt

[tasonir]

I completed the only banner that matter's, Slow and Steady. How appropriate that the best god should have the most meaningful banner, reliable streaking

Sadly the 5th character in that streak ran into a ijgyb or whatever that goblin's name is, and he had a flame wand. You wouldn't think a flame wand would do that much damage, especially when I had FIFTEEN AC ON D:2, and lured him around a corner, but he zapped it precisely three times to kill me from full health. Seriously. Ah well, the important part was getting a streak of 4, because Chei banner, of course. And two were 15 runes with decently high score, so I'll call it a win.

Working on a caster now so I can do a god whose point value hasn't been driven into the single digits, and man, it's been long time since I was a caster. Having haste and powerful spells is definitely absurdly powerful, but I am making a lot of mistakes being rusty. Fortunately the character is so fault tolerant that it hasn't killed me yet

As an example: I had a ton of EA scrolls, so I enchanted up an ice dragon hide as I was getting tired of having ~12 ac, then I realized afterwards that I had 7 strength (deep elf conjurer). I had overtrained magic enough that fireball stayed at 1%, but most of my other spells took a dive...I've been making it work through overtraining, although in hindsight I probably should have just kept the robe of the archmagi instead


Edit: here's the gargoyle morgue: http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/tasonir/mor ... 062415.txt 3 zaps, for 5, 6, and 12 damage.

[WalkerBoh]

This tournament is crazy. I'm not sure how to explain the huge win rate increase (2.66% last time I checked, previous tourney was 1.55%), but the number of wins and players winning is obscene. Two people (DrKe and I) won 4 games in a day, which has never happened before. It's been a lot of fun so far though, I love how close the top player and top clan competitions are.

With regards to the scoring changes, streaks and runes are definitely king. Many top players essentially get no points from r/c/g at this point - I wonder if that will put increased emphasis on high scores, runes, and the team competition points (# of high scores, uniques killed, etc). I'm also very sad points for longest streak were removed, just in time for me to have a chance at winning it...

[edgefigaro]

I completed the only banner that matter's, Slow and Steady. How appropriate that the best god should have the most meaningful banner, reliable streaking

Sadly the 5th character in that streak ran into a ijgyb or whatever that goblin's name is, and he had a flame wand. You wouldn't think a flame wand would do that much damage, especially when I had FIFTEEN AC ON D:2, and lured him around a corner, but he zapped it precisely three times to kill me from full health. Seriously. Ah well, the important part was getting a streak of 4, because Chei banner, of course. And two were 15 runes with decently high score, so I'll call it a win.

Working on a caster now so I can do a god whose point value hasn't been driven into the single digits, and man, it's been long time since I was a caster. Having haste and powerful spells is definitely absurdly powerful, but I am making a lot of mistakes being rusty. Fortunately the character is so fault tolerant that it hasn't killed me yet

As an example: I had a ton of EA scrolls, so I enchanted up an ice dragon hide as I was getting tired of having ~12 ac, then I realized afterwards that I had 7 strength (deep elf conjurer). I had overtrained magic enough that fireball stayed at 1%, but most of my other spells took a dive...I've been making it work through overtraining, although in hindsight I probably should have just kept the robe of the archmagi instead


Edit: here's the gargoyle morgue: http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/tasonir/mor ... 062415.txt 3 zaps, for 5, 6, and 12 damage.

Yah, that banner is the one I feel is beyond me. Maybe next tournament I'll consider it plausible. Well done on 4 streak!

[Scalding Steam]

It's fun. I ended up being a much more active participant than I thought I'd be.

Just won an all-rune HuAK today, was my first extended run since 0.9. Aura of Abjuration rules. Also did a Speed Demon III run with a MiBe, which was much easier than I expected.

My goal is to end in top 100. It's... a stretch, seeing that I'm currently at the 146th place, but I gotta try.

[hubbles]

My clan (Team Meat) has also noticed a surprising increase in wins this tourney. I don't understand it, but I think a few factors have led to easier descents: better randarts, singularity, God rebalancing, no shoals drowning, and definitely the cumulative changes of the past few updates (no item destruction).

[Sharkman1231]

My clan (Team Meat) has also noticed a surprising increase in wins this tourney. I don't understand it, but I think a few factors have led to easier descents: better randarts, singularity, God rebalancing, no shoals drowning, and definitely the cumulative changes of the past few updates (no item destruction).

Maybe you've all improved.

[TAS2012]

This tournament is crazy. I'm not sure how to explain the huge win rate increase (2.66% last time I checked, previous tourney was 1.55%), but the number of wins and players winning is obscene. Two people (DrKe and I) won 4 games in a day, which has never happened before.

We'd been noticing that the winrate was higher this tournament
compared to last, and recently wheals noticed that damage was doubled
compared to 0.15. The commit that introduced the bug was found to be:

0.17-a0-22-ge0bdd66
http://s-z.org/neil/git/?p=crawl.git;a= ... bdd66d849c

So player melee damage has been doubled for about two weeks now,
including all of the tournament.

