WOTM Suggestions

[WOTM]

WOTM Suggestions

Do you feel that WOTM could be run better? Do you think you have an awesome idea that isn't related to a theme? Perhaps it's related to how the contest is run, when it is run, or otherwise? Well, this is the place to offer suggestions! If you have any ideas about how the contest could improve, leave them here.

Not Negotiable

1. Managers: Only fellow managers or administrators can decide who gets to be a manager. This is not a democracy, nor will it be run like one, so if it's a suggestion to get another member promoted to manager status, don't bring it here.
2. Themes: If it's a theme suggestion, leave it in the Theme Suggestions thread. Thank you!
3. Rules: Any rule alterations, additions, or deletions that would break on-site rules such as being Fonz cool, keeping adult content censored, or plagiarism, will not even be considered. Other rule adjustments, additions, or deletions however, will be.

[Neobullseye]

Uhm... One thing I've been bothered about for a while now is the 1500-word cap in Casual. Now I understand the split between Casual and Advanced, so I'm not nagging aout that. It's just that, at least to me, 1500 words is so little I'm often forced into Adanced just due to going over the word limit. Can that limit be upped a bit?

Now I don't know if this falls into the "not negotiable" region (or more specifically, clausule three stating that on-site rules will always define and override WOTM rules), but it doesn't look like it is, especially seeing as that same clausule also states that "Other rule adjustments, additions, or deletions however, will be.".

[Kagamine]

I have no qualms with moving up Casual's word limit a bit, though I'm sure the other managers will need to weigh in before any final decisions are made.

Also I'm not sure why you'd think that would be non-negotiable. All that clause meant is that we can't do anything that goes against general Guild rules.

[Jorick]

Allowing more freedom for entry size is good, but I have two concerns with moving word limits around from where they are.

First, the additional size of reading might push voters away. You can already see this at work in Casual and Advanced: Advanced often gets half the total votes that Casual does. Some of that might be a mistakenly perceived inadequacy on the part of some who vote in Casual, similar to how many Casual roleplayers will never go to Advanced because they mistakenly think they lack the skills, but I'm sure some of that is because of the greater size of the entries. This is the lesser of my concerns though.

My main issue is what that might do to Advanced word limits. If we move the Casual maximum up 250 or 500 or more words, what do we do to Advanced? Leave those word limits alone and just have a larger overlap? Move the minimum and maximum requirements of Advanced up the same number we move the Casual maximum? Just bump up the Advanced minimum to keep the overlap at 500? Just bump the Advanced maximum up and let the overlap be larger? There are some positives and negatives to consider with each of those options, so they'll have to be talked out before we make any firm choice.

[Kagamine]

My main issue is what that might do to Advanced word limits. If we move the Casual maximum up 250 or 500 or more words, what do we do to Advanced? Leave those word limits alone and just have a larger overlap? Move the minimum and maximum requirements of Advanced up the same number we move the Casual maximum? Just bump up the Advanced minimum to keep the overlap at 500? Just bump the Advanced maximum up and let the overlap be larger? There are some positives and negatives to consider with each of those options, so they'll have to be talked out before we make any firm choice.

I'll say one thing, I do not want to bump up the Advanced maximum. 3500 words is already massive. If I had to make a choice, I'd say either bump up the Advanced minimum, since I don't see many Advanced entries with too small of a word count anyway, or just leave the Advanced requirements as is and leave the larger overlap. After all the Casual/Advanced split isn't just about word count, but also difficulty level (with the components) and sometimes just plain comfort. I don't see the overlap as a big issue.

[Brovo]

Uhm... One thing I've been bothered about for a while now is the 1500-word cap in Casual. Now I understand the split between Casual and Advanced, so I'm not nagging aout that. It's just that, at least to me, 1500 words is so little I'm often forced into Adanced just due to going over the word limit. Can that limit be upped a bit?

Now I don't know if this falls into the "not negotiable" region (or more specifically, clausule three stating that on-site rules will always define and override WOTM rules), but it doesn't look like it is, especially seeing as that same clausule also states that "Other rule adjustments, additions, or deletions however, will be.".

