This thread is the place at the end of the Season to voice your opinion on how things are run - what do you want more of, less of, done differently, not done at all, added, subtracted, multiplied, divided or sent to infinity to find its absolute limit - that's the sum of my available maths knowledge, so don't expect any more tangents. Throw all the questions and suggestions you have here and we'll do our best to respond to them.
Season 9 will begin in January along with the next Big Comp, details of which we'll share with you guys as we get closer to the start-date. As for the topic at-hand, right off the bat I can acknowledge that we struggled with getting the threads done on time, had some issues staying on the same page with the people from Reddit, and stirred up some controversy when we decided to create Rastakhan cards ahead of the expansion's full reveal.
I'm sure there are plenty of opinions on the matter, so now's the time.
Behold, foolish interlopers! I am commanding this mortal to spread the will of the Scourge throughout the interwebs, encouraging you to seek out me, Archlich Kel'Thuzad! Now coming to you as the tenth class of Hearthstone!
I am a finalist in this Class Creation Competition, so if you could give it a look I would be greatly appreciative <3
Mini Comps are a 7-part collection of smaller competitions we run at the end of each Season. Stuff that doesn't usually warrant their own major week, and/or the occasional silliness. Us mods come up with them, and we trickle them out for two weeks while the Finale Poll is running.
Each Mini Comp lasts two days: one for Discussion + Submission, and one for voting. You can still earn yourself a winner's banner like normal, but otherwise they're just for fun.
Behold, foolish interlopers! I am commanding this mortal to spread the will of the Scourge throughout the interwebs, encouraging you to seek out me, Archlich Kel'Thuzad! Now coming to you as the tenth class of Hearthstone!
I am a finalist in this Class Creation Competition, so if you could give it a look I would be greatly appreciative <3
This is the first season I'm actually active at Fan Creations, and I must say it has been a blast. Thinking of a different requirement every week is pretty good creative gymnastics, and I really enjoyed the feeling of getting better at this every week.
The only thing I don't like is that most people tend to be a bit too selfish in the Discussion thread: they just go there, drop their cards and expect to get feedback without giving none. Of course, there are exceptions (linkblade91, Sinti, TheProgenitor and a few others). I don't know how to fix this without enforcing more severe rules, which wouldn't be good for WCDC either :(
I thought the requirement to choose cards for the Hall of Fame in the Big Comp was interesting. It allowed for people to expand their design space for cool ideas that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Even though I didn't take advantage of that, others did, and I think it would be a cool feature to include in future Big Comps at least as an option. As more and more sets get released, design space gets smaller and smaller, and coming up with ideas that are both interesting and balanced gets harder and harder. Being able to retroactively remove or alter problematic cards could open up a lot of options. I think this applies especially to a class comp; in the imaginary world where our class exists, I presume it'd have been around from the beginning, and problematic cards wouldn't have been made in the first place. The feature would have to be limited, of course, else people could make whatever broken garbage they want, but something like we had this Season could be fun.
Regarding to the incident in 8.18 (Spooky Scary Skeletons), where none of the highly upvoted cards in page 1 got to the final poll (including mine) because of the nature of the current voting system, I want to call some considerstion to the mods for changes to the voting system.
Let's get this out of the way first: I understand that the card with most votes doesn't need to get to the final poll, otherwise people will rush their submissions to get more votes, and the final poll will be filled with page 1 submissions. There just need to be a good way to calculate the score of each submission from the amount of upvotes it has.
However, for the current system, the score of a submission is calculated to be the percentage of upvotes that that submission have from the total votes given in the page that submission is in. The problem from this method is that whether a submission goes to the final poll can be affected by the performance of other cards in the same page. Your card just needs to stand out in the page you submitted, which means the exactly the same submission may or may not go to the final poll depending on where it is submitted. If the rest of the page is filled with well desinged cards you will have less chance to go to the final poll than if the rest of the page is filled with poorly designed cards.
In 8.18, the highly upvoted cards (40+ upvotes) in page 1 didn't go to the final poll because their numerous upvotes make one another's upvote proportion of the page less.
For changes, I agree on Tox's idea of calculating score from comparing the card's upvote and the average upvotes a card on page X would has. This would entirely elminate the focus on posting your card in a page where there are badly design cards (which is really bad spirit for our competition), as your card's is now unaffected by what others do.
Another way that I agree on is to replicate r/customhearthstone's voting system. (It's a hs design competition on reddit which is very similar to ours here at Hearthpwn, go check it out! (The mods probrably know about this already)) The submissions are comments stacked in 1 page, but the upvotes are hidden, and the comments are sorted randomly each time. So the basic idea of this system is that each submission gets approximately the same amount of possible upvoters that sees their card, which will definitely make it a fair system. However, that basic idea requires designers to submit at the same time. This system encourages the designers to submit at the fastest possible time to have more people see it before the dateline. Late submitters will get disadvantaged.
