well, i'd call this already concluded .u. imo
Welcome to single-vote polling.
I say, for the sake of the future contests, we should decide do we factor in only ladder spells or modding community in general come to voting up these things.
I know this came last, but it's the most salient & important part going forward, so I'm putting it first, and that is to say:
this so hard
I think this is an incredibly important point to recognize; we need to 'set the stage' so that everyone's (entrants, voters, even Judges) expectations are aligned. It hurts to get dinged on 'originality' when you were making it "original for Warcraft", but the Judge was judging for "original to all of modding". :< I think it's something we can &
should do for each & every Contest (even if just nominally; like if we decide on a default & then make sure no one has problems, 'reverse Byzantine' style).
And more than that for , not just for this particular issue, but for almost everything else, too. The most important elements to the Contest really shouldn't be 'left up to interpretation', but should be agreed upon,
by the people competing, ideally.
In particular, I'm speaking specifically about something I have yet to formalize; that is, the relative 'seriousness' of the Contest, the goal. "Is this Contest mostly for fun/community, or this Contest mostly a serious 'test of skill'?" That single, solitary question underpins & defines nearly every other decision that is made.
More on this later.
Apheraz Lucent said:
Originality, Complexity and Creativity are all very fragile terms. Let me demonstrate:
Well technically I said "Creativity", "Originality", and
"Uniqueness", not "Complexity". (I
was talking about 'Complexity' earlier, but it's a different discussion, specific for this Contest, so I'll leave it aside for
this one).
Apheraz Lucent said:
Originality, Complexity Uniqueness and Creativity are all very fragile terms. Let me demonstrate:
Say we take your force wall which knocks enemies in a line away from the caster. It's original to ladder spells, but not so come to modding community. If you, however, make the wall an actual wall of 300 range width which drags enemies away while it slows down reaching the final destination, you got yourself a creative, polished spell. Make the Wall create an impassable 500 width barrier at it's end, and you got originality. And for complexity, add a stun if a unit is dragged for longer than two seconds.
Using a very overused system (knockback), we still managed to create something new.
Using a superbly small detail, such as slowing down the wall as it goes, we made the entry look polished.
And using a petty stun added depth and complexity to the spell.
I completely agree, 'fragile' is a good word. I'd say the differences between them are very nuanced, very subtle, and in some ways kinda nonexistent (they
are used as synonyms for a reason). It's why I use the "C/O/U" acronym for them, because it's a lot to type out when I often mean more than one.
Google defines them respectively as:
Creative | relating to or involving the imagination or original ideas... |
Originality | the ability to think independently and creatively... the quality of being novel or unusual. |
Uniqueness | the quality of being the only one of its kind... the quality of being particularly remarkable, special, or unusual
|
As you can see, there's a lot of overlap.
Personally, I am nearly always of the opinion that the bar for C/O/U should be, by default, set at Warcraft 3 (as it currently exists, at TFT). If anything, allow for points for going 'above & beyond' if you can come up with something C/O/U when it comes to the modding community as a whole.
This is for a few reasons: personally, everything I do is in the context of Warcraft 3; I'm usually 'adding to it' or 'replacing some things in it'. And in Warcraft 3, there are *tons* of abilities, with very little 'direct, functional overlap'... But loads of indirect and/or combinatorial overlap (perfect examples: Drunken Haze = Evasion & Critical Strike. Spiked Carapace = personal Thorns & Devotion Auras. Web = Autocast Ensnare only vs. Air. Etc etc etc).
So you can have a hero with all four abilities that are, at their heart, mostly mixed & combined versions of existing abilities.
And to me, that's still OK; that's still
"technically C/O/U".
Then sometimes you get a hero like
the Swashbuckler (Hero Contest #8), where almost every skill in his skill-set is not only "technically C/O/U", but also
literally C/O/U.
(Again, though, only for Warcraft. Riposte exists all over, Turmoil is basically a variant of the Red Alert 2 Yuri's Revenge's Chaos Drone's Chaos Cloud, Snare Trap & Persecute are probably both in DotA, and all of those probably exist in the Spell section in some form). That is something that high marks in my book (and did).
Requiring contestants to 'meet the bar' of C/O/U in terms of the *everything* (like, the Hive's Spell section... Or worse, truly everything, like every game ever made) is, I feel, an unnecessarily high bar. Also an inconsistent one; two Judges using the same Criteria should not get wildly divergent results, generally; but that's totally possible if Judge A hasn't played as many games (& thus been exposed to more ideas) as Judge B. Judge B, having played everything ever, sees nothing as truly C/O/U and grades accordingly (low). That seems no bueno to me.
I think there's more on that topic but I've already taken up a lot of time/real-estate, so I'll leave it there for now.
we actually had A LOT of ideas we ended up throwing out because it was too complex. For example, we had originally intended for the slow from the yellow paint to increase over time. We also wanted to add a lightning effect that attached the unit to the puddle, and if they didn't break the link, they would be snared.
Glad to see you already taking an interest. Feel free to try the heroes and vote 
You had an even tougher break with the similar idea of brushes being part of it.
