IWT6a

[End Master]

CHEATS & SECRETS FOR INFLUENCING THE JUDGES! IN THIS ISSUE, END MASTER!

End Master is one of the easier judges. He doesn't really give anything less than 6 in any category and even that's very rare. Most of the time it's 8s, 9s and 10s.

Assuming you can at least string sentences together and form coherent thoughts, he'll probably overlook grammar and spelling mistakes more than the rest of the judges. Your plot doesn't necessarily have to be very original, but it helps.

The best thing to do with him is to make sure your story is very entertaining, though what he finds entertaining and what you do may differ considerably.

Don't really expect long comments either, he'll either like it, or he won't. So while you won't gain any great insight on what you might need to improve on, the plus side is he won't bother to tell you in great detail about how much you suck either.

[Cat2000]

Is anyone happy to compile a list of which stories are being entered?

[Usoki]

I'll be doing that later tonight. Or maybe later today, if I can wrap it up before my meeting.

CHEATS & SECRETS FOR INFLUENCING THE JUDGES! IN THIS ISSUE, USOKI!

Usoki is a grammar nazi. He doesn't just assume he's better than you- he knows it. Because of this, he doesn't expect much from you. Use commas and apostrophes, and you'll be fine.

Usoki also has a short attention span. If you bog him down with lengthy and pointless passages of description, he will not read it. He still hasn't actually read the undead vampire portion of Necromancer. He assumes it is skippable, because when he picked back up with the time travel bit, he didn't seem to have missed anything. I guess what he's trying to say is... don't be boring and uncreative.

Usoki has gotten far more tolerant of offensive things since he first joined the site. Use this to your advantage. That being said, nothing is worse than offensive writing for no other reason than to be offensive. If you're going to load up on toilet jokes, try to work them into the story as plot points.

[Ryan_DuBois]

So it's the author doesn't do the whole "double thing"? It's the judges Anyway, I give out ratings based on this simple forumla:

Rating I think you will give me / 2 = Your rating!

[Usoki]

I know you're kidding, but... go ahead. Try it. This is Apoth, we're talking about here. If you try to bend the statistics in your favor... he's going to warp them around until they fuck you in the ass.

[End Master]

I'm still not seeing Ryan's two stories popping up. Are they going to be under Yazzman or a new name?

The interesting thing about this contest is we've only got three people who entered the contest (that I know of) but we've got five stories to judge, so it's still more than the first two contest we did.

[Cat2000]

We're just rating in the way we would be rating normally, right? Or do we need to work out which should get the higher score...? I'm a little confused.

[Usoki]

I'm in, I'm in. I present to you- Sigma Epsilon Chi. The opening is finished, but only one of the main branches is complete. You can receive equipment for any of the quests, but Piorre's quest is the only one with any progress. Still, Piorre's quest is fully written, and the combination of the two parts puts me over twenty rooms.

Maybe it's for the best that the first theme fell apart... I had to do a lot more work to create my hub room than I'd remembered. Deletable room, then the hub, then the rooms need to exist, then sever the hub, delete and remake the room to attatch the hub, then link all of the new choices to the right spot...

[Usoki]

Apoth explains it better... You rate each of the three categories like normal. You then assign one to be more important, and that one gets counted double. There are a total of 40 points possible, but we only give 3 numbers.

[End Master]

Here's a quick example. (Not the real scores I'm giving!)

Ryan's story

Grammar/Spelling: 9
Plot/Creativity: 8
Enjoyment: 10

Cat's story

Grammar/Spelling: 10
Plot/Creativity: 9
Enjoyment: 8

I'm choosing to double "Enjoyment" so you get double the points for that category. This means Ryan gets 20 points while Cat only gets 16.

Total scores from me would be:

Ryan: 37
Cat: 35

Apoth ultimately takes all the scores from each judge to do his stat thing which will give the final score.

[Ryan_DuBois]

"The Rift", being almost a year old, is probably buried back there somewhere. If you can't find it, you can link to my account through "When Zombies Attack".

I don't think "War" is going to be released tonight... Sorry, but I don't think I can justify it... We'll see.

[EDIT]

Wait... so does End's post mean that I win?! Thanks, guys!

So what's the point of this whole "weighting" a category thing? Like what criteria do we use to determine which category to double? It seems to me like there's two possibilities: either we double the highest category (because the author excelled in that category) or we double the lowest category (to strategically improve our odds of winning the contest). Seems kinda pointless to me, but whatever.

[Usoki]

You double the category you think is most important. We probably had an agrument over what was more important or something. I don't really know why it is the way it is... but it works, and I'd rather not spend the two weeks minimum of arguing discussing a new system.

MRH would double writing because he's a grammar nazi. End would double enjoyment because that's the part of the story he finds important. Ves would blah blah blah.

Choose what you value most in the story, not what will shake up the data the most.

[Cat2000]

Okay; that makes sense. Where/when are we posting the ratings?

Is it two weeks we've got? Or is that not figured out yet?

[Ryan_DuBois]

I think you just send the ratings to Apoth, Cat. You can post them on the forums, too, just for verification.

[Usoki]

No, send them straight to Apoth- message him in any way you want. But don't post them on the site. You'll find out what everyone wrote/voted about your story at the end of the two weeks, when Apoth sends you your results.

No one has complained, so two weeks it is. All votes due by February 3rd. If you don't vote on all of the stories (except your own) your vote doesn't count. Well, and all participants have to vote to keep number balance, but I don't think that'll be a problem.