It seems like the 3x a year schedule is a bit fatiguing, although maybe it is just for me.  How would everyone feel about going to just 2 competitions a year & adding a couple months onto both the development and playing parts of the schedule.  Right now we have 8 months to develop & 4 to play.  I could see 10 months to develop & 6 to play, with new themes starting at the beginning/mid year and voting being around the equinoxes.

I think that 2 per year is good.

me too. i can't keep up either.

Ok, I went ahead and updated the schedule:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjtIsJkyopekdEpUeW84NlRjYzhlQkptNjdTSjFnb3c&usp=sharing

Let me know if you have a problem with it.  I added 2 months onto the playing time for the current 'Educational' theme, and used the full new schedule for the 'Classic Video Games/Arcade' theme.

Sorry to throw a wrench in it now that you've decided on a change, but what if we picked 4 themes for the year, or 2 themes each in the 2 6-month periods.

No one has to do them all, but it gives makers a bit more flexibility in what they want to work on at any given time. It also doesn't leave us feeling like we should try and shoehorn a map into the contest or rush something to make it in time.

We could even just have a schedule for a few contests out so that we could get maps cooking way in advance.

The downsides to any of those is that voting for multiple themes at one time will just clutter up the voting; especially without some built-in survey style mechanism on the site.

I like the idea of having 2 themes.  I think it would be best to have one judging for both themes though.  The added flexibility might help get more entrees overall, but I bet each theme will have less individually. 

Tom currently puts up $300 dollars a year as prize money.  If he doesn't mind we can distribute the same amount in some other way.  If there are 2 contests a year - that's 150 a contest.  With 2 themes each contest - maybe $60 for the top board overall.  $30 for the top in each theme (not counting the winning board), and then 6x$10 for then up to the next 6 boards not already winning one of the bigger prizes.  That means if 9 or less people enter, you're sure to win atleast the equivalent of 3 months of free membership.

>We could even just have a schedule for a few contests out so that we could get maps cooking way in advance.

We could have a big vote once a year and use the top 4 themes to seed that year's contests.  And just stay ahead of things.

Ozyman wrote:

I like the idea of having 2 themes.  I think it would be best to have one judging for both themes though.  The added flexibility might help get more entrees overall, but I bet each theme will have less individually. 

Tom currently puts up $300 dollars a year as prize money.  If he doesn't mind we can distribute the same amount in some other way.  If there are 2 contests a year - that's 150 a contest.  With 2 themes each contest - maybe $60 for the top board overall.  $30 for the top in each theme (not counting the winning board), and then 6x$10 for then up to the next 6 boards not already winning one of the bigger prizes.  That means if 9 or less people enter, you're sure to win atleast the equivalent of 3 months of free membership.

 

>We could even just have a schedule for a few contests out so that we could get maps cooking way in advance.

We could have a big vote once a year and use the top 4 themes to seed that year's contests.  And just stay ahead of things.

Yep, fine with me. How does the following prize structure sound:

First prize: $100

Second prize: $50

Third prize: $30

Fourth, Fifth prize: $10

Ideally I'd like the next theme to be based around something that I can post  to http://www.cartographersguild.com - they've got some very talented mappers so it would be nice to try and draw on some of that talent.

tom wrote:

Ideally I'd like the next theme to be based around something that I can post  to http://www.cartographersguild.com - they've got some very talented mappers so it would be nice to try and draw on some of that talent.

Whew, looking through there, I'd say its time to step up my game.

Cramchakle wrote:

tom wrote:

Ideally I'd like the next theme to be based around something that I can post  to http://www.cartographersguild.com - they've got some very talented mappers so it would be nice to try and draw on some of that talent.

Whew, looking through there, I'd say its time to step up my game.

Aye, those guys and gals are professional fake map builders!

They do have some nice stuff and I think some of the map makers on some other Risk sites are regulars there as well.

I think we could have a contest that had as its criteria, "beautiful map-based games with original cartography". The graphic aesthetic could be the primary criterion for judgement.

Kjeld wrote:

I think we could have a contest that had as its criteria, "beautiful map-based games with original cartography". The graphic aesthetic could be the primary criterion for judgement.

I like this idea.  Maybe next theme we can try to get this suggestion out there earlier.

