-Burnout: This was by far the biggest problem with the event in my opinion, and the one that probably requires the most conceptual reworking to fix. The drop in submissions after week 1 was exceedingly obvious, probably due to lowered interest. I have no idea how to remedy this and would love suggestions
My own reasons for why I got burnt out,
- The Unbalanced Scoring System: Yeah this was a problem for inactivity too as well as just scoring (for me personally, at least). By week 2 Arts and Crafts had pulled so far ahead of the competition that it was obvious that they'd won before week 3 had even begun, and that gap just grew larger and larger over the remaining 2 weeks. Knowing this, then, what point is there in continuing to compete? The event was over by the end of week 2 so I just stopped caring and moved on to something else
- Small Teams: If you're the only one contributing to the event, your scores will suffer. If a team of three only has one person actively competing, then they're probably gonna become disinterested in the event. Having such small teams mean that tardiness is basically a death sentence unless you're willing to draw multiple high scoring pieces in one week. This wasn't an issue for me at the start, but by week 3 my team and I had all lost interest - even if I wanted to continue playing, I would've been at a huge disadvantage
- Lack of Transparency: This is about the scoring sheet again, but not the actual scoring itself. Rather, its about how nobody knew how their pieces were scored. Nobody knew how powerful drawing multiple Pokemon was, nobody knew if it was better to focus on shading or having neat lineart, nobody knew how objective or subjective the scoring was. So when one team scores 200 off three pieces and another scores 240, nobody knows why one team's pieces scored higher than the others. This, in my opinion, is a huge downfall. Spending hours on a piece only for it to score 70 points due to factors that you were not told about sucks. It makes the scoring system feel completely random and, imo, thats a huge demotivator. Why should I spend hours on a piece when I have no idea if it'll break 100 points?
To use an analogy: imagine playing a game of darts on a dart board with randomised points that aren't displayed anywhere, where the score is updated every four darts you throw. It would fucking suck. You'd have no idea where to aim to gain the highest amount of points, so when you get four bullseyes and only score 30 points you call bullshit and stop playing
This is a competition. I understand the desire to avoid the scoring system being abused. But a competition where you have no idea how to score high isn't a particularly fun one. Hell, if the scoring system had been publicly available from the start then someone could've noticed how unbalanced it was and pointed it out. You've claimed that the scoring system was rigid and explicit in how pieces were scored, but there's nothing to back that up. So it feels less like an objective competition and more like pieces are being scored completely randomly. Like the people participating are throwing darts at a randomised dart board, if you will
Unfortunately I don't any suggestions on how to fix this issue besides offering my own reasons for why I became burnt out. Just make the scoring system more balanced and be more transparent on how it works ig
