The author of Paradise has elected to withdraw the game from the 2015 IFComp. It is no longer visible on the online ballot. Judges who have already rated the game will still keep this rating as counting towards their minimum five ratings.
The competition’s organizers were unaware before recently that the original, sandbox-style engine the game runs on, the free exploration of which provides a large part of the Paradise play experience, had been publicly available in 2014, and the subject of multiple online magazine articles which linked readers directly to it (e.g. this PC Gamer story).
The author did reset the Paradise landscape with original content prior to the competition. However, since — intrinsic to the nature of the work — the lines between this new content, the underlying sandbox engine, and things built by other players using that engine is blurry at best, the IFComp organizers have ruled that this work as a whole has already seen a public release predating the start of the judging period. As such, it runs counter to author rule #3. The author has agreed to withdraw the work from the competition on these grounds.
Paradise will continue to run at the author’s own website, just as it had during the first week of the judging period. IFComp’s organizers encourage players curious to explore an interesting multiplayer text-based interactive structure to visit it.
from Planet Interactive Fiction
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