Generic Contest Discussion

[Ngoc Nguyen]

Here's a fun motorization contest idea: Use 1 simple hub and 1 L motor and build something in a given dimension constraining box.

[gyenesvi]

22 minutes ago, Ngoc Nguyen said:

Here's a fun motorization contest idea: Use 1 simple hub and 1 L motor and build something in a given dimension constraining box.

What do you mean by simple hub? The one that has the two switches? I don't think many people own that. Plus it does not make use of advantages of the PU system.

I guess the most widely available hub is the 4-port Technic Hub (if we are talking about PU). Then what makes sense is the restriction of 4 motors max (of any kind, and also allow the 6-port Mindstorms hub as well to be used in an RC setup). With model size constraints, it could be interesting.

[Jim]

20 hours ago, SaperPL said:

@Jim is there a place where are previous contests are linked? 

Regarding this question; we do have the Technic Index, but what do you guys think of creating a separate pinned Contest Index topic? 

[Seasider]

@Jim I’m not sure if we could prove powered vs un-powered as we’d have to review contests where both were allowed and then you’d still get the issue of they would be different models etc. but I do strongly believe the public vote is swayed to powered when it’s an option.

I think the “licenced” is very easy to prove with competitions like the Small scale car competition

as to having the competition history split out as a separate pinned thread yes I think that’s a great idea but it should only be a repository with links to the previous contests and not a post for all us lot to comment on

[Jim]

14 minutes ago, Seasider said:

as to having the competition history split out as a separate pinned thread yes I think that’s a great idea but it should only be a repository with links to the previous contests and not a post for all us lot to comment on

Exactly. Like the current Index, but a "spinoff" if you will.

[Lipko]

41 minutes ago, Jim said:

Regarding this question; we do have the Technic Index, but what do you guys think of creating a separate pinned Contest Index topic? 

How about a more descriptive index topic name instead of "[complete name of the subforum again] Index"?

Edited August 24, 2023 by Lipko

[Ngoc Nguyen]

37 minutes ago, Jim said:

what do you guys think of creating a separate pinned Contest Index topic? 

I guess there won't be any Contest about that

[Jim]

1 hour ago, Lipko said:

How about a more descriptive index topic name instead of "[complete name of the subforum again] Index"?

General Index, Generic Index or maybe Main Index

and possibly, a separate

Contest Index

[Erik Leppen]

Given the competitions are a large part of this board, it would make sense to have a competition index. I feel the competitions are really separate from things like set reviews and such.

Not sure what effect adding another pinned topic would have, but I feel that after 25 competitions it's safe to assume they are here to stay :)

 

By the way, somewhere hidden deep inside the recent rules discussion in the TC25 discussion topic I made the suggestion (that I think nobody has even noticed) to replace the word "contest" (or "competition") by "challenge" to more reflect what I am assuming the organization wants to get out of it. As I said there,

On 8/16/2023 at 3:39 PM, Erik Leppen said:

The words [contest and competition] emphasize that there is a battle, that can be won or lost, and that the goal is to win or to beat others; the word [challenge] much more underlines that it is primarily a way of expanding your building experience and have fun.

Still curious what people think of this idea :)

[mdemerchant]

I think the idea is good because words matter to most people but I don't think it will entirely solve the problem.  A challenge with judging, winners and prizes is still a competition by definition.  But it could definitely help.

As someone who unfortunately doesn't have time to be able to enter competitions and isn't a big contributor to the forum, I'm not sure this carries much weight but I do have a suggestion as well.  The main debate seemed to be around the need for sufficiently detailed rules but to me there are two sets of rules. There are rules that define the constraints and determine eligibility.  I agree they should be as clear as possible but Jim always seems very good to give quick feedback on any eligibility questions so that seems OK to me.  My suggestion is about the second set of rules around how entries will be scored.  I think we should just get rid of those entirely.  Jury or public votes for the models they like.  This is certainly what happens in the public voting anyway.  You have a model that catches people's attention, they will vote for it.  Totally fair to everyone involved and no one goes into the challenge thinking I just need to follow this formula to win and hence aren't disappointed when they follow it and don't or they perceive the formula to change halfway through.

Look at it this way, a great piece of art isn't considered great because of some judging formula, it's considered great because lots of people look at it and think that's great.  Same with Lego models in my opinion.

I'll don my armor now 

[SaperPL]

8 hours ago, mdemerchant said:

 My suggestion is about the second set of rules around how entries will be scored.  I think we should just get rid of those entirely.  Jury or public votes for the models they like.  This is certainly what happens in the public voting anyway.  You have a model that catches people's attention, they will vote for it.  Totally fair to everyone involved and no one goes into the challenge thinking I just need to follow this formula to win and hence aren't disappointed when they follow it and don't or they perceive the formula to change halfway through.

