sportsfest | Talkback

We know that we faced some major issues regarding the cross-posting to twitter (and tumblr, which really fell to the wayside during the course of the event). We originally had a dedicated social media mod, but lost the mod before the start of the event.

How was the general schedule of the event? We know that there were some issues regarding the end of MR and BRs overlapping, but was there anything else?

How were the interactions and the general helpfulness of the mod team?

How were your experiences in the Discord server?

We experimented a lot with the scoring system and changed it dramatically from previous SASOs. How did you feel this new system worked out? How did using the lowest number of team members work for point thresholds?

How did you feel about halftime signups?

There was a lot of attrition after Halftime. Was it burnout? Or were the BR’s not as interesting? What could we do to improve this?

Edited 2018-09-09 19:26 (UTC)

I know some of my teammates & I struggled with the point system and the medal tiers. We were all busy this summer so we focused on creating the best main round entries we could. While I’m very proud of what we created, it was disappointing that MRs were so drastically less weighted than bonus rounds. And weighting points by number of team members was a bummer, too. It’s a disincentive to join a team as a casual member, contributing what you can when you can, if that bumps up the number of points thr team needs to score to medal. To be competitive in the current system you have to be all-in in all the rounds which just isn’t sustainable for a whole summer for a lot of people. In SASO I felt like it was more possible to do a trade off and gain your points in MRs or BRs.

One of my teammates talked about the idea of more of a “merit badge” or “superlative” kind of system where you earn team recognition based on different styles of accomplishments. A MR badge, etc. I don’t know exactly how that would work but I thought it was an interesting idea!

Opinions! I love giving opinions :)

This was my first year doing Sportsfest and I was in Grandstand and I had an enormously grand time. It was just so much fun and low stress and I loved how *social* the event was. I hadn't been part of fandom in that sort of way for over ten years and I'm so glad I took part, thanks to Mousapelli for banging the sportsfest drum!

I hope it continues, I know I would start to look forward to it in my calendar every Winter here.

I have no opinions on scoring in general, though I guess I would have liked to see a grandstand team score, useless as it would have been.

I liked the idea of the Discord server, it added to the social nature of the fest, and I liked that when I popped in there were always people chatting away and when I asked a question of the mods it was responded to almost immediately every time. That was fantastic. I didn't like how so much information seemed to be be disseminated from the Discord server though, like.. when Icie's search got up and running, it was just sort of hidden in the channels for a bit and none of my friends knew it was even available. Every time I told my friends some sportsfest info, they would be like 'how did you know?' me: 'oh, i saw a mod say something in the discord server'. Which is fine (so instantaneous!), but I felt like official responses to things needed to be aggregated on DW etc, because DW is where the fest actually happens.

I was tired after halftime, but I also struggled with the 4th BR because it was too hard to post pictures on DW on my phone, which is where I fandom/keep screencaps etc. So to transfer pics from my phone, to my PC, it was just too much work.

Let me see ... Let me see.

1) The scheduling of the event suited me but then I work from home so there's not really going to be a good/bad time. I wasn't that concerned about the MRs and BRs overlapping but then I had the relatively easy job of only writing and not having to format/edit/create a page for our entry.

2) Any time I asked a question of a mod, it was answered quickly and with a friendly tone. (Thank you!)

3) I didn't join the main discord server (joined a team one instead). I'm not good in chats which always seem fast moving and with a set of people driving the pace or subject. I'm also in a time zone that's inbetween most people, so I'd have missed a lot. (There were also some issues, I heard, so I think it's probably a good thing I steered clear.)

4) This is the first time I've joined a team, so I can't really comment on the scoring system and whether it was fair/unfair. I do think MRs should have had more points as a lot of work went into them, whereas BR fills and prompts could be dashed off quite quickly. I'm not sure it worked weighting the points to number of team members. If you're in a small team and two people are caught up with RL issues (like work!) it's much harder for the remaining members to bridge any gap than if you're in a team of eight where everyone can write two or more fills. But then ... I joined SportsFest to be part of the team, and to see how much I could personally write and challenge myself with rather than to 'win' anything. I did very much love being part of a team, so would probably join one again rather than being on Grandstand.

5) Uhm, I thought team switching was a bit odd (did it happen at all), for latecomers who wanted to join a team or replace members who'd had to quit then it was good.

6) I was a little burnt out after round 1 and 2 and was also going through some personal sh*t so that might have been why I wasn't so productive and inspired after BR1 & 2. There was also the fact that it got tiring going through pages and pages of prompts. Icie's search app is great, but often I didn;t know what was going to inspire me to write a fill, so I didn't use it to find a particular ship. It was better at the beginning to get right in at the start and keep on top of the prompts. I'm not sure what can be done about this, and it's probably only an issue for me.

General impressions. I've had a lot of fun, especially with the bonus rounds and wrote a tonne. Not sure any of it is quality, but that's another matter. Would I do it again? That would depend on the team and the fandom. I've genuinely enjoyed writing for a smaller fandom and finding other people like the same ships.

First year doing big fandom event like these for me !

In terms of schedule it went pretty well imo, MR and BR's time were enough i think, overlapping being the sole problem that refrained me from starting a lot of BR fills. I chosed to do MR over BR both times, but i saw that some team splitted the job which is an alternative i didn't think off (tho i would have done both anyway)

The mods were reative on questions and problems were solved quickly so everything went smoothly :)

Discord was a good way for me first to find a team and then to befriend people from other teams, which i don't think would have happenned if i didn't joined. Conversations were rarely too overwhelming or fast so we all had a chance to talk to each others. And the various channels were all usefull
We also had a team discord, a nice tool for organising MR and points etc

Idk too much about the SASO scoring system, aside the fact that teams were competing against each other something like that ?
It was a good idea not to confront different teams' entries for points so the general atmosphere stays friendly.
Team Sowlmates worked with the lowest nb of team members, we were a bit shorthanded at the end of remix round to reach Silver medal but then it was our will to work hard to get it. Taking it easy or having less active members is fine as long as all team members discussed about their competitiveness beforehand.

I don't feel like halftime signups brought a lot of people ? Maybe it wasn't as teased as the first signups on social media and/or didn't get as much attention

I didn't do BR3 because i was travelling and then i know many people going on vacation on august. But i was confused at BR3's theme anyway, and even tho i loved BR2 and BR4 quote/caps possibilities it was a bit redundant.

1. I think the schedule worked out fine. I'm not sure about having it equally disseminated on all fronts/outlets, since the dreamwidth posts were frequently inaccurate, outdated, or coded with broken links.

2. I would like to say that, despite thinking long and hard about even throwing my hat into the ring in this year's talkback (since I'm doing it anyway now) the overall interactions of the mod team were confusing and, at its worst, felt unprofessional. I'm still kind of confused about half this entire posts and why the mod team didn't step in when it became so personal/grudgewanky. I commented myself on last year's SASO mod-pocalypse about how people in large-scale events like this might expect a mod team, in certain cases, to be there, keep an eye on stuff, and be mindful of the mod/participant line.

