Monster Arena

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Monster Arena is a WWW-based fighting tournament game hosted by RinkWorks.

Monster Arena tournaments start on the first day of each month, and one round is played every day. A tournament is divided into seven preliminary rounds, one qualification round and as many elimination rounds as are needed.

Players can register at any time during the preliminary rounds. Registration closes at the start of the qualification round.

[edit] Monsters

Each player has three monsters, which can be of various races (such as human, faerie, troll, kobold or gwuil), either male or female, and associated with one of four elements: earth, water, air or fire.

The monsters have three different statistics:

• Strength - how well this monster can attack other monsters
• Constitution - how well this monster can defend itself from attacks by other monsters
• Agility - how often this monster gets to attack or defend during the fight

The starting values of these statistics depend on the monster's race and sex.

The monsters can be freely named, and many players exhibit creativity and humour in naming their monsters.

The player initially starts with 500 gold, which can be used to purchase weapons and armour for the monsters. Weapons count toward strength, armour counts toward constitution.

[edit] Fights

In every round, a player's monsters fight other monsters. Which monsters they are up against depends on the progress of the tournament.

Fights happen automatically. The player never gets to actually "play" his monsters during the fight. There's no intense action in a Java applet or Flash animation where the player frantically clicks his mouse or pounds the cursor keys. There's not even a list of HTML controls to select various attack and defense moves from.

Fights happen completely inside the RinkWorks server's memory, where the Monster Arena program uses the monsters' agilities to determine who gets to attack whom, and then divides the attacking monster's strength by the attacked monster's constitution to determine the number of hit points the attack takes from its victim. Because of this, a fight is over pretty much as soon as it starts.

In preliminary rounds, the game generates computer-generated opponents for the player's monsters. All players get the same opponents, so the game is totally fair and does not discriminate. Regardless of the outcome of the fight, the player's monsters stay alive to face the next round, and the computer-generated opponents vanish. Winning the round earns more points and gold, though.

Gold can be used to buy better weapons or armour, or to add improvements (more strength, more constitution or more agility) or element-specific modifiers to the existing ones. The player can also buy more hit points for his/her monsters. Every time something is bought, its price increases.

In the qualification round, players actually get to face other players' monsters. The players are paired up depending on the order of their score. Winners of the qualification round progress to the elimination rounds, while the losers are divided into two parts. The majority also get to progress to elimination rounds, while those with very few points are cut off from the tournament.

In the elimination rounds, players also face other players' monsters. Here, losing a round always results in the player being cut off from the tournament.

Winners from one elimination round are paired up in the next elimination round. If the round happens to have an odd number of players, the one with the lowest score is paired up with computer-generated opponents, and always progresses to the next round.

This continues until only one player is left. This player then wins the whole tournament.

[edit] Winners

[edit] External links

• The Monster Arena homepage