I was on my self-imposed sabbatical when the whole contest thing started up. I think its a great idea, and is ultimately what brought me back to the site. But missed out on the initial conversations about how to run it, so sorry for sticking my head in here and stirring shit up.

I'm not volunteering to run anything. I'm not that dependable, but if I were going to design a "Crammy's" (thanks for that, M57), the format would be:

Two contests per year. Jan-Jun and Jan-Dec.

Jan-Jun
Themed. Theme is selected and announced by tom. No voting. (Try not to annoy the man with pre-announcment lobbying.) Assume he'll make the decision he thinks will be best for the site. Another benefit to this is that it will be easier for one person to flesh out the "rules" of the theme to include more than just a vague, overall idea. Instead, he could say, "Medieval graphics with Capitals and non-standard borders" or "A digital version of a non-RISK, totally original board-game."

This will still be a 'community votes' sort of thing. Keep a stickied post at the top of the forums. First post will be a running list of submitted maps. People can respond by listing their three favorite in order. Any post that includes anything more than a 1., 2., 3. list of board names is deleted by the mods. The winners will be determined solely by the total number of mentions.

Awards given out as most recently discussed: First through fifth.

Jan-Dec
No theme. Any map submitted during the year, except those winning prizes in the theme competition -- no double dipping -- is eligible. No forum voting for this one*. Winners would be determined based on the ratings left by players in the existing rating system.

My ideal world requires a change to the site to make this work; sorry. Here's how:

We'd need the 0-10 stars for "overall", "graphics", "fun", and "innovation". Total up the stars given in reviews, hope Doom doesn't recruit strangers from around campus to vote for him, and assign winners in those 4 categories.

*Because this was just plain too simple, a fifth category, with forum voting for an honorable mention. This is to reward those hidden gems that the general population just isn't going to get or won't appreciate the amount of back-end work required to make it work given the game engine. The Finite-State-Machine, as an example, is crisp and clean but not exactly beautiful, will probably be too intense for most people who came for RISK to find "fun", and probably just won't get enough plays to tally up the stars required for a win, but deserves a trophy -- Ozy wrote a Python script outside the site to make the board, FFS. (Sorry if you don't see that board how I'm calling it, Ozy. I'm in awe of it, but don't see it winning any popularity contests.)

This would call for tom to change the rating system, though. Dunno if he's up for it.

Also, it's not really spam since the message would be internal to the site, but send all the users a private message from "the site" announcing the start of the contests to up awareness.

The downside to the Jan-Dec format is that it is pretty open for abuse, which, with TOS as our historical precedent, when pride and or money are on the line, someone's probably going to cheat.

There would be no way to require everyone to play every board. There would be no way to keep people from making fake accounts to vote for themselves. There would be no way to keep someone who legitimately has a lot of friends on here from getting his buddies to vote him in.

Kinda sucks that people suck.

>hope Doom doesn't recruit strangers from around campus to vote for him

lol.  That is only going to be understood by the old-timers.  I was just starting to read the forums at ToS when that happened.

>Theme is selected and announced by tom. No voting.

I love the idea of just having Tom pick the theme.  So much simpler & it's his money.  Someone else wants to put up some prize money they can run their own contest too.  I figure we can have a post where we all make suggestions and discuss and he can read it if he wants.  But, I'm not sure if Tom is up for it.

>We'd need the 0-10 stars for "overall", "graphics", "fun", and "innovation". Total up the stars given in reviews, hope Doom doesn't recruit strangers from around campus to vote for him, and assign winners in those 4 categories.

I also love this idea.  I think if we want to have a theme-less contest, having it be decided by reviews makes a lot of sense.  It should encourage players to review new maps too, because that is how they vote.

>Sorry if you don't see that board how I'm calling it, Ozy.

It is very clear to me & was from the beginning that FSM would never be a popular map, considering even great fun maps like Hex have a pretty small following.  I just wanted to see if I could do the state transitions in the wargear factories and the educational theme was enough incentive to actually do it.  In all honestly it was a lot more work than I expected to get something playable and I kind of regret the hours I spent on it, but I was already so invested at the end I needed to see it through.  If it actually turns out to be a fun map for players who understand it, that's great, but I'm not even sure about that.

>There would be no way to require everyone to play every board.

Oh.  That's kind of a big downside, because standard simple world maps will probably end up dominating.  Maybe only count the reviews if they've reviewed at least half the maps on the list?