Ah. I suppose I should explain something that happened a long, long time ago at the formation of the contest. (Something that neither Kagamine or Jorick were staff at the time for.) This very topic of debate came up between myself, Dudel, and Contra Fates. I wanted to keep limits down then, I prefer to keep them down now. The reason being is that quantity is alarmingly often mistaken for quality. IE: The guy who can write how fire burns a person seven different ways in three paragraphs and not advance anything is typically considered "better than" the guy who can manage to construct a functional story with three to five paragraphs.

These limits were put into place for, primarily, two reasons.

First: Jorick's first and second points combined. If the limits were too high for casual then to compensate it would result in obscene, monolithic lengths for advanced that nobody would have the time to read, let alone review, fairly. Then compare and contrast, and then vote upon. If we did not increase the lengths for advanced, then casual and advanced would be too similar and there would be no point to having them as individual categories, which would make the contest hard to run fairly on a site that primarily divides itself into casual and advanced in nearly every other manner. ((That, and there are discernible differences to be found in advanced and casual, not based on quality, but based on stylization, that would inevitable be lost if the two categories became too similar.))

Second: Part of quality story telling is the ability to decrease the lengths of your writings. There is this little prolific beast called purple prose. It used to plague WotW. It was going to plague WOTM. (Sometimes, you can still see visages of this beast echoed in the advanced section when a story is posted and, when read, it has no themes or character development.) Good story telling involves having the ability to cut excess so that all that is left is the lean meat and bones of it all. To put it metaphorically: Stories are like children. If you feed them too little, they starve and die. If you feed them fatty, descriptive foods that don't advance the story, they grow obese and unhealthy and ugly. If you feed them plot point vegetables, character developing fruits and a few exciting climax meats?... Well, then you have yourself a healthy story.

A lot of my reviews, when I actually got around to doing them, pretty much shouted the same thing: "Stop butchering the plot and characters! Stop giving me meaningless words!"

Really, a good part of WOTM is essentially that you learn from it. Every failure you learn from. Every success, you revel in. Part of learning is to have hard limitations, boundaries, edges, fences, things and constraints you have to work within so that you have to get creative, have to think outside the box. This is what writing is all about.

So the word limits, as is, are fairly healthy. We usually don't crack down if you're a few words above or below the limits as is anyway. They're simply there to challenge you to write better with what you have.

I hope that clears things up.

[Kagamine]

First: Jorick's first and second points combined. If the limits were too high for casual then to compensate it would result in obscene, monolithic lengths for advanced that nobody would have the time to read, let alone review, fairly. Then compare and contrast, and then vote upon. If we did not increase the lengths for advanced, then casual and advanced would be too similar and there would be no point to having them as individual categories, which would make the contest hard to run fairly on a site that primarily divides itself into casual and advanced in nearly every other manner. ((That, and there are discernible differences to be found in advanced and casual, not based on quality, but based on stylization, that would inevitable be lost if the two categories became too similar.))

Well hold on- when I considered the thought of bumping up Casual's word maximum, I figured at most it would only go up to 2000 or so. That's still vastly different from Advanced, where the maximum is 3500 and, as mentioned, most Advanced entries that we see are much closer to the Advanced max than the Advanced min. So I don't see how bumping up the maximum a bit would make Casual and Advanced look too similar, since there is still a considerable gap in word range.

Second: Part of quality story telling is the ability to decrease the lengths of your writings. There is this little prolific beast called purple prose. It used to plague WotW. It was going to plague WOTM. (Sometimes, you can still see visages of this beast echoed in the advanced section when a story is posted and, when read, it has no themes or character development.) Good story telling involves having the ability to cut excess so that all that is left is the lean meat and bones of it all. To put it metaphorically: Stories are like children. If you feed them too little, they starve and die. If you feed them fatty, descriptive foods that don't advance the story, they grow obese and unhealthy and ugly. If you feed them plot point vegetables, character developing fruits and a few exciting climax meats?... Well, then you have yourself a healthy story.

A lot of my reviews, when I actually got around to doing them, pretty much shouted the same thing: "Stop butchering the plot and characters! Stop giving me meaningless words!"

