89 replies to this topic

[Russ]

So we've got HeroOfFire with a full quest, Lunaria with a joke quest, Octorockoncrack with something, Avataro with a short quest, maybe ywkls, probably not Lejes, and no clue with Dan. Alright, that's some good competition, I'd say. I just finished up ours tonight, aside from testing and maybe adding a scripted minimap if I have the time to understand Moosh code and build it, so I'll be good to go.

How exactly is submission gonna work, aside from PMing you Zoria? How many screenshots can we include? Are all the entries going to be posted in a single thread, or multiple?

[Timelord]

Just a reminder, and possibly first notice for a few of ou: Because of the PZC downtime at the start of the contest, the due date is 10th February, 2016; as I recall, so you have a couple of extra days to do things, if you need them.

Nothing short of temporal recursion will allow me to finish my entry in time though.

So we've got HeroOfFire with a full quest, Lunaria with a joke quest, Octorockoncrack with something, Avataro with a short quest, maybe ywkls, probably not Lejes, and no clue with Dan. Alright, that's some good competition, I'd say. I just finished up ours tonight, aside from testing and maybe adding a scripted minimap if I have the time to understand Moosh code and build it, so I'll be good to go.

How exactly is submission gonna work, aside from PMing you Zoria? How many screenshots can we include? Are all the entries going to be posted in a single thread, or multiple?

I'm not staff, and thus I can;t post hidden threads, so, aye, PMing the entry to me is the best solution. I would prefer to have one thread with the polls, and one for each quest entry. I don't see a problem with allowing people to make a thread each, given that if i try to do that, the forum will post-merge them all into one lump; so perhaps that would be ideal?

I'll host any screenshots that you fancy. I'll put a logistical limit of twelve images in there, primarily because I don't want to juggle more than that. If you self-host, the images must be machine-readable without clicking follow links.

Edited by ZoriaRPG, 31 January 2016 - 06:13 AM.

[Russ]

Just a reminder, and possibly first notice for a few of ou: Because of the PZC downtime at the start of the contest, the due date is 10th February, 2016; as I recall, so you have a couple of extra days to do things, if you need them.

Hold on a second, this hardly seems fair. For one, this information was never said until just now. I worked insanely hard to get this done by the deadline, and having the extra week would have been a lifesaver. I had to shorten some stuff to make the deadline, and now the design's locked in place and I can't really go back and change it. The due date extension rewards those who couldn't make the deadline, while punishing those who worked hard to make, so I have to object it.

[Lejes]

Yeah, I thought the original plan was to submit all entries by the first of February, and moving it to the third was the extension to account for the downtime?

[Eppy]

3rd appears to be the original deadline(original post last modified Dec 30). I can see adding on 2-3 more days to the deadline being a little fairer, but an entire week, with such a late notification, seems a bit unfair...

[ywkls]

@ZoriaRPG- While I like the idea of the extension (because then I have some hope of getting done), I too thought that the 3rd was the extended date. I know you said you were going to extend it because of the outage, but since you never posted what that was; I was rushing to finish everything and panicking because I had no hope of getting done.

 

Though, since you never updated the first post to list any Participants, perhaps this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.

 

@Everyone Else- Since this idea basically originates with ZoriaRPG (though it was discussed on Skype beforehand), he can do pretty much anything he wants with it; including canceling the whole thing or extending the deadline indefinitely. I know it is unfair to those who had to cut stuff out or cram junk in, but I'm actually on your side on this because I was doing the same thing. 

[HeroOfFire]

I knew about the outage (there was a reason I had three different quest updates on the 3rd), but this is quite the extension. Isn't the 3rd Wednesday? How about the 5th so the quests are available for play Saturday?

 

Of course if you want to give us that much time it's fine, I totally wouldn't use it to add 15% more content to my submission.

[Deedee]

The 10th of February?

Omfg. I thought I would of had to rush  my ass off to get my quest out the door. Now I have enough time to do a good deal of dungeons!

Thanks, Zoria!