This is how it supposedly works like now when you end up in situation where all entries are high quality according to the voting criteria/base theme/topic of the specific contest. What happens then is that submissions with more features/bigger will win against the smaller ones, when both "score" 100% on all other voting criteria, despite in theory competition theme not being about who can build something bigger with more functions. So it's not necessarily problem of it being fair as long as it would be clearly stated that in such situation where everything else is on par, the jury will pick a more complex build with more functions which often means a bigger model - the problem that I'm picking the fight about is the clarity of that situation and effectively contest inclusive for newcomers. It's like making a race open to casuals only to allow professionals to take the lead anyway for example because they have sponsors and better cars and you're just entering with your everyday family car - a lot of people simple won't bother participating in something like that. That is why I'm picking a fight with rules of some of the contests (not all) being precise enough to be inclusive to people who don't have the same amount of time and spare bricks to build bigger things.

8 hours ago, mdemerchant said:

 Look at it this way, a great piece of art isn't considered great because of some judging formula, it's considered great because lots of people look at it and think that's great.  Same with Lego models in my opinion.

Yes, but also are there any art competitions without specific rules of what the theme and format is supposed to be? I'm curious if that reference even makes sense here. Someone has used car shows as a reference, but we're like making casual contest about car show where most of people thing they are supposed to bring a car, and then there's few guys that come in with trucks and excavators and people just love it for being so unique on a car contest.

I think the best way to make the competitions fair and clear is to specify a size - this way if an entry needs to be bigger, those who don't have time will know it doesn't make sense for them to participate, and they won't feel like they're wasted their time after participating if they lose to bigger entries. But making it this way would make those people ask for contests in specific size requirement they are okay with next time.

[Erik Leppen]

4 hours ago, SaperPL said:

[...] those who don't have time will know it doesn't make sense for them to participate, and they won't feel like they're wasted their time after participating if they lose to bigger entries

There's a saying that goes "time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time".

 

Hence the emphasis on enjoyment rather than on winning or losing.

That's the thing. I feel you seem to be focussing almost fully on winning or losing. That's fine, of course, but that's not what these TC's are mainly about. They're - at least in my view - mainly about having a friendly community build challenge, with prizes to reward great builds. (Hence my suggestion to pick wording to reflect that.)

I like the analogy of @mdemerchant with art. Lego MOC building, like painting, writing, composing, game development etc. is a creative hobby after all. I feel having a themed challenge can help those in a "writing block" to build something new, but having too formally-defined rules may take the art out and make it more of a sport.

[Lipko]

4 hours ago, Erik Leppen said:

I like the analogy of @mdemerchant with art. Lego MOC building, like painting, writing, composing, game development etc. is a creative hobby after all. I feel having a themed challenge can help those in a "writing block" to build something new, but having too formally-defined rules may take the art out and make it more of a sport.

Very nicely expressed.

[Jim]

On 8/25/2023 at 11:14 PM, Erik Leppen said:

Still curious what people think of this idea :)

We can call it anything we want, but at the end of the day it's contest. We have ran 25 contests and now we need to change the name because one or two persons have issues with some things. Starting to sound like the real world 

[howitzer]

Yeah, if there's ranking and prizes, it's a contest. Challenge could be some kind of a "build a solution to this problem and show how it works, then all the different solutions are presented" thing but without ranking or prizes.

[Jim]

Just now, howitzer said:

Yeah, if there's ranking and prizes, it's a contest. Challenge could be some kind of a "build a solution to this problem and show how it works, then all the different solutions are presented" thing but without ranking or prizes.

Exactly. No need to sugarcoat it.

[SaperPL]

23 hours ago, Erik Leppen said:

I feel you seem to be focussing almost fully on winning or losing. That's fine, of course, but that's not what these TC's are mainly about. They're - at least in my view - mainly about having a friendly community build challenge, with prizes to reward great builds. (Hence my suggestion to pick wording to reflect that.)

Well, there are different people and they have different motivation when it comes to taking part in a contest. If you're only taking into account this point of view that it's about having friendly community build challenge and it should by only about fun of building etc because that's how most of the consecutive contestants view this and not taking into account potential views of people outside this group, then it might be a survivor bias if that's the base for deciding whether current approach is good or not. Also if you react in a way that this point of view is only the correct one as this is how contests were envisioned to be, then you may not have a lot of people even consider stating their point of view that is different.

If we want contests to have more participants and quality entries, then maybe we shouldn't limit ourselves to the views of the people who already are taking part in contests consecutively?

