Generic Contest Discussion

[msk6003]

36 minutes ago, SaperPL said:

I think you're not getting what we're talking about - we're not talking about limit of pieces of the set that you want to shrink, but limit of how many pieces your shrunk model can have.

I'm (and probably gyenesvi too) talking about alternative build contest. I don't like any kind of max limit in here.

[SaperPL]

6 minutes ago, msk6003 said:

I'm (and probably gyenesvi too) talking about alternative build contest. I don't like any kind of max limit in here.

I missed that earlier, sorry!

[howitzer]

I think the limit should be about relative size and not about parts, in the shrink the set-contest. Parts limit is next to impossible to enforce/verify, and it creates a temptation to minimize the structural parts in the set, which leads to weak designs and poorly working functions. Relative size on the other hand, is much easier to verify and forces actual compromises in choosing what functions to keep and rewards creative solutions for attempting to squeeze in as many functions as possible.

[SaperPL]

For shrinking contest - yes, the size limit is nice for planning out things.

For alternate build contest it's about the cost of the set and I believe that setting up a part limits to something around 1000 is a good choice because above that it becomes a pay-2-win at some point - with bigger sets you'll end up with everything you may need for vehicle construction and lots more panels that can be configured in more ways.

[gyenesvi]

45 minutes ago, msk6003 said:

I'm (and probably gyenesvi too) talking about alternative build contest. I don't like any kind of max limit in here.

Yes, I was talking about an alternate model contest, not the shrinking contest. For an alternate model contest there needs to be a max limit on the chosen set, because if not, then if everybody can choose their set to build from, then simply the bigger ones will have an unfair advantage (more parts to build from). This could be circumvented by having a few pre-selected sets of roughly equal size that everybody can choose from. But even then, these pre-selected sets would probably have to be not too big so that they are more probably available to many people.

For a shrinking contest, it's a different story. For that a max limit is not required I guess, but nor do I get the min limit for the set. I guess nobody would choose a small set to be shrunk.. I like the idea of a relative size constraint. @howitzer, @SaperPL did you mean an upper or lower limit on the shrunk size? Maybe something like it should be no bigger than 75% of the original? I am not sure a min is useful here.

[howitzer]

22 minutes ago, gyenesvi said:

Yes, I was talking about an alternate model contest, not the shrinking contest. For an alternate model contest there needs to be a max limit on the chosen set, because if not, then if everybody can choose their set to build from, then simply the bigger ones will have an unfair advantage (more parts to build from). This could be circumvented by having a few pre-selected sets of roughly equal size that everybody can choose from. But even then, these pre-selected sets would probably have to be not too big so that they are more probably available to many people.

For a shrinking contest, it's a different story. For that a max limit is not required I guess, but nor do I get the min limit for the set. I guess nobody would choose a small set to be shrunk.. I like the idea of a relative size constraint. @howitzer, @SaperPL did you mean an upper or lower limit on the shrunk size? Maybe something like it should be no bigger than 75% of the original? I am not sure a min is useful here.

For alternative model contest I don't think the larger sets are that much easier, considering that the expectations for the parts usage and functionality would also be proportionally higher. I think someone choosing a large model and then building a small alternative would get quite harshly judged. It could also be required to have a photo of leftover parts so that the parts usage could be judged better.

I also think lower limit isn't useful for the shrink the set contest, as making a very small version of the set would not be that challenging and would be judged accordingly. Upper limit (for example the 75% of the original you mentioned) would be better as it would force creativity and choices in how to replicate the functions (if at all) while making the set noticeably different from the original.

[Seasider]

All this is great discussion but remember the rules will be whatever @Jim and @Milan come up with all you’re doing is pure guesswork / conjecture.

[gyenesvi]

1 hour ago, Seasider said:

All this is great discussion but remember the rules will be whatever @Jim and @Milan come up with all you’re doing is pure guesswork / conjecture.

Sure the final word is theirs, but I guess they would listen to our ideas / preferences and make the rules accordingly, so I don't think it would be pure guesswork, we are rather giving them hints.

1 hour ago, howitzer said:

For alternative model contest I don't think the larger sets are that much easier, considering that the expectations for the parts usage and functionality would also be proportionally higher. I think someone choosing a large model and then building a small alternative would get quite harshly judged. It could also be required to have a photo of leftover parts so that the parts usage could be judged better.

