DC19 Schemaverse Results and Final Remarks

[Abstrct]

Hi All,
Thank you to everybody who came to one of the Schemaverse talks, signed up at the booth and gave the game a try. For our first year, the response from everybody was incredible and far greater than we could have imagined.

From a completely selfish point of view is was so great to have a chance to talk to many on how to improve the game. I have a giant list of bug fixes and features that I can't wait to start implementing. I know a lot of people asked about the source so I hope I can get some help improving the game over the year in preparation for DEFCON 20. Before you start checking out the source, just give me a week or two to get everything in there cleaned up. Some changes were made leading up to and during the conference that need to be committed and I have some ideas on how to better organize the code as well.

There are quite a few other people that deserve a thank you as well. To the speaker, contest, noc and forum goons, thanks for making sure everything was running smooth on your end. You guys have quite the job to pull off and I just hope that we don't make it any more…interesting…than it already is.


Sponsors - Our Prize donors

PostgreSQL
http://www.postgresql.org

Navicat PostgreSQL
http://www.navicat.com

pgWest 2011 - The PostgreSQL Conference
https://www.postgresqlconference.org/

(and an anonymous donation)


Sponsors - Infrastructure

If a friend of mine at the Info Bunker had not offered us a server (72 hours before the conference) we would have been hosting off a VM for the Tournament. Naturally, the kick-ass machine they offered us, at completely no cost, performed awesome. My original estimate was that about 20 people would sign up and I figured the VM would have no issue with that. When we hit 84 users by Friday we were quite grateful for the added horsepower.

They definitely deserve some recognition here for saving the day from deadlocks and also just having a pretty badass facility: http://www.infobunker.com/

Sponsors - Art
For a database game I would say we had some pretty fantastic art :D Our pins were a hit and the images really helped out in the presentation too. Thank you to my friend Brad Johnson (http://brad-johnson.com/) on his great work on the new logo and all the pin designs which he managed to pull off on a ridiculously short timeline.

Winners and Prizes

Congrats to all the winners in the first Schemaverse DEFCON Tournament! I am in the process of getting everything organized and actually getting you your prize. If you don't hear from me by email or whatever other method I can find you on, send me an email at josh at schemaverse dot com.


Schema Supremacy Trophy: Derpfish
Prize: One Admission to pgWest 2011 - The PostgreSQL Conference

Best in-game hacks reported: Inversespire and Octalthorpe
Prize: $50

Lottery of all players: cppbari
Prize: Navicat for PostgreSQL

First Blood Trophy: trafficone
Prize: PostgreSQL Poster and T-Shirt


Final Standings




Fun Statistics

Registered Players: 108
Most logged in at once: 12

Total events logged: 2063611
Number of queries ran: 1273888

Total Ships: 21136
Attacks: 55539
Repairs: 40228
Successful Mines: 1619563

Presentation Material
The final presentation material for When Space Elephants Attack can be found at https://schemaverse.com/Abstrct-When...antsAttack.pdf
It is drastically different compared to what is on the DVD.


The Team
The Schemaverse Tournament was made possible by these fine folk from SauceTel. You can definitely expect to find us back next year with The Schemaverse DEFCON Tournament and maybe some other games as well.

• Abstrct
• appl
• rick
• Tigereye

Follow @Schemaverse on twitter for updates to gameplay, bug fixes and details about next years contest.


-Abstrct
http://schemaverse.com

[trafficone]

Re: DC19 Schemaverse Results and Final Remarks

Congrats to the winners! Can you divulge the details of the in-game hack? Also, how long should the winners wait before contacting you?

[Abstrct]

Re: DC19 Schemaverse Results and Final Remarks

Can you divulge the details of the in-game hack?

Absolutely :D My two fav attacks were the following:

Great Start
As the rules say, any ship can start with any skill combination of attack, defense, engineering and prospecting so long as the sum of them together is less than or equal to 20.

A couple people figured out that if you perform an erroneous insert like the following, the values still pass the check done on the insert trigger:

INSERT INTO my_ships(name, attack, defense, engineering, prospecting) VALUES('owned', 1000000, 5,-1000000, 15):

Since 1000000 + -1000000 +5 + 15 = 20 -- Everything is good!
Silly mistake on my part but certainly a fun advantage if you figured it out

Spy Drone
The spy drone hack was my favourite for sure. Somebody was using transactions from a python script to do most of their playing and figured it out that transactions could be used to their advantage in some situations.

The best transaction hack they discovered went like this:

1. Start a new transaction
2. Insert ship into a place on the map where you currently have no other ships
3. Check the ships_in_range view to see if there are any enemies around - Log this outside of the schemaverse
4. Roll back transaction to destroy ship and receive money back

TL:DR They used a common database feature to create their own free spy drones. This was an awesome idea and certainly deserving of the cash hack prize that was handed out.

Both bugs are on the list to be squashed. I already have fixes in my mind for them so next years players will need to keep rooting around my code for new ways to game the system.

Also, how long should the winners wait before contacting you?

Don't bother waiting, just email me your name/address to josh at schemaverse dot com so I can send you your swag :)



-Abstrct