I agree that spending too much effort trying to curb cheating in an honor-system-based just-for-fun competition without any rewards is just silly. (And in any case people could always just edit the character dump to say whatever they want since it's just a text file.)

I will say though that (depending on how important/involved ID is in that particular variant), knowing these kinds of things can affect player enjoyment (as Gwarl said)
even if they don't make much of a difference to the integrity of the competition.

I always turn flavors off, anyway, and don't bother to remember which one was what. If it was something bad, like an early ?deep descent, the mangled scroll name is gone before I have the chance to memorize it. Although, I guess I could go back through the message list and see if it's there. I just never bother.

I do think it important that each comp player starts with the same town setup, shop contents, equipment and inventory, and stats. Where turncount matters, the location of home and shops relative to the stairs can make a difference. Contents of shops can certainly make a difference (e.g., a good sling).

As for the capability of having the same starting level by immediately descending the stairs, the only time I've ever used that was in the latest FA comp, but given all the blood and very few winners, I don't think it mattered at all.

Nightmare-mode compo
 

For the future, I propose that we should have a Nightmare mode compo from a certain variant of Zangband, whether it's Z itself, Heng, or PCB 7.0.0. What do you think?

October competition is already decided on, it's just a secret. And I'm pretty sure what December will be. November is up for discussion though, might see a Z or Heng comp there.

I want to apologise to everyone for being late with this month's competition. I'm busy with exams, and it's going to be a couple of days until the new competition gets posted. There are complications with updating the competition on Live, it isn't quite a five minute job. Thanks for your patience.

When the 1st official FrogComposband release arrives, make the next compo for it!

Apologies for the delay!

Here's the shortlist of variants for the next comp:

angband feature/magic development branch
frogcomposband
sil-Q
hellband

These are going to be the next 4 competitions, not necessarily in that order.

Anyone who would like to see one of those sooner rather than later, make a post to let it be known.

I will try and get the competition up in the next couple of days but no promises.

I'd say leave the feature/magic branch for now - there are some tweaks I want to do to it, and some 4.1.2 bugfixes that I want incorporated too. Maybe next one or the one after, we'll see how it goes.

Hellband last please ;)
I have a number of bug fixes that need testing and finalizing.

T.

rodent/Sideways has also expressed misgivings. Quirk, is Sil-Q ready for another competion? :)