That all sounds reasonable, but I don't believe that's how people cast their votes :) It's rather just like it is about technic in general: people just prefer large good looking branded iconic (sports)cars, they care less about technicalities. (That can be observed from the evolution of lego sets though FB responses to responses here on EB. At least that's what I see.) I even think people would easily overlook the amount of leftover parts as well when voting. The only way to make that work would be incorporating it to the rules, such as some % of the parts must be used, but then again that could lead to models that are just using excess parts for the sake of using the parts. Also, a bigger source set is an advantage not just in terms of part count, but also because of probably larger part variety, from which more ideas can be implemented. That's why I think it would be safer to just restrict the source sets' size. It would be much easier to compare entries that are about the same size/complexity.

[SaperPL]

3 hours ago, gyenesvi said:

For a shrinking contest, it's a different story. For that a max limit is not required I guess, but nor do I get the min limit for the set. I guess nobody would choose a small set to be shrunk.. I like the idea of a relative size constraint. @howitzer, @SaperPL did you mean an upper or lower limit on the shrunk size? Maybe something like it should be no bigger than 75% of the original? I am not sure a min is useful here.

When talking about shrinking contest, I meant the size limit for the contest entry model - Because for example you could shrink down 1:8 supercar to 1:10 for example? and it would still be a pretty big model while still it would be shrunk. For me it would make sense if all of us were either shrinking down to car-transporter-sized cars or to $10 set size. 

For alternate model I simply wouldn't want it to be a pay to win contest when few people would win just because they're alternating the biggest sets like liebherr or supercars. And I feel like it'd be easy for experienced alt makers to just come and disrupt the contest with something they were working on anyway.

3 hours ago, Seasider said:

All this is great discussion but remember the rules will be whatever @Jim and @Milan come up with all you’re doing is pure guesswork / conjecture.

Discussion is there to give them feedback for what we think would make sense/what we'd like to see in the contest. And there is a good reason for them to figure out optimal rule set if their goal is to bring the most people to participate - If I'm not really excited about the challenge or I'd see that rules will allow people with most money and time on their hands to dominate the contest, I'd probably focus on my own projects instead. And I suppose everyone is deciding on each contest participation based on whether they are excited enough for the challenge and have time/resources to spend on it in specific time.

[Jim]

2 hours ago, gyenesvi said:

That all sounds reasonable, but I don't believe that's how people cast their votes :) It's rather just like it is about technic in general: people just prefer large good looking branded iconic (sports)cars, they care less about technicalities. 

For the contest later this year I might go for "100% jury voting". This avoids limited voting and we can enforce the criteria better. Maybe we will even do this for the next contest.

[SaperPL]

21 minutes ago, Jim said:

For the contest later this year I might go for "100% jury voting". This avoids limited voting and we can enforce the criteria better. Maybe we will even do this for the next contest.

Why not go for criteria verification by jury first and then voting like usual stage? There is a deadline for submissions and after submissions are closed you can take a moment to discard the ones breaking the rules. The contest being announced with stages like this ahead would make people more careful about the criteria in the first place if the reasoning behind changes in the process is enforcing of the criteria.

If you are allowing submissions to be voted on and then make a jury voting that affects the popular vote, then it's not really clean and that happened before, but if there's a stage where you decide that some submissions did not meet the requirements, and that's before voting, there's a room for discussion on how people interpret those before the voting stage, IF that situation were to happen. I feel like there's a higher chance that people would be avoiding breaking the rules if there's a stage where they can be disqualified before the voting.

Also I don't like the jury voting if that's just few people deciding because obviously we all value different things and thus popular vote takes into account more points of view than just group of few people in the jury.

[Jim]

“popular vote takes into account more points of view than just group of few people in the jury.”

I highly doubt this is the case for EB contests. 

[JoKo]

11 hours ago, Jim said:

For the contest later this year I might go for "100% jury voting". This avoids limited voting and we can enforce the criteria better. Maybe we will even do this for the next contest.

I d'rather like a jury voting than popular voting with undefined voting time at it is now.

[SaperPL]

10 hours ago, Jim said:

“popular vote takes into account more points of view than just group of few people in the jury.”

I highly doubt this is the case for EB contests. 

How do you even end up with such conclusion? Everyone has his own point of view and values things slightly differently, so if we'll have like 30 contestants + 20 more users that will vote, how does this compare to few moderators in the jury? Or is the jury supposed to comprise of more people now, like for example all previous contest winners or something like that? Did I miss something?

Popular vote of course poses a risk of people voting for what they like and not necessarily taking rules into account and that's why verification of submissions should take place before the voting stage. And also yeah, you could make an argument that a lot of if not most of the people voting don't take the spirit of the competition as the priority in voting but just vote on what looks cool.