Also, being an Old Man Yelling At Clouds, I was confused as to why the mods were offering a postcard as an event perk ... and not focusing their energies on the event's logistic matters. But I'm still glad the postcard got made; it's cute.

3. I muted most of the Discord server's channels as soon as I realized that it would be more of a off-topic/irl chatroom. It also wasn't linked anywhere in the general info posts on DW or Tumblr, so I had a hell of a time finding it only to mute most of the channels. And if I was looking for new information, it was posted to the Discord first; I have to work long hours and not look at my phone, and I rely on having the main DW comm as a source of news. I felt really lost, and the pace at which the channels moved made it feel like I couldn't find anything. I'm also someone who is just Very Old about these things, and the mod/office channel had me a bit uneasy as to where I might communicate a more sensitive problem that wasn't just in a public place. I felt like I couldn't rely on any mod mail or PMs because the mods were so obviously (near constantly) on the Discord server, and it appeared to be the mod-favored mode of communication.

4. I think the new scoring system came from a good place. But I'm not really sure if it worked. Last year's SASO had a lot of wank involved in terms of fill creation rates (not unlike this year's remix creation wank, I guess) but if this was a response to that discussion, I don't think it was successful. It was still prohibitive, just in a different way.

5. I joined during the halftime! And I burned out just a quickly. Having a full complement of teammates wasn't something I could personally experience, having joined Grandstand, but if that was the case for me and I knew my team had lost people, there'd be a huge pressure to play catch-up, no? I know that with good captaining a lot of this stuff can be alleviated too, but it just seems like in this case the structure of the whole thing was a bit off.

6. I think having a halftime talkback is always a good idea. Lots of people leave (for various reasons) and for the people like me who missed the ball and joined, it's kind of useful as a structural starting point for the event. I think something like that might also prevent stuff like grudgewank from happening, since talkback always happens at the end of the event when we're all burned out, miserable, tired, etc. I know a lot of people last year talked about how SASO is kind of a meat grinder in terms of emotional investment; it's not untrue tbh but lmfao if that was the case last year, I think it was still true this year, just with less clearly-disseminated information. But fests like this are also kind of endurance events. You can take one look at the schedule and know it's gonna go for a long time. Can't be acting new after signing up for this sh*t, man.

We had to reject a few really, really great nominations (e.g. The King’s Avatar, Fence!, and Check, Please!). Would people be interested in broadening the event’s scope? If so, in what ways?

How did the nomination system work out (Google Form, with MyAnimeList categorization being one of the main criteria)? Did it seem fair?

How did Halftime Nominations go? Would people be interested in having nominations open throughout the entire event?

How did team formation go? What did you think of the different team options (ship, character, team, etc.?) Was any of it confusing?

Did the team worksheet help? Or was it a waste of time?

I was the person that asked about Fence and Check Please, and to be honest, I think allowing them in would open a floodgate to a lot of other media and widen the scope of the fest too much.

I really loved being part of grandstand and the freedom it afforded me to do whatever I wanted. Especially now that grandstand members can make a MR, I'm not sure there would ever be enough persuasion that would make me join a team. Especially since joining a team would commit me to contributing a lot to try and and make the higher score threshold.

I wasn't around when the nominations open so I'm not sure what the criteria are. Sure open it up to other sports. Does it matter if they're small fandoms as long as a team can be formed? There's no judging of the entries, so I don't know what the issue is here.

As far as forming a team went, I knew the fellow Knife Emoji guys from twitter and had just fallen into the fandom so I asked if I could join them. I know when I participated the previous year on Grandstand, I basically gave up after three fills as found it overwhelming.

I liked the team worksheet. I'm not sure how it helped, but I could keep track of what I'd written.

Re: B. Pre-Event

wickedcherub - 2018-09-11 08:13 (UTC) - Expand

Re: B. Pre-Event

equinoxchick - 2018-09-11 09:50 (UTC) - Expand

I wasn't there during nominations, and went to check the list after sign ups. There were a lot of fandoms nominated but prompts and teams came down to barely 20ish different fandoms
If we widen the scope, idk how many people who didn't watch/like at least one of the big titles (HQ, YOI, KNB, Daiya etc) would come to participate for specific smaller fandoms. It might not be a problem for MR but BR's prompts are pretty, and naturally, more big-fandom centric

I liked the freedom we had in terms of team options, and it didn't felt confusing while going through MR. It's good that we can choose whether we want to represent a character/ship or fandom

There were three different ways to give remix permissions (blanket permission on remix permission post, non-blanket permission on the remix permission post, and permission given on individual fills). How did this work?

How did you feel about Remix Round run for the entire course of the event? Would future iterations want to extend the “remix-only” period at the end of the event?.

For those who used the Afterhours community, how was the experience? We noticed that the comm definitely worked better for some BR formats than others (e.g Time/Place vs. Quotes).

What did you think of the BR and MR themes?

We noticed that some participants were a little confused about Rec Round. What was confusing?

Do recs/comments feel genuine when they’re for points?

How did you feel about the tagging system?

It seemed like Grandstand MRs were a success. How could we make it easier for Grandstand-ers to participate in MRs?

Bonus Round and Main Round deadlines were very close together. Some possible solutions for this is to enact an editing period between submission of MRs and finalization of MRs (this would also help with the chaos of the 24 hour mod check period). What are your thoughts on this? What are other possible ideas?

I liked the length of the bonus rounds, I can't speak for how they overlap with the MR, though I noticed that the BR would slow down during MR crunch time.

I found the Afterhours community really awkward, but I don't have a solution for it :) Like I felt like all prompts could be in the main community, and if a fill was explicit then it could be posted in afterhours. Having a dedicated afterhours community seemed to encourage very explicit prompts only in the comm, as opposed to a mix of.. kinky and vanilla, for want of better terms?

I liked the MR themes very much. Lots of scope for interpretation, yet specific enough. I already discussed my issue with BR4 above, but the other three were very good themes.

I think Rec round was confusing because the bot required a separate rec per comment for points, but grandstand members could combine their recs, and that wasn't made clear.

I loved that Grandstand could do an MR, but like I said, it did take away some of the point of being in a team.

I'm still thinking now that I'm pretty tired during the event and I've still got things I haven't gotten around to doing, eg commenting on MRs and doing the rec round which I still want to do.

1) I only went by what permission was given at the end of individual fills, and contacted one person once because I really wanted to write something. I didn't check the blanket permission thread because it was much easier to check at the end of the fill.

2) Having the remix round all the way through was great, and I liked that I could keep contributing.

3) N/A

4) I liked the BR and MR themes. I think there was a broad enough scope to suit everyone. I did find the manga cap one the most challenging to post, but it was fine in the end (I posted far less prompts for that one, but filled a fair amount).

5) I wasn't confused about the rec round, but I didn't understand why I had to make a sep post for each rec, when a long post with links would have worked just as well. It meant more effort, and tbh, I lost interest.

