These early tournaments had a simple structure; by the time I stopped hosting it, the scoreboard was absurdly complicated.
An old post of mine from Kuro5hin.Org, dated “Wed Oct 31st, 2001 at 06:31:11 PM EST”.
Tonight (Halloween) at midnight Pacific U.S. Time, /dev/null’s third Annual NetHack Tournament opens. As with past years, the Tournament is open to anyone who’d like to play. We’re also open to anyone who’d like to volunteer to run a game server, since (though we have a T1 hosting the main game server) play can be slow across the transoceanic links.
/dev/null is a loose association of networking geeks, unincorporated and noncommercial. We make no money from this; we just do it for giggles.
The prize structure going in, as we’re open to suggestions to change this during the Tournament, is:
Prizes
The “standard” prizes will go to:
- Highest Score
- 1st, 2nd and 3rd Highest Score in each class
The “additional” prizes will go to:
- Most Ascensions
- Lowest Scored Ascension
Since we’d appreciate volunteer servers to help speed the game play up for folks not near Oakland, California, here’s roughly what you need to host:
Server Requirements
Remember, before volunteering, that anyone with admin level access to a game server box is not allowed to compete. So don’t volunteer to host if you want to be a contender.
- a multi-user NetHack installation (thus, probably, a Unix of some sort; the /dev/null server is an OpenBSD system)
- sufficient speed/disk/memory to support 250 player accounts and 25 concurrent players (ours is a P133 with 64M of memory and 2.5G of disk)
- a dedicated Internet connection (our is on a T1)
- since NetHack needs real user accounts, we’d recommend that it be a dedicated system (the players will need to be entered in /etc/passwd to play on the box)
The K5 community was very helpful with last year’s Tournament, as these two articles having been posted on K5 attest, even to two readers here volunteering to run game servers. Thank, again!
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