Lastly, even if the above solutions are rejected, can mods please hide the amount of upvotes of submissions in the submission thread during each design comp? It's a small thing to ask for, but I don't even know if it's possible on Hearthpwn forums. I think it's important to eliminate the bias you have for highly voted cards in the first place. I mean, when I scroll pass through a submission thread and saw a submission with lots of upvotes, I naturally become curious for the card and ends up giving it more attention than others about why a lot of people appreciate it, which in turn would probrably end up with me "bandwagoning" with the crowd and gave it the upvote that may not be given if I don't have a positive attention bias for it in the first place. Hiding the upvote amount would mean that whether people will upvote it or not depends solely on their thoghts and opinions on the card, uninfluenced by what others think. This is what upvotes should communicate.
I hope that the mods would consider and deal with this problem, so that awkward situations like in 8.18 will not happen again.
Regarding to the incident in 8.18 (Spooky Scary Skeletons), where none of the highly upvoted cards in page 1 got to the final poll (including mine) because of the nature of the current voting system, I want to call some considerstion to the mods for changes to the voting system.
Let's get this out of the way first: I understand that the card with most votes doesn't need to get to the final poll, otherwise people will rush their submissions to get more votes, and the final poll will be filled with page 1 submissions. There just need to be a good way to calculate the score of each submission from the amount of upvotes it has.
However, for the current system, the score of a submission is calculated to be the percentage of upvotes that that submission have from the total votes given in the page that submission is in. The problem from this method is that whether a submission goes to the final poll can be affected by the performance of other cards in the same page. Your card just needs to stand out in the page you submitted, which means the exactly the same submission may or may not go to the final poll depending on where it is submitted. If the rest of the page is filled with well desinged cards you will have less chance to go to the final poll than if the rest of the page is filled with poorly designed cards.
In 8.18, the highly upvoted cards (40+ upvotes) in page 1 didn't go to the final poll because their numerous upvotes make one another's upvote proportion of the page less.
For changes, I agree on Tox's idea of calculating score from comparing the card's upvote and the average upvotes a card on page X would has. This would entirely elminate the focus on posting your card in a page where there are badly design cards (which is really bad spirit for our competition), as your card's is now unaffected by what others do.
Another way that I agree on is to replicate r/customhearthstone's voting system. (It's a hs design competition on reddit which is very similar to ours here at Hearthpwn, go check it out! (The mods probrably know about this already)) The submissions are comments stacked in 1 page, but the upvotes are hidden, and the comments are sorted randomly each time. So the basic idea of this system is that each submission gets approximately the same amount of possible upvoters that sees their card, which will definitely make it a fair system. However, that basic idea requires designers to submit at the same time. This system encourages the designers to submit at the fastest possible time to have more people see it before the dateline. Late submitters will get disadvantaged.
Lastly, even if the above solutions are rejected, can mods please hide the amount of upvotes of submissions in the submission thread during each design comp? It's a small thing to ask for, but I don't even know if it's possible on Hearthpwn forums. I think it's important to eliminate the bias you have for highly voted cards in the first place. I mean, when I scroll pass through a submission thread and saw a submission with lots of upvotes, I naturally become curious for the card and ends up giving it more attention than others about why a lot of people appreciate it, which in turn would probrably end up with me "bandwagoning" with the crowd and gave it the upvote that may not be given if I don't have a positive attention bias for it in the first place. Hiding the upvote amount would mean that whether people will upvote it or not depends solely on their thoghts and opinions on the card, uninfluenced by what others think. This is what upvotes should communicate.
I hope that the mods would consider and deal with this problem, so that awkward situations like in 8.18 will not happen again.
This problem of pages occasionally not having cards make the finals has existed for a long time in the competition, and we've taken steps to reduce it, but it's not something that can be completely removed without revamping the system entirely. We used to guarantee that at least one entry from each page would make the finals, but this bloated the final poll and often reduced the overall quality of the finalists.
To address some specific things you mentioned:
We are unable to hide the number of upvotes a submission has, the forums just aren't set up to allow this. We would if we could, I agree that removing this potential bias would be good - it's why the final poll results are hidden, after all - but we aren't able to.
We have to work within the confines of the forum system, so a set-up similar to the Reddit's design competition wouldn't work, as we have no way of randomising the submissions. A custom website could be built for this task, but none of us have that ability.
I'm not super sure I understand what you're referring to in regards to Tox's suggestion. It sounds interesting though, I'd like to hear more about it. It may have already been discussed and I've just forgotten.
In regards to the specific incident in 8.18, this happens very rarely, and in fact it's much more likely that submitting on one of the last pages will end with nobody on the page making the finals - we actually checked this in a previous Season, as people had raised concerns when nobody from the first page made the finals two weeks in a row. In response to that, we made the decision moving forward to err on the side of more finalists in the future, which has seen a reduction in pages not making the final.
I would also suggest that each card submission will get a bonus depending on the page it was posted.
For ex. on the first page there is no bonus as everybody will scroll it, the second one could get +10% from the card total upvotes at the end and so one, considering that many users won't scroll through the entire submission pages and so a potential good card on page 5 can have slightly more chances for the final pool (as upvotes for later submissions tend to value more IMO).
