Four months have already passed, and, with the tournament already begun, we’re pleased to announce the next release of Dungeon Crawl: 0.9, Victory Valedictory. As always, there have been a load of changes, but most significant of these is probably the following: we say Auf Wiedersehen to victory dancing.

Gone are the days of pointlessly casting spells at walls, or pounding on a macro to evoke a crystal ball — usually with undesired results. The experience pool has been removed, and it is now not actually possible to “victory dance”. Instead, experience is spent as it is gained. The exact mechanics of this depend on two separate modes: in auto mode, experience is spent on skills recently used, while in manual mode, finer control is available via the skill screen (m).

As a final reminder, the August tournament has already started! You can visit the Tourney Website for more details, but succinctly: you can play with the console version either on CAO or CDO (“Trunk” on CDO, and “0.9″ on CAO, currently). Webtiles does not currently count towards the tournament, as it needs to be updated to run 0.9. This will be done Soon!

So, pull on your crawling shoes (and knee-cap covers), and get ready for a solid two weeks of frantic adventuring!

Eronarn has provided an excellent summary of major changes in 0.9, so here they are!
More: Read the rest of this entry…

There’s an important change this year:
due to the second tourney we had in May, duration of the official tournament has been shortened.
It will last from Aug 13th to Aug 28th, sixteen days.

In other news, the tentative date for 0.9 release has been changed to the first week of August.

Also, Debian trunk builds have been automated, so you might see them updated regularly. This is not the case for Mac builds though, sorry for that.

It is a pleasure to recap what has been going during the last 16 days: some players have set up a tournament to celebrate the release of 0.8: Overview

USAGE AND WEBTILES:

Server usage jumped up (about 400 players/day), not least because tiles players were able to join in the fun – a feature that’s been long asked for: Webtiles, Usage

PLAYER HIGHLIGHTS:

Winner was mikee (4191 points), narrowly edging out elliptic (4107 points) by managing the last win in the tourney (which gives bonus points).

mikee started with a two streak (including the first 15-rune win of the tourney), followed by two duds and then a seven streak! (KeAr^A, TrCr^E, MiAr^O, SEIE^K, HuVM^V, HOHu^T, HECj^S)

theglow played just five games and won them all! (SEWz^V, HuSt^S, GhGl^M, CeTm^O, DEIE^A)

casmith789 had the most combo high scores (22).

Players could go for some additional goals (Pennants). Only two got them all: 78291 and mikee.

CLAN HIGHLIGHTS:

Winner was Zinja, who was also the only clan to win at least one game with each species.

Second place was narrowly won by catonkeyboard (the team with the most combo high scores) over killdudes (aptly enough, the team with the most uniques killed… only Tiamat escaped them).

INTERESTING STATISTICS:
(brackets are about last August’s tournament, which took a full month)

number of players: .......................... 1523 (1091)
number of players with at least one win: ..... 108 (109)
number of wins: .............................. 233 (321)
average number of wins per day: ............. 14.5 (10.3)
distinct winning combinations: ............... 149 (101)*
overall winrate, quits excluded: ........... 0.79% (0.72%)
* Rules have been changed to make niche combinations more attractive.


Thanks to everyone who helped with the infrastructure and cheers to participants!

No, it’s not August! But to celebrate the release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.8, “Frantic Frenzied Felines”, various members of the Crawl community have banded together to run an unofficial tournament. Of course, August’s Tourney will run as scheduled.

From May 14th (midnight UTC) through May 30 (midnight UTC), 2011, any version 0.8 game played on CDO or CAO will count towards the tournament.

As with the official tournament, one can join a team, gain banners (or pennants) for various accomplishments, and, most importantly, accrue points for various activities.

All of the details for the tournament can be found here (http://crawl.develz.org/tournament).

Good luck, and good crawling!

The annual Crawl tournament took place during August. Thanks to the folks running the servers (CAO and CDO) for their awesome help.

Click here for the official tournament web page,

Some interesting numbers (those in brackets refer to the 2009 and 2008 tournaments):

More: Read the rest of this entry…

A quick reminder to all you eager Crawlers out there: there’s less than twelve hours (at the time of writing this, 10 hours, 21 minutes and a few seconds) until the start of the annual DCSS Tourney! Get your crawling kit in, stock the fridge with caffeine drinks and settle down for the ride.

As a reminder, crawl.akrasiac.org’s official tourney page is here.

We look forward to see you die regularly!

-DCSS Tourney Team, ’10

Calling all avid crawlers!

The calendar rolls once more towards August, and August means the annual Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup Tournament! It will begin at midnight, August 1st (UTC), and continue through until midnight, September 1st (UTC). All Stone Soup version 0.7.0 games started during this period of time, on both crawl.akrasiac.org and crawl.develz.org, will count towards the tournament.

We have several changes from last year’s tournament, including new banners, changes to the scoring system, and much more! You can read all about it on the official tourney page on crawl.akrasiac.org.

This year also introduces the Dungeon Sprint mini-game into the Tournament. Dungeon Sprint, or Sprint, is a variant of Stone Soup created by Chapayev, consisting of a dungeon dramatically reduced in size but increased in difficulty. Sprint games will be counted for the tournament from the 15th of August at midnight (UTC) on both CAO and CDO, and points will be awarded for wins! For more information, check out the tourney page linked above.

As usual, the Tournament will be a fast-paced month of Stone Soup action! Tune in for the blood-shed, tears and the enraged screams of those killed by Sigmund, as well as the joy of snatching the orb, and your first win, from beneath the pulsations of an orb of fire!

The best of luck to you all, we hope you have a great time playing this year.

-The Crawl Development & Tournament 2010 Teams

First of all, thank you to everyone who participated in this year’s Crawl Tournament, and special thanks to greensnark, Onia, and eredien for all of their help with tournament logistics and prizes. We had more than 700 players this year — edging up on NetHack tournament territory!

Our first place prize, a custom-skinned 9″ Asus eee netbook, goes to 78291, who scored over 4000 individual points in our tournament scoring system. Close behind him was mikee, with 3879; until an unfortunate drowning death near the end of the month, it was pretty much neck and neck. 78291 also scored the fastest real-time win (2:21:28), the top score (a 50K turn all-runer DDCK), the first victory of the tournament (a sub 3-hour SpCK of Lugonu), a decaying rune fetched at XL 8, the two wins with the fewest kills, and a streak of seven consecutive wins.  Basically what we’re saying here is: Stabwound, watch out.

More: Read the rest of this entry…

Like last year, the annual Stonesoup tournament will take place between August, 1 and 31. See here for a discussion on the scoring, and this page for last year’s tournament description. We are planning to release 0.5.1 before the beginning of the tournament so you’ll be able to play with a number of bugs fixed.

In other news, the DOS version has long been available for download from the Sourceforge site. And for Mac users facing problems when installing 0.5 we’ve added some documentation to hopefully help with that.