Notable players

78291 

Long time holder of top z-score on NAO, he achieved his dominance in mere 7 months: his first NAO ascension took place on May 5, 2007 and last on December 29, 2007. It took years before his z-score was surpassed by stth. Currently, after 8 years of not playing NetHack, he is still at 3^rd spot. He went on to play Dungeon Crawl where he is no less prolific (under nick N78291).

Adeon 

Holder of the longest streak (of 29 games) and fastest realtime ascension (1 hour 32 minutes). He is also the author of the Sheol branch in UnNetHack.

BilldaCat 

Current holder of a game-time speedrun record with a 2130 turn game.

Maud 

Famous for his ground-breaking game-time speedruns. He has number of sub-3K ascensions, the most famous being the 2135 game from December 2010.

nht 

Also playing as unnht, is a highly skilled player with a knack for very fast play, as documented by a slew of sub-10K wins, including phenomenal 2185-turn win on NAO. In addition to vanilla NetHack, he scored lot of wins in UnNetHack, including feats such as the Master Thief conduct. He also experiments with TAS runs, such as 363-turn, 16-second UnNetHack win or 235-turn AceHack win. Worth mentioning is also the first public NetHack Fourk ascension, which is still the speediest game for the variant with its 6428 turns.

stth 

Extremely prolific player who was the first to surpass 78291 in z-score and who still is on #1 spot. He achieved ultraextinctionist game, where every kind of monster was killed 255 times, going as far as killing 38 mail demons (which normally go extinct after one kill). He's also notable for variant play, ascending most variants available for play. He scored the first dNetHack ascension and he is usually the only one to ascend GruntHack and SporkHack during Junethack. He currently has around 600 ascensions under his belt.

Tariru 

Player who achieved more than 200 wins in the course of one year. His first ascension dates back to January 2012, but in mid-2014 he suddenly started churning ascensions at rate 25 or more per month, peaking at 30 ascensions in December 2014. In last few months of 2015 he slowed down considerably, but he still reached #1 on multi-variant z-score ladder. Appart from quantity, his other feats include long rows of non-vanilla ascensions, including 11-game dNetHack streak, 4-game DynaHack Elberethless streak (where the games were his first four DynaHack games). He has by far the most dNetHack wins.