The DWIronman League

The DWIronman League is a monthly competition taking place on the Doomworld forums. It was initiated in July 2016 by Gus Knezevich (Alfonzo), who managed the competition up to December 2019 before passing the duty to NaZa. After NaZa had manifested wanting to stop hosting the competition during JohnSuitepee's stream on on December 13, 2020, four Ironman regulars (Daerik, ReaperAA, Roofi and Vince Vega) picked up the torch and will rotate hostship duties between them starting in January 2021. Since then, the host of the Ironman challenge changes monthly, not only between the four regulars, barring the time Scotty hosted two months in a row in September and October 2021 and a period in 2022 when NaZa organized 4 challenges in a row from February until May.

Each month, participants play a specific WAD, trying to get as far as possible without dying, and submit a demo or a video recording of their playthrough. Typically, in multi-level mapsets, participants must start from the beginning of MAP01 on Ultra-Violence difficulty, and are ranked based on how many maps they successfully complete. For single-level PWADs, ranking is instead based on the percentage of kills. If multiple players tie, the player with the shorter time is ranked higher.

Rules
There are two distinct leaderboards, for "Standard" and "Prepared" runs.


 * In a Standard run, the player is allowed a single attempt per month, and must submit their first playthrough as the competition entry. The run must be labelled with one of the three categories: category 1 for "blind" runs (i.e. the player is unfamiliar with the WAD), category 2 if the player is reasonably familiar with the WAD, and category 3 if the player has watched the WAD in a demo or video recording, or watched someone stream the challenge, after it was announced as the month's challenge.
 * If the month's competition features two or more WADs, the player is allowed a single attempt per each mapset, and is ranked based on the total result across both.
 * For certain more difficult WADs, the rules are more forgiving: up to two times, the player is allowed to record a new demo starting on the map where he died, on a lower difficulty level (Ultra-Violence → Hurt Me Plenty → Hey, Not Too Rough). In this variant, all the recorded demos must be submitted together, and ranking is based on the result attained on the highest difficulty setting.


 * In a Prepared run, the player is also allowed only a single attempt per month. However, this "real" run can be preceded with any number of practice runs. After submitting an entry to the Prepared competition, the player is not allowed to participate in the Standard competition. However, the player's first practice session can be submitted as a Standard run.

Up until July 2019, there was no distinction between the Standard and Prepared leaderboards. Instead, "prepared" runs were submitted alongside all the other entries, and were classified as category 3.