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Hearthstone | Posted by | 3 years, 11 months ago
Fan Creations

WCDC Season 5 Feedback Thread

This is the place where you can leave your thoughts about how the competitions are proceeding and how you suggest things should be changed if necessary.

Historically, when we've tried to do this before, it has resulted in asking for how things can be changed which gets us some nice feedback, and then we end up not having any time to discuss implementation because the down-time is often occupied by an expansion reveal season which eats up a LOT of time and focus. It has therefore come to me that it would be better to ask how satisfied you are with the system during the season as opposed to after it.

If you have ideas, then please let us know. We'll have more time to actively be able to discuss it.

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  • This is the place where you can leave your thoughts about how the competitions are proceeding and how you suggest things should be changed if necessary.

    Historically, when we've tried to do this before, it has resulted in asking for how things can be changed which gets us some nice feedback, and then we end up not having any time to discuss implementation because the down-time is often occupied by an expansion reveal season which eats up a LOT of time and focus. It has therefore come to me that it would be better to ask how satisfied you are with the system during the season as opposed to after it.

    If you have ideas, then please let us know. We'll have more time to actively be able to discuss it.

    Friendly Staff

  • Thanks for bringing this up again. Honestly I was a little disappointed when Season 5 started without any changes to the system. I do know how life gets in the ways of plans we have and while the card design competitions surely are a great way to entertain ourselves, there are far higher priorities. I hope everything worked out in the best possible way for Shadows!

    So I've dug up last years thread and here's a short recap:

    - Finalist Voting or nah?
    We couldn't reach an agreement about the idea of abolishing the finalist voting. The point stands though that participation goes way down during the finalist voting, partly due to the fact that the finalists can not vote themselves.

    - New rating system?
    The idea of a new rating system didn't find many supporters. It was meant to serve the purpose of avoiding too harsh ratings. If someone is forced to rate balance and flavor seperately for example, an OP but flavorful card might come out with a better rating than with the current system, where people might just go "OP! 1 star!". There were different ideas for the execution of this like adding categories to rate the cards in or extending the star system. Another interesting option that came up for the finalist voting asks the voters to put the submissions into their prefered order.

    - Quality of life improvements
    The description boxes for each card should be visible in the finalist voting. It would help to see the cards on our voting pages and in the finalist voting ordered by how many stars we gave them in the first voting stage. Rewards (not only for the winners?) would be nice :)

  • I agree with all what anchorm4n said. Finalist voting feels bad and too low engagement, more rating options would be awesome and some 2nd place and 3rd place rewards could be good for attracting new people. I personally suggest we at least increase the Finalist stage from 1 day to 2, just to squeeze in a few more votes.

    And i know it would be very hard to do, but i really wish for a big comp again. A custom class or custom expansion competition.

  • I must apologize, as I did not mean for it to take this long to get back to the two of you.

    Quote From anchorm4n

    Thanks for bringing this up again. Honestly I was a little disappointed when Season 5 started without any changes to the system. I do know how life gets in the ways of plans we have and while the card design competitions surely are a great way to entertain ourselves, there are far higher priorities. I hope everything worked out in the best possible way for Shadows!

    So I've dug up last years thread and here's a short recap:

    - Finalist Voting or nah?
    We couldn't reach an agreement about the idea of abolishing the finalist voting. The point stands though that participation goes way down during the finalist voting, partly due to the fact that the finalists can not vote themselves.

    - New rating system?
    The idea of a new rating system didn't find many supporters. It was meant to serve the purpose of avoiding too harsh ratings. If someone is forced to rate balance and flavor seperately for example, an OP but flavorful card might come out with a better rating than with the current system, where people might just go "OP! 1 star!". There were different ideas for the execution of this like adding categories to rate the cards in or extending the star system. Another interesting option that came up for the finalist voting asks the voters to put the submissions into their prefered order.

    - Quality of life improvements
    The description boxes for each card should be visible in the finalist voting. It would help to see the cards on our voting pages and in the finalist voting ordered by how many stars we gave them in the first voting stage. Rewards (not only for the winners?) would be nice :)

    We ended up finding that we like the idea of having the description boxes available during voting. As far as rewards go, Gold is definitely something to give out. The main problem is just the fact that we simply don't have very many things to buy with the currency yet, or else it would absolutely be a go.

    We all came to the conclusion that a more advanced rating system also wouldn't really help much. In addition to requiring much more work on the voter's part (it may not sound like much, but it forces voters to think about their rating much more thoroughly). It would also look much more intimidating to newer competitors and would end up lowering the voter turnout.