Maybe i'm wrong and it doesn't work, but wanted to share my idea anyway since i tried to participate in all of the Competitions since i joined the forum.
This problem of pages occasionally not having cards make the finals has existed for a long time in the competition, and we've taken steps to reduce it, but it's not something that can be completely removed without revamping the system entirely. We used to guarantee that at least one entry from each page would make the finals, but this bloated the final poll and often reduced the overall quality of the finalists.
To address some specific things you mentioned:
We are unable to hide the number of upvotes a submission has, the forums just aren't set up to allow this. We would if we could, I agree that removing this potential bias would be good - it's why the final poll results are hidden, after all - but we aren't able to.
We have to work within the confines of the forum system, so a set-up similar to the Reddit's design competition wouldn't work, as we have no way of randomising the submissions. A custom website could be built for this task, but none of us have that ability.
I'm not super sure I understand what you're referring to in regards to Tox's suggestion. It sounds interesting though, I'd like to hear more about it. It may have already been discussed and I've just forgotten.
In regards to the specific incident in 8.18, this happens very rarely, and in fact it's much more likely that submitting on one of the last pages will end with nobody on the page making the finals - we actually checked this in a previous Season, as people had raised concerns when nobody from the first page made the finals two weeks in a row. In response to that, we made the decision moving forward to err on the side of more finalists in the future, which has seen a reduction in pages not making the final.
Now that hiding upvotes and random sorting is not available, there is no reason to have only one page for all the submissions like in r/customhearthstone, and this is the calculation from "average page performace" from Tox is the last solution that I know.
From Tox in 8.18 Final Poll:
A potential solution, that have been talked about tho, is a competition side by side based system. By this i mean that we calculate scores, not based on the amount of votes that the card has recieved, compared to the other cards on the page, but rather that we compare them to how many votes a card in that specific position have had through the years.
Say we have 5 cards on page 1 with 50 votes, and a card in those positions have on average had 75 votes. But on page 6 the card that does the best have 4 votes, but a card in that position have on average 8 votes.
This would negate the effect of "weak pages", and allow for several cards to advance from a single page, not affected by the quality of cards on their page or on another page.
This would still require a ton of work internally. But based on how HearthPwn works, this is a way more manageable solution than a complete revamp of the entire site.
At least it will eliminate the aspect of trying to post in the page where there are many bad submissions. However, the hardest part would be deciding on how to calculate the average value in the first place.
The voting is fixed. Friends take turns voting on their other friends lack luster cards. >>Hey bud, you vote on my card this week and next week its your turn<<
So much for unbiast voting. I've seen some pathetic cards win and placing them into a hall of fame really rubs the dirt into the eye. For all their efforts the prize is suitable and should never change. I guess some people take this game more seriously and need some notiriety.
The competitions are too slow. Once one ends another should begin (its the internet people). Once the submissions are closed, start the new competiton or have several running at the same time.
THere should be a card creation play off. 32 creators (including me) compete one on one against each other until you get to the final 2. Think bigger jello head!
Moderators should relacks and not take the fun this to seriously.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
[deck]Deck ID or Code[/deck]Card Name Pyramid shine
The voting is fixed. Friends take turns voting on their other friends lack luster cards. >>Hey bud, you vote on my card this week and next week its your turn<<
So much for unbiast voting. I've seen some pathetic cards win and placing them into a hall of fame really rubs the dirt into the eye. For all their efforts the prize is suitable and should never change. I guess some people take this game more seriously and need some notiriety.
The competitions are too slow. Once one ends another should begin (its the internet people). Once the submissions are closed, start the new competiton or have several running at the same time.
THere should be a card creation play off. 32 creators (including me) compete one on one against each other until you get to the final 2. Think bigger jello head!
Moderators should relacks and not take the fun this to seriously.
I'm not a mod or anything, but if you want more hs card desgin competitions, you can check out the one on reddit, r/customhearthstone. They also have a weekly card design competition too.
How do you guys find all the threads related to the design comps? I normally just type in "card design comp" in the searchbar. But, to my surprise, the minicomps use "WCDC" so I just found the minicomp and submit a card like 2 hours ago.
Can you change the name to "Card Design Competition" for the minicomps? Or is there any other way for searching these threads? What methods do you use? Because as a matter of fact, currently, all submissions for the 2nd minicomp have 0 upvotes. We should bring more people to the minicomp. Announce about it somewhere, or change the heading as I said, if most people look up for the threads the same way as I do.
The voting is fixed. Friends take turns voting on their other friends lack luster cards. >>Hey bud, you vote on my card this week and next week its your turn<<
So much for unbiast voting. I've seen some pathetic cards win and placing them into a hall of fame really rubs the dirt into the eye. For all their efforts the prize is suitable and should never change. I guess some people take this game more seriously and need some notiriety.
The competitions are too slow. Once one ends another should begin (its the internet people). Once the submissions are closed, start the new competiton or have several running at the same time.
THere should be a card creation play off. 32 creators (including me) compete one on one against each other until you get to the final 2. Think bigger jello head!