6) I'll admit I initially commented for points, but at the same time I read things I otherwise wouldn't have done and really enjoyed the MR stories I wouldn't otherwise have looked at. I would have wanted to comment anyway, though, because I think it's a nice thing to do. As far as reccing went, I rec'd fills I genuinely liked. It wasn't only for points or I'd have recd a lot more.

7) Uhm, didn't think about it, tbh, although to begin with I wasn't sure if I had to incorporate the prompter's tag in my fill.

8) Not sure.

9) This didn't really affect me, so can't comment.

I gave a blanket permission + "talk to me about it first" line to all my fils.
But i didn't feel like giving blanket perm/perm details under the remix perm post was of any use? Since i think that we mostly refered to the remix perm line in a fill's header.
Also i think that even though perm is granted we should encourage people to ask the filler first before remixing (unless it's especially stated that there's no need), just to make sure the filler is ok with the content of the remix

I did some remixes during BR,and remix round being open during the whole event sounded good to me. I won't be against a bit more remix only time after BR4 tho

I liked the BR and MR themes, it was challenging, i had the opportunity to write and draw on subjects i won't usually

The idea of a rec round is really sweet et appreciable. But point-wise, since the points are granted per post and not recs per post, doing one rec per post was way more efficient. And i myself splitted recs into several comments. I think that having a minimum of 2/3recs per post would avoid the spamming while being points worthy ?

For recs and comments, sometimes i rly liked the content but was hardly putting words on why i found it great,,, so yeah i guess that i had to think a bit to find things to say

Also concerning comment round it was pretty short considering the lengh of all the MRs put together. Ngl i am pretty discouraged when i see 10k+ words and had to come back to big MRs' post several times until i actually start reading it

I think it's appropriate to put a loose limit for MR or even BR. (I'm a concise kind of writer haha)
So in the same idea i thought of a "max lengh" line in prompts header, in case of the filler don't feel like reading smth too heavy/long ? Not to be strictly respected but to give an idea of the average max word count

Re: C. Main Rounds and Bonus Rounds

gryphongirl - 2018-09-14 06:26 (UTC) - Expand

Re: C. Main Rounds and Bonus Rounds

sportsfest_mods - 2018-09-15 01:09 (UTC) - Expand

Re: C. Main Rounds and Bonus Rounds

gryphongirl - 2018-09-15 05:33 (UTC) - Expand

We learned at the end of the last MR, that the mods have the ability to reveal/make MRs public. Future iterations would probably want to take advantage of this, instead of making each captain reveal their MRs.

Are Dreamwidth communities helpful? We kept them because they were a SASO requirement, but did teams actually use them?

Would it be helpful to require Discord accounts in order to disseminate information better? (This goes hand in hand with this year’s social media/cross-posting issues). How did captains feel having to have Discord?

We never ended up tagging our Dreamwidth posts. Dreamwidth formatting in general was a pretty big issue. How could be make Dreamwidth posts more accessible to participants? Are there any better platforms for this type of event?

Edited 2018-09-09 19:25 (UTC)

Although I had my issues with Discord, I will say that I liked the announcement feature. Having a notification on my phone that things were live etc was very helpful. The only other thing I can think of that does that is straight up email, but the Discord announcement is better because you can always go in and check the announcement in a centralised place later.

I don't have any suggestions outside of Dreamwidth for this sort of event. I think it works mostly quite well.

Re: D. Dreamwidth/Discord

littlerain - 2018-09-13 18:40 (UTC) - Expand

We relied a lot on previous SASO experience, which many participants did not have. What tutorials would have been helpful? What would you have wanted to know at the beginning of the event?

How could we support team captains better?

What did people think about the SportsFest Postcards? What were the reasons for signing up or not signing up for one? What about the Postcard Contest? We’d really want to pay the winning artist in any future iterations (even if it was just $20).

Do people like BRs or MRs more? Future iterations of the event could possibly split it into two parts.

Edited 2018-09-09 19:25 (UTC)

I loved the idea of the postcard. I didn't sign up for one for a number of little reasons but I'm glad there was one.

I very much enjoyed my time, I wrote my first fanfic in approximately 15 years or something, I got to participate in fandom again, I got to read a lot of rare pairs that don't get a lot of love, I made lots of new friends, screamed a lot of at current friends, thank you for all of your hard work! Look forward to doing it again.

Re: E. Other

equinoxchick - 2018-09-10 18:47 (UTC) - Expand

Re: E. Other

wickedcherub - 2018-09-11 08:12 (UTC) - Expand

Re: E. Other

equinoxchick - 2018-09-10 18:45 (UTC) - Expand

Re: E. Other

littlerain - 2018-09-13 19:24 (UTC) - Expand

Re: E. Other

hilaryfun - 2018-09-16 00:47 (UTC) - Expand

Re: E. Other

gryphongirl - 2018-09-15 17:12 (UTC) - Expand

Hello mods! I'm just going to put all my talkback in one post, especially since I was on grandstand and thus don't have much to contribute regarding team/MR/scoring/etc. questions. So please excuse the length!!

First, I just want to thank the entire mod squad (and icie!) for taking this on and making my first Summer Sports Anime event such a joy to be a part of. I was so excited to finally join something like this after missing the boat on SASO last year, so just the fact that you made sure this event existed means a lot to me. And all in all it turned out to be a warm, fun, positive event (from my view at least), so you should all be super proud. I know it took more work than we were ever aware of on your end! But I was able to write more than I have in a long while, make new fandom friends, and feel a renewed love for some of my favorite series and ships (and got tempted into a couple new ones!) Not sure what else I could ask for. ^^

-I think aside from some rounds butting up against each other a little close (MR and BR), the schedule seemed very fair. Having those deadlines pushed me to write, and sometimes I write some of my best stuff under pressure lol.

-The mod team, despite this being their first rodeo and having to deal with issues as they cropped up, I think did a great job responding to questions and interacting with us in general. Everyone was incredibly friendly, personable, welcoming, and for the most part professional. I know there was some role confusion on the Discord, but in general I kind of liked getting to know the mods as friends and people in the chat, rather than having them stay aloof and only descend to give announcements and warnings. A happy medium between the two would be most perfect of course, but that's a hard balance to strike.

-Ngl this was actually my first experience with Discord! :D I think it was a fun way to learn my way around the platform and definitely provided me with the most fandom socializing I've had in years, so I truly appreciated that. I think it was a fun space to get instant feedback for questions, fills, and just sharing that new meme or post from tumblr that's sports anime related (or just funny). Any IM chat space is going to have its issues (that's just fandom), but all in all I think things stayed very civil, clean (outside of designated spaces lol), and enjoyable. The only suggestion I might have is to keep the 'main' SportsFest Discord more focused on event and sports anime-only content (the off topic channels were fun and good for getting personal if that's what you're looking for, but those were also the channels that tended to get most overwhelming or out of hand). Teams could then start their own Discords (and I gather several did) if they wanted to branch out to chat about other anime, subjects, or their personal lives.