But if you for example would need a jury voting step to ensure the submissions are evaluated to your own/jury's interpretation of the rules, then it might mean that the rules were not properly written in the first place and then the clear handling of this is for the participants to either be the only ones voting, or making decision together on where to draw the line of crossing the rules based on the rules written in the beginning.

9 hours ago, JoKo said:

I d'rather like a jury voting than popular voting with undefined voting time at it is now.

Yeah, this is kind of weird. And also the fact that votes are public may have some effect on others voting.

[Jim]

11 minutes ago, SaperPL said:

How do you even end up with such conclusion?

Popular vote of course poses a risk of people voting for what they like and not necessarily taking rules into account

Exactly this  

Thanks for explaining the issue at hand.

9 hours ago, JoKo said:

I d'rather like a jury voting than popular voting with undefined voting time at it is now.

This used to be less of an issue, but with limited voting it clearly is.

We will do Jury voting next time.

In Billund right now so will close the contest Monday or Tuesday.

[SaperPL]

16 minutes ago, Jim said:

Exactly this  

Thanks for explaining the issue at hand.

That is why I said multiple times that jury should disqualify submission not adhering to the rules - with chance to object/discuss the jury's interpretation of the rules - but after that it's fair game that people should vote on what they like since at this stage everything is made according to the rules. Even if you would make a contest about making a model that is "good at doing something", until that is objectively measurable by pure numbers, making a bare minimum mechanism that for example moves fastest or furthest etc, may loose to a model that is a complete package with looks and building techniques etc even if it's worse performing in that specific matter, and that would be fair because there would be different views on that.

Unless there is actually a contest where we are rules that define the contest being about specific metrics, and not just being the boundaries, there's no actual reason for jury vote here apart from disqualifying submissions that are out of the boundaries of the rules and that still should be open to interpretation if the rules were not stated precisely enough in the beginning.

[gyenesvi]

3 hours ago, SaperPL said:

Unless there is actually a contest where we are rules that define the contest being about specific metrics, and not just being the boundaries, there's no actual reason for jury vote here apart from disqualifying submissions that are out of the boundaries of the rules and that still should be open to interpretation if the rules were not stated precisely enough in the beginning.

I think it's not so black-and-white about the rules, and it would not be enough just to disqualify entries that violate the rules. Imagine we have a shrinking contest without any constraints, and let's think about two possible entries. One contestant picks a 1:8 supercar, makes it 1:10 or 1:12 and keeps some of the few functions, maybe drops the gearbox; the result is still big and may look cool, but technically shallow. Another contestant takes a medium construction set maybe, makes it smaller but keeps all the functions with a lot of technical tricks and cool building techniques. Suppose that both entries would adhere to the rules, so none of them would be disqualified by the jury's pre-filtering, and then voting is passed to the crowd. Which one keeps the spirit of the contest better? Probably the second. Which one will get more votes? Probably the first.

About pure jury voting, I could actually argue both ways. They might take the spirit of the contest better into account, but their viewpoints may be more limited and their own taste may also be reflected in the results. I actually see that as an existing problem with front-paging (which is somewhat related as it is the moderators' way of deciding which builds are cool enough and which ones are not that much). To me it seems to reflect the moderator's personal preference, and I see many more interesting and worthy builds here than the ones that make it to the front page.

[Jim]

10 minutes ago, gyenesvi said:

I actually see that as an existing problem with front-paging (which is somewhat related as it is the moderators' way of deciding which builds are cool enough and which ones are not that much). To me it seems to reflect the moderator's personal preference, and I see many more interesting and worthy builds here than the ones that make it to the front page.

To be clear; there are several members who have permission to flag topics as featured. Not only moderators.

[SaperPL]

1 hour ago, gyenesvi said:

I think it's not so black-and-white about the rules, and it would not be enough just to disqualify entries that violate the rules. Imagine we have a shrinking contest without any constraints, and let's think about two possible entries. One contestant picks a 1:8 supercar, makes it 1:10 or 1:12 and keeps some of the few functions, maybe drops the gearbox; the result is still big and may look cool, but technically shallow. Another contestant takes a medium construction set maybe, makes it smaller but keeps all the functions with a lot of technical tricks and cool building techniques. Suppose that both entries would adhere to the rules, so none of them would be disqualified by the jury's pre-filtering, and then voting is passed to the crowd. Which one keeps the spirit of the contest better? Probably the second. Which one will get more votes? Probably the first.