Moderators should relacks and not take the fun this to seriously.
No offence, but I think the main reason your cards aren't making it to the finals is because a lot of them seem overcomplicated or have bad wording.
I do agree that theres probably some bias, but I think thats mostly ok because the more popular people on here are usually also the best at making cards anyway.
I want to adress phase durations for big comps. There are waaay too short. Those of us who participated in the Year Comp remember being stressed out about the extremely tight deadlines to the point that what was supposed to be fun became a chore. IIRC we had 3 weeks to do 45 cards with 9 different concepts (for 9 different classes). I felt this too during CCC#4 even though I was unemployed at the time, so I don't even imagine what it's like for someone with a job!
The number of sets/concepts we have to come up with is at least as important. I think that in the future, 2 weeks per set/concept is good. This will be especially important in the next big comp which, if it works the same way as previous ones, will be extremely heavy since this year is the biggest in terms of cards released (six full expansions with 135 cards each!). Longer phases would also mean more contestants, since many potential constestants don't enter due to lack of time.
Here's what I think would be ideal for the next class comp (provided nothing changes compared to previous ones obviously):
2 weeks for the initial phase
3 weeks for the basic set
3 weeks for the classic set
4 weeks for the 3 remaining phases, that is (UNG+KFT); (K&C+Witchwood); and (Boomsday+Rumble)
(I realize it would make the comp last 20 weeks exactly, not sure if it's nice or not to have the final poll at the end of a season)
How do you guys find all the threads related to the design comps? I normally just type in "card design comp" in the searchbar. But, to my surprise, the minicomps use "WCDC" so I just found the minicomp and submit a card like 2 hours ago.
Can you change the name to "Card Design Competition" for the minicomps? Or is there any other way for searching these threads? What methods do you use? Because as a matter of fact, currently, all submissions for the 2nd minicomp have 0 upvotes. We should bring more people to the minicomp. Announce about it somewhere, or change the heading as I said, if most people look up for the threads the same way as I do.
All of our latest competitions are pinned to the top/front of the Fan Creations forum; their location has never changed. The title was reduced down to "WCDC" because "Weekly Card Design Competition Season 8 Finale - Mini Comp #X (Discussion)" is insanely long lol.
Behold, foolish interlopers! I am commanding this mortal to spread the will of the Scourge throughout the interwebs, encouraging you to seek out me, Archlich Kel'Thuzad! Now coming to you as the tenth class of Hearthstone!
I am a finalist in this Class Creation Competition, so if you could give it a look I would be greatly appreciative <3
I would also suggest that each card submission will get a bonus depending on the page it was posted.
For ex. on the first page there is no bonus as everybody will scroll it, the second one could get +10% from the card total upvotes at the end and so one, considering that many users won't scroll through the entire submission pages and so a potential good card on page 5 can have slightly more chances for the final pool (as upvotes for later submissions tend to value more IMO).
Maybe i'm wrong and it doesn't work, but wanted to share my idea anyway since i tried to participate in all of the Competitions since i joined the forum.
To some degree, our scoring formula already compensates for those positioned on a later page. The formula is noted on all of our Submission threads:
( ab ) / ( c ) = x
Where, a = The total number of submissions on the same page as the submission. b = The total number of up-votes that the submission received. c = The total number of up-votes on the same page as the submission. x = The submission's final score.
C is the main factor, here: the early pages are going to receive far more upvotes in general, so each submission on those pages is kept in check by the sheer volume.
Behold, foolish interlopers! I am commanding this mortal to spread the will of the Scourge throughout the interwebs, encouraging you to seek out me, Archlich Kel'Thuzad! Now coming to you as the tenth class of Hearthstone!
I am a finalist in this Class Creation Competition, so if you could give it a look I would be greatly appreciative <3
This is the first season I'm actually active at Fan Creations, and I must say it has been a blast. Thinking of a different requirement every week is pretty good creative gymnastics, and I really enjoyed the feeling of getting better at this every week.
The only thing I don't like is that most people tend to be a bit too selfish in the Discussion thread: they just go there, drop their cards and expect to get feedback without giving none. Of course, there are exceptions (linkblade91, Sinti, TheProgenitor and a few others). I don't know how to fix this without enforcing more severe rules, which wouldn't be good for WCDC either :(
We dont want to force ppl to give feedback in order to receive it. But they will find quite fast that if they dont give feedback back or if they r being entitled about it, others will just ignore their cards in the future. Yes, we would all like if more ppl gave feedback on average, but it is quite time consuming, if you dedicate yourself to it, so i can understand if ppl dont want to do it. But they should return feedback to at least one or two persons (preferably those who gave them feedback in a first place), they dont have to give feedback to all ppl in the thread.
