Quote Originally Posted by Felly View Post
Firstly, congratulations to the top three teams and to everyone else for participating! Y'all showed some serious dedication to the forum here the past four weeks, and I think that's great.

While I'm here though, I'd like to make some suggestions for next year's WAR. I feel like I saw a few problems this year, and I hope they can be corrected for next year. I'm not trying to start any drama here, just bringing some things that I felt were issues to the table with the hopes that they'll be fixed in some way, somehow. I'm not trying to rain on anyone's parade here or get results changed or whatever, I'm just speaking my mind and hoping for resolution.

• Extend the weeks of WAR to 2 weeks instead of just one.
I feel like a week is way too short of a time to get things done. For me, I felt like I was scrambling to do several events during weeks 1 and 2 when I was entering a lot more categories (before I started feeling overextended), and I wasn't able to really put my best foot forward. If we extend each week of WAR to two weeks, we could have a Sunday to the following Wednesday entry period with the Thursday through Saturday to be used for judging. I felt like judges were kinda rushed this year as well and rushed to get results up. The extended time for entries would possibly result in more entries (or just higher quality entries) and allow people to enter more events, and the extended time for judging would give people more of a chance to judge entries and provide feedback and whatnot. We all have lives here, I'm sure, so we unfortunately can't dedicate loads of time to this like we may want to.

• Judging Panels
I don't think any of our current judges are accused of this, but I feel like a single judge can lead to bias. I'm not saying that any of this year's judges were biased and I'm not saying it has happened or will happen, but with a single judge, the possibility is there. A panel of judges, three or four, could not only allow the judges to enter the categories they're judging, but it also allows three or four different people to judge the work. There can be a head judge for each category, someone who's in charge of posting the weeks and gathering the scores of the other judges and tallying up the0 final results to be posted with the critiques of each of the judges. Might also prevent ties since the lowest score could be dropped.

• Not giving points to two people of the same team
Basically what happened here, here, here, and other places as well. Those are just the three I decided to link. In them, you see that two different people from the same team earned points in a given category. The way I'd like to see it is that three different people from three different teams score points. I feel like the fact that two people from the same team earned points in a category contributed to the 40.5 point gap between third and fourth place in the final results. (I feel as if that 40.5 point gap is appalling and disgusting, by the way, but nothing we can do about that.) By giving three different people from three different teams points, the large gaps of points may not exist. I also just feel like every team should have a shot at earning points, and with two people from the same team earning points in a category, it's just not happening. There should be reason behind it, of course. If there's a crap entry just thrown in for the sake of trying to get a point, don't give that person a place in the top three. If you have four phenomenal entries and two people that were supposed to score top three are from the same team, give the position to the other person instead.

Hopefully these are all reasonable solutions. The last one was brought up before WAR started, but I don't think the other two were.
I think it's a bit extreme to say the difference in points was "appalling and disgusting"... Why is that? I feel like this is the closest WAR in a long time, if not ever. It's very rare that 3 teams are in legitimate contention for first place during the final week. You can't really expect everything to be even when every individual has a different skill and participation level. Heck, each of the top three individual scorers on their own pretty much scored more points than any of the teams outside the top three.

I think the scores also prove the point I was trying to make before the WAR, in that the distribution of certain individuals is more important than team size if you are trying to make things "fair". If the top 3 individual scorers were on the same team, that 3-person team would have beat every other team's point totals for this WAR. It just so happened that they were all on different teams which made for a good race. That's not something that can be controlled, because no one knows who is going to have the time/put in the effort/like the prompts enough to win a good majority of events before the WAR starts that year. Last year's top scorers were completely different.

So as far as limiting entries to one scoring entry per team, I oppose that due to what Neo said. But also because if you wanted to place restrictions it would make more sense to limit individuals in that each person can only enter 1 or 2 events each week. That would also eliminate the need to extend the submission period for events from 1 to 2 weeks as there would only be 1 or 2 things for individuals to focus on rather than trying to enter 5-6 events.

Agreeing with Neo on the judging panels. It's a nice idea but we don't/didn't have a big enough memberbase or enough interested people to do it.

And yeah, WAR probably won't be happening again but it's good to get ideas for future events. :)