Atención:

Friends! Colleagues! Soldiers of the Wastelands! The time has come again for the fires of competition!

Hear, ye! In the names of PNWBemani.net and Masterman Vending, I, GRAND POOBAH GERRAK, declare the following challenge and offering of bounty:

A prize shall be issued to the first man, woman, or child to hold at least 25 first-place scores in the “Gerrak's Recommended” pack on the ITG machine at Acme Bowl for 1 consecutive week. Upon declaration of the winner, the people holding the second and third-most number of scores will receive prizes as well.


To be declared the winner you must:

1)   Obtain at least 25 scores and hold them for 1 consecutive week! It should be noted these do not have to be the same scores held for the entire week, so you can, say, take 28 scores, lose 3, take another 2, lose a different 2, and still have been considered as maintaining a high-enough total for the week. However if at any time during the week your total drops below 25, you must raise your total back, and start the week over.

2)   Post on the forums that you claim to have 25 scores. After 1 week, if no one claims to have re-taken enough scores to reduce your total below 25, I will go to Acme to verify your claim and declare you the winner. You must post on the forums to ensure other players know you are claiming to have almost won, and your week does not start until the day you post. You do not have to list the titles of the songs you hold, nor the actual total number of records you hold, you need only state that you hold 25 scores as of that day. If two people claim on the same day, their submission will be considered simultaneous and be subject to tiebreaker-rules (below), regardless of the actual time of their forum post. For these purposes, consider a “day” to start (and thus end) when Acme opens, rather than midnight (i.e. posts made ‘Saturday’ at 3am count as being made on that Friday.)


If someone claims to have 25 scores, there is a one-week challenging period where other players may try to take-back those scores. If you take back enough scores to reduce that player to below 25, you should post on the forums that you have done so, and ideally what song(s) you took back. I will verify that the player has been reduced to below 25 (and I will probably check every day I go if someone claims to have enough to win anyway), and if so, they must start their week over after re-upping their total. If you are going to make this claim, you should make sure you have actually reduced their total below 25 (by counting!), since they may have held more than 25 when you retook the song!



Some general rules/comments (Some extra details/notes in fine-print). The few slight revisions to rules (or other emphasized text I suppose) in bold:

1)   No one can be declared the winner before Mon, Oct 8. This is to ensure ample time for players to learn the songs, and establish scores. This means no one can issue a claim of holding 25 until Mon, Oct 1. Beginning Mon, Oct 22nd, the total required to win will reduce by 2.5 each week, rounded up. This is a sort of “sudden death” to ensure the tournament/event wraps up by around the end of Oct or beginning of Nov. I've extended this slightly to accommodate the longer-term nature of the event than originally anticipated. In the rather unlikely event of a tie, tiebreaker goes to the person who holds the most number of scores, then to the person who holds a higher sum of difficulties in their scores, then to whoever holds a score on the highest difficulty, then to the holder of the most number of scores at this difficulty, then to the higher of the average percent of this difficulty across their scores if there's still a tie somehow (complicated I know, but decisive…). I also reserve the right to make resyncs to the pack at any time, though at this point most have been tested and/or corrected; let me know if you think a song is way off-timing. Sadly pad-errors cannot fairly be taken into account for this event, if you suspect pad errors, you should report it to Masterman Vending (their number is on the machine, for those who don’t know). The machine has a built-in tiebreaker for exact ties in scores on any given song.

2)   Remember, there are prizes for the top three score-holders, and many (even most) of the charts will require playing a couple times to nail-down. There is also no entry fee for this event! So if nothing else, just try to take as many as possible! If you can’t take a score, move on to another song, keep practicing it, or give it another try the next time you go. If someone starts taking a lot of scores, practice up some of those songs and take them back!

3)   You must use the same name for all your scores across the pack, to within extremely obvious similarity (i.e, NSXX/NSX/NSXX! Are all fine, ALLAN/GRAK would not be acceptable). It must be very obvious to who’s total each score adds to.

4)   We are on the honor-system here, please exhibit good sportsmanship! This means you may not have, for instance, two different people using the same name to try to make a combined effort at getting a total of 25. Analogously, you may never put the name of another player for a score you made. You should also never make a false claim of holding enough scores, or for reducing someone’s total to below the needed total. No one should be cheating here, but if you suspect/witness it, please report it to me and I will investigate the allegation, to the possible end of disqualification. You should also always treat other players with politeness, respect and encouragement. This is a friendly competition and community after all!

5)   The scores held must be out of the “Gerrak’s Recommended” pack, NOT “Gerrak’s Pumpin Kicks”. The latter pack will be deleted after the event, and remains on the machine only temporarily for players to practice out of (if desired) and for me to play the songs in that pack without potentially disrupting any scores (and hence unfairly disrupting anyone’s total). No songs in GPK can count toward your total, even if you hold a higher score on a song in GPK than the score in GR.

6)   Only Expert-level charts count toward the total, or Hard charts where no Expert is available. Long/Marathon songs only count as 1 toward your total (but do count!).

7)   There are four charts in pack that will be considered ~~BOSS SONGS~~ (wooooOOOoo). These are the three 15s (Trisection, Over Drive, and Flames of the Sky), and the one 16 in the pack (Beyond the Universe). If you hold a score on any of these songs, it counts as two toward your total. The three 15s are of completely different chart-types celebrating (what I consider to be anyway) the 3 main attributes of difficulty in any song: Speed, Stamina, and Technicality (corresponding respectively above). The 16 is just really, really hard. This is to add some fun to the hard-end and to present a very tough challenge to aspire to, but of course there are ample songs in the pack to win without holding (or passing even) any of these, and I strongly suspect not all 4 of them will even be passed by anyone by the end of the event!


The "Gerrak's Recommended" pack is available for download in two separate links for your convenience in learning the songs! They can be found here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?tla0a58xx5qr59e (part 1)

http://www.mediafire.com/?4rqm5815xth38c4 (part 2)

Best of luck friends! And I hope you enjoy the event! Exact prizes will be revealed later and will be cooler than just boring cash. Special thanks to Bill Masterman for his significant contribution to the prize pool!