Now I won't argue with you about what purple prose does to a story, because you're completely right about that. However, it seems that making stories too big with purple prose is much more of a problem in Advanced- you know, where I've seen people submit, and sometimes actually aim to submit stories with exactly 3500 words. In Casual however? Not so much. A lot of times, I've seen Casual entrants say they had to cut out a lot of their story just to make it within that word limit, therefore leaving absolutely no room for purple prose as is, and sometimes actually hurting their entry. I like to keep an eye on the post-contest discussion in the voting threads, and quite often in Casual I'll see a review say something like "this entry would've been better if you'd done X/included X", and the author responds with "I was going to include X, but I had to cut it out to fit the word limit", or something similar. So purple prose? In Casual? Not an issue. And even if the maximum was raised just a bit, I still can't imagine it would create a purple prose "plague", especially since the purple prose infested entries are usually only the really long ones in Advanced.

Lastly, I understand the need for a challenge in WOTM. That makes sense. However, what I don't think makes sense is that, while Casual, thanks to it's name and many other factors, is implied to be the easier of the two levels, in reality has such a slim word range (less than half the word range of Advanced), that I've heard entrants say many times "Advanced is easier than Casual", specifically because of such a restricting word maximum. Now again, I understand the need for word limits and the importance of a challenge, however, I do not think that Casual's word limits should make it more challenging than Advanced.

If anything, it would probably make most sense to even out the word ranges in some way, since it doesn't make the most sense that Advanced gives far more room in terms of word count than Casual does. If Casual's max can be bumped up slightly, and maybe Advanced's min is bumped up a bit (since, like I said, not many people write in the shorter half of Advanced, unless they were originally writing for Casual, in which case... yeah), so that the word range is more fair, and Casual doesn't have to come off as so much harder than Advanced.

At any rate, I've had the thought in the back of my mind that Casual's word maximum was rather slim and maybe a bit too challenging for a while now, especially after seeing the numerous comments about it, some of which were about that limit hurting entries, causing people to submit in a level they were less comfortable entering in, or in some cases, shying them away from the contest altogether. I actually expected that it would be brought up when this thread came to fruition, and figured it would be the best time to see if something could be done about it. Because I really think some improvement could be made.

[Kadaeux]

If they think their post needs "cutting" to make it into casual perhaps they should just, oh I dunno, take a chance in Advanced.

EDIT:

More than 1500 words and your entry is NOT a casual one.

[Kagamine]

If they think their post needs "cutting" to make it into casual perhaps they should just, oh I dunno, take a chance in Advanced.

That's exactly what many of them do. However the issue there is that, among other things, the Casual/Advanced split exists for comfort, and many aren't as comfortable participating in Advanced, especially since, everywhere other than word limit, Advanced is made out to be the more difficult of the two levels. And, while some are brave enough to overcome that level of discomfort (which is another thing I feel entrants shouldn't have to do), others are shyed away completely by their inability to meet the Casual word limit.

More than 1500 words and your entry is NOT a casual one.

You may think so, but many find that such a strict word limit makes entering in that level more difficult, and that, going by the actual definition of the word, the more casual thing to do would be to write more, not having to worry about such a tight word limit, and entering Advanced. And that, doesn't make sense to me.

Semi-related: So far, I like the way this thread allows managers and participants to all discuss things together in one thread. It's a bit different from how things normally go, and I'm liking the change of pace.

[Kadaeux]

That's exactly what many of them do. However the issue there is that, among other things, the Casual/Advanced split exists for comfort, and many aren't as comfortable participating in Advanced, especially since, everywhere other than word limit, Advanced is made out to be the more difficult of the two levels. And, while some are brave enough to overcome that level of discomfort (which is another thing I feel entrants shouldn't have to do), others are shyed away completely by their inability to meet the Casual word limit.

If people are going to shy away because of a word limit that is their problem. There is already a problem for when there are many entries the ones further down the list of votes not getting the voting attention they deserve. You increase word limits because of a few complaints you exacerbate the problem further.

You may think so, but many find that such a strict word limit makes entering in that level more difficult, and that, going by the actual definition of the word, the more casual thing to do would be to write more, not having to worry about such a tight word limit, and entering Advanced. And that, doesn't make sense to me.

Semi-related: So far, I like the way this thread allows managers and participants to all discuss things together in one thread. It's a bit different from how things normally go, and I'm liking the change of pace.

If they find it difficult to write in that level, for all their fears or not, they should try their hand at Advanced, I suspect that much of the "fear" of submitting entries in the Advanced level is plagued the same fear that stops people posting in advanced RPs.

A fear that Advanced are Elitists who will treat them differently.




If a change needs to be made don't change the difficulties. Change their titles.

Change Casual to "Short Story" and Advanced to "Story" or something similar.