Hello guest, and welcome to the BioRUST Battles section! This area of the website allows you to pit your design skills against others in pre-defined contests, giving plenty valuable experience to everyone who participates. The entire system is automatically driven and is purpose-built with ease of use in mind but, just in case you needed it, here's a description of the base functionality and how it all works...

Joining Battles
Joining in is as easy as logging in, surfing the different battles that are open, choosing one that appeals to you, and then clicking the 'join' button! The entire system is geared for newbies and self explanatory. There are three types of contests - competitions, 1-on-1 duels, and free-for-all battles.

• 1-On-1 Duels work much like duelling battles in popular online games. One user starts a battle, and then another player joins in. Submissions then start (one per user based on the competition subject, rules, etc), and when both submissions are in, the battle goes to a voting phase where other members rank each image and an overall winner is decided.
• Free-For-All Battles operate in exactly the same way as 1-on-1 duels, except that there are a pre-defined number of participants larger than 2. The battle does NOT start until the pre-defined number of combatants is met... although this does not, of course, stop you working on your creation before everyone has joined! If all the places are not filled at the end of the two week joining period, the entrant number will be reduced and the battle will start regardless.
• Competitions remove the joining phase, and go straight into submission. This removes the limit on participants and has been designed for pre-defined site-wide competitions. For this reason users can never start a competition-type battle by themselves, but can join as many as they like created by the BioRUST staff.

Eliminating Bias & Cheating
Cheating is an ever-present menace that can seriously suck all entertainment from any fun activity. Over here at BioRUST, we have thought very carefully about this problem and have taken several steps to reduce its impact. These include (but are not limited to):

• Anonymization - Until the battle/contest is over, all entries are anonymous, and no identifying marks are allowed. Once the battle is over, of course, this veil of secrecy is removed, and the identities of the artists is made available publically.
• Randomization - Following submission of your artwork, the winner is decided by a public vote. On some competing systems, the first entrant is always displayed first, which can generate bias (especially if an entry is located on a 2nd/3rd page of submissions... it may not even be seen!). BioRUST's battles system, however, displays all entries in a random order, thus eliminating this potential problem
• Human Intervention - Although the battles system is largely automatic in design, a human moderator is always on hand to deal with complaints and/or take action against cheaters. Our mods are very active and knowledgable - little gets past them!

Everyone is a winner!
All winners are automatically given the appropriate award from Biorust and informed of their win by e-mail.  The contest is then moved over to the Past Battles section of the main index, and all entries are shown with their corresponding rating, number of votes, and name of the member who submitted the image.   Even if you don't win, however, there is no need to feel down - everyone submitting an image in a battle/competition is automatically given a +1 bonus to their reputation... just to thank them for their input!

Interested? Well then, just register, log into BioRUST, and surf back to this page - everything will then be open to you. Have fun and enjoy showing off your skills!