Bugfix commit (actually a revert):
http://s-z.org/neil/git/?p=crawl.git;a= ... 33ee90c02d

wheals' example of the effects of the bug:
http://sprunge.us/HPhU

[scorpionwarrior]

This tournament is crazy. I'm not sure how to explain the huge win rate increase (2.66% last time I checked, previous tourney was 1.55%), but the number of wins and players winning is obscene. Two people (DrKe and I) won 4 games in a day, which has never happened before.

We'd been noticing that the winrate was higher this tournament
compared to last, and recently wheals noticed that damage was doubled
compared to 0.15. The commit that introduced the bug was found to be:




0.17-a0-22-ge0bdd66
http://s-z.org/neil/git/?p=crawl.git;a= ... bdd66d849c

So player melee damage has been doubled for about two weeks now,
including all of the tournament.

Bugfix commit (actually a revert):
http://s-z.org/neil/git/?p=crawl.git;a= ... 33ee90c02d

wheals' example of the effects of the bug:
http://sprunge.us/HPhU

Woah, I noticed I was doing a ton of damage with dire flails and other weapons that are usually underwhelming, I assumed it was confirmation bias and whatnot. apparently not. I also noticed monsters being awakened on death of other monsters much more than usual, which seems related.

[TAS2012]

Makes me feel dirty playing now. Hope there is an emergency bugfix soon.

[Sandman25]

I am not sure but from the commit it looks like the damage was doubled for infusion only.

[TAS2012]

Doubled for all melee damage by the player AFAICT. This is also what the developers say on it, an emergency mid-tournament bugfix seems to be on its way already.

[Sandman25]

Doubled for all melee damage by the player AFAICT. This is also what the developers say on it, an emergency mid-tournament bugfix seems to be on its way already.

Poor pure casters, nobody is going to play them for a while...

[tasonir]

Wow. Kind of makes you (me) think how opaque damage results really are, that you can double the damage during one of the heaviest played weeks and people won't notice it for days...

[xentronium]

Actually I had a moment where I thought to myself, "why the heck am I doing so much damage with this trident." I actually thought, maybe there's a bug and tridents are doing more damage than they should. But I didn't notice anything unusual with my bardiche later on, or with many battle axes and dwhips on other characters.
So I only noticed a difference on a low end weapon, because I'm already conditioned to think of good weapons as being good, and didn't really notice when they got better.

[TAS2012]

I think many players noticed the change in how successful their games were in general, just not sure what was causing it.

Fix has now been pushed to most servers, if you are playing the 0.16.0-18-g484a79e it has been fixed (previous would probably have been 0.16.0-2-gb487679).

Changelog (ATM) for (upcoming) 0.16.1

  Code:

Stone Soup 0.16.1 (20150322)
--------------------------------------------
* Major bugfix release. Because of the first two bugfixes listed below, it's
  strongly recommended that all 0.16.0 users upgrade to this version.
* Fix a bug where all player melee damage was effectively doubled. This only
  affected player melee damage, not player ranged or spells, or monster damage
  at all.
* Fix a bug in sprint where controlled blink was blocked as if from the stasis
  effect.
* Artefacts with the Contam property are no longer marked as chaotic and hence
  hated by Zin, since Zin wouldn't give penance for using e.g. weapons with
  this property anyhow. There's now a warning under Zin when Contam items are
  removed, since this does incur penance.
* Monsters no longer avoid walking on shadow traps.
* Fix the build for the Android port of DCSS.
* Other minor bugfixes.

[TAS2012]

See the wins spike and compare to games...
http://crawl.akrasiac.org/scoring/per-day.html

[WalkerBoh]

Yeah there's really no other way a mediocre player like myself could post a 13-streak. Glad that one has a giant asterisk for all of eternity.

[TAS2012]

0.16.1 is announced. Good reading found there.

[TAS2012]

Yeah there's really no other way a mediocre player like myself could post a 13-streak. Glad that one has a giant asterisk for all of eternity.

Pffft, mediocre player.

What would that make me then......

[Moanerette]

Just a quick note for my colleagues in Team Evil; I'm pretty ill at the minute and simply haven't had the energy to play. I'll try and finish my current game before the tourney's conclusion, but apologies for not being able to participate more.

[scorpionwarrior]

Just a quick note for my colleagues in Team Evil; I'm pretty ill at the minute and simply haven't had the energy to play. I'll try and finish my current game before the tourney's conclusion, but apologies for not being able to participate more.

no worries, and get well soon :) Playing crawl while sick sounds like a bad time.

[nilsbloodaxe]

Just a quick note for my colleagues in Team Evil; I'm pretty ill at the minute and simply haven't had the energy to play. I'll try and finish my current game before the tourney's conclusion, but apologies for not being able to participate more.

no worries, and get well soon Playing crawl while sick sounds like a bad time.

Wimps, I just finished my 4th win in a streak while sick as a dog.

[Bloax]

Don't look at me, I'm just sleep deprived as fuck and yet somehow managed to churn out a 6-win streak in 14 hours.

Of course it then hits me just how sleep deprived I was after 23 hours on 6 hours of sleep after 24 hours of uptime the previous day and then I manage to end the streak on a DDBe.