[Octorockoncrack]

Well I've gotten quite a bit of work done, been tile ripping like mad lol. I wanted to try and finish before the original deadline, but 4 days isn't a whole lot of time to make a quest. Nonetheless, at this rate I'll have a submission in the next couple of days.

[Timelord]

No, you are all right on target: 10th February was my error, entirely. The extension was supposed to be 3-4 days, to cover the exact duration of the downtime, which I had originally intended to make 7th February. I even marked it down as such; then when I posted, I looked at my notes, read 7th, and added three more days by mistake.

 

For me, the downtime was 4 days, in any case. (Was also down again, yesterday.)

 

Really though, even some PZC events have been extended.

 

My problem now, is that after posting the 10th Feb deadline, people might be counting on it. In fact, I'm already getting more backlash from attempting to correct this, so it'll have to due.

 

Actually though, especially for mods (e.g. Russ), I don't know how you missed my statements in the downtime thread. I need to rescan this one, and others, to see where I discussed this, but I did do so, in at least two places.

 

With regards to updating the OP, I have had to do most everything on me mobile for over two weeks, and the edit option doesn't like to actually work on my Android.

 

I finally cobbled together a temp laptop out of a few rubbish units to use temporarily. I should be back in action in a couple days, as normal, but it's been one whopper of a month; which some of you may have noted from my general quietness on the forums, and on Skype.

 

(One thing that I will do, is flag entries received before 3rd Feb, as 'Early Bird', or something like that, to indicate that they didn't push past the original deadline.)

 

P.S. Regarding never adding contestants, several people indicated interest, but only a few actually stated that they were making anything. I'll add the list of those that I know are/were participating, and those I suspect to be participating to the OP.

Edited by ZoriaRPG, 03 February 2016 - 09:49 PM.

[Russ]

No, you are all right on target: 10th February was my error, entirely. The extension was supposed to be 3-4 days, to cover the exact duration of the downtime, which I had originally intended to make 7th February. I even marked it down as such; then when I posted, I looked at my notes, read 7th, and added three more days by mistake.
 
For me, the downtime was 4 days, in any case. (Was also down again, yesterday.)

Er, Pure was only down for two days before, and done for an hour yesterday. I'd hardly count that as four days, but eh, minor details.
 

My problem now, is that after posting the 10th Feb deadline, people might be counting on it. In fact, I'm already getting more backlash from attempting to correct this, so it'll have to due.

So you made a mistake, but you're keeping it because you're afraid of the backlash? That seems kinda silly. Especially since the only people who'd be depending on the new deadline are the ones who wouldn't have made the original deadline anyways.
 

Actually though, especially for mods (e.g. Russ), I don't know how you missed my statements in the downtime thread. I need to rescan this one, and others, to see where I discussed this, but I did do so, in at least two places.

Well, for starters, we might have missed your statements because we'd be expecting an update to be posted here, not the downtime thread. I'd think it's only common sense that an update to the contest rules would be posted in the contest, but perhaps that's just me. Furthermore, your post in the downtime thread wasn't anything concrete. You said you would push back the deadline, but didn't specify the number of days and then failed to actually follow through with that by letting us know how many days you were extending it.

On a side note, I don't see why Pure being down should affect the contest's time. It's not like we need access to the forums to build a quest.
 

With regards to updating the OP, I have had to do most everything on me mobile for over two weeks, and the edit option doesn't like to actually work on my Android.

While this is understandable, you still didn't keep us updating by posting in the thread at all. After the contest started, there was total silence from you in here until your post about extending the deadline, which came just before the deadline given in the original post.

To be blunt, I feel this contest has been very poorly handled. You essentially left it sitting for a month, the only update on it being a vague "I'm gonna get to doing this thing" post in a completely different, totally unrelated thread, before coming in last minute to extend the deadline to a date you've admitted was an error. After numerous complaints and requests for clarification, you waited almost four days, acknowledged the error, then decided not to do anything about it. This has been a mess from start to finish, and frankly, I'm tired of it. Moosh and I will be withdrawing from the competition and submitting our finished quest to the database in the next few days.

