WOTM Suggestions

[Kagamine]

Alright, I'll concede with most points, Kadaeux. However,

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.

I for one haven't noticed anything like this. Not in terms of voting. Reviewing? Sure, I can sort of see where you're from here, particularly in cases where a reviewer doesn't have time to get through all of them and thus only gets through half the list or so, but voting? Never has it seemed to me that people are voting for an entry towards the top of the list before reading them all.

But if that is the case, well, then we have a completely different problem to assess. Because voters shouldn't be doing that.

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.

While I see your point, I unfortunately doubt that a title change for the Casual/Advanced split will ever become a reality. The suggested one especially, since the Casual/Advanced split stands for more than just word count.

[Kadaeux]

Alright, I'll concede with most points, Kadaeux. However,



I for one haven't noticed anything like this. Not in terms of voting. Reviewing? Sure, I can sort of see where you're from here, particularly in cases where a reviewer doesn't have time to get through all of them and thus only gets through half the list or so, but voting? Never has it seemed to me that people are voting for an entry towards the top of the list before reading them all.

But if that is the case, well, then we have a completely different problem to assess. Because voters shouldn't be doing that.

The problem only crops up with popular themes with 5+ entries or so that i've noticed.

While I see your point, I unfortunately doubt that a title change for the Casual/Advanced split will ever become a reality. The suggested one especially, since the Casual/Advanced split stands for more than just word count.

No reason not to make a change. It's purely cosmetic. And the suggested one still works. Yes the "Difference" between Advanced and Casual is more than just word count. It's also component requirements. Both still require near-perfect Grammar and Spelling.

And a longer story would "need" more than a short story component wise. It's not that much of a leap and completely bypasses the Casual/Advanced prejudices.

[Neobullseye]

With all due respect, but the main reason I've brought this up is that all too often, people do exactly what you've suggested. They finish their story, notice they've gone over the 1500-word limit, then bump their Casual-minded piece into the Advanced section. And this shows; the quality of these pieces tends to be below the course of action for Advanced, yet at about the same level (skillwise) as the general Casual-level entry. Furthermore, since the critics in Advanced tend to be quite a bit harsher than the Casual ones, this results into the storywriter being judged above his/her level just because his piece was a bit too long. This in turn results into people shying away from the contest as a whole.

You've also suggested to us to cut our story down a bit. The problem is that at some times, it's nigh-impossible to pull off. Yes, there are miracle stories of people taking a 30K+ story down to only 3500 words, but that's not quite the same as taking an already short story down even further - Say, from 2000 to 1500. Personally, I've never really managed to do it. Maybe it's just a problem I'm having, maybe my writing isn't as descriptive as it is to begin with, or maybe it's another problem entirely.

Now, as a standard user, I will stand by your end decision. But that doesn't mean I can't defend my position, especially seeing as that's what this entire thread was made for.

[Kagamine]

With all due respect, but the main reason I've brought this up is that all too often, people do exactly what you've suggested. They finish their story, notice they've gone over the 1500-word limit, then bump their Casual-minded piece into the Advanced section. And this shows; the quality of these pieces tends to be below the course of action for Advanced, yet at about the same level (skillwise) as the general Casual-level entry. Furthermore, since the critics in Advanced tend to be quite a bit harsher than the Casual ones, this results into the storywriter being judged above his/her level just because his piece was a bit too long. This in turn results into people shying away from the contest as a whole.

You've also suggested to us to cut our story down a bit. The problem is that at some times, it's nigh-impossible to pull off. Yes, there are miracle stories of people taking a 30K+ story down to only 3500 words, but that's not quite the same as taking an already short story down even further - Say, from 2000 to 1500. Personally, I've never really managed to do it. Maybe it's just a problem I'm having, maybe my writing isn't as descriptive as it is to begin with, or maybe it's another problem entirely.

Now, as a standard user, I will stand by your end decision. But that doesn't mean I can't defend my position, especially seeing as that's what this entire thread was made for.

I'm still mainly on your side here. I'm just waiting for a response from Brovo.

[Kadaeux]

Now, as a standard user, I will stand by your end decision. But that doesn't mean I can't defend my position, especially seeing as that's what this entire thread was made for.