@Jim After the ruling of this contests, I have two questions hoping that you'll explain it:

1. The requirement for having a discussion topic with some actual progress. My perception so far was that in the spirit of the competition we should be able to see side by side what kind of build everyone is making.
   Of course it's not there in the rules, so now after how this contest podium looks, is it okay to not show anything throughout whole contest period and drop everything ready with some historical steps of how the build came to be, in last day before the deadline?
2. You noted in the results that being last in this exact contest doesn't mean the entry was so bad as all the entries were really high quality and it was tough to decide between each other. Wouldn't it make sense to have jury score each submission on each criteria and give out like 0-5 or 0-10 points for each criteria and then this would be summarised between jurors? In both cases of how you scored it currently and in case of giving a specific score for criteria, there is a chance that we'll have two entries with same amount of points, with higher possibility of it happening in the scheme proposed by me, and so requiring second step of ruling which one is better, but the current used approach requires every juror to decide specific order which seems really hard. With scoring, I would expect results in the current contest ending up with 4th place being populated by multiple people and then 5th place being populated by multiple people, but it'd represent the quality of the entries reasonably well. This would work as long as we're not stuck with many people on the first place in the score.

[Jim]

1 hour ago, SaperPL said:

@Jim After the ruling of this contests, I have two questions hoping that you'll explain it:

I won't. I'm done discussing and explaining.

[Erik Leppen]

Good to see the Contest Index being added! Great stuff to scroll through :) Memories and nostalgia :D

I also noticed some of my own entries' images have dead links now, since I changed my website. So I better set up some redirects I guess 

[MangaNOID]

On 4/26/2023 at 3:46 AM, Jim said:

I might go for "100% jury voting". This avoids limited voting and we can enforce the criteria better.

Well I gave TC25 a go knowing this,  I love having my crane, its probably the best Technic thing I have and there were many great entries to follow and appreciation to the Mods for their time to organise. But I ended up not caring about rankings or the contest in the end because for me, half the fun of the contest, and the community spirit of the contest was missing due to the jury voting.

I like to see how people vote, maybe a few comments from that and get a large pool of voters to vote to get a more appropriate community based result as this is a community based event.  A few Jury members is far more limiting than at minimum 10,20 or so voters.

and: 

On 4/26/2023 at 3:46 AM, Jim said:

and we can enforce the criteria better.

After being (quietly) part of this forum and seeing all the contests for the last 7ish years (and voting on most of them) I kinda find that a little elitist and insulting to the community 

 

[Erik Leppen]

I, too, prefer to have a voting round, I think.

Voting offers a way to "take part" for those who don't have the time to build.

[Jim]

4 hours ago, MangaNOID said:

After being (quietly) part of this forum and seeing all the contests for the last 7ish years (and voting on most of them) I kinda find that a little elitist and insulting to the community 

I'm pretty sure lots of people in Technic will cast the right votes, but there will be other members who simply vote for "bigger is cooler". That was one of the reasons we wanted to try jury voting.

One of the other reasons was that I had to beg for people to vote in the last contest, which led me to believe that community engagement wasn't as strong as we hoped it would be.

9 minutes ago, Erik Leppen said:

I, too, prefer to have a voting round, I think.

Voting offers a way to "take part" for those who don't have the time to build.

I'm perfectly fine with public voting for next contest (or 50/50). But like I said in my previous comment; I basically had to beg for people to vote.

On 8/27/2023 at 11:14 PM, Erik Leppen said:

I also noticed some of my own entries' images have dead links now, since I changed my website. So I better set up some redirects I guess 

Cool. Thanks.

[Jundis]

18 minutes ago, Jim said:

I basically had to beg for people to vote.

This I find very strange. At least for me, voting is always a cool thing as you really have to look into the details of the model. This could easily take an hour. Did we really have such few votes last time?

[Jim]

1 minute ago, Jundis said:

This I find very strange. At least for me, voting is always a cool thing as you really have to look into the details of the model. This could easily take an hour. Did we really have such few votes last time?

In the end we had two pages of votes, which isn't too bad. 

[gyenesvi]

36 minutes ago, Jim said:

One of the other reasons was that I had to beg for people to vote in the last contest, which led me to believe that community engagement wasn't as strong as we hoped it would be.

I think that had more to do with generic interest in the topic of the contest than with engagement. With this contest, interest seemed much higher, so I'd expect voting participation would have also been higher. But I don't mind jury voting or 50/50 voting actually. I do believe that the jury can be better at enforcing the spirit of the contest and avoiding "bigger is cooler" voting.

However, I do agree with a previous comment, that it could be both easier / better / more transparent to score each entry individually, and then derive the ranking from the individual scores, instead of directly ranking them against each other. For example each entry could get a score on a 1 to 10 scale for each criteria, according to how well it satisfies each criteria associated with the spirit of the contest, and the scores per criteria would be summed up to arrive to a final score for a model. Has this been ever tried?