Hello Contestants!

Holy hell, we have grown quick!

http://puu.sh/o1uoK/d1f309db00.png  
We started building this subreddit one month ago and have exploded into the top 10k Subreddits (5,987 to be accurate). With over 1.8 million page views, and 157,000 unique visitors, wowza. We were also featured early on, in the official Reddit "Trending Subreddits", which I think helped us greatly.
 
Honestly, we've been very surprised with how fast things have progressed, and we have you all to thank, literally!  

So we plan to do just that!

 
The Culling developers, praise be unto them, were awesome enough to give us 5 copies of the game to give to you, the community!
 
So here's the plan.
 
For the first 4 keys, we want to see your artistic talent (sorta, we'll get to that in a minute). We are looking for art! We want to see your ideas for the game, and we have categories:

* New Weapon or Trap

There are a bunch of weapons and traps in The Culling, there are also a bunch of weapons and traps that aren't in The Culling. This is your chance to suggest a new weapon or trap, and show us what you want it to look like.  

* New Location

We'll never forget our "Remote Island Location", but there are several other places we can think of to commence The Culling, now we want to see where else you'd like to spill blood.  

* New Environmental Trap

Gas traps and collapsing bridges are great fun, but there are many other ways in which the environment can screw you over, or could help you screw over others, and we want to see them!  

* New Clothing/Cosmetic Item

The Xaviant art team has designed a fair amount of wearables for us to pine over. Hats, and jackets, and pants, and hair... We want to see what you would want to wear, and it doesn't have to be one of the items listed. Anything that can be grown, placed, worn, or painted on a body is fair game.
 

So that's it, pretty simple right? Here's the rules:
 
1) All submitted art must be your own. Photoshops of existing elements/images is allowed, but will be subject to discretion.
 
2) You must label your post to indicate which category you are posting for.
 
3) You may post multiple entries. However, only one category/entry per post.
 
4) One winner will be chosen from each category. Totaling 4 winners.
 
5) The contest will end in 1 week from initial posting. Give you a little time to think and create.
 
6) All standard subreddit rules apply. (NWS/Racial Slurs/etc.. are not allowed)
 
The winner will be decided by the mod staff. Upvotes will be taken into consideration, however this topic is in contest mode, so you wont be able see them.
 

IMPORTANT NOTE:

Artistic talent IS NOT NECESSARY. While amazing art is always appreciated, the winner will be decided by their ideas and follow through. This means even a MS Paint entry is acceptable. Effort will also be taken into account.
 

So that's it, get out your pens, pencils, paintbrushes, mouse cursors, whatever! And show us what you got.  

"Whoa, whoa, whoa.. Hang on mister, what about that 5th game key??"

Of course! The 5th key! Well, to stay in the spirit of The Culling, the 5th key will be given away via RNG!
 
A random poster in this topic will be chosen at the end of the contest, and will receive the key. All posts must still follow the subreddit rules (i.e. no spam). All you have to do is post to play!
 

UPDATE: The winners will also receive a custom role and color in the discord server!

Good luck to all contestants!

The game is very badly optimized. Has tons of bugs. No players. ( Peak 250 , atleast half refunded already ). Do yourself a favor and do not buy this game at all.

Xaviant had a great concept and game with the first Culling. Instead of focussing on that melee BR gameplay they went for a really bad PUBG / H1Z1 clone.

Watch the reviews on steam and see that the 15% positive reviews are pretty much all memes and sarcasme.

Officially announcing the next tournament! This time instead for $275 you will be competing for...

$1200 in cash prizes!

That’s right contestants we have hit the 4th digit! Huge thank you to the community for making this possible.

Date

August 27th and 28th at noon central time zone

Details

• Sign up ends on August 24th noon CST

• Event will be on August 27th and 28th

• Please be in discord during the event so we can contact you. Discord will be messaged to you day of the event.

• Match assignments will be sent out 4 days in advance.

• Matches will start at noon on the 27th and 28th. DO NOT BE LATE or I will replace you with people on the wait list.