-I think attrition was mostly due to burnout and probably just the ebbs and flows of IRL--for me at least, you can only devote so much energy to following the flood of BR prompts, keeping up with Discord, etc., and a couple solid months of that is pretty intense. That's not a bad thing or a criticism, and I'm honestly not sure how to combat it--it just kind of felt like a feature of the event. It's possible keeping some of the most flexible and easy-to-prompt/interpret BR themes until the late rounds might help when energy is flagging.

-On that note I really enjoyed all the BR themes--my excitement staying up the night before until midnight to see what each new theme was stayed consistent to the end! The wacky BR themes were probably what fascinated me most about SASO and thus joining this event, and I thought they were all creative and allowed for a lot of great ideas to be thrown around. What other people have said about the Image round being slightly harder to find and post content in DW for is the only drawback, I'd say.

-I do think the page growth moved incredibly fast though--it started out thrilling and exciting to keep up with the flood of BR prompts, but I did notice it got more intimidating once a little burnout set in later on. I adore icie for organizing the database and it helped, but like equinoxchick mentioned you really have to just sift through prompts to get inspired sometimes (especially when you have too many favorite ships and fandoms to spend time searching one by one), and dozens of pages piling up in the span of a couple hours would give almost anyone pause. xD Again, I can't think of a perfect way to combat this; limiting prompt posting speed/number by participant goes against the basic point of the event (getting points by prompting) and feels like it would stifle creativity, but I'm not really sure how else to make the sheer number of prompts easier to wrangle.

-I can definitely see the practical need for Afterhours to be a separate locked community, and it was good to have a place to keep all the prompts where people were clearly just looking for some good-old-fashioned smut; sometimes it's nice to just be able to be straightforward about asking for what you want! That said, I think it did make it a little difficult to prompt some things that might have been 'softer' and more 'borderline' (like M instead of E I guess?) or were less outright kinky or explicit. While people could put 'nsfw ok' in their main BR tags and quite a few people did, I don't think we got too many fills that crossed that border, and I wondered if it was because the community separation kind of got people's heads in two distinct spaces, if that makes sense?? Just my two cents. :)

-As far as nominations, I think the criteria are very fair and everything got in that I would want to write for as far as sports series, so I have no complaints.

-Since most people tended to just give remix permission in the heading of their fills, the blanket permissions chat didn't end up seeming necessary--I know I never checked it again after my post there. ^^;

-I think making the rec round worth points is a good way to get people to do recs, which are always fun and give fills and creators more attention they deserve. That said, making and formatting lots of posts was tiring; I wonder if there's maybe a way to have people make 'master rec list' posts after each round or so, maybe even posted to their DWs and linked instead of in rec round comments, and then score based on # of entries or something?

-I didn't notice any issues with tagging, and I appreciated being able to leave a couple silly or 'talkative' tags in there along with the usual content ones.

-I know it was hard to foresee everything enough to make a big tutorial at the beginning, but I think having a masterpost of 'how-tos' would be a help next time around. There were a lot of questions about posting logistics and 'is this okay?' regarding this and that, so it would be nice to have a way to say 'here's a link to everything about that.' I learned a lot from observing SASO and how it works last year, but for those who are new to the event and to DW/Discord each year, it's also better to be newbie-friendly and assume they have no idea how things work.

-Last but certainly not least, I LOVED my SportsFest postcard (it's propped up on my desk as I type!)--I signed up for one because as my first big fandom event I knew this would be a special thing for me, and it was! The postcard will remind me of the time I spent, the fills I created, and the friends I made at SportsFest, and I'm really glad I got one. :D I can definitely see chipping in $$ for one in the future, as I'd like to see both the artist and the mods who put in all the postal work get some compensation.

Thank you, everyone, for making Summer 2018 so wonderful for this fandom writer!!

Hello hello mods! A big thank you for making this event happen this year. SF/SASO is a pretty unique fandom event and possibly the only one of its kind for sports anime? I enjoy the challenge, pushing oneself to create more things, and making new friends. We owe it to you guys for working so hard on this.

I wish this event could keep going, so I’ll offer my thoughts if there’s a mod team that would consider picking it up again next year.

A. General

2. Mod Conduct.

4. Scoring.

B. Pre-Event

1. Half time nominations.

2. Team formation.

C. Main Rounds and Bonus Rounds

1. Remix permissions.

2. Remix round.

4. BR themes.

4.5. MR themes.

6. Recs/comments for points.

7. BR and MR overlap.

MR Work Limits

restricting

D. Dreamwidth/Discord

1. Dreamwidth communities.

2. Discord.

E. Other

1. Tutorials/assumed knowledge.

3. Postcards.

Apologies for the length. I hope these comments don't sound too harsh - they're coming from a place that wants to see this event continue and improve. Again, thank you for organising!

Edited 2018-09-11 14:25 (UTC)

As someone who did a lot of remixes - I'd like to say I worked hard on each one and approached it with sincerity. I also spent most of my summer working very hard on bonus round fills and Main round art. For example, my Star Wars AU poster alone took 40 hours to do. And I also work full time.

Also, just in case anyone thinks I may have "dropped a filter" on anything please enjoy one of my layered Photoshop files.

layers

Re: Remixed

swankitty - 2018-09-13 05:25 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Remixed

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Hi mods, I’m just going to put all my talkback in one post. I apologise for the giant text wall, but I hope that you will find the feedback useful. Thank you for running this event, and for all the hard work you have put into it.

Main Rounds and Scoring
One of the things I enjoy most is making Main Rounds. It's always lovely to see people collaborate, to collaborate with people. It's very much a labour of love and care, particularly if you're a small ship. The emphasis of MR has always been quality, and it’s always a pleasure to see what people have come up with, how they have pushed themselves to make something for their ship/team.

Now, let's talk about the new point system. It arbitrarily gives us only 500 points for participating. Comparatively, my team effectively earned more points in one BR than we did for our MR. It pushes all the work into BRs and leaves us with little motivation to actually work on our MRs, save for love for the ship. There is no reward for working on it except for personal satisfaction and a rather paltry amount of points.

The point scale, in theory was a great idea. In actual application, I believe it required far more of the participants than most were willing to commit. At 12 fills per member of the team, that's about 1 fill a day from all members. Not every team had people who could plug out that many fills so quickly, or effectively. Even worse if you had members of the team who preferred to work on MR instead, because that meant they were added weight if you were trying to aim for gold, because that's a whole extra 12 fills to be split between the remaining team. You can argue well, you guys didn't have to go so hard. Yes, we didn't have to go so hard, but it didn't mean we didn't want to give it a try at least. Most people when faced with a bar, usually try to go over, not walk into it and say “Well, that's okay I guess.”

Effectively, it created a system I believe is even more demotivating than SASO's. It factored in things that went wrong with the previous SASO, but it also failed to account for the amount of workload that it would place on participants. SASO last year was an anomaly, and the high fill volume participants were few and far between. In fact, I'd say that there were only 3-4 of them in the entirety of the event. In an event for 300+ people, they were the 1%. Yes, a lot of people complained about the 1%. But we always complain about the 1%, because they stand out.