I thought the requirement to choose cards for the Hall of Fame in the Big Comp was interesting. It allowed for people to expand their design space for cool ideas that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Even though I didn't take advantage of that, others did, and I think it would be a cool feature to include in future Big Comps at least as an option. As more and more sets get released, design space gets smaller and smaller, and coming up with ideas that are both interesting and balanced gets harder and harder. Being able to retroactively remove or alter problematic cards could open up a lot of options. I think this applies especially to a class comp; in the imaginary world where our class exists, I presume it'd have been around from the beginning, and problematic cards wouldn't have been made in the first place. The feature would have to be limited, of course, else people could make whatever broken garbage they want, but something like we had this Season could be fun.
To be honest, i absolutely hated that ppl did this. It felt incredibly unfair to me, since the cards some ppl HoF'ed were the cards many players want that to happen in the real game and it was a pretty cheap way to garner votes.
With that said, this reminded me of something i keep saying each big comp: I would want to see a standardized format for a submission in each phase. Ppl who can use this forum's tools better, can format their post nicely and/or can make a nice banner etc. tend to get a big advantage over others. Yes, some ppl r plain lazy and will submit whatever no matter what, but it shouldnt be that hard to make a standardized layout and help them with that and bring everyone on the same level - presentation wise. So it would be more about the actual cards and not about the fact that you wont even bother looking at some submissions due to their formatting.
This is the first season I'm actually active at Fan Creations, and I must say it has been a blast. Thinking of a different requirement every week is pretty good creative gymnastics, and I really enjoyed the feeling of getting better at this every week.
The only thing I don't like is that most people tend to be a bit too selfish in the Discussion thread: they just go there, drop their cards and expect to get feedback without giving none. Of course, there are exceptions (linkblade91, Sinti, TheProgenitor and a few others). I don't know how to fix this without enforcing more severe rules, which wouldn't be good for WCDC either :(
We dont want to force ppl to give feedback in order to receive it. But they will find quite fast that if they dont give feedback back or if they r being entitled about it, others will just ignore their cards in the future. Yes, we would all like if more ppl gave feedback on average, but it is quite time consuming, if you dedicate yourself to it, so i can understand if ppl dont want to do it. But they should return feedback to at least one or two persons (preferably those who gave them feedback in a first place), they dont have to give feedback to all ppl in the thread.
I thought the requirement to choose cards for the Hall of Fame in the Big Comp was interesting. It allowed for people to expand their design space for cool ideas that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Even though I didn't take advantage of that, others did, and I think it would be a cool feature to include in future Big Comps at least as an option. As more and more sets get released, design space gets smaller and smaller, and coming up with ideas that are both interesting and balanced gets harder and harder. Being able to retroactively remove or alter problematic cards could open up a lot of options. I think this applies especially to a class comp; in the imaginary world where our class exists, I presume it'd have been around from the beginning, and problematic cards wouldn't have been made in the first place. The feature would have to be limited, of course, else people could make whatever broken garbage they want, but something like we had this Season could be fun.
To be honest, i absolutely hated that ppl did this. It felt incredibly unfair to me, since the cards some ppl HoF'ed were the cards many players want that to happen in the real game and it was a pretty cheap way to garner votes.
With that said, this reminded me of something i keep saying each big comp: I would want to see a standardized format for a submission in each phase. Ppl who can use this forum's tools better, can format their post nicely and/or can make a nice banner etc. tend to get a big advantage over others. Yes, some ppl r plain lazy and will submit whatever no matter what, but it shouldnt be that hard to make a standardized layout and help them with that and bring everyone on the same level - presentation wise. So it would be more about the actual cards and not about the fact that you wont even bother looking at some submissions due to their formatting.
A standardized template or something everyone could use for those competitions would be absolutely fantastic. I support that entirely.
This is the first season I'm actually active at Fan Creations, and I must say it has been a blast. Thinking of a different requirement every week is pretty good creative gymnastics, and I really enjoyed the feeling of getting better at this every week.
The only thing I don't like is that most people tend to be a bit too selfish in the Discussion thread: they just go there, drop their cards and expect to get feedback without giving none. Of course, there are exceptions (linkblade91, Sinti, TheProgenitor and a few others). I don't know how to fix this without enforcing more severe rules, which wouldn't be good for WCDC either :(
When I participate I do give feedback. I should probably start participating instead of just lurking like I am at the moment. (Speaking of which, hey y'all. Hows it going. This lore stickler still exists.) I just need to remind myself to come back here each day and get back into that card creation mood ya know.
I want to adress phase durations for big comps. There are waaay too short. Those of us who participated in the Year Comp remember being stressed out about the extremely tight deadlines to the point that what was supposed to be fun became a chore. IIRC we had 3 weeks to do 45 cards with 9 different concepts (for 9 different classes). I felt this too during CCC#4 even though I was unemployed at the time, so I don't even imagine what it's like for someone with a job!
The number of sets/concepts we have to come up with is at least as important. I think that in the future, 2 weeks per set/concept is good. This will be especially important in the next big comp which, if it works the same way as previous ones, will be extremely heavy since this year is the biggest in terms of cards released (six full expansions with 135 cards each!). Longer phases would also mean more contestants, since many potential constestants don't enter due to lack of time.