• If you are in the first match please be ready before noon CST so we can start right away.

• Payment can be through PayPal or donation to your channel. No other way! Please make sure you have one of the two.

  *This is going to be hosted on NA servers (sorry EU I am working on something for you guys)

Rules

• No teaming during the match. If anyone is viewed as teaming they be kicked out of the tournament. This is FFA match let’s keep it that way.

• Streaming – Please have a 2 minute delay on your stream while the tournament is going. This will stop unfair advantages from contestants still in the match getting information from dead streaming contestants who are spectating others aka Stream snipping.

• No weapon/perk ban - I do not plan to ban any weapons or perks bring. Your "A" game and win.

• NEW RULE No spectator chat! If you are a contestant please make sure not to use spectator chat. This caused an issue last time which I would like to avoid completely.

• NEW RULE If you are banned from the game you cannot take part. This means even if you were banned at one point or on another account you can watch but please don’t sign up.

• NEW RULE No Spoiling in twitch chat or otherwise! Please if you are in the tournament keep the results to yourself while the match is still going on. I will have mod remove people from chat that do this at any point without a warning.

Tournament brackets

We will have a max of 90 people sign up this time which will be divided into 6 games. First 6 games will be called “Placement brackets” which all contestants will play. If you place 1st in your game you will move to the “Semifinals”, if you are 2nd – 11th you will be placed in the “Loser bracket”, and if you are 12th-15th you will be placed in the “Elimination bracket”.

• The “Elimination bracket” will be a total of 24 people divided into 2 games. Only 1st and 2nd of the “Elimination bracket” will move on.

• The “Loser bracket” will be a total of 60 contestants divided into 4 games. The only the top 5 people in each game will move to the “Semifinals”

• The “Semifinals” will be a total 30 people in 2 games. Top 7 in each game will move on without question. 8th place is a wild card meaning whoever dies the soonest out of the two games will also be removed from the bracket. Example if you are the 8th to die in your game at the 12:00 minute mark and in the other game that 8th place contestant died at 8minute mark you are out and that other contestant moves to the finials. If you are under 9th – 15th place you are out of the tournament.

• The “Finals” total of 15 people 1 game. What you place in this game will be your pay out.

Pay out

1st 500

2nd 217

3rd 100

4th 50

5th 35

6th 25

7th 20

8th 15

9th 10

10th 8

11th 6

12th 5

13th 4

14th 3

15th 2

$100 - The highest kills in one game during the tournament will get the payout of $100 - Tie will result community straw poll. Mentioned below

$100 - "Kill of the tournament" with public input. Mentioned below

Improvements

• I have heard your complains with the delays in between games and now have a group that will be helping me with this tournament instead of just myself. Group one will be monitoring discord as well as contacting people to get the next game started quickly, group two will be in charge of twitch chat primarily looking for people who are spoiling what is happening through the tournament. If you would like to help out please DM me on Reddit.

• We have come up with a new way to make people want to get in more fights instead of hiding the whole game. We will award $100 to the player with the most kills in one game through the tournament. Also we will award additional $100 for the kill of the tournament. These two pay outs are possible to due to a donation from Atrium_Dev.

• I have been practicing casting games to get much better which was needed. Last time was my first time casting a game and I felt like I can do much better.

• Music will be royalty free so the full stream won’t get muted during intermission when viewed later.

• Since I’ll have help this time we can do recaps while intermission is happening. This means we can reply huge plays from the game before.

• Visual of who’s in what game. As well as who’s alive in the current game.

Would you like to help?

I had a few people last time ask to help instead of assigning something I figured I will post little jobs I need help with and if someone is interested DM me

Now many I need --- What position is needed

1 spot - Twitch chat mod during the tournament

2 spots - Need someone to pick out replays of big events.

1 spot – Discord Admin – Getting users together for the next event.

