Hi folks,

First up, from myself, Makarios, and Ictinus, we want to offer our apologies for the experience you have all had during this past few events, and for the events surrounding the previous Staff Games. While we do our best to foresee and prevent problems, we've failed to do that in this case and we are not happy with the quality of gameplay product that we have presented throughout this tournament so far. We have been discussing how best we can remedy this to both make amends and to safeguard the competitive integrity of the Staff Games, and the integrity of your experience and expectations as players.

As of this post, the Championship aspect of 952 Games is cancelled. The staff will not be awarded at the end of the week. Points earned in the rest of the events will determine a winner, who will able to select an auction artefact from the upcoming auctions list (that will be live later next week) as their prize.

We will be rescheduling these Championship games in full for September (955) with adjustments, most of which are laid out below. It will be our priority to implement, adjust, and polish the games in time for this, and you'll be given as much advance notice of the schedule as possible.

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What will happen with the current games:

We'll run the rest of the events as planned, and double the credit prizes. This will be done retroactively for prizes already sent out. Further, the winner of the overall events will receive an auction artefact of their choice from the current circulation (so if we're never selling it again, that's not on the list of options).

UPCOMING remains accurate!

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Future Games:

Bugs:

We have added a new bugs category for Championship bugs CHAMPBUG. Any bug submitted and fixed from this category during this testing week will earn the filer 50 credits.

Championship points:

Championship points will be tied into the game proper, so they can be automatically awarded and viewed.

Championship points will only be awarded to the top six instead of top ten going forward, and the point spread changed to seven for first place, five for second, four, three, two, and finally one for sixth.

Rules/Questions:

We'll be using the new CHAMPSFAQ system in future for common questions and rule clarifications in order to avoid miscommunications. We will be updating all of the help files for each event with more detail on what is and isn't allowed, and plug as many gaps in obscure knowledge as we can. We'll need help to do this, so please use the system liberally but specifically, ask about specific abilities/items/use cases.

Format changes:

The Race around the world:

This will become a ship race using the ship race system with a custom course. The tumble race portion will be retired, there will be no more harbours and such to concern with. Wavecall will remain disabled but everything else will work. Whirlpools will have a shortened duration.

Riddles:

This event will remain as-is.

Twins:

This event will remain as-is.

XPevent:

We will be trialing some new xp modifiers in the upcoming xpevent. These were planned already to address some of the cases of overly safe ranking from last time, but this will be a good chance to see them in action.

We may also disable some artefacts for the Championship version, pending discussion. Any decisions here will be listed in the help file once made.

Worldgames:

Foozle format will remain with a new card, we're happy with this event.

The egghunt will be changed for championship egghunts to make eggs fall out of your hands in most cases instead of vanish (they'll still vanish when you go into cities or similar, but this should address a lot of the problem cases).

Bandersnatch will get the same treatment as egghunts. Whether this will be only for pk championship Bandersnatch or no pk is to be decided.



Again, we offer our sincerest apologies to all who have been adversely affected by these events, but we hope that you will help us in this coming week as we work to test and refine the remaining activities ready for September.

Penned by My hand on the 9th of Scarlatan, in the year 952 AF.