I'm honest at that point, i thought i was at the off-topic section for a moment and needed to double check.
WALL OF TEXT INCOMING!
I see that it was for contest, where some of these things are debateable (why the claims some do are futile is something i will come back later to), but lets get the map section out of the way:
Demanding that projects should be send in without the authors name is nothing more than a slap in the face for every recource creator. (i will try to keep the ranting at a minimum)
How do you thing authors build up a community for their maps? By the quality of it (Quality and objectivity and the mutual exclusion of each other is something i will come back later)? Things like Custom hero survival, Vampirism and all it's clones should tell us a different story. They are playable, indeed, but far away from polished, demanding or bugfree. Still people play the heck out of them.
Because of the "franchising" of the map. And this is due to dedicated work of the authors, editors or the community. I don't connect the names of vexorian, gex, shar dundred or crazyrussian, rufus, Aeroblyctos, DSG or bribe (Names are pulled out of my ass, there is no ranking as equal or something like that) with high quality recources for no reason. My bias is not based around arbitrary conditions like skin colour or gender (These being arbitrary takes them anything to base differentiation on). The whole work of them is not seperated from their newest recources, they stand in context. I not only assume that they meet certain conditions, i expect it. And neglecting this work would be nothing short of disrespect.
This doesn't mean that we just should approve them without quality management systems (I mean, a system needs to work, still, that is objectively achieveable). But it means that we shouldn't try to actively damage the progress of people working on their profile/name/whatever. This is not how you build up communities or a portfolio. Thats how you drive people to other sites.
What this means is that any bias coming out of the former work of a synonym is not arbitrary, it is reasoned. Basing assumptions on that can be reasoned upon (although, i give you that, they can fail).
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Now, lets take that a stage further, shall we?
The definition of quality itself is subjective.
"Degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfills requirements." (ISO Norm 9000)
Requirements are inherently subjective, because they encompass needs and expectations, which they customer doesn't even need to be concious about.
What does this mean?
There are some signs of quality we can objectify. This means: they are still subjective, but we have arbitrary chosen certain measureable, objective parametres to poll them upon. Like TheLordOfChaos201 hinted on a map which got very clunky control and camera, which makes it for they personally non-approveable. What it means is that they have valued the camera as to such a degree detrimentically to the gameplay that it should be sub-standard, while someone else found it meeting the minimum requirements to be approved (This is, by the way, why it can be argued that the abolishment of moderated reviews could overall lead to a decline in quality on the hive. Less demands let more stuff through. But i don't want to argue on that, i am happy that the rule quickening the review process)
It's the same with game design. So many designers have tried to describe what is good game design or what is "fun". And most of them simply fail. More less than others. I read enough blogs of bullshittery (Sadly, i dont have bookmarks of a list anymore, damnit) to know what i am talking about (Mark rosewater tried with his known jonny/spike/timmy apporach to make a systematic take on that, but it is still only an abstractation from reality).
What does that mean? Talking about keeping contests objective and even more so recource submissions is futile. I cannot take someone seriously who says me that icon or skin reviews are objective (Btw, the mods make a great job in that section, much love <3).
But what they are is objectified. The mods keep themself on certain criteria they analyse their work upon. And they can be reviewed themself on these analysis. That is part of quality management. What this means is if you think a review was negatively based towards you because of bias, you can look at the review, see if you there is a dissonance between your view on your work and the analysis, and get a second mod to review your recource again. Thats why it should be normal to have two judges on a contest (of course this is not always possible since really active and knowledgeable member, which are dedicated in the community and have made themself a name, have gotten rare). When two or even three of these reviews fail to meet your expectations, you should ask yourself if your own perspective on your project is flawed or if you just simply don't want to fullfill the criterias. And in that case, you should move on (looking at someone like shadowshaman.mn and other).
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What does that mean for contests?
We cannot really stop bias. Even WIP or pictures of the class or just the use of many custom models could lead people to vote for someone they randomly picked (like often said, many ppl dont open more than 3 entries). So we instead of making futile attemps to unify them, we should think of the weighting of our quality analysis tools.
Judges, in comparison to the poll, need to measure parametres objectified. The grade in which they can analyse the entries is far more reasonable than of the poll. On the other hand, we could only really increase the quality control by more people which review the judges or the reviews and which are dislogded from the community. This is not possible for a small community like use, except people would get their ass up and review more maps with reason.
Poll votes are measures without any mean of quality assurance. So these need to be assumed to be completely biased. But, and this is important, they can be taken as quality parametres (even more so, one of the most important parametres in industries).
But this is not why we want to keep them. The community is important for the hive, so we have them in the contests because of ideologic reasons. This means that even if they are biased, we take them because in the end our whole work here revolves around the community. Our doing here doesn't exist in a vacuum.
I was somewhat his friend and loved his cinematics, so I put up harsher thresholds when reviewing his work.
