Thank you for your patience, everyone: I didn’t expect judging to take two and a half months. However, the final judge completed judging yesterday, and today I am happy to announce the final results for MARTH.
1st Closing Act 71/80
2nd Into Madness 60/80
3rd Project HBR: Lonely River 56/80
=4th Manaketes and Warps 55/80
=4th Blast from the Past 55/80
=4th Storge Gaiden 55/80
7th The Lady and the Princess 54/80
=8th The Breakout 53/80
=8th We Are Legion 53/80
10th Tactics of Taming 52/80
11th Trader Raiders 49/80
12th Where's Fado 45/80
=13th Rise of the Replacements 42/80
=13th Omori Emblem 42/80
=15th Cycle of the Heavens 39/80
=15th Nine Heroes 39/80
=17th The Random Vague Job 67 38/80
=17th Tower Defence 38/80
19th Rookie's Day 35/80
=20th Village Chapter 32/80
=20th Decadences 32/80
22nd Battlefield - Homecoming 29/80
=23rd Fighting for Freedom 28/80
=23rd Smash 'n Grab 28/80
25th (Untitled) 27/80
26th Port Phenire 19/80
D/Q The Traitor's Tale 28/80
D/Q Heir of Leonster 15/80
Congratulations to Closing Act, by Rivian! You have made a really terrific hack, and you have won MARTH! Into Madness by Rexacuse takes the silver medal, while Project HBR: Lonely River by BobbyAsaka claims bronze.
Unfortunately, The Traitor’s Tale and Heir of Leonster are disqualified as they kept crashing for several judges with little explanation, rendering them likely unwinnable.
Due to the sheer quantity of submissions, posting the feedback on FEU is not feasible. Instead, I have created a MARTH website which hosts the reviews and downloads. Each entry has a page, with all relevant reviews, scores, and links.
https://chalphycastle.ie/projects/make-a-really-terrific-hack-marth/
And now, for my closing statement.
I decided to host this contest as a perennial contestant of hacking contests. The last traditional, no-frills hacking contest was Ghast’s Make A Fun Chapter 4 in 2020. After that, subsequent hacking contests started to grow more restrictive - Make A Fun Chapter 5 in 2021 banned chapters lasting beyond 30 minutes, among other such restrictions. A typical FE chapter often lasts much longer than this. My disregard for these rules got me disqualified - but to be fair, the chapter wasn’t very good anyway and disregarding rules should get you disqualified.
I still continued entering the X-Hour Blitzes and the first Hack Jam, though I frequently ran overtime in the former and the timing limitations for the latter were unusual, though I kept within a definition of 48 hours. By the second Hack Jam, I intended to enter, but due to over-ambition I failed to finish my entry in time. That hack is now being repurposed.
I hadn’t felt the same interest and motivation in entering these contests with their tight time limits, so I decided that I should host a contest myself. I took my inspiration from MAFC as a whole, but many elements (such as having multiple judges) came from MAFC 2019. I aimed to learn lessons from the contests that came before.
When I first posted the MARTH thread, I expected that I would receive about five entries. Instead I received 28 entries, the most any hacking contest has ever had, breaking Box MAFC’s record of 22. Thank you to everyone who entered. I set out to create a simple contest, and this did better than I could have ever imagined. Thank you to my fellow judges as well: having multiple pairs of eyes on a chapter goes a long way to having a fairer score and to mitigating my personal biases.
Perhaps one day there may be a successor to MARTH, but it won’t be for a long time. If you have any questions about anything, feel free to ask. In the meantime, I hope to see you all around, perhaps in FEE3. Again, thank you to everyone.