[Timelord]

Er, Pure was only down for two days before, and done for an hour yesterday. I'd hardly count that as four days, but eh, minor details.
 
So you made a mistake, but you're keeping it because you're afraid of the backlash? That seems kinda silly. Especially since the only people who'd be depending on the new deadline are the ones who wouldn't have made the original deadline anyways.
 
Well, for starters, we might have missed your statements because we'd be expecting an update to be posted here, not the downtime thread. I'd think it's only common sense that an update to the contest rules would be posted in the contest, but perhaps that's just me. Furthermore, your post in the downtime thread wasn't anything concrete. You said you would push back the deadline, but didn't specify the number of days and then failed to actually follow through with that by letting us know how many days you were extending it.

On a side note, I don't see why Pure being down should affect the contest's time. It's not like we need access to the forums to build a quest.
 
While this is understandable, you still didn't keep us updating by posting in the thread at all. After the contest started, there was total silence from you in here until your post about extending the deadline, which came just before the deadline given in the original post.

To be blunt, I feel this contest has been very poorly handled. You essentially left it sitting for a month, the only update on it being a vague "I'm gonna get to doing this thing" post in a completely different, totally unrelated thread, before coming in last minute to extend the deadline to a date you've admitted was an error. After numerous complaints and requests for clarification, you waited almost four days, acknowledged the error, then decided not to do anything about it. This has been a mess from start to finish, and frankly, I'm tired of it. Moosh and I will be withdrawing from the competition and submitting our finished quest to the database in the next few days.

 

Sadly, I have to agree. I'm well-aware that this turned out to be a disaster, and there's very little I can do about it at this point. I didn't expect to be up to me earlobes in January, which tends to be otherwise slow for me; but it happened, and there's little that I can do about it. Ultimately, anything I do at this point, would be merely to appease people, only to offend others.

 

I doubt I would even have remembered about the promised deadline extension if people didn't remind me, and badger me about it. If I hadn't stated that I would do it elsewhere, i would have forgotten, and I wouldn't have felt the need to keep to my word, and actually extend it. Then again, I probably would have thought that the event was supposed to end on 7th February, too...and not been back in time to handle adding the entries.

 

I probably won't be back proper;ly until tomorrow, and then situated for a day further still... As to other concerns...

 

Earlier today I posted that the proper deadline was 7th February, and that caused just as much hell as having it as 10th February, so I retuned to the 10th (in a post edit, that you might be able to view; not sure if mods can review edits), to stifle yet more complaints. Within five minutes of posting that, I had two people send me messages asking me to overturn it back to 10th February.

 

There is simply no winning there, but I do disagree that being unable to access resources isn't a sufficient reason to modify project schedules, particularly when it was starting during an outage; mostly to permit access to the databases for resources.

 

I know that I had issues accessing Pure for about 3 1/2 days, during the outage period in January, and there were resou7rces int he database that i did in fact need, including the latest Koten tileset. That duration is where I derived the extension value, but I digress. I agree that by increasing the deadline, I'm caving towards users who should have had their shyte in, on time; but at this point, I don't really see giving people a few more days as making any real difference.

 

Like as not, if they couldn't make one deadline, they won't make a different one; and more than that, if not for the extensions, your project would never have been in on time either. I know that Moosh was pretty happy about having extra time, and was pretty clear that only my increased deadline of 10th February would have made it possible to complete something to submit. Given that the two of you are supposed to be working together on that project, I find it strange that you are at odds (with him) for wanting/not wanting the extra time.

 

To be frank, this has been a train-wreck from start to finish, with numerous people asking for exceptions to the theme, scheduling, post-handling, and all sorts of other things. I was probably overly liberal, in allowing things, to permit as many people as possible to do what they wanted. (In fact, I was liberal in allowing what you, and Moosh wanted to submit, as well; given that I initially decided not to permit it, only to be talked out of that...)

 

There were (notably) three requests for theme exceptions. Of these, I approved yours, considered another, and flat-out rejected the third.