I feel that instead of addressing the issue, it has only exacerbated the BR heaviness of the event. It completely devalues people whose main contributions are to MRs, has in fact, made them deadweight. Doesn't matter they have skills that are applicable to MR only and are capable of building truly amazing things. They didn't do work for BR, and that's where the accumulation of points actually happened.

If you wanna do the math, let’s say you have a 5 person team. 5 fills in 1 BR from you is already enough to make up your MR contribution. For me, 5 fills would have taken approximately 2-3 days. Proportionally, I spent over a week with some rather specialised skills to get that many points for MR1, not including the time that went into planning and organising MR.

This felt like a very shortsighted response that addressed one issue from last year's SASO, an issue which I believe was unique to last year only. The number of complaints probably heavily skewed the current mod team's decision regarding points, but I feel it failed to take overall trend into account in its attempt to address an issue that was only relevant to 1%. It also failed to account for the points that a team garners from voting as well, or how the MR points scaled in comparison to BR.

MRs are so very much a labour of love, a cumulation of effort, time, and creativity that has always demanded more of us than BRs do. I truly enjoy making MRs and that the event facilitates this for us, but when put into a point scale like this feels very much like the MR has been devalued in comparison, and also the effort that goes into creating a beautiful MR.

Another thing I want to point out was in SASO’s system, it was entirely possible to win based on your MR entries, just as it was possible to win via BR. Comparatively, Sportsfest is heavily, heavily BR skewed. It is impossible to win without BRs. I feel that this is something that needs to be reconsidered.

This brings me to the point scale and medalling. The scaling felt, in some places, unnecessarily complicated. The intentions of the scale was good, but frankly it just got confusing and too tiring to process after a while, especially when the entire thing scaled depending on the number of members you had. The medal point limits feel extremely arbitrary. I’m not sure how the limits were decided, but I feel that it doesn’t account for a lot of things and feels more like a quota to achieve. Yes, it’s all fake points and internet cookies, but that arbitrary line can also sometimes feel like a failure to achieve. I’m more in favour of the medalling being decided post event, once the points have all been totaled and laid out. If you wish to scale the points with team members, perhaps you could simply divide the total points earned by the team by the number of members then rank the teams accordingly.

I’d also like to discuss upper limits. Part of the reason SASO had upper limits in place was to ensure all the entries were accessible. It’s rather daunting sometimes to look through entries that are very long or very big. While I’m not advocating limiting creativity, I believe there should be a maximum limit to ensure people aren’t too put off by bigger entries. It does not have to be as strictly enforced as SASO’s, but I believe it should be in place. This also ties into comment round, and generally making MR manageable for people to consume.

Bonus Rounds
Bonus rounds had very interesting themes this year, but I feel the themes swung from two extremes this year: hyper-specific and vague feelings. Admittedly, it’s difficult to find themes that straddle the line between the two, but regardless, I did enjoy the themes this year.

I personally didn’t really care for remix round being open for the entirety of Sportsfest. If I chose to write a remix, it took time away from a BR or MR, if I was working on MR. I’d have preferred a dedicated period of time to work on remixes. Furthermore, as Hayley pointed out, it felt like a way for some teams to just get ahead and accumulate points, sometimes without consideration for the original creator’s intent and feelings.

I feel like comment round could have been a little longer, personally. Some of the entries were quite a lot to get through and writing thoughtful, considerate comments for entries can be a time consuming process. Moreover, while the number of MR entries weren’t as many as SASO last year, I think this is something that should be considered as the event continues to run and expand.

I feel like rec round could have been better formatted to make the entire thing feel less spammy. Say for example, requiring a minimum of 3-5 recs per post, as opposed to how people were doing one rec per post. The intent is sweet and I definitely enjoy it and checking out people’s recommendations.

As for the sincerity of the comments/recs, I believe that is very much apparent in the intent and the wording of the people who write recs and comments. Truly sincere comments are clear in their intent and are also quite often characterised by gushing, whereas the comments that were for points only were very obvious when placed side by side, as it was in some of the rounds. One can argue that all comments were made with some degree of sincerity, and I don’t doubt they were, but I believe it was also glaringly obvious when the comments/recs were mostly about getting points.

Scheduling
Overall, the schedule was very much more relaxed compared to SASO’s, which is nice. I really appreciated the week off. It gave me some breathing room to do other things and also to step away from Sportsfest for a while. I also really liked that during Halftime, you opened up signups and nominations again to offer participants more opportunities.

There were a lot of overlapping events, particularly where BR and MR ending was concerned. The overlap between the end of BR and MR was rather tiring. Some people went from one crunch to another in an attempt to get everything out and it was exhausting to watch, much less be a part of. I believe this might have contributed to some burnout and I believe the mods should probably consider this when lining up events.

Organisation
The organisation is much better in the second half, thank you for improving on that. However, I still want to talk about organisation for the event as a whole.

A lot of things were not properly clarified, but I want to especially stress Main Round organisation.

First off. Nowhere did you guys specify there would be mod checks until MR1 went up.I found out there would be a mod check only after the MR posting guidelines went up, which was midway through the MR1 posting period. Neither was it stated how long mod checks would be ongoing, nor what the mods would be checking for. I suppose I should have assumed from previous experience, but since it wasn’t explicitly stated anywhere, I didn’t think it was happening, especially given how casual the rest of the event seemed to be. While a relatively minor issue, I feel it would have smoothened out the process of MR much more if all these things were clearly laid out from the beginning.

Many of these things could also have been put on the schedule, or the schedule updated to reflect these events as a point of reference. A lot of announcements are made in the Discord server but changes aren’t made to the DW posts. Not everyone is in the SF Discord, and things are very easily lost in Discord as well. I personally refer to DW more often than I do Discord as most of the information is clearly laid out. I found myself spending a lot of time looking for information. and then cross-checking with Discord to make sure it was up to date. Sometimes links were broken, or did not lead to where they should, further complicating the issue.

As a whole, I feel like Discord should not have been the primary place to look for information, which it unfortunately was this year. The chat moves very fast, and while the mods do their best to highlight important issues, a lot of it gets drowned out by the sheer pace the server moves at, even when separate channels are provided for information.

Secondly, MR comm. I mentioned this during halftime previously and I’d like to reiterate it. I’m not sure if any of you were captain last year, but SASO had a resources post in the comm for the captains to refer to, linking everything that might be needed for MR posting as well as relevant information. If nothing, it eased the flow of information and ensured that we were looking in the right places. I feel that this might be especially important for Grandstand MRs, given that they have no access to the captains chat where I believe most of the MR relevant information went up first. Alternately, creating a community for captains/MR posters where all relevant resources have been gathered.

Another thing I want to point out is the use of DW in general. Generally, the impression I’ve gotten is that the mods are not very familiar with Dreamwidth as a platform overall, hence leading to various hiccups over a whole variety of issues including MR comms, post formatting etc. Similarly, this suggests the mods are not particularly familiar with HTML and how it works in combination with DW. I’m not expecting the mods to be coders, but I believe it would be very beneficial for the mods to familiarise themselves with HTML and DW better as a platform, should you continue to use DW to host the event.