    We did also agree that the finalist phase is quite important. There are several times where the highest-scoring card from the initial voting phase doesn't win in the end, which means that the finalist voting is still very impactful. Another problem with removing the finalist phase is that it allows the possibility of trying to cheat the system by submitting your card shortly before the deadline where an extremely late submission could up with a really high score just simply because of the fact that barely anyone voted for them and they all voted for them relatively high.

    Quote From BasilAnguis

    I agree with all what anchorm4n said. Finalist voting feels bad and too low engagement, more rating options would be awesome and some 2nd place and 3rd place rewards could be good for attracting new people. I personally suggest we at least increase the Finalist stage from 1 day to 2, just to squeeze in a few more votes.

    And i know it would be very hard to do, but i really wish for a big comp again. A custom class or custom expansion competition.

    Extending the finalist voting a day could be feasible. The side-comps we've hosted in the past has proven that people don't have any problems with keeping track of 2 competitions at one time, and this is easier than that.

    I'd be just as excited about a custom class or custom expansion competition as you are, but we would need to figure out a much better system to do that because the current one we have for regular competitions absolutely will not cut it. I do also question its viability as an event at the moment since our turnout for regular competitions is already quite low (which is something that we hope to find a way to remedy), and a competition on as large of a scale as this requires monumentally more effort and upkeep from the competitors.

    Friendly Staff

  • How would extending the Finalist Phase work? I don't think comps should last more than a week, as that neat duration makes them easier to follow. So, we would need to cut out the Submission Phase or remove the Voting Phase altogether, but I don't know if either of those options are a good idea.

    Regarding the participation issue, maybe we should put more announcements in the main page. Right now we only have the Design Conversations once a week, which sure, mention WCDC, but aren't focused on them. I think having a reminder one day before the submission phase ends and maybe on the finalist phase would help. Not sure if this would end up being too annoying for people not interested in comps, though.

  • Hey, thanks for your reply Demon and letting us know what the thoughts of the staff are so far. I won't try to change your mind about the things you've agreed upon and discarded already, but I'd like to focus the spotlight on one of the ideas that haven't been discussed much yet.

    What honestly really pisses me off majorly are the ratings in the finalist voting. Each and every week the ratings of the cards go waaaaay down during the finalist voting and I just don't get why. There may be the rare exception to the rule but I just don't see how anybody could give 1 or 2 stars to our finalists applying fair rules. Those cards are generally balanced, flavorful and neatly executed. This gets not reflected in their ratings at all.

    Now what might take the sting from this issue would be to not rate them card for card anymore, but instead ordering them from first place to last (or maybe just picking the top 3). That's what most people seem to do anyway: pick your favorite and downvote all the rest to oblivion. KANSAS' idea of having "card battles" where you always see two cards and pick your favorite would be another iteration of the same concept. Do you think this would be possible from a programming point of view?

    On second thought, is this a problem for anyone else at all? What it comes down to is that I'm fine with getting told that the 7 other cards are better than mine / my favorite, but I can't seem to get over good cards getting rated a 2.something average.

    Regarding prices, maybe we can talk Flux into dishing out a bronze Premium membership for a year for the person who accumulates the most wins during one season. In case of a draw I'd greatly enjoy a deciding competition. This could be epic! On top of that, we could also do a final vote for the card of the season.

    When it comes to encourage participation, most of the above aims at just that. Picking up what Wailor said, I'd encourage Shadows to reach out to the winner of each competition and let them share their thoughts about their card in a weekly article like in the spotlight articles Demon does but smaller. This could be seen as some further encouragement and a reminder at the same time. Should be completely voluntarily of course.

    • Quote From anchorm4n

      Now what might take the sting from this issue would be to not rate them card for card anymore, but instead ordering them from first place to last (or maybe just picking the top 3). That's what most people seem to do anyway: pick your favorite and downvote all the rest to oblivion. KANSAS' idea of having "card battles" where you always see two cards and pick your favorite would be another iteration of the same concept. Do you think this would be possible from a programming point of view?

      So, I'll respond with the typical "anything is possible" line because I love to use that internally as well, even though I know the staff must groan at me quite a bit when I do so. 

      Personally, I like the idea of doing a "pick your top 3 cards and rank them". It would be not as high effort as ranking all the cards, and it would force people to actually have a top 3 instead of the possibility of the downvote frenzy. Card battles sound like fun too, but I think there might be too much RNG factor there and without enough people going through it, we might end up with less than optimal results.

      Either of these would be fairly easy to implement though on the backend. Having it work easily on the frontend though is a different story since we need to make sure it works really good on mobile too. Curse mobile devices!

      Quote From anchorm4n

      Regarding prices, maybe we can talk Flux into dishing out a bronze Premium membership for a year for the person who accumulates the most wins during one season.