That is exactly why it makes sense to make a contest that has rules about the submission to make it so it's not "bigger is better"/pay-2-win. That's one of the reasons why I want the rules to be precise. Because when you look at this from the other way around - consider a contestant that is spending a lot of money adhering to the written rules and being the one that slightly shrunk 1:8 supercar to 1:12 scale and after the popular vote that he wins this way against the other one that was more "in the spirit of the contest", he's disqualified from the top three because that's how jury decides. If that happens it means either this is a failure of the rules being not clearly representing the spirit of the competition in the interpretation of the jury if the rules could be interpreted in the way to allow this kind of submission, or the failure of not disqualifying the submission before the popular vote happened.

And I'm giving this example of popular vote and then jury vote because this scenario happened already and IMO has clearly shown this problem.

If the rules leave room to interpretation, they should be improved/explained as soon as people start asking questions at the beginning of the competition, but if someone finds a way to fit into the rules while walking the fine line on the boundary, it should be a fair game.

If the problem is with people voting for just what looks better and voting stage taking too much time, then why not consider only contestants voting like in game jams? This has higher chance of people voting having the focus on what the contest was about and understanding the problems and constraints of the topic etc.

There are ways to do this correctly and there are references in other creative-work-based contests, but the approach where you want to have jury vote just because the rules leave too much room for interpretation OR you allow people outside of the contest to vote and end up flooded with votes on what looks better, is just flawed.

From my perspective the cleanest way to do so is to allow only contestants and moderators to vote and maybe previous contest winners as well, after enforcing the rules/disqualifying the submissions clearly failing to comply to them.

1 hour ago, gyenesvi said:

About pure jury voting, I could actually argue both ways. They might take the spirit of the contest better into account, but their viewpoints may be more limited and their own taste may also be reflected in the results.

I don't want to argue about their viewpoint being better or worse, but the approach is clearly flawed - if we need jury to weigh which submission is mostly in the spirit of the competition, then it means rules weren't written clearly enough or popular vote would allow voters who don't care about the spirit of the competition.

[msk6003]

4 hours ago, gyenesvi said:

I actually see that as an existing problem with front-paging (which is somewhat related as it is the moderators' way of deciding which builds are cool enough and which ones are not that much). To me it seems to reflect the moderator's personal preference, and I see many more interesting and worthy builds here than the ones that make it to the front page.

To be honest, it seems to me that the criteria for front paging are not technical achievements, but rather how clean the picture is and how good the model looks. At least in my opinion, I think my 8480 studless model can go well enough, but I can't get it.

[gyenesvi]

10 hours ago, Jim said:

To be clear; there are several members who have permission to flag topics as featured. Not only moderators.

Good to know, thanks for the feedback. Still, somehow I feel that a whole category of models does not make it to the front-page.

6 hours ago, msk6003 said:

To be honest, it seems to me that the criteria for front paging are not technical achievements, but rather how clean the picture is and how good the model looks. At least in my opinion, I think my 8480 studless model can go well enough, but I can't get it.

Exactly my thoughts as well, I just did not want to go into it too much here. But as I see, Creator style has a much higher chance of being front-paged as opposed to pure technic. And I agree that your model is an example of something that would be worthy of front-paging.

But let's get back on topic :)

8 hours ago, SaperPL said:

That is exactly why it makes sense to make a contest that has rules about the submission to make it so it's not "bigger is better"/pay-2-win.

Yes, I agree with you on that! And I believe one way of making such rules in a non-complicated way is to have competitions in which the theme and the model size is not too varied, so entries are more comparable. For example, I think the small construction vehicle competition we had was a great example. All models were construction models, so no danger of fancy empty supercars taking the votes, and there was a size constraint, making entries roughly equal size. Now in this regard, a possible shrinking contest is already tricky, because the source materials are quite varied, and at best we can impose constraints on the size of the entries to make them comparable. Though that may work out in the end, because in the same size, a car model may not have an advantage over a construction vehicle (both will have their own strengths).

[suffocation]

I thought the point of these contests was to challenge builders to bring new ideas to the table that might benefit everyone.

[Jim]

51 minutes ago, suffocation said:

I thought the point of these contests was to challenge builders to bring new ideas to the table that might benefit everyone.

The point of our contests is to have FUN  

[Seasider]

20 minutes ago, Jim said:

The point of our contests is to have FUN  

And there I was thinking the point was so we could all moan about the rules, ask for changes to them and also ask for extensions with the closing date all without posting a WIP until the last minute.

 

(lots of sarcasm… not meant to be serious) 

[Jim]

4 hours ago, Seasider said:

And there I was thinking the point was so we could all moan about the rules, ask for changes to them and also ask for extensions with the closing date all without posting a WIP until the last minute.

Well, that’s actually the fun part