Yeah, you've been living in your smitemaster's paradise, but now it's time to prove your skills and collect respect. You may
think you got the moves, but it's entirely different game when we put the pressure on. Next Saturday, March 6th, 11am Pacific Standard Time, a hold will be released. And I mean eleven hundred hours exactly. We will synchronize with an atomic clock that Crampy's got down in the basement. The hold will be released at this URL...
http://www.drod.net/files/ContestHold.hold
Click the above URL right now and you'll get a missing file error (404), and at 10:59 3/6 you'll still be getting that error. But when the eleventh hour turns, you'll see that familiar dialog asking where you want to save your file. Don't dawdle--dump the hold file onto your drive, import it into DROD, and start playing straight away! The first person to get through this difficult hold authored by Clayton Weiss will win the contest and get one item of his or her choosing from the
DROD Store. You should set aside three hours of your time to hack your way through it. From our testing, we figure it could take that long to win.
How do we know you've won? Post the
secret word in a reply to this topic. You won't know the secret word unless you beat the hold or cheat. To ensure that nobody wins by cheating, we also ask that you upload a full set of victory demos within 15 minutes of posting the secret word. The time of the secret word posting will be used to determine who completed the hold first, but posting victory demos is also required.
Early Preparations
Here are some things you can do early to have a better chance of winning.
1. Play some of the harder holds available. Clayton's hold is quite difficult, and you want to be ready for it. A well-rounded skillset is crucial, so if you've always avoided a certain type of challenge (i.e. tar maneuvering, efficient combat with many monsters) now would be a good time to revisit these and learn a few things.
2. Make sure you are familiar with how to import holds into the game.
3. Practice exporting victory demos and putting them into a ZIP or RAR archive to post here. You don't have to be incredibly fast with this--just make sure you could do it within 15 minutes. It would be very sad to lose solely because you don't know how demo exporting work.
Ten O'Clock Preparations
Right before the contest hold is released, here are some more things to do:
1. You
must enable recording of victory demos for the competition or it is impossible for you to win.
2. Synch the clock you will be using to an accurate timesource. If you are six minutes fast, that's six minutes of boring refreshes waiting for us to put the file up. If you are six minutes slow, well... what if one of the other contestants completed the hold just five minutes before you? The horror!
3. Close other programs that might slow down DROD. Run it fullscreen for best performance. Set key repeat settings to suit you.
4. Start a reply to this post. As soon as you know the secret word, put it in the body of the message and hit "
Send Message"
. You never know--being five seconds earlier than the next guy could make all the difference.
5. Don't refresh this topic or forum pages to get the file. Specifically, I planned this so we wouldn't get a terrible server load that would slow everything down. A good way to be ready for the file release--at 11:59, type in the above URL in the address or URL area of your browser and continue refreshing about once every five seconds until you get the file download. Dialup and low-bandwidth people don't sweat it--these hold files are tiny and will be across the wire in seconds.
The Left-Me-Outs
11am PST might be three hours after your bedtime. It might be when you are driving to work. I realize that some people won't be able to make it, but we must pick one time for the contest, and 11am PST is the best time according to our web statistics. I wouldn't mind organizing a second contest (maybe 11pm) at a different time after we see how this one does.
Victory Demos
Let me say it one more time: You
must enable recording of victory demos for the competition or it is impossible for you to win. If it isn't clear why, please reread the above and ask questions as needed. I don't want anyone getting upset because they think they should have won, but failed to meet this requirement.
-Erik
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The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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