Danger Zone L$ 25,000 Tournament

The Danger Zone tournament continues with Crystal Morrison claiming finalist spot number 3. Midway through the week she exploded to the top of the leader board and never looked back. Crystal joins the previous two week's wiiners, Zen Golding and Phantom Kaos. There are five slots left to be filled -- one of them could be you!

As a finalist, Crystal is guaranteed to win at least L$2,500. If she beats the other finalists, she will take home the Grand Prize of L$25,000 all for herself Good luck, Crystal!

I want to talk a bit more about the format of the Danger Zone Tournament, since I still see people showing up without fully understanding how it works. It is different from anything else on Second Life. I created this Tournament format to solve a couple issues I had with the Expo and Danger Zone.

Mostly, it's just that I don't have time to be online at all hours of the day. I needed something that pretty much ran itself. So the Danger Zone Tournament is fully automatic. It runs itself. It doesn't need a host, or a sign-up sheet, or anything besides a little badge you have to put on. From the player's point of view, playing in the Tournament is no different from playing an ordinary game of Danger Zone. If you're wearing the badge, then your game counts towards your tournament score.

Hiring hosts can be problematic, so the Danger Zone Tournament runs continuously. You don't have to wait for an event, and there's no special time you have to be there. You can grab a couple friends and play games any time. As long as you're wearing the badge, the games count for your tournament score.

Finally, the tournament resets each week. If you're just finding out about it now, you don't have to worry about being left behind. All the scores reset to zero at the start of the week (5PM Saturday, to be exact). So anyone who wants to join can do so, at any time, and still have a good chance of winning the grand prize.

A few words on implementation (this is mostly for the scripters out there). An automated system like this can run into memory and performance issues. Potentially, every single resident could sign up and participate in the tournament at once. It's not possible to keep track of everyone's scores in a central location. You'd run into the 16k limit very quickly, and sorting and searching those lists would be very very slow.

I also didn't want to run things through a web server, mostly because I don't have a web server.

So the tournament system is distributed. The badges themselves each contain a little bit of code that tracks each player's score. When a badge gets close to the Leader Board, it registers the score and displays it if it's in the Top Ten.

That meant I had to encrypt everything, and try to harden communications as much as possible. I haven't had any problems though with people trying to hack the badges.

If anyone is interested in the code I used for running the Tournament, IM me in world.