Dreadmark has been a solitary pilgrimage so far. This round it grew a spine of steel behind the scenes, with real servers and real leaderboards that make it an online world worth competing in. Then we made sure it could be trusted before anyone starts the climb.
There are two boards. The Eternals ranks the highest-level characters, softcore and hardcore strictly apart, with ties at the cap broken by experience and by who got there first. The Reckoning is the race. You create a fresh Ladder Pilgrim and run them from birth to the Dark Lord's corpse, and your official time is kept on the server's clock instead of yours or your machine's. Pilgrims bank into their own private stash, so every race is self-found. Both boards live on the title screen beside PLAY, and in-game on the L key, so you can check your standing between fights.
The world speaks now, too. The Herald announces season world-firsts the moment they happen, such as "so-and-so is the first to reach Level 12". When someone in the hardcore top-100 dies, the bell tolls for every hardcore player online. Softcore never hears it. That dread is a hardcore privilege. Along the foot of the board runs a Wall of the Fallen, where dead hardcore names rest under their skulls forever. Season one is Season: Demo, and when the next season begins it will be archived rather than wiped. Underneath it all, ladder characters back themselves up to the server at every checkpoint. Lose a disk or move machines and your pilgrims come home on their own, while a dead hardcore character stays dead no matter what you do to the files. Death finally has teeth.
Then we made it fair. A leaderboard is only worth chasing if you can trust it, so the board now only counts runs it can prove happened. A score that was never really played, the kind you'd get by editing a file, never appears on the board and never triggers the Herald. Every run is also checked against the game's own rules. If anything reads as tampered, its character gets locked, which pulls it from the board and bars it from ranked play. Mistakes made in good faith can be reversed. The lock is for the deliberate stuff.
The hours you sink in belong to you, too. A crafted flask used to lose its modifiers without warning the first time you changed zones, and the currency you had spent on them was lost as well. That's fixed, and a flask you craft now stays crafted across doors and sessions. For the rare day something does break, ranked characters keep a short history of their own past states, so a single hero can be rolled back to a good moment without disturbing anyone else on the board.
The names are being written, so go claim a line.