This also shows in the way people were confused about how to go about posting things on DW as well. A primer on how to use DW would have been helpful, as well as often used HTML. Even a list of links to such resources would have been very helpful, simply so people can go to look up how to do certain things themselves. Many such resources do exist on DW itself, and frankly would have been very helpful to a lot of people, gauging from how many people were asking for HTML help over Discord.

One particular issue that really bothered me was the post formatting. I use the darker version of DW for my own reasons, and when I open up certain entries on DW, I can’t see half the text because the text has been formatted black. Sometimes it’s the entire post, sometimes it’s only part of the post. Perhaps I’m in the minority, but I sincerely doubt I’m the only person who has run into this issue. Something for the mods to take into consideration.

Regarding DW comms, I doubt that we’re the only ones, but my team did not make use of the DW comm we created at all. While I understand the intentions behind it, but I also believe it’s not entirely necessary. I would propose setting up a method of putting team members in touch with the team captains instead. Team worksheets were helpful in getting all team members on the same page and setting expectations, which I think was overall a good move.

Mod Conduct
I brought this issue up during Halftime and I appreciate what the mods have done to improve, but frankly, what happened should not have happened at all. It was very disheartening to have to experience that, and it also impacted my trust in the mods’ capability to handle things in a professional manner.

But as a whole, the mod team was very responsive and approachable, which I really appreciate.

I appreciate all the hard work the mods have put into running this event of this scale over the course of the last two months, I truly do. Your hearts are in the right place and I look forward to seeing how much the event can improve and get better from here. Thank you very much for a fun summer!

I wanted to +1 this comment, but especially the breakdown of MR and scoring. It's explained in much more detail than I what I covered, but I should have emphasised that I think the point allocation is something probably needs the most review.

Voting comes with its own drawbacks. It's impossible to make everyone happy no matter what scoring method. It seems like the current system is in place to address last year's concerns, but in implementing it MR has been completely devalued... which is a bit odd considering it's called Main Round.

At the moment it feels like we're aiming for an arbitrary goal (determined by your team size no matter what their specialised skills are like and time they have to do fills) and I pretty much agree with what Ewa's said here. Last year the scores were constantly fluctuating - you couldn't closely track or compare yourself to another team when the rankings could change after MR, but I preferred just charging ahead and doing my best without having to worry about reaching a threshold or falling short of it. Just some of my own thoughts.

Hi lovely mods! Thank you for the past summer, I enjoyed my time participating in this event creating and having fun with friends! I do hope there would be future SF(/SASO-like events), and with this in mind I'm writing this feedback post for my thoughts and things that might be improved.

1) Scoring
The biggest drawback of this event for me personally was the new MR scoring system. This was perhaps done to avoid voting as there have always been a lot of (dissatisfied) talks about it every SASO, but I really liked how in SASO BRs were designed for quantity, and MRs are for quality. The fact that all MRs are scored the same discourages participants to put in effort to refine their MR entries, as we can spend time to make more BR fills instead.

At first, I was neutral/slightly indifferent on the idea of the medal system, just like how I felt about SASO's ranking system (I like getting points for creating things but I'm not very competitive). But as the event went on, it started to feel like some fills were made for the sake of scores to reach certain medal tiers. This wouldn't be much of an issue if it were only happening in normal BRs, but this also happened in remix rounds where I feel that some remixes were done just for points without thinking of the original filler. Fills are different from prompts: they're something that someone created with love and effort, and treating them like prompts or just something to obtain points off of is incredibly disrespectful. By using the medal system, teams are encouraged to post to reach certain standardized targets ("to get a gold medal you have to get X score no matter what" — you have to aim for a hard XX number of fills in total) whereas using the ranking system would make it more like a scale ("the team with the most points will be #1, others will be ranked proportionally" — the number of fills you do to get to ranking #XX is not set and fluctuates depending on other participants). As Ewa has put it, it feels like it's a quota that you have to fill. In the end, I prefer having the ranking system more.

2) Discord server
I loved having the mods very approachable in the Discord server! Answers to questions are also always prompt and friendly — thank you.

However, I feel that because Discord is fast-paced and very easily accessible, sometimes there were answers to questions that would've benefited from a bit more discussion from the mods' side. Sometimes it felt that the mods are disconnected, e.g., a mod replying to a question/request that had been taken care of by another mod. Other times it felt like something that was put out without much consideration, for example the answer to someone asking about "colorizing art" for remix round. It was something that would affect artists who had given blanket permissions but had not known that it was an option for remix, as it was not listed in the remix permission post. Perhaps expanding what kinds of "colorizing" are allowed and, as Hayley has said, emphasizing that "it's always good to check with the filler" would be great.

Another thing — I feel that an event Discord server should be just that: an event Discord server. Having sharing and fandom channels on top of SF-related channels is nice because you can interact with fellow participants about things related to the very foundation of SF (i.e., fandom), but I wonder if having other very personal channels was a good thing. Sometimes the Discord server felt more like a personal Twitter account/private group chat rather than an event server; it felt incredibly awkward to be able to read some extremely personal episodes in a group for an event with 150+ participants. Yes, channels can be muted, but having those channels in an official event server in the first place, in my opinion, felt out of place.

3) Schedule
I liked the general schedule of SF overall! Four BRs and one continuous remix round with two rec rounds felt very balanced. However, I really miss the editing period that we had for MRs in SASO, it felt nice to be able to post an entry knowing that there's still a few more days to polish and perfect it. Also, it was very unfortunate that the deadlines for MRs and BRs were so close together. I was very focused on our MRs that by the time our MR entries were posted and I could do BR, I was too tired and definitely needed more than 24 hours to create a fill. Even having the BRs end in 48 instead of 24 hours after the MRs would help immensely, but having editing period during that time would be great as well!

4) Afterhours
I am not much into NSFW, and I cannot stress how much a separate Afterhours comm made browsing BR pages more comfortable for me. Thank you.

5) Remix permissions
I like the fact that you can have a blanket permission but you can still give exceptions by using the remix permission header for each fill, because some fills might be different than others. Sadly, with this system, it becomes very difficult if you change your mind about your previous remix permissions, especially if you've made a lot of fills. I tried to minimize this by linking my "permission with caveats" post to my every fill so I could just change that one post if I'd changed my mind, perhaps this is something that can be considered ? (It is pretty troublesome though because you always have to have the link ready).

6) Mod Conduct
There were however some problems with one of the mods being unprofessional, both in the public Discord and in private correspondences. Although it was improved in the latter half of the event, I wish something like this did not have to happen, and I hope it won't happen again in future events!

Again, thank you very much for running this event and making it possible. It was an enjoyable summer, and I wish the departing mods nothing but good luck!

Edited 2018-09-15 02:19 (UTC)

A. General

Schedule: Some more time so MRs and BRs didn't overlap as much would definitely be nice! the BRs got real quiet around MR posting time. Having an editing period to relieve some of the stress would help a lot with that too, I think. Having the week break was also very much appreciated, people definitely need the reminder to chill and do other things so they don't burn out.