      I don't have a problem with us offering something like this, it would be a pretty sweet reward for the top competitor of the season. I've wanted to do another kind of reward (physical) as well, for each individual competition, though never got the time to fully flesh that one out. No spoilers in case we do end up doing it.

      Quote From anchorm4n

      When it comes to encourage participation, most of the above aims at just that. Picking up what Wailor said, I'd encourage Shadows to reach out to the winner of each competition and let them share their thoughts about their card in a weekly article like in the spotlight articles Demon does but smaller. This could be seen as some further encouragement and a reminder at the same time. Should be completely voluntarily of course.

      We 100% could be doing more in our news feed for promoting the competitions and winners. We certainly push out enough content on Out of Cards that anything Fan Creations wouldn't become a huge wall of FC-only content on the homepage. We had that issue on the last site we were on due to the stupid rules we had to follow for posting content and all I could remember were the consistent complaints about "so much fan stuff omg". People still clicked on it though, to complain, so the metrics were still good lol. Granted, we'd probably still get the occasional complaint here, and honestly, I don't really care. Skipping content you don't like is easy enough and if all you want to do is complain, maybe we should do more FC content on the homepage to get them to leave, making the community more positive overall.

      • Hey, thanks for sharing your thoughts Flux! Very cool to hear about how much is possible and the efforts you're willing to make, we certainly appreciate it! 

        One thing I'd like to clarify about the battle of the cards aspect is that you'd get to see two random cards in the first display and pick your favorite. The next choice would be between your favorite from the first pick and another random card you haven't seen up to this point. That way you could get to see all of them in as much time as we use now. Here's an example from a German news site that lets you choose the best outfit worn at the Oscars in 2020 (scroll down until you see two pictures of people next to each other and click on the one you like better):

        https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.spiegel.de/stil/oscars-2020-diese-outfits-trugen-die-stars-auf-dem-roten-teppich-a-f5e827b1-cc50-4106-b7cd-3b050d23ca28-amp

        I'd be super excited to try this or the top 3 which need to be put in order with a slight favor to the latter.

  • To attract more people, I believe having the competition panel be present on the main homepage would help immensely. I mean the main homepage, not just the hearthstone one. We do have hearthstone achievement guides pinned at the top of the article list already so the argument that non hearthstone people would be annoyed doesn't stand. Weekly "invitation" articles could help too.

    I don't know why the custom scene has died out so much. I remember when there were 7 or so pages of discussion on hearthpwn. I really hope it bounces back, I adore these competitions. 

    Finalist voting also fucks me over at times and the number of people voting 1 stars is strange indeed. There are some individuals with very polarised opinions. Alone it wouldn't matter much, but since finalist voting has so few voters it can get skewed. At the whelp competition, there were 12-13 votes in the finals per card. In the normal phase there were 25-37 votes per card. That's more than a 50% loss in voters.

    Another idea is having the finalist phase be advertised by an article on the main page. And you can put the cards in a grid with the stars beneath just like when you have card reveals.

  • Sorry to necro this, but I'd like to suggest being able to edit the text of your submission. I understand not being able to edit your card, but it would be cool if you could edit the description. It's very annoying to find out you wrote a card name incorrectly 😅

  • Lots of stuff has already been mentioned, but there's one more thing I'd like to add: 8 finalists is quite a lot. It's not strange for it to be half of the participants. My proposal is to reduce the amount of finalists to 4-5. Here's why:

    1) When I do end up in the finals, I often feel like I'm missing out on a lot of the valuable votes of participants who know what they're doing. Because they are all in the finals as well and thus aren't allowed to vote.

    2) On the other side of this, when I'm in the finals, but I know there's at least three or four submissions that are better than mine, I'm sad that my vote is no longer relevant to the outcome of the competition.

    People seemed positive about this idea and proposed having the amount of finalists being a set percentage of the participants. I'd say with a minimum of 3 finalists.

    If people aren't happy with the current star rating for the finalists, I think reducing the amount of finalists would also work really well with the "order from best to worst" system that I proposed previously.

    Also, the submission descriptions could probably be put in spoiler boxes in your voting page. This keeps them accessable, but prevent excessive scrolling.

    Regarding prices, maybe we can talk Flux into dishing out a bronze Premium membership for a year for the person who accumulates the most wins during one season.

    Not that I'm against this, but I think it kind of misses the original point. If extra rewards are added, it would be nice if they supported people who came in second (and maybe even third) to make "winning" more achievable for the underdogs.

    Having it work easily on the frontend though is a different story since we need to make sure it works really good on mobile too. Curse mobile devices!

    As a mobile user, I must say you guys have been doing a great job of this!