Here's what I think would be ideal for the next class comp (provided nothing changes compared to previous ones obviously):
2 weeks for the initial phase
3 weeks for the basic set
3 weeks for the classic set
4 weeks for the 3 remaining phases, that is (UNG+KFT); (K&C+Witchwood); and (Boomsday+Rumble)
(I realize it would make the comp last 20 weeks exactly, not sure if it's nice or not to have the final poll at the end of a season)
I probably won't participate in this but I want to echo this. There was simply too little time in previous comps for people to participate properly.
Another Season in the books, and it was a doozy:
Season 8 saw us fix the Hearthstone timeline with Chromie and Toki, Time-Tinker; I finally won one of these things, creating a new card-type in the process; we held a crossover event with Reddit to celebrate their 200th competition; and we jumped the gun with our hot takes on Rastakhan's Rumble's new mechanics: Overkill, Loas and Spirits.
This thread is the place at the end of the Season to voice your opinion on how things are run - what do you want more of, less of, done differently, not done at all, added, subtracted, multiplied, divided or sent to infinity to find its absolute limit - that's the sum of my available maths knowledge, so don't expect any more tangents. Throw all the questions and suggestions you have here and we'll do our best to respond to them.
Season 9 will begin in January along with the next Big Comp, details of which we'll share with you guys as we get closer to the start-date. As for the topic at-hand, right off the bat I can acknowledge that we struggled with getting the threads done on time, had some issues staying on the same page with the people from Reddit, and stirred up some controversy when we decided to create Rastakhan cards ahead of the expansion's full reveal.
I'm sure there are plenty of opinions on the matter, so now's the time.
Behold, foolish interlopers! I am commanding this mortal to spread the will of the Scourge throughout the interwebs, encouraging you to seek out me, Archlich Kel'Thuzad! Now coming to you as the tenth class of Hearthstone!
I am a finalist in this Class Creation Competition, so if you could give it a look I would be greatly appreciative <3
What's a mini comp?
Mini Comps are a 7-part collection of smaller competitions we run at the end of each Season. Stuff that doesn't usually warrant their own major week, and/or the occasional silliness. Us mods come up with them, and we trickle them out for two weeks while the Finale Poll is running.
Each Mini Comp lasts two days: one for Discussion + Submission, and one for voting. You can still earn yourself a winner's banner like normal, but otherwise they're just for fun.
Behold, foolish interlopers! I am commanding this mortal to spread the will of the Scourge throughout the interwebs, encouraging you to seek out me, Archlich Kel'Thuzad! Now coming to you as the tenth class of Hearthstone!
I am a finalist in this Class Creation Competition, so if you could give it a look I would be greatly appreciative <3
This is the first season I'm actually active at Fan Creations, and I must say it has been a blast. Thinking of a different requirement every week is pretty good creative gymnastics, and I really enjoyed the feeling of getting better at this every week.
The only thing I don't like is that most people tend to be a bit too selfish in the Discussion thread: they just go there, drop their cards and expect to get feedback without giving none. Of course, there are exceptions (linkblade91, Sinti, TheProgenitor and a few others). I don't know how to fix this without enforcing more severe rules, which wouldn't be good for WCDC either :(
I thought the requirement to choose cards for the Hall of Fame in the Big Comp was interesting. It allowed for people to expand their design space for cool ideas that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Even though I didn't take advantage of that, others did, and I think it would be a cool feature to include in future Big Comps at least as an option. As more and more sets get released, design space gets smaller and smaller, and coming up with ideas that are both interesting and balanced gets harder and harder. Being able to retroactively remove or alter problematic cards could open up a lot of options. I think this applies especially to a class comp; in the imaginary world where our class exists, I presume it'd have been around from the beginning, and problematic cards wouldn't have been made in the first place. The feature would have to be limited, of course, else people could make whatever broken garbage they want, but something like we had this Season could be fun.
Regarding to the incident in 8.18 (Spooky Scary Skeletons), where none of the highly upvoted cards in page 1 got to the final poll (including mine) because of the nature of the current voting system, I want to call some considerstion to the mods for changes to the voting system.
Let's get this out of the way first: I understand that the card with most votes doesn't need to get to the final poll, otherwise people will rush their submissions to get more votes, and the final poll will be filled with page 1 submissions. There just need to be a good way to calculate the score of each submission from the amount of upvotes it has.
However, for the current system, the score of a submission is calculated to be the percentage of upvotes that that submission have from the total votes given in the page that submission is in. The problem from this method is that whether a submission goes to the final poll can be affected by the performance of other cards in the same page. Your card just needs to stand out in the page you submitted, which means the exactly the same submission may or may not go to the final poll depending on where it is submitted. If the rest of the page is filled with well desinged cards you will have less chance to go to the final poll than if the rest of the page is filled with poorly designed cards.
In 8.18, the highly upvoted cards (40+ upvotes) in page 1 didn't go to the final poll because their numerous upvotes make one another's upvote proportion of the page less.
