February Write Off 36 members · 254 stories

Group for the February Write Off of 2012

Comments ( 9 )
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Why are people still joining this? :rainbowhuh:

I've noticed that the vast majority of stories that were submitted to the competition have fewer than 100 views on them, whereas stories of this quality (just judging by the summaries provided) would easily have gained that many views within a few hours of being approved. Is this because, once the competition was over and the fics were released to the general site, they were listed by the date on which they were submitted to the competition, and thus never showed up on the front page of the site? If so, I think this is a problem with the competition premise, as an author essentially "gambles" a story's ability to be seem by many readers, in exchange for a small chance of winning the competition.

Only 9 in the shortlist? Where's ten? :derpyderp2:

281137 I did not mean to imply that and I apologize for anyone who misunderstood me so. I am not questioning the fariness of the judges but instead was refering to first round.(where everyone was allowed to decide which story they prefered and would get on the shortlist) You have to keep in mind that the people who decided to the top 10 list were not chosen judges and just people like me or anyone ells, and I feel confident in saying that some of them might have goten a bias based on the ratings.(Like I said, I personally did gt affected and that is why I stoped voting at some point)

Eitherway, I am not saying the competition was badly handled or anything but just wanted to draw attention to the whole rating thing and that it should probably changed for the next time a competition in this style is done.

281127
If you mean, did the judges allow the thumbs up or down to affect their judging, I can say most certainly that I ignored the rating when it came to choosing from the shortlist. I imagine the others did too.

281127 I totally agree. A few stories that weren't that bad had bunches of down votes, and some pretty terrible stories had a few ups and only one down. :rainbowderp: I really don't know how that happened. I guess people just based their ratings off of others', and anything that wasn't great was skewed.

Next time, ratings should be disabled. People still wouldn't have to waste their time with God-awful stories, because one can easily tell from the first paragraph if the level of writing is sub-par.

281127 Most of the competition stories were similar in quality, so I'm not surprised at how the ratings panned out. The few standouts on either end of the scale--the unusually good and the unusually bad--were pretty uniformly thumbed up or down, respectively, and the large number of stories in the middle zone were probably mostly subject to the YouTube Effect, where people based their ratings more on prior ratings than on their own opinion of the story.

Am I the only one who finds the ratings of these stories really strange?
I mean.. I havnt read most of them but there are so many "5 star" and so many "0 star" stories.. you would expect everything to kinda average out because of the way the competiton was set up.(random vs random, aka.. as many good stories should have been pited against good stories as they were against bad ones)

Overall, I refused to rate and I think next time the rating should be taken out of the competition stories.(if a story has like 6 thumbs down then obviously that will effect everyones opinion before they even read it, certainly happened to me at some point(and which is why I stoped reading them after like the 2nd day, I was unable to make fair judgment)

FIRST!!! and i joined first as well and why am i saying this?

  • Viewing 1 - 9 of 9