Mods: my experiences were all very good! The mods were always quick to respond to inquiries. I do agree that having information in multiple places can get a little confusing, and the discord moves so quickly that having information accessible there can be a challenge, but not knowing whether to check the dw comm or the discord server for the information i was looking for sometimes got frustrating. using the dw for tutorials and static information/reference is important and I think that was underutilized.

Discord: i loved having the discord server with places to interact with other participants, it made the event a lot more fun and social for me, especially being on grandstand and not having a team i was interacting with. I find discord a lot more approachable than dw for that kind of casual chatting.

Scoring: I was on grandstand, so I don't have much to say about the scoring. I was a huge fan of getting points for commenting, though, if solely because it encourages more people to comment on MR entries. I think it's very much worth it even when some of the comments are obviously just for points. Perhaps lowering the cap, so people aren't pressured to comment on every single entry, might reduce the just-for-points comments. There are always one or two MRs that I just don't have much to say about.

Halftime signups: i was a HUGE fan of this, a couple of my friends got to join in because of it and i appreciated it a lot! Overall the event felt a lot more relaxed and less restrictive, and I definitely appreciated that.

Halftime attrition: personally, I had a lot of trouble with a couple of specific BRs, so when I got slow that was the reason. I don't collect screen caps so that round I found it very difficult to prompt at all and also to find prompts that appealed to me, they were often very vague. I also had a lot of trouble with the quotes round, for some of the same reasons. I know balancing vague and specific in the BRs can be challenging, and different people have different preferences, but it makes me miss previous years with a higher quantity of BRs and therefore more options when some of them were ones I personally struggled to prompt or fill.

B. Pre-Event

Rejected nominations: I would absolutely LOVE to see an expansion of what qualifies for this event. particularly with the database working and making prompts a lot easier to sift through, having more options definitely appeals to me, and i've enjoyed all of the relaxing of the rules and requirements so far. i think it'd be great if series like Check, Please! or Fence qualified.

C. Main Rounds and Bonus Rounds

Permissions: It was a little tedious to have to fill out the permissions on every fill when I gave blanket permission, but I definitely appreciated it being right there on the fill when I was trying to do remixes. Having both options seems to have worked out very well.

Remix round: I would like to see the remix round extended after the event, yes. I tended to forget the round was ongoing during the event, and it seemed slow sometimes.

afterhours: i definitely appreciated having nsfw content in a separate comm.

themes: i LOVED both of the MR themes, even though I didn't end up being able to participate. They were a really great balance of providing inspiration while not being limiting. I liked the BR themes as well, even though a couple were difficult for me.

rec round: I didn't find it confusing at all, but I've done them in previous years.

recs/comments for points: i didn't perceive any as being less than genuine, and I very much appreciated seeing the volume of comments increase when they were for points. Again, I think the policy is worth any potential less-than-genuine commenting.

I had trouble finding people in grandstand to participate in the MR, i'm not sure where a good place to ask would've been but communication during the event was a little difficult when we didn't have a team channel or comm. I'm also not sure what a good solution is, beyond setting up a channel for grandstand MRs? I dunno. something similar to when people advertize their teams pre-event, maybe? some sort of place grandstand people can post if they're looking for a MR team/teammates?

editing period: yes please!

E. Other

postcards: i loved them! it would definitely be great to have a way to fund them so the mods didn't have to pay for it, and for the artist to be compensated.

BR or MRs: I'm a huge fan of BRs, personally, that's always my favorite part of the event. I really love looking through prompts for something that inspires me to do a short fill. I don't see how splitting them up would be beneficial? i enjoy the rhythm of the event as it is, going from small prompts and fills to working on and reading larger works, and I wouldn't want either to be isolated or to seem more or less important than the other. It does seem like there should be a grandstand-equivalent option for folks who want to do MRs but aren't interested in the BRs without them becoming dead weight for their team, though

i'm one of the people who basically disappeared toward the end of BR 2. the reason for that was, plainly, that i wasn't enjoying myself. there were a lot of reasons why that was the case, including personal stuff and things i don't expect any mod team to be able to fix (eg, realizing how well and truly out of step i am with fandom at large and my main fandom in particular), so i don't want to make it sound like it was all on the event. i am going to elaborate on the parts that were, however, in hopes that the event can improve if it continues. i did all three years of saso and i loved it dearly and it would be sad for it to disappear completely.

scoring and main round
the scoring system, for me, was completely demoralizing. while i love BRs, i've never been high output. my goal for the last saso was to do one fill per round. i came into this year knowing i was going to be even lower output than previously because of some personal circumstances. i joined a team at the last minute because i really enjoy main rounds, even when they are stressful, because having the opportunity to collaborate with so many talented people to make something for a ship you all love is rare! if i'd realized that my skillset was basically useless in terms of points and that i was actually adding to my team's scoring burden without being able to help meet it, i probably would not have. to be clear, my team is lovely and no one cared about medalling, but it still made me feel pretty junk not to be able to meet the the minimum quotas prescribed by the event as a meaningful contribution toward a medal. i have never been upset by not being able to do as much as other people can but not being able to do what the event considers minimum is a different matter.

my primary value to a team is as a main round architect. i'm good at concepts and figuring out how to best execute them with the available resources. with saso scoring that was valuable because it was set up to create a balance between MR and BR -- a team had to do both reasonably well in order to place high. MR under this scoring system seems to be an afterthought, worth only 500 points each. completing both main rounds doesn't get a team of any size even halfway to a bronze medal. i understand that some people didn't like voting, which is fine, but devaluing MR to this extent doesn't feel well thought out.

additionally, i know everyone complained about the saso MR limits and while i think it was good to relax them in most ways, i do think there needs to be a maximum cap on the number of words allowed. no voting pool means that i don't get the list cut down to 10 entries that i'm responsible for going through thoroughly. comments being worth points means i should try to go through as many as i can. being busy, tired, and short on attention span means that i look at almost every entry being 7-10K+ words long and end up reading none of them. personally, 5K max per entry is probably the most i could handle.

mod communication, organization, and event venue
i would be strongly against using discord as the primary method of communication for the the event or making it mandatory. the fact that it became the event's primary form of communication did also contribute to my dropping out. discord is good for socializing and it seems that a lot of people did find it useful for announcements, but it's a terrible platform for disseminating large amounts of information. important information should be presented in a linkable format that is easy to find or pass on to people who might have missed it. you cannot do that with a discord message. i also want to note, because i doubt that i'm the only one, being on a large chat server with a lot of strangers makes me anxious. i did initially join the server but i ended up muting it because it was too busy and was pinging my anxiety really badly.

in terms of venue, there really is not a more suitable site for an event of this style and scale than dreamwidth, especially not one that is specifically and explicitly fandom friendly. i personally use the team dreamwidth community for test posting of MR entries and, when i was captaining in the past, have used it for collect team contact info, collating all BR0 gifts my teams received and some other odds and ends. while i prefer to have a team comm, making them optional would probably be fine if the majority of people don't actually use theirs.

