May 26, 2019
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I'm also working on getting more high profile players on the site. :)
I'm mostly frustrated that most complains have been there for so long now or even gotten worse.
It's not like we're getting help from any big names and the only one who notices us is SDJ and his legion of braindead monkeys are always smearing us.
At this point, why bother, we're never going to get any recognized for any as the stigma of the bad outweighs all the good a hundredfold.
Personally I prefer to hold a pretty high standard for guide contests specifically. Obviously players are always going to have differing opinions, but in general it's a good goal to shoot for to put out a contest where every winner is a guide we can be proud of as a community.
I also want to clarify that I don't hold the judges responsible for the backlash we received. It's the responsibility of the staff to check the winners for quality and make sure we're satisfied with the results, as well as to set up the contest in a way that is likely to get us some reliable winners. We'll be making some changes for the next guide contest to make it easier for judges to find good guides.
I want a high standard for our guides too but the overwhelming majority of troll/bad builds have done irreversible damage to this site.
We can help improve guide quality by offering feedback to receptive guide authors, voting according to guide quality, or creating new high quality guides (or bringing in more skilled authors to create them). There's still plenty of room to critique and improve without running into the dogpiling issue that some authors were complaining about.
Also, sometimes a guide author isn't going to respond well to feedback. There's nothing to fix there really, it's just their prerogative to take the criticism or reject it. If you don't feel a guide author is accepting of criticism and won't improve their guide's flaws, you're always free to downvote.
In the case of this contest, I think it's a mostly separate issue and there are different lessons to learn there. We don't need every guide on the site to be good to run a satisfying guide contest.
1) Make it clear your build is a just for fun/off meta/troll build
2) Give detail how to play the off meta style
Not very hard to do honestly.
[Edit]: found it. This is pretty much the attitude we get whenever someone disagrees with our comments about a particular build. That's not to say that we don't have some amazing authors who are very open to our critiques, but the ones who aren't are the ones who stand out.
Yes DS did sorta trash the guides. Mostly because he didn't have the answer for the question how were the guides chosen. So gave him the answer: the poested guides he skimmed and deemed faulty were the least faulty guides in the categories because activity of high lvl players in nonexistant.
edit: cleanup see reply
And yes he provided solid feedback, even though a lot of it was already known to most users.
Anyway, after 5 years, it gets tiring to see the cycle repeat itself
That's like wanting to display an apple but all 9 apples you have are rotten. You can't display a fresh one if you haven't got one. Stupid comparrison but the point is clear!
DS should probably have spent a bit more time looking through the winners, but he's busy. And if the first few he looks at aren't quite up to snuff, then you might expect the rest to be similar.
There were also a ton of guides that were not eligible, because they are creations of the judges. That also hurts the overall contest in a way.
One option we're looking into is changing up how the judging work and reducing the total number of judges so more of our current top guide authors can compete in the contest. This doesn't necessarily guarantee every category gets a quality guide, but it should increase the likelihood of that happening.
If we aren't getting enough quality guides to pick from, the first and easiest thing to do is let more of the good guide authors compete.
Allowing authors to win multiple categories is an option. Typically we have that rule to allow more different authors to win, but it's something to keep in mind if we need more ways to increase the number of eligible high quality guides.
Diversity in winners.
Pretty big chance the people who were judges would have gotten the prices "again" (not talking because cheating the system and being able to participate, but looking at the quality of guides already made). Same problem would be when people could win multiple categories.
knowledge, since it was category based. Honestly while I like the thought behind it you will need at least 5 (even more on different categories) judges. which IMO is also a nice amount.
The only thing is that 1 person had responsibility for bringing out the score. Correct me if I'm wrong: I know most judges have discussed stuff, however I have no view in how this affected the scoring.
My own suggestion for judges would be to keep the number of 5 judges. However instead of them all 5 being from Smitefire (3 SF 2 elsewhere, if possible). Also, instead of making 1 person judge for lane X I would try to split it to at least 3 persons.
The 2 from Smitefire (you could also pick a high lvl smite player from somewhere else) could discuss the build and depth and the 3rd person depending on his/her knowledge on smite could give the: If I'm new how much did this guide help me. (or other things) This person would mostly look at the information in the guide and look how understandable it is. (and all of them can look at formatting however that's not as important)
Kinda my take on it (although some parts out of reach). While it does increase the workload per judge you can't get pointed towards he dictated it because you got at least 3 people making up a score (and taking the average from it).
EDIT: Grammar
That escalated quickly o.o
The best way to get a 3rd party vote is to list all eligible guides on the internet, e.g. Reddit, and have all of them vote.
That would make it a "community" elected contest rather than one with pre-selected judges, but that's the closest to 3rd party you're likely going to get.
Unless they manage to get high-ranked players from the outside to be judges on the website, and that every season, the community would be the best bet for a 3rd party vote.
The runeforge hammer thing was a bit of a nitpick but the Merlin criticism was definitely valid.
I feel that this is the right answer :v
Same words: The runeforge hammer thing was a bit of a nitpick but the Merlin criticism was definitely valid.
Also Salad has put in the item sections you only pick it up depending on your team. Otherwise you need a point blank knockup and get some AAs in. Otherwise the item description overe should update to include that knockups Don't count
Also I think I've made myself clear on other posts why we implemented the guest voting system, but that aside, guest voting really has little to do with this issue, as this is a curated contest with hand-picked guides. We would get the same reaction whether we had guest votes or not.