/dev/null/nethack Tournament 2013 Announcement

[krystal]

Below is the annual "official" /dev/null/nethack announcement.

Once again, this has been crazy busy and the Tournament has seen less
development than it deserves.  In addition to changing jobs (which is
always extra time consuming) this year my wife and I had twins (and have
thus had _way_ less sleep than I'd previously thought possible).
Nathanial, who wrote last year's excellent Pool Challenge patch, also
has a new job and a new baby.

Yow.

So.  This year will not include a new Challenge, nor will there be any
substantial changes to the system (though I _will_ fix the problem with
the Oracle bot losing its database connection and going quiet).  Next
year will be the year of major re-writes, though; the new PHP-based web
site will be ready to use by then, and I suspect I'll be able to talk
Nathanial into not only coming up with an awesome new Challenge but also
hunting down some of the more irritating bugs in the old ones.

Pre-registration opened on October 1st, and will remain available until
the start of the Tournament on Halloween; during that time you can again
re-activate your player account from previous years (provided that you
still have the same email address), rather than having to register a new
account every year.

Feel free to pass this announcement 'round and submit it to any
appropriate venues, should you feel so inclined.

See y'all on Halloween.

-robin

#####
The NetHack season is upon us once again.

On Halloween, at midnight Pacific U.S. Time, /dev/null's Fifteenth
Annual NetHack Tournament (<http://nethack.devnull.net>) opens.  As with
past years, the Tournament is open to anyone who'd like to play.

We no longer try to describe the Trophy structure in these
announcements; it gets more complicated every year and this section had
reached two screens of text.  A full description is available on the web
site at <http://nethack.devnull.net/tournament/trophies.shtml>.

To participate in the Tournament, visit our web site
(<http://nethack.devnull.net>) during the month and sign up for an
account.  Pre-registration is available in the month before the
Tournament to returning players from previous years.

/dev/null is a loose association of networking geeks, unincorporated and
noncommercial.  We just do this for giggles; we make no money from this
other than what folks feel like donating and from selling the occasional
bit of swag.
#####