i don't want to say too much about organization since it's been covered and i hear it improved a lot in the second half. instead i'm just going to write up some things i feel whoever takes over should keep in mind:

don't underestimate the amount of time you need to spend preparing for an event of this size. all communities, informational pages, etc should be up and running well before the event goes live.
don't assume previous knowledge from your participants. have all relevant information on how to participate in the event available and accessible before it's necessary.
anticipate and try to preempt any issues that may come up rather than just reacting to things as they happen.
have at least one person on staff that is familiar and comfortable with how dreamwidth works. making a few simple tutorials or even linking the dreamwidth FAQ pagess relevant to the event would probably be helpful to participants who weren't around for the lj days and are only familiar with tumblr and twitter. i feel like a lot of things that people tend to complain about (eg, comments not being editable after being replied to, editing comments after a round closed resulting in being screened) could be avoided with a quick dreamwidth primer. on a side note, unless something's changed since the last time i ran a dw-based event, i don't believe a community admin can actually change the security level of a post made by someone else, so there's that.
while it's good to have different people in charge of different areas, there needs to be someone keeping track of the big picture and making sure things are done properly and on time.

in the end, if this event were to run again with this same scoring system, i would not participate. organizational issues can be overcome with experience or preparedness, but structural problems are a different matter. i think scaling via team size was an idea that came from a good place, but i've said before that how much BR output a team can achieve depends a lot more on who is on team than how many. there's also the fact that not everyone can participate consistently for the entire duration of a long event like this. on a full team, sometimes people do just ghost, leaving a team with a higher scoring burden and fewer people to reach the threshold. if the idea is for people who cannot participate for the entire event or cannot meet a minimum output level to not join a team, that should probably be spelled out at sign up.

Edited 2018-09-14 03:41 (UTC)

As an addendum to Mel's excellent points for incoming mods, I'd also strongly encourage any incoming mods to take a look at how SASO was run previously, and all the events that it was built upon. Many of SASO's rules were in place for a reason, even if it seemed unnecessarily strict or spelled out. The community's needs shift with the years as the community changes, and there are different problems every year. While the mods cannot be expected to anticipate every problem, there is much to learn from the way the events were run in past years as well as why it was run the way it was.

Thank you to everyone who has left feedback so far! We'll address the most common and pressing concerns in our wrap-up post on Sunday. Any feedback you leave will be helping a potential team of new mods! In addition, although the main event itself has concluded, the participant guidelines are still in effect. Talkback will close on Saturday at 11:59 PDT. We appreciate all of you for participating and letting us know your thoughts!

Hi mods, a lot of what I wanted to say has been addressed by others and I already brought up some of it during half-time talkback, so I'll keep this short, but I mainly wanted to +1 points that others have raised about mod professionalism and conduct (which, as Ewa said, did improve in the second half of the event but probably shouldn't have happened at all), and the tone of the Discord chat. While it was nice to have a casual place where participants could hang out and get to know one another, it was also very fast-moving, had too many channels, and could and did often very quickly become a space for in-jokes and conversations that sometimes felt a little exclusionary.
- One example I recall very early on in the event was a conversation about POV in writing. There were a number of remarks about 2nd person POV that made me feel very uncomfortable. As someone who had written several 2nd person POV fills at that time, it was upsetting for me to read an entire conversation along the lines of how much people disliked it. I am aware it was not personally targeted at me but it made me feel somewhat unwelcome in the community. I would have appreciated a mod stepping in to say that while everyone is entitled to their opinions, it is important to keep the tone of the chat welcoming and to affirm that all kinds of writing are valid and appreciated in the event.

I strongly feel that Discord should not be the main channel of communication. Not everyone has it and it should not be a requirement to participate, because not everyone is going to want to be in the Discord chat or keep an eye on it constantly. Dreamwidth works well for an event like this.

I didn't find the rec rounds confusing, but I did find it intimidating and tiring after a while because the scoring system encouraged spamming of multiple comments, each with one rec. I much preferred the SASO system where you needed a minimum of 3 recs per comment.

I was fine with all the BR themes (superlatives was very hard for me to prompt because my brain just doesn't work that way, but I was fine filling the prompts). That said I do see there was a lot of confusion over the caps round and how it differed from the quotes round, and while I understand it in theory, in practice I did find there was a lot of overlap, as people would prompt caps with dialogue or text that could equally have been a quote. I think if these themes are brought back in future, there should be one or the other, but not both. Time and place was my favourite round, the format was very easy to understand and resulted in a lot of creative and exciting prompts.

Half time was a great idea and it should definitely remain! It was great to have a break in the middle of the event just to catch up on reading and take a rest. Overall I really appreciated that the vibe of the event was much more relaxed than SASO. I did enjoy myself very much, especially having the opportunity to create two beautiful MR entries with my wonderful teammates (both MR themes are great and worked well for us), and like I said during half-time talkback, I truly believe the heart of the event is in the right place and it can be even better from here. Thank you for all your hard work!

Hello! I would just like to raise the issue of mod conduct since the rest have already brought up valid points regarding other aspects of this event.

Firstly, imo, to be a mod, maintaining a tone of neutrality is an all around essential, and if you can't rise above your own personal takes regarding fandoms, writing styles, ships, etc while interacting with the participants, it just comes off as immature and unprofessional, derisive even as a few friends and I have encountered.

Please. Do better. You want to draw people in to join and support your event, not drive them away.

Secondly, please do not simply assume things about your participants when you're dealing with them. During bonus round 4, I made an oversight regarding the number of screencaps limited to each prompt and received a private message from a mod to rectify it, which was absolutely fine! They were doing their job and even initially worded their message quite politely.

However, in the last line of the message, they implied "although you're on Grandstand, you can't just simply flout the rules just because you're not gaining points", which is correct but also: excuse me, why are you assuming that my mistake was due to a lack of regard towards the event's regulations? Do you honestly think I was that selfish and had nothing better to do than to cause more trouble for the mods?

I've been a SASO participant since 2016, so I'm fairly familiar with the BR formatting and their respective rules, but we are all human; we slip sometimes. Now, can you imagine saying that to an event newbie who's just getting acquainted with the whole system? Does that not come off as negative instead of encouraging?

Also, when I received that message, I was grieving over the sudden passing of a friend and I assure you, reading it and dealing with that last line with an already shaky headspace, it was Not A Good Feeling.

So, please, just be polite. Be neutral. Don't give off this air of condescension.

Thank you.

How to Participate:

Main Talkback Points:

Etc.

A. General

Re: A. General

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B. Pre-Event

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C. Main Rounds and Bonus Rounds

Re: C. Main Rounds and Bonus Rounds

Re: C. Main Rounds and Bonus Rounds

Re: C. Main Rounds and Bonus Rounds

D. Dreamwidth/Discord

Re: D. Dreamwidth/Discord

E. Other

Re: E. Other

Re: A. General

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Remixed

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Mod conduct