 

Really,the entire premise of this event has been so mutilated by catering to other user requests, that it barely resembled the original intent, at all. Likewise, I've been liberal in accepting entries, given that fewer than half of the entries actually announced their intent to participate. I certainly have no desire to host anything of this scope again, any time soon, if ever. Tome, it's just not worth the stress.

 

Fun fact: It wasn't my idea to host something of this magnitude. I did it on the suggestion, and encouragement of other members/mates; who I will now proceed to drag out to the roadside, and horse-whip. IotM is more than enough for me to manage, and as it stands, due to lack of participation, and feedback, IotM is probably going to turn into IotQ. People couldn't even submit ideas for a theme in time for the next month. Now you know why I have never wanted to volunteer as a staff member here, for anything. (I have enough 'fun' with all the things for which I've already stuck out me neck.)

[Russ]

Like as not, if they couldn't make one deadline, they won't make a different one; and more than that, if not for the extensions, your project would never have been in on time either. I know that Moosh was pretty happy about having extra time, and was pretty clear that only my increased deadline of 10th February would have made it possible to complete something to submit. Given that the two of you are supposed to be working together on that project, I find it strange that you are at odds (with him) for wanting/not wanting the extra time.

This actually isn't true. Our quest has been done since the 31st; we've been using the extra time to repeatedly play test and polish. Moosh was happy about the extension because he's trying to make a second entry in the extra time. It makes me a bit upset when you come down on me so condescendingly, especially when your information isn't accurate.

Regardless, I can sympathize with you. Having hosted multiple contests of the sort before, I understand how tricky they can be. I feel the idea behind this one was interesting, but at the same time putting conditions on entries will always limit participation, which is why I think your liberal exceptions with the theme were a smart idea. With deadlines, I've found it's best not to extend them, other than in cases where somebody submits a few hours after the deadline or something similar. Extending it by multiple days give those who can't work on a schedule an unfair advantage over those who can, yet rarely actually increases turnout in the end.

[Mani Kanina]

This actually isn't true. Our quest has been done since the 31st; we've been using the extra time to repeatedly play test and polish. Moosh was happy about the extension because he's trying to make a second entry in the extra time. It makes me a bit upset when you come down on me so condescendingly, especially when your information isn't accurate.

It's not as if you or anyone else made it clear that Moosh was working on a second entry earlier in the thread, and given that you two were on a team project, I don't think it's unreasonable at all to assume that Moosh was talking about the team effort product. I don't think the statement was condescending at all given the context, sure, Zori's thoughts on the matter did not end up being true, but I see no point in being cross about a very understandable misunderstanding.



Personally, I am happy for the extended time. I mean, I could send in my entry now, but deep down we all know that these extra days will make nightnight the best (spiritual) sequel to dayday that we all know dayday deserves.

On a more serious note, you're correct in the fact that the extra days will probably not have an increase in turn out, but because of that I honestly don't see the problem with it either, it's just a couple of more days. Which is nothing in the grand scheme of things, given that the entire contest was a month. I guess I just can't make myself care much about such things. ¯\_('v')_/¯

[Timelord]

 

This actually isn't true. Our quest has been done since the 31st; we've been using the extra time to repeatedly play test and polish. Moosh was happy about the extension because he's trying to make a second entry in the extra time. It makes me a bit upset when you come down on me so condescendingly, especially when your information isn't accurate.

It's not as if you or anyone else made it clear that Moosh was working on a second entry earlier in the thread, and given that you two were on a team project, I don't think it's unreasonable at all to assume that Moosh was talking about the team effort product. I don't think the statement was condescending at all given the context, sure, Zori's thoughts on the matter did not end up being true, but I see no point in being cross about a very understandable misunderstanding.

 

Pretty much this... I'm not a mind-reader, and all I knew is that Moosh wanted more time for the quest he was working on, to submit for this. Never was it mentioned that he had more than one project. I didn't even consider that as a possibility when making the rules for this menagerie.

That clarifies some mysteries to me, as it really did feel as if both participants for one project were wanting two entirely different, and mutually exclusive decisions from me; which you might understand, is rather agitating, and perplexing.