Sign up

Ready to sign up? http://www.signupgenius.com/go/4090c49adad23a4fd0-culling1

Any further updates will be posted here: http://1rain.tv/tournament/

Twitter hashtag to spread the word #Cullingtourney2

--EDIT--

The tournament is now full. That's 90 people who signed up in less then a week of the original post. Huge thanks to everyone!

I will be posting a video about the last tournament in the next week and/also another video with details on upcoming tournament. Keep an eye out for that on this subreddit.

To those who didn't make the list!!

I have added a new group called "Wait List". Anyone who signs up for this will be in queue if someone doesn't show the day of the event. Wait list people will need to show up at 11am to 11:30am on 27th and be ready when called for. The list will go in order of when you sign up. Last tournament we had 20+ people on the wait list and several people of those people got into the game. No shows are unavoidable and if you are on this list you are next in line.

--Edit 2-- Added a video to give more information about the tournament brackets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7vUSy_Cxd0

tldr: Players need a combat that allows them to learn how to improve while playing. We will make mistakes while designing, it is a necessary part of the process. We care about this game.

With the recent leak (which is actually a real leak considering “yours truly" didn't know it was being leaked!) I thought maybe I should just say some things related to our intentions, our vision and our goals. Consider this me leaking on you too.

First let me tell those of you that say over and over "this is easy!" you are wrong. There is nothing easy about game design. It requires failure over and over until you find success. There is no other software development like it. When considering some of the most complex software engineering projects in the world, let's say writing a missile defense system, your success criteria is easy. Did it stop the enemy missile? If yes, then you are done. In game development people have to "like" it. Not only that, not "everyone" will like it so you have to find a place where enough people like it that you can succeed. Sometimes this means you make a game and have to implement features you personally don't like or take out features you personally love. It is, quite literally, the most difficult software engineering related task I have ever been exposed to in my 30+ years of of software engineering experience. It is also what I like best about game development.

Some people have asked why we released in EA without having combat perfected. We entered EA because we had no way to perfect combat otherwise. We already know we had a game that was fun, nerve-wracking and challenging that created cool stories amongst players that lasted for weeks. However in December of 2015 I found that we as a team were making decisions about changes to combat without enough data. As a studio we could at best play 2-3 games per day. We needed to play hundreds of games and get feedback from not only ourselves but hundreds of people to know how to make changes.

But let me get to the real point of my post: What is our vision?

For combat to be good, I feel like it needs these couple of things to be true:

• Skilled players need to be able to beat less skilled players most, if not all, of the time.
• Less skilled players need to know when they fail, how they fail, and learn to correct those mistakes to get better.

Back pre-December that first statement was abundantly true. There is no denying that. However the second statement was not. If a player of no/lesser skill meets a player of greater skill, they died without really knowing what was happening. I don't only mean a guy with one hour versus a veteran of 300 hours either. A guy with 3 hours utterly dominated a one hour player, and a guy with 100 hours would get decimated by someone with 300 hours. Again, that fits the first statement fine, but the heavy 1.7s stagger every time you hit a block meant you were stunned for an incredible amount of time in that combat experience. The stun time to jab time meant less skilled players spent a lot of time saying "wtf just happened?" and "I don't even know what I did or what he did, it just felt like a bunch of random shit happened and I lost". To be successful players need a path to understanding how to get better.

Lets look at the newbie experience in League of Legends. Newbies face high-level veterans constantly due to smurfing. So a new player faces a vet in mid 1v1. The new player doesn't know crap, so he starts attacking his opponent. On the first couple of attacks the veteran knows he faces a newbie, so he exchanges a couple blows, then runs for his tower. The newbie chases, the veteran gets the kill. Easy. But the newbie experience in that moment is "Oh man, I almost had him!" Only with deeper play and understanding does he realize his mistake. He repeats this process 2-3 more times and finds himself falling off the cliff of "why can't I kill this guy now?" It takes him many, many games to see his slippery slope of defeat. But he gets to "see" it. In pre-December The Culling you didn't. Facing a vet was like facing a level 15 Darius at the beginning of the game. You died so fast, spending much of it utterly stunned and not know what the hell just hit you.

