Junethack 2011 - Post Mortem
Patric Mueller
Junethack - The NetHack Cross-Variant Summer Tournament 2011 has
ended on midnight today.
http://junethack.rawrnix.com/
The last day saw frantic action to finish all the games that were
interrupted the day before when NAO was upgraded (hopefully fixing the
hangs that has been haunting NAO the last few weeks) and a left-over
admin message made many weary to play on the server.
Overall, IMO it was a successful tournament, despite the name (hey, this
community can wait 8 years for a release, it can take a one and half
month late tournament) and despite the fact that the code for the
tournament website was finished only one day before the tournament
ended.
I think Junethack succeeded in providing a different experience than
devnull, not only because of the cross-variant trophies but they
certainly contributed their share. I for one would like to see even
more cross-variant trophies next year.
Some boring statistics links:
http://junethack.rawrnix.com/activity
http://junethack.rawrnix.com/ascensions
http://junethack.rawrnix.com/scoreboard
Some boring statistics:
337 people registered on the server, 197 linked their account with the
public servers, and 161 actually played at least one game.
7445 games were played on all 9 public servers during the tournament by
registered users, 18079 were played by all players including those not
taking part in the tournament.
49 different people ascended 172 games.
Tournament games by variant:
NetHack: 5672
SporkHack: 358
UnNetHack: 419
AceHack: 727
NetHack 1.3d: 269
The detailed trophy summary is on
http://junethack.rawrnix.com/scoreboard
Because of excessive start scumming, which affected the performance of
parsing new games on the server and displaying the website, we had to
add some start scum protection. A start scummed game was defined as a
game where the player escaped or quit within the first 10 turns.
At the end of the tournament, we counted 125252 start scummed games.
About a week into the tournament, we got slashdotted which resulted in
117 new registered users on a single day:
http://games.slashdot.org/story/11/07/22/2338215/First-NetHack-Cross-Variant-Summer-Tournament
See you all next year again!
Bye
Patric
--
NetHack-De: NetHack auf Deutsch - http://nethack-de.sf.net/
UnNetHack: http://apps.sf.net/trac/unnethack/
JoaoSantos
> Junethack - The NetHack Cross-Variant Summer Tournament 2011 has
> ended on midnight today.http://junethack.rawrnix.com/
Thanks to the admins for the tournament.
> I think Junethack succeeded in providing a different experience than
> devnull, not only because of the cross-variant trophies but they
> certainly contributed their share. I for one would like to see even
> more cross-variant trophies next year.
[...]
It was a nice tournament, specially because of the variants available.
> Tournament games by variant:
> NetHack: 5672
> SporkHack: 358
> UnNetHack: 419
> AceHack: 727
> NetHack 1.3d: 269
[...]
Is it me, or was the number of sporkhack games way lower than
expected?
solidsnail
Patric Mueller
> On Aug 15, 10:58 pm, Patric Mueller <bh...@bigfoot.com> wrote:
>
>> I think Junethack succeeded in providing a different experience than
>> devnull, not only because of the cross-variant trophies but they
>> certainly contributed their share. I for one would like to see even
>> more cross-variant trophies next year.
> [...]
> It was a nice tournament, specially because of the variants available.
There was already code for an additional clan trophy written (most
trophy variants combinations) to even more encourage people to play
variants but it was already to late in the tournament to change the
clan rules. But next year it will be there.
I did miss Slash'Em a bit. If you do variants it should definitively
be there, too. But we didn't have a public server available for
Slash'Em. Maybe next year.
A cool idea (that I got voted down on and that would also probable not
have been realistic with the little time we had in preparation left)
was to allow translated versions of the game(Japanese, Spanish and
German) to be also counted for the tournament.
But AFAIK there aren't any public servers for the Japanese and Spanish
versions and the German version is a bit out of date.
>> Tournament games by variant:
>> NetHack: 5672
>> SporkHack: 358
>> UnNetHack: 419
>> AceHack: 727
>> NetHack 1.3d: 269
> [...]
> Is it me, or was the number of sporkhack games way lower than
> expected?
I'm not sure how popular SporkHack is. Why did you expect more?
JoaoSantos
[...]
> >> Tournament games by variant:
> >> NetHack: 5672
> >> SporkHack: 358
> >> UnNetHack: 419
> >> AceHack: 727
> >> NetHack 1.3d: 269
> > [...]
> > Is it me, or was the number of sporkhack games way lower than
> > expected?
>
> I'm not sure how popular SporkHack is. Why did you expect more?
Truth is I have been away from Nethack for some months, so I'm not
sure what people have been playing lately. However, I had the feeling
SporkHack was the more popular variant (apart perhaps from SLASHEM).
solidsnail
Patric Mueller
Popularity is hard to measure and even harder to compare. It doesn't
make it easier if you can't compare the same numbers.
For example we have the same download metric for Vanilla NetHack,
Slash'Em and UnNetHack, because all are hosted on sourceforge (and
these even miss the download numbers for the Linux distros or for the
Vulture packages).
But we have no download numbers at all for SporkHack (because its
binaries are hosted elsewhere without statistics) and AceHack (because
it didn't have a real release yet).
SporkHack certainly had more discussion in here than Slash'Em and
UnNetHack, but that doesn't say anything about how many people
actually played it.
But I can show you the data for the games on the public servers during
the tournament period. The Junethack website of course only showed the
data for those games with registered users, but the database contained
all games.
Total numbers of games played during the tournament period:
NetHack: 15836
SporkHack: 549
UnNetHack: 527
AceHack: 862
NetHack 1.3d: 305
Count of different users playing during the tournament period:
NetHack: 975
SporkHack: 63
UnNetHack: 59
AceHack: 77
NetHack 1.3d: 39
If you look at the download numbers on SF, you see that
Vanilla:Slash'Em:UnNetHack are about 100:10:1.5
If you look at tournament numbers, UnNetHack does better with a
100:3.3 resp. 100:6 but compared to the other variants you can't
really say which one is more popular.
Because the numbers are rather low and also because the tournament
tried to encourage playing other variant by providing trophies for
doings so, so it's not really unbiased.