First, I want to thank everyone who participated (players, coders and
administrators); the Tournament couldn't happen without everyone's
contributions.

With one returning admin volunteer (welcome back, Matt; Craig would have
joined us again as well, but hardware problems prevented him) and one
new admin (welcome, Wolfgang) we had 6 production game servers on two
continents; we also had an offer late in the month from Ryan in
Australia, who will hopefully be joining us next year.  We logged a
total of 16,722 completed games played by 406 players.

That puts us at half the players we had last year, and almost exactly
the same number of games (a perfect reversal from last year when we had
half the games of the year before, but almost twice as many players).
Though the average number of games per player did go up slightly, most
of the extra games seem to come from a renewed interest in character
re-rolling.  ;-)

Apparently, promising to let players punch me if the .nethackrc Editor
wasn't available this year was a good motivator since I finally got that
part rebuilt.  Next year, I guess I'll have to make the same offer if
the game recorder/monitor functions aren't available then.

We did not, however, manage to get the long-awaited extinctionist Trophy
(tentatively called Armageddon in our CVS tree) available this year.
aardvark, if you're reading this, please drop us an email if you'd be up
for adding species-extincted to your patch.

The spam-flooding on r.g.r.n. this year was a _major_ hindrance for me
(in case the jackass responsible is actually reading this group: yes,
you did manage to annoy someone; I hope that makes you happy and helps
you eventually manage to get a date), so we will probably try to bring
back our Bragging Board next year.  Yes, it'd be a big hassle but it'd
help get non-Usenet folks involved and would hopefully eliminate the
possibility of our interaction with players being overwhelmed by digital
vomit.  Can ya' tell I'm annoyed?

Speaking of next year: it seems that it will be our Tenth Anniversary!

I'm not going to go into our plans here (since we tend to be kinda
seat-of-the-pants about this sort of thing) but at the very least we
_will_ be doing a new t-shirt and sticker set, possibly based on Roger
Barnett's "Twas the Night Before DevNull", for the anniversary (since
the last set we did was in our first year) and hopefully a few tchochkes
as well.  My personal favorite of the ideas we've discussed so far is
FridgeHack(tm), the NetHack variant you can play on your fridge.

We'd like to do an in-the-real-world get together for either the launch
or closing of the Tournament next year as well if enough folks in the
San Francisco Bay Area are interested (please let us know if you would
be); we'd also be happy to help folks in other cities coordinate
get-togethers if any of y'all are interested.

Far be it from us to claim a monopoly on nifty ideas though, so if you
have a suggestion for t-shirts, stickers, tchochkes, events or whatnot
to celebrate our 10th anniversary please do send them in; we'll send a
free set of swag to anyone whose idea we use.

Thank you all; as I say here every year, we probably have as much fun
putting this on as anyone does playing in it.

-robin