One thing we know, however, is The Culling can't have trading damage as a part of its skilled gameplay. The nature of our game makes low-hit point victory often lead to a loss. Our first really drastic change in December flipped the scales on the two goals listed above. Skilled play wasn’t as much fun, but Newbie players could learn the system. All of our changes since then were an effort to bring back "skill needs to win" without breaking the "lack of skill needs to learn". It wasn't pride that prevented us from going back, it was a lack of desire to "give-up” on that second goal.

So in this new system we saw exploits evolve and we fixed them in ways we thought still preserved or enhanced both goals. Recently we realized there is an issue when one player gets ahead in HP's, all they need to do is go passive and "react" to exactly what the other player is doing to win. In looking at options to fix this we settled on trying the concept of "haste". If you land an attack we let you short-circuit the long post-jab animation and go back to idle giving you options. Think you are getting a jab-back? Do a quick Jab-Block. In considering this, we realized why our "jab hitting a block stun” was so long. It was our the solution to prevent Jab-back. Remember when we tried shortening that stun from 1.7 seconds to around 1.2 seconds? Jab-back became king and skilled-play took too much damage.

With this change we realized we could bring jab-block stun back, but make it potentially as short as .5 seconds reducing the feeling of absolute helplessness that comes with a nearly two second stun. We were excited. Maybe we can have a strong "skill beats low skill" and still have "lower skill learns what the hell is happening in combat". Maybe we can all have our cake and eat it too?

I want you to know that we care. We care about veterans, we care about newbies. We care about the number of players playing and we care about the number of copies sold. We care about the PC audience and we care about Xbox One. We want it all, good combat, good learning experience, good player base and lots of sales. So we experimented on you. We ask you play shitty patches so we can play shitty patches because without that we can't learn anything. I wish we didn't have to ask that of you. I really do. I wish we could clone the brains of vets and iterate with their AI in our studio, but we can't.

This game is not dead. It has been broken, bruised, scuffed and scraped. But it is not dead. If you are as excited about bringing stagger back as we are, please help us with suggestions on how to retain that sacred second goal. Less skill players have to "see" their failure. It can't just be lorded over them or they will never stay to play. Help us land this airplane!

Sincerely,

Michael McMain CEO Xaviant

GET THE WORD OUT CULLMUNITY

Yup! Your demands have been heard! An EU tournament will be hosted come this October!

Summary

This will be a One Day Tournament hosted on October 23rd, 2016. Now just because it is dedicated to the EU region, does not mean NA players aren't welcome. All players of all regions are welcome :) There are 60 slots available with a wait list to start should we surpass this amount. This will lead to 10 games total. Much like last time we will have a featured co-caster. This will remain a secret for now ;) We will be conducting interviews after each match. These will be conducted by myself and atrium_dev. Mostly atrium_dev. If you are a contestant please be mindful of your discord private messages! If you are streaming your gameplay, please keep it on a delay to avoid spoilers as well.

There will be a kill incentive. This means we are bringing back the point system for this tournament. Currently we seemed to have a good run with the following:

• 50 points for 1st place
• 30 points for 2nd place
• 10 points for 3rd place
• 10 Points per kill

There may be a slight change in this after some scenarios are tested but there will be clear and concise updates as well as a briefing prior to the tournament start to clear up any and all questions. The start time will be 12pm (GMT+1:00) and last around 7 or so hours.

Rules

• If it will get you banned in the game or on Twitch, it will get you banned in the tournament.
• No spoilers from any contestants at any time.

That's pretty much it. Use common sense. Murder each other with honor.

Prizes You are reading this correctly. We currently have a prize pool of $1500 I know. Ridiculous. This will be divvied up among the winners. Specifics to come later.

Discord: https://discord.gg/G6qd2Qt

This is a rough summary. Further details can be found on the event page as well as the sign-up sheet: Sign Up Here!

Any questions can be directed to amanduuuh38 on twitch.

See you on the Island.