MAngband

How about having a MAngband competition?

I know, there once was a Ironman competition, but i was thinking about something quite different:

For one month there could a competition server be running, where you can simply log on as usual and play. All games during that period are evaluated and several awards can be won. *Many* awards can be won. The general idea is, that there should be more goals, then 'just' winning. This should be interesting to people like me, who don't expect to win the actual game in near future but can try to reach some other, maybe intermediate, goal. But it should also be fun for those players, who enjoy additional challenge.

For example there could be killing awards like: the first player to kill a specific unique (that makes one award for each unique - probably not very interesting for Grip, Fang and Maggot, but very well for Morgoth and probably many in between), an award for most kills in total, the title "dragon slayer" for the player with the most dragon kills, and so on.

There could be awards to parties, awards which reflect rather MAngband skill and not just online time (maybe 'conducts'?), collection awards, awfully lots of awards that i have not yet thought of, ...

I started coding some of this, but before I spend too much time for this, I'd like some featback. What do you think?

There's actually been two ironman competitions through the years, first one was in 99-00, or maybe 01... and the last one in december 05.

Any kind of competition could be a good thing in my opinion.

The most important thing, practically, would be to host the competition on a server that is fast enough to be playable for most players.
Most your ideas for awards are kinda interesting, it seems it could also eventually lead to some way to get more statistics out of the game. Typically the competitions are won by whoever gets the most experience and / or has dived the deepest in the dungeon. So a little variation here would probably be fun

And also, I think it's a really good idea to document whatever you're doing as much as possible, since it may be interesting for others later at some point. And have as many of those features/tweaks configurable [yes/no].

Hm. And you asked me in the #mangband channel:

[18:51] <Udosdottir> hello, warrior!
[18:52] <Udosdottir> what do you think, is a good indicator for MAngband skill, other then winning?

Answer:

1: Staying alive!
2: Killing monsters!