What would you do to make WAR better?

[Nekomata]

As Eric said, we have had WAR plenty of times before and it has worked out well in the past. True, sometimes tweaking to the system is necessary given that the community's desires and expectations change from time to time, but it's something that could be done to ensure most desires are met.

Generally, I think the WAR has had more of a positive effect than negative. A lot of art pieces, writing pieces, and activity that wouldn't have been made otherwise came out of it being done for the WAR. The issue before was the discrepancy in team sizes. We're trying to find alternative ways to make it work.

Now, the plan I outlined above is a combination of ideas that hasn't been employed before together in this format. One year, we had a WAR where there were three teams, draft-based, and people made the team theme after the first batch of people had been drafted. This actually worked out remarkably well (I think it was WAR VIII that did this, but I don't remember exactly). I think it's an idea worth trying once again. Usually, the complaint against drafting was people ended up on teams they didn't like. Here, they would simply be grouped up with other peeps and then they would decide what kind of team they'd like to create together. For that, I think it's a lot more unique and shows unity and teamwork among the members. Not to mention by this drafting, we'll have even teams.

The outline I also mentioned above uses Neko's idea to have participation have value by giving the judges WAY more points to work with (kind of in an inflated point economy way, but that's okay), so they'll be able to award things that come in fifth, sixth, and seventh place a little share of the point pot while still rewarding the quality entries with a larger share. Now this idea has yet to be done at all, so this may very well be the magic ingredient that makes it finally work in a way everyone likes.

I still say we give it a shot.

I'm willing to give it another shot! As I said, I wouldn't have put the effort into coming up with ideas to improve it if I didn't think it was worth it back then. I'm not sure how I feel about the draft- since I can definitely see where there are concerns with ending up with people you don't like, but I think it could bring some good too, like making people get to know one another better!

And yeah, my idea for the more inflated point economy (as you describe it) was to encourage participation from everyone. I saw one major problem with the past war is people felt they weren't able to contribute because they couldn't win! It's discouraging when your efforts go to absolutely no worth! People spent a lot of time on entries and got nothing for it- and I can see how that would make some people drop out after a round or three.

I liked the idea of WAR because it was a team-based thing where everyone would come together for some friendly fun! I was a little upset at how quickly people gave up on it after the last time.