 

Regardless, I can sympathize with you. Having hosted multiple contests of the sort before, I understand how tricky they can be. I feel the idea behind this one was interesting, but at the same time putting conditions on entries will always limit participation, which is why I think your liberal exceptions with the theme were a smart idea. With deadlines, I've found it's best not to extend them, other than in cases where somebody submits a few hours after the deadline or something similar. Extending it by multiple days give those who can't work on a schedule an unfair advantage over those who can, yet rarely actually increases turnout in the end.

That's why I really don't see the problem. If people didn't use the previous 91% of the time wisely, then this 9% extension isn't going to matter much. It still allows people who have completed entries to go in and correct any small flaws, whilst laughing at the others who try to crank out something in 'not enough time'.

If the downtime were in the middle of the event, I would likely not have included it, by the by. I did that because it occurred as the event was starting.  It wasn't two days, though. not at all. It was 3-days + ( 2 days {tol. +/- ~16 hours} ). The thread alone indicates three days of downtime in the OP, and there was spotty downtime for the next two-ish days thereafter. I really have no idea what the total length was, but it varied from 3 1/2 to 5 days...

 

Aside from being unable to access the database, this also meant that people mightn't even be aware of the event, or be able to read the rules, thus robbing them of X-days of potential progress. I tried to be as fair, and liberal as possible with this, which was probably my greatest error all along.

Most PZC events run that way, but I usually handle things far more strictly, by making a ruling, that I do not overturn. Blame that on decades of GM experience, if you will.
 

Personally, I am happy for the extended time. I mean, I could send in my entry now, but deep down we all know that these extra days will make nightnight the best (spiritual) sequel to dayday that we all know dayday deserves.

On a more serious note, you're correct in the fact that the extra days will probably not have an increase in turn out, but because of that I honestly don't see the problem with it either, it's just a couple of more days. Which is nothing in the grand scheme of things, given that the entire contest was a month. I guess I just can't make myself care much about such things. ¯\_('v')_/¯

This is pretty much how I feel about it, and more-so, I don't have the emotional capacity to care too much. Either way, someone will complain. There's no getting away from that:

As I said, when I realised the error, I intended to correct it, and people argued back and forth with me on if I should fix it to 7th Feb, or keep it as 10th Feb. I decided eventually to go in, and correct it, and almost immediately had complaints, so I decided to follow my ethos, and keep with my original ruling, despite that it was an error. This is precisely how I arbitrate games:

I make a ruling, and if it turns out to be in error, it still stands; but in the future, in a similar situation, my resolution may differ. In doing this any other way, you waste too much time, and energy arguing over something that is usually trivial. I usually side with what will cause the fewest overall problems, and in this case, giving more time was the fairer of two options, to me; mostly because there were already people depending on the 10th, due to posting it.

There's my rationale, in a proverbial nutshell. Having already granted the extra time, it would be more unfair of me to retcon it back away, than to leave it as-is.

Truly, my biggest problem in hosting an event like this, is that I can never anticipate my schedule this far in advance. This applies to participation, as well, and is usually why I don't participate in timed events. The sad thing, is that the suggestion to make this event spawned out of a conversation on exactly this topic (my non-participation in timed events), and it's just a clear example of how having such an erratic schedule makes doing this impractical.

 

Even trying to plot out my calendar two weeks in advance is painful, and subject to entirely unanticipated, and immediate shifts, or changes.

Sadly, I did not have the option to co-host this--that's a staff-only luxury--or I'd've done that. At least IotM--while technically hosted by me--is actually run by a group of us, in a fairly simple manner. The next one, might be this month, but maybe March, and we have three ideas out there for it. Once the group decides which to do, we've got something in line that grayswandir suggested for a more open method of determining a theme on the forums, that isn't too broken to be viable.

Too bad PZC doesn't support the idea of special membergroups, who can cross-edit posts of the members of those groups, for events like these. That would make multi-hosted administration of private events friendlier to manage. In the end, 'tis what 'tis.

Edited by ZoriaRPG, 04 February 2016 - 08:04 AM.