Bluntly. It's a competition. The idea is to compete based on the constraints. If someone can't do that it isn't the fault of the competition. The competition hasn't done any wrong. You don't change a competition just because some people don't know how to restrain themselves or rethink their ideas into a more compact form that gets the idea across.

You don't see a lottery changing the amount of numbers required to win just because only one in a million or so people (depending on nation, lottery, prize value etc). You don't see American Idol reducing the number of judges because 100'000 or so hopefuls are culled down to 20 by a process of elimination.

You run within the constraints of the competition. In the end it is a contest. The idea is to compete within a set of constraints. Not lobby to have those constraints shifted because people can't do so. Because if they can't work within those constraints, congrats. There is your process of elimination. They either choose to enter at a higher level so to speak or don't compete.

[Brovo]

I'm still mainly on your side here. I'm just waiting for a response from Brovo.

I didn't want to do this, but, you leave me no choice apparently.

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.

Not particularly. The minimum of advanced should have a small word gap to the maximum of casual. Otherwise there is, literally, no point to having more than one category aside from name's sake.

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.

And this invalidates my points... How?

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.

Because they didn't learn. This is a contest. There are skill elements in a contest. If a person is not skilled enough to cut their entry to fit casual's requirements, than either they should bump themselves "up" to advanced, or learn to cope with the fact that contests. Have. Skill. Caps.

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.

Then they should have gone to advanced. End of story. This is, again, not really refuting any points I'm making that this is a contest, and that it's designed to pressure people to get creative. Blaming the contest only goes to show that some people don't actually want to be creative, or to learn, but that they would rather the contest change for their whimsy, not because of a legitimate complaint. If the complaint was sincere, serious, and legitimate, I would give it credence, I would debate with all sides involved, and come to a happy medium. As it stands, most people that complain...

--Never actually contact the managers directly, they only complain in the voting threads.
--Never or very rarely suggest alternatives to the current situation aside from "moar words pls".
--Never or very rarely take responsibility for the fact that they decided to write a story that was either too complex, or too long for the word cap, and simply refused to go to advanced for... Some... Personal reasons.

I granted an exception in this case to Neobullseye because (s)he asked a sincere question for which (s)he wished a sincere answer, and I was capable of easily delivering it. Especially since the point of this thread to offer suggestions, so, I gave it appropriate credibility due to the nature of the topic, which is "suggest things." That being said, thank you Neobullseye, you actually brought this to our attention and I genuinely appreciate that kind of forward thinking prowess that some others whom shall not be named do not present.

tl;dr version: If they wanted to write a story too complex or too long for casual's word limitations, than they should have gone to advanced. As it stands we typically get less advanced entries than casual entries anyway... Sooo... This will just bring balance to the force, really.

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.

If we raise casual's limits, we have to raise the limits for advanced for reasons already stated and left without any real counter-points.

Lastly, I understand the need for a challenge in WOTM. That makes sense.

Of course, it is a contest, IE a competition. Just like a carnival ride even WOTM has a "you must be this tall to enter" condition.

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.

Congratulations. You're now treading onto an underlying problem that this entire website has had for years. People reading the words "advanced" and "casual" and being unable to figure out why one is not necessarily more difficult than the other.

The casual and advanced categories are based upon and named after the same premises that the role playing sections are named under. I would be open to renaming advanced and casual, but I think we would require Contra Fate's permission for such a drastic change. I would also want to hear some of these complaints directly. I mean, apparently we get several complaints about a wide variety of issues that rarely, if ever, hit my monitor. As it stands, only Neobullseye has even voiced this so far in this thread, which is designed to make changes, and this thread is already almost a week old. Everyone's had a chance to look at it. Nothing's happening.

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.

This still doesn't resolve the fact that people simply aren't writing stories that conform to the contest's rules. There are several really good casual stories that conformed and did fine. That shows the system itself... Is fully functional. It's only a few authors that don't get it and fall prey to it... And either they learn, or they do not.

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.

You do. I don't think so. Jorick doesn't seem to think so either. When the contest came about, Dudel didn't think so, and neither did Sinrus.

