Since the official announcement at Ankama Convention #5 about its return, several discussions about Goultarminator II have developed on the forums and tournament newcomers had a lot of questions. What rules will change? Will things still work the same? When will the tournament begin? The time for answers starts... now!

Let's start with the most important date: Registration and the first qualifying event will begin August 2, 2010.

Complete calendar:

• From August 2 to 8: Registration & Test of Speed
• From August 9 to 10: Test of Popularity
• From August 11 to 12: Training teams
• From August 13 to 22: Selection Phase
• From August 23 to 24: First Round
• 25 August: Second Round
• August 26: Third Round
• August 27: Quarter-final round
• August 28: Semi-final round
• September 4: Grand Finale

The first Goultarminator was the scene of frenzied fighting

In terms of rule changes ... First, the teams this year will have four members instead of three. There is no specific reason for this, we just want to encourage more possibilities for combinations and strategies.

This year also introduces replacements. The first Goultarminator was unfortunately marred by absenteeism and incomplete teams, completely distorting the results. We hope that having a few back-up members to fill in for missing teammates will allow each team to participate in every battle. However, since their presence can be counted on, incomplete teams will not be allowed to fight. This will avoid situations where teams recover easy points (perfect and overwhelming victories) against teams missing one or more of their members.

We considered changing the qualifying monsters for the event but it quickly became clear that there were few creatures that could both be killed solo and offer an actual challenge. Among the creatures that meet these criteria, some favored certain alignments (Rat Black, White Rat) and others seemed too risky because their behavior may block players (Koolich or Silf the Greater Bherb). In the end, we decided to retain the same creatures as the first edition, but change the distribution of classes.

As for characters, a change that will contribute to the balance between the servers is that all the characters below 200 on their original server will be automatically promoted to level 200 on the tournament server. Thus, all participants will have the same spells at their disposal. The only difference will be the choice of spells, mount and investment in scrolls.

New tournament, new maps.  The atmosphere is sometimes burning …

As for equipment ... This element has been much discussed in recent months and a legion of questions about "exotic" smithmagic - that is, maging stats onto equipment that normally shouldn't be there (+MP on a Gelano, for example) - have marched through the threads. In the past, Lichen has mentioned a possible change to this system. This change has been developed, but we did not want to put in place just yet. The Goultarminator II will provide an opportunity for us to test this change and see how it works in practice.
Thus, during the Goultarminator II, regardless of the number of "exotic" AP, MP, or Range points granted by equipment, only a maximum of +1 AP, +1 MP, and +2 Range will be used, all other exotic AP/MP/Range bonuses willl be ignored.

Two spells will also be changed before Goultarminator II:  Summoning of Chaferfu and Summoning of Arachnee.  As of now, the Critical versions of these spells can respectively add an additional AP and unbewitch an enemy.  Obtaining the critical effect or not on these spells may well tip the outcome of a fight one way or the other. These spells have proved both too powerful and too random. They will therefore be modified to be more interesting on a normal summon and less influential on the outcome of the battle in case of critical summon. This change will be implemented on the game servers before the start of Goultarminator.

The number of points gained for a win will be slightly changed. Points for a "landslide" victory have been lowered, allowing a mere 20 bonus points to the score of the battle rather than doubling, to prevent a team with a perfect landslide victory but three defeats to be selected instead of a team has accumulated more victories on average.

Regarding points, we decided to reward more servers at the end of the tournament to make better use of time investments throughout the event. The top 10 servers will be rewarded. This plan to compensate the maximum possible servers will also affect community events where the points are based on the server ranking, but all servers will be awarded points instead of the top two or three.

I would now like to digress for a moment about the Heroic Server. Like last year, we asked ourselves about final death and its impact on skills and community events.
Our final position has not changed and the estimated value of the players from that server comes directly from their ability to play in these conditions. It is not therefore planned to temporarily disable the final death or block aggressions. The heroic players will have to qualify within the constraints of their server. I want to go still further and not impose a Time Attack bonus in the Gobball Dungeon like last year. This year, the heroes will have to qualify only by fighting the same creatures that players from other servers are fighting. However, thanks to the new rule, if the characters that qualify die in the meantime, they still will be 200 on the Tournament Server.
Finally, for Community events, servers are indeed likely to be disadvantaged if the players of the server choose to attack each other instead of playing the game. In this case, it will be the choice of the server community.

(Image caption: … sometimes wetter. But it always stays Frigosty.)

Until the start of the tournament and the publication of any information on this page, you can read the complete rules in PDF. 

TBA: Information about community events will be published just before the start of each event.