I actively lobby for potential raters for my boards.  When I see someone playing one of them a lot or climbing in the rankings, I'll ask them to review it if they can spare the time.  Of course, I think my boards are great (well, most of them), and my experience is that the better and more active players 'get it' and offer the best insights, not to mention they tend to be fans of the boards.

So I'm mixed about using reviews as a voting mechanism.   On the one hand, more is better.. but the politics (read, potential cheating and rigging of votes) would clog up the pipe so to speak.

Going a bit OT here - In the long haul, I'd like to see an overhaul of the ratings system anyway, so perhaps two birds can be killed with one stone.  Minimally, (and this has been discussed at some length in some older threads) I'd like to see categories (aesthetics, balance, originality, game-play, etc).  If someone is going to take the time to write a few lines about it, it only takes a few more seconds to rank 5 or 6 categories.

M57 wrote:

I actively lobby for potential raters for my boards.  When I see someone playing one of them a lot or climbing in the rankings, I'll ask them to review it if they can spare the time.  Of course, I think my boards are great (well, most of them), and my experience is that the better and more active players 'get it' and offer the best insights, not to mention they tend to be fans of the boards.

This is distinctly different from TOS example I alluded to, wherein someone was recruiting people he'd never met to just play one game on his boards so they could give it a 5 star rating (best on that site) regardless of if it deserved it and move it up in the ratings.

Over there, boards could be for sale, and being in the top 10 gave a mighty boost in sales. Being number 1, especially, was relatively quite valuable. Gaming the system with juiced 5 stars was a good gig. I know I was organically pulling down about $20-30/month on just a few decent maps when I deleted them all and came here. I think I vaguely recall our cheater claiming to be making about $100/mo.

Point being: its near impossible to stop someone from trading their integrity for beer money if they so badly want to win.

I did what you do. If someone was playing a lot of games on my maps, Id ask them to take a moment to leave feedback. I wasn't begging or bribing for perfect scores, though, nor bringing in outside help.

Anyway, maybe just ignoring the possibility and continuing to treat this as a match between friends is the best option. It's not like this is The £64,000 Question. If there are too many hoops, it will cease to be fun.

Ozyman wrote:

I love the idea of just having Tom pick the theme.  So much simpler & it's his money.  Someone else wants to put up some prize money they can run their own contest too.  I figure we can have a post where we all make suggestions and discuss and he can read it if he wants.  But, I'm not sure if Tom is up for it.

Well, since I'm not willing to volunteer in any official capacity, I hate to volunteer anyone else, but it would just be one theme per year. Seems pretty tolerable.

In fact, even my lazy arse would be willing to show up and make one annual decree.

I've been turned off to the "Design Contest" idea/threads for quite awhile now.  I think was a good idea, but its just not panning out that well for a number of reasons.  And since I am trying to break my habit of reading every forum post dropping these was easy.

I talked with Ratsy some about partnering on a board and he mentioned the current RPG contest.  So, I went back and read most of the Design Contest threads I had skipped.

I really like the idea of the Crammy's for a number of reasons.  In particular  I think the "themed" contests are too limiting.  Frequently the designer already has a board in mind that happens to fit.  Some good boards have come out of the theme's, but also many good boards have come out during the contests that people are doing just because they want to. 

So, I'd like to see the theme idea dropped entirely and instead have a yearly "best of" for a few categories.  I think the idea of using the board rating system is a good one.  I am not a fan at all of the current system.  I rated a few boards when I started, but rate very few of them now.  If we can repurpose it and make the rating system better I'd be all for it.

Another thing that bugs me some about the current contests is the monetary reward - I'd be happier with something, somewhere on the site saying "this board was rated the best use of innovative game play in 2013" or something like that.  Playing for money does not gibe with the reason I frequent this site.

Another thing that bugs me some about the current contests is the monetary reward - I'd be happier with something, somewhere on the site saying "this board was rated the best use of innovative game play in 2013" or something like that.  Playing for money does not gibe with the reason I frequent this site.

 

 

I suggested a while ago ribbons for the thumbnails for maps that have won the competition, and I'd still like to see this happen.  If we had Crammies, they could be little scottish trophies!

Lots of good ideas here, but a lot of them require some work from Tom, so unless he has the time to make site changes, we have to find some way of working within the system we have.