As it presently stands: There is no reason to raise the caps beyond "some people are too afraid to try advanced." So as it stands, there is no need to raise the caps for people whom refuse to even try to find another way.

As harsh as it may sound: If you wrote a story too long or too complex for casual, put it in advanced. This is why advanced exists in the first place. Invalidating its existence would be a pointless and fruitless solution.

EDIT

@Neobullseye: If the "casual-minded story being bumped up to advanced" doesn't fit and fails, then I have a news flash for you.

That entry didn't conform and didn't do well enough in advanced. That doesn't mean the author is a horrible human being, it just means that their entry was not written well and that they had a lot to learn. Whether they chose to actually learn from their failures or not should not be the concern of the contest.

tl;dr: An author's personal failings should not be blamed on the contest.

[Kagamine]

While there are a few nitpicky pieces in that post that I still disagree with, Brovo, I won't bother tearing the post apart to address them. I understand the main point(s) you're trying to make, and I'm outvoted anyway, so if the word limit must remain so firmly set in place for these reasons, then I accept and concede.

[Neobullseye]

Fair enough then. As said before, I will concede to the moderators' decisions.

Also, I sincerely apologize if you got offended by the tone of my previous post - which, now that I read it in a different light, I can easily see happening. Please believe me when I say that this really wasn't my intention.

On a sidenote: When I made the argument about "casual-mindes stories", I wasn't only talking about myself. This note is just meant as a clarification, not as another argument: As said before, I shall stand by your decision and won't argue any further.

[SgtKlum]

Well, this seems like the place for this, so I'll put it here. I'm going to ignore the issue above because.. well, frankly, it seems like a fairly sticky situation and I ain't going near it.

I began discussing this with the WOTM account person in PMs, but it seems like an issue which might be relevant to several people and I didn't really want to delve into it too deeply with the WOTM account because... well, firstly I don't know who they are and secondly I'm sure whoever they are they're busy people and don't want to be dealing with my crap all evening.

My suggestion would be in regards to this rule:

• If a participant has already won an Advanced WOTM competition in the past, they may not enter casual. This is to ensure that the Casual/Advanced skill division remains fair to the other participants. Competitors are allowed, however, to enter Casual if they entered Advanced in the past, as long as they have not already won Advanced.

My objection to this rule is a pretty basic one, really. I've entered and won both the Casual and Advanced competitions in the past. This means I'm currently restricted to only entering the Advanced level competition. At face value this makes sense, keeping someone who has proven they can write at an Advanced level in the past in the Advanced section so as to make it fairer for those writing at a Casual level. Sure. I get that. The problem is that I feel I'm being unfairly shoehorned into the Advanced section. The way inspiration works, especially for me, is that I won't always be able to incorporate two components from one theme into a story. Sometimes just one component will capture my imagination and I'll set myself the challenge of writing a 1500 word story which incorporates that component and stays true to the theme. Sometimes I pull it off. Usually, I fail miserably. But that's the challenge! I pretty much only ever entered these competitions with the intention of improving my writing ability. I enjoyed the idea of having to stick to a theme, I loved getting feedback from people on my work, but now because I've won the Advanced section I'm being severely hampered.

To cut a long story short, because I'm pretty sure I've been babbling, my point is this: Not every person who has won the Advanced section will be able to produce an Advanced piece of writing every single time. It seems odd to me that I should be forced to compete at a level that I won't always feel comfortable with purely because I have competed there in the past. I would call for a second look at this rule, if nothing else.

[Kagamine]

If it means anything, the WOTM account, at any given time it is online, is one of the WOTM managers. In the particular instance you are referring to, it was me. Given your reaction, I actually kind of expected you to come to this thread.

You raise a good point, but let me also say that the Casual/Advanced division exists not only for skill division reasons but also comfort. I can easily see how Casual writers could feel a bit intimidated knowing they're up against an Advanced winner. At least, that's how I've been looking at it.

At any rate, I for one am pretty neutral on this front as to whether or not this rule goes or stays. There are valid points on both sides. So, I'll just wait for input from the other managers, and see what they think.