For changes, I agree on Tox's idea of calculating score from comparing the card's upvote and the average upvotes a card on page X would has. This would entirely elminate the focus on posting your card in a page where there are badly design cards (which is really bad spirit for our competition), as your card's is now unaffected by what others do.
Another way that I agree on is to replicate r/customhearthstone's voting system. (It's a hs design competition on reddit which is very similar to ours here at Hearthpwn, go check it out! (The mods probrably know about this already)) The submissions are comments stacked in 1 page, but the upvotes are hidden, and the comments are sorted randomly each time. So the basic idea of this system is that each submission gets approximately the same amount of possible upvoters that sees their card, which will definitely make it a fair system. However, that basic idea requires designers to submit at the same time. This system encourages the designers to submit at the fastest possible time to have more people see it before the dateline. Late submitters will get disadvantaged.
Lastly, even if the above solutions are rejected, can mods please hide the amount of upvotes of submissions in the submission thread during each design comp? It's a small thing to ask for, but I don't even know if it's possible on Hearthpwn forums. I think it's important to eliminate the bias you have for highly voted cards in the first place. I mean, when I scroll pass through a submission thread and saw a submission with lots of upvotes, I naturally become curious for the card and ends up giving it more attention than others about why a lot of people appreciate it, which in turn would probrably end up with me "bandwagoning" with the crowd and gave it the upvote that may not be given if I don't have a positive attention bias for it in the first place. Hiding the upvote amount would mean that whether people will upvote it or not depends solely on their thoghts and opinions on the card, uninfluenced by what others think. This is what upvotes should communicate.
I hope that the mods would consider and deal with this problem, so that awkward situations like in 8.18 will not happen again.
This problem of pages occasionally not having cards make the finals has existed for a long time in the competition, and we've taken steps to reduce it, but it's not something that can be completely removed without revamping the system entirely. We used to guarantee that at least one entry from each page would make the finals, but this bloated the final poll and often reduced the overall quality of the finalists.
To address some specific things you mentioned:
You can find me here! Good luck everyone!
I would also suggest that each card submission will get a bonus depending on the page it was posted.
For ex. on the first page there is no bonus as everybody will scroll it, the second one could get +10% from the card total upvotes at the end and so one, considering that many users won't scroll through the entire submission pages and so a potential good card on page 5 can have slightly more chances for the final pool (as upvotes for later submissions tend to value more IMO).
Maybe i'm wrong and it doesn't work, but wanted to share my idea anyway since i tried to participate in all of the Competitions since i joined the forum.
Why is the rum gone?
Quote from ShadowsOfSense
This problem of pages occasionally not having cards make the finals has existed for a long time in the competition, and we've taken steps to reduce it, but it's not something that can be completely removed without revamping the system entirely. We used to guarantee that at least one entry from each page would make the finals, but this bloated the final poll and often reduced the overall quality of the finalists.
To address some specific things you mentioned:
Now that hiding upvotes and random sorting is not available, there is no reason to have only one page for all the submissions like in r/customhearthstone, and this is the calculation from "average page performace" from Tox is the last solution that I know.
From Tox in 8.18 Final Poll:
A potential solution, that have been talked about tho, is a competition side by side based system. By this i mean that we calculate scores, not based on the amount of votes that the card has recieved, compared to the other cards on the page, but rather that we compare them to how many votes a card in that specific position have had through the years.
Say we have 5 cards on page 1 with 50 votes, and a card in those positions have on average had 75 votes. But on page 6 the card that does the best have 4 votes, but a card in that position have on average 8 votes.
This would negate the effect of "weak pages", and allow for several cards to advance from a single page, not affected by the quality of cards on their page or on another page.
This would still require a ton of work internally. But based on how HearthPwn works, this is a way more manageable solution than a complete revamp of the entire site.
At least it will eliminate the aspect of trying to post in the page where there are many bad submissions. However, the hardest part would be deciding on how to calculate the average value in the first place.
The voting is fixed. Friends take turns voting on their other friends lack luster cards. >>Hey bud, you vote on my card this week and next week its your turn<<
So much for unbiast voting. I've seen some pathetic cards win and placing them into a hall of fame really rubs the dirt into the eye. For all their efforts the prize is suitable and should never change. I guess some people take this game more seriously and need some notiriety.
The competitions are too slow. Once one ends another should begin (its the internet people). Once the submissions are closed, start the new competiton or have several running at the same time.
THere should be a card creation play off. 32 creators (including me) compete one on one against each other until you get to the final 2. Think bigger jello head!
Moderators should relacks and not take the fun this to seriously.
[deck]Deck ID or Code[/deck]Card Name Pyramid shine
I'm not a mod or anything, but if you want more hs card desgin competitions, you can check out the one on reddit, r/customhearthstone. They also have a weekly card design competition too.
About the whole voting thing, I think the first submissions on a page might also be benefited.
I mean, I submitted first in the flavour text mini comp, and got second in number of votes. Then, in the finals, I was almost in the last position.
Sure, mini comps have very few votes, so it's not statistically representative, but even then, it's a bit strange.
How do you guys find all the threads related to the design comps? I normally just type in "card design comp" in the searchbar. But, to my surprise, the minicomps use "WCDC" so I just found the minicomp and submit a card like 2 hours ago.
Can you change the name to "Card Design Competition" for the minicomps? Or is there any other way for searching these threads? What methods do you use? Because as a matter of fact, currently, all submissions for the 2nd minicomp have 0 upvotes. We should bring more people to the minicomp. Announce about it somewhere, or change the heading as I said, if most people look up for the threads the same way as I do.
No offence, but I think the main reason your cards aren't making it to the finals is because a lot of them seem overcomplicated or have bad wording.
I do agree that theres probably some bias, but I think thats mostly ok because the more popular people on here are usually also the best at making cards anyway.
Unpopular opinion: Rogue is OP
I want to adress phase durations for big comps. There are waaay too short. Those of us who participated in the Year Comp remember being stressed out about the extremely tight deadlines to the point that what was supposed to be fun became a chore. IIRC we had 3 weeks to do 45 cards with 9 different concepts (for 9 different classes). I felt this too during CCC#4 even though I was unemployed at the time, so I don't even imagine what it's like for someone with a job!
The number of sets/concepts we have to come up with is at least as important. I think that in the future, 2 weeks per set/concept is good. This will be especially important in the next big comp which, if it works the same way as previous ones, will be extremely heavy since this year is the biggest in terms of cards released (six full expansions with 135 cards each!). Longer phases would also mean more contestants, since many potential constestants don't enter due to lack of time.
Here's what I think would be ideal for the next class comp (provided nothing changes compared to previous ones obviously):
(I realize it would make the comp last 20 weeks exactly, not sure if it's nice or not to have the final poll at the end of a season)
Custom cards :
CLASSES : Alchemist (CCC#5 | Phase V) | Chef (CCC#4)
EXPANSIONS : Year of the Scorpion (Year Comp)
All of our latest competitions are pinned to the top/front of the Fan Creations forum; their location has never changed. The title was reduced down to "WCDC" because "Weekly Card Design Competition Season 8 Finale - Mini Comp #X (Discussion)" is insanely long lol.
Sorry I messed up your searching :(
Behold, foolish interlopers! I am commanding this mortal to spread the will of the Scourge throughout the interwebs, encouraging you to seek out me, Archlich Kel'Thuzad! Now coming to you as the tenth class of Hearthstone!
I am a finalist in this Class Creation Competition, so if you could give it a look I would be greatly appreciative <3
To some degree, our scoring formula already compensates for those positioned on a later page. The formula is noted on all of our Submission threads:
( ab ) / ( c ) = x
Where,
a = The total number of submissions on the same page as the submission.
b = The total number of up-votes that the submission received.
c = The total number of up-votes on the same page as the submission.
x = The submission's final score.
C is the main factor, here: the early pages are going to receive far more upvotes in general, so each submission on those pages is kept in check by the sheer volume.
Behold, foolish interlopers! I am commanding this mortal to spread the will of the Scourge throughout the interwebs, encouraging you to seek out me, Archlich Kel'Thuzad! Now coming to you as the tenth class of Hearthstone!
I am a finalist in this Class Creation Competition, so if you could give it a look I would be greatly appreciative <3
We dont want to force ppl to give feedback in order to receive it. But they will find quite fast that if they dont give feedback back or if they r being entitled about it, others will just ignore their cards in the future. Yes, we would all like if more ppl gave feedback on average, but it is quite time consuming, if you dedicate yourself to it, so i can understand if ppl dont want to do it. But they should return feedback to at least one or two persons (preferably those who gave them feedback in a first place), they dont have to give feedback to all ppl in the thread.
To be honest, i absolutely hated that ppl did this. It felt incredibly unfair to me, since the cards some ppl HoF'ed were the cards many players want that to happen in the real game and it was a pretty cheap way to garner votes.
With that said, this reminded me of something i keep saying each big comp: I would want to see a standardized format for a submission in each phase. Ppl who can use this forum's tools better, can format their post nicely and/or can make a nice banner etc. tend to get a big advantage over others. Yes, some ppl r plain lazy and will submit whatever no matter what, but it shouldnt be that hard to make a standardized layout and help them with that and bring everyone on the same level - presentation wise. So it would be more about the actual cards and not about the fact that you wont even bother looking at some submissions due to their formatting.
- Click Here To Join Us On Discord! -
A standardized template or something everyone could use for those competitions would be absolutely fantastic. I support that entirely.
When I participate I do give feedback. I should probably start participating instead of just lurking like I am at the moment. (Speaking of which, hey y'all. Hows it going. This lore stickler still exists.) I just need to remind myself to come back here each day and get back into that card creation mood ya know.
I probably won't participate in this but I want to echo this. There was simply too little time in previous comps for people to participate properly.
Edit: Also where my flair at
please consider voting for my custom class in the fan creations competition :]
• TRIALS IN AUCHINDOUN - A Custom Hearthstone Adventure (4th Wing!) • New and Interesting Hearthstone Mechanics (by me!) •