- Joined
- Jun 30, 2016
- Messages
- 53
Information
The Arena is a place where all users can participate in organized contests. Winners will receive experience and icon awards.
1. Discussion
If you want to start a contest, you should start a discussion in the Submission Forum. Explain your thoughts, or themes, and look for fellows who are interested in participating. If enough people are interested, you may proceed. If the exact theme choice is not clear, yet, an extra poll might help for the final result.
In case you're certain a theme doesn't have to be discussed (for any reason), then you can talk with staff and directly start with step '2. Submission' in case of agreement.
If a submission fails to attract members and is just inactive, it will be archived. That doesn't ban the topic from being a contest theme - it simply means no one was interested in participating at the time.
2. Submission
Once you have a concrete theme, you can prepare the submission thread and post it in the Submission Forum. Have a look at our Arena Templates which should already include all required rules and criteria for the respective contest. If that's not the case, contact the staff to ensure a proper rule-set instead of creating one on your own.
Once a moderator approves the contest submission, it will get moved into the Arena, and becomes an official contest. We probably won't always have the required resources to hold every suggested contest, but if enough people are interested, and no moderator chips in, feel free to open a thread in Staff Contact.
Host
The person who posts the contest thread is called 'host'. The host can help organizing the thread, recommend judges, and help contestants in the thread. However, the host is not responsible in any kind for enforcing rules, to discipline users, to determine judges, or to give penalties of any kind. He is, however, very welcome to suggest and discuss it with the Appointed Moderator.
Appointed Moderator
The appointed moderator is the staff member who approves the submission, making it an official arena contest.
He is responsible for the rule-set, for approving judges, and for any other contest related issues. If there are problems of any kind, with which the host, or judges can't help, you should contact the appointed moderator. The appointed moderator should be very familiar with the Appointed Moderator Guide.
Judge
A judge is a user approved by the staff to judge an arena contest. The judge has some good knowledge and expertise in the chosen contest theme, and usually already has some review experience. Judges should be very familiar with the Judge Guide.
Contests can only start if they have at least two judges signed on. If at some point, this is reduced to one or less, and more judges cannot be found, a discussion with contestants must be started on how best to proceed. The solution has to be approved by a Staff Member. The options include:
- Reducing the judge's voting weight, in exchange for more polling weight
- The contestants manage to convince someone whom the staff couldn't to help judge
- The contest proceeds in the same framework with a single judge
Judges must be compensated with between 50 and 150 experience per entrant, depending on the amount of work required to review, and the scarcity of judges for the contest type.
Entries
Any entry uploaded to a resource section must not be moderated until after the contest results are posted.
Deadline
A contest should last approximately one month, but this may vary depending on the specified contest theme as some results take longer to make.
Extension
Up until around three days before the deadline, participants can ask for an extension to get more time. All participants will have two days to approve/reject the extension. If the vote is unanimous, the contest will simply be extended. If however it is at least half, an extension will still be granted, however participants whose submission remains submitted before the original deadline (and not updated after) will be get an advantage over those submitted after.
An example of advantage/penalty is this for entries submitted after the original deadline (when vote is not unanimous:
FinalScore = [ORIGINAL_NUMBER_OF_DAYS_DEADLINE / (NUMBER_OF_DAYS_FROM_CONTEST_START_UNTIL_SUBMISSION) * FINAL_RATING
If a contest lasts one month and is extended 7 days and a contestant submits their entry on day 3 of the extension and the final rating is 42, the math is as follows:
31 / (31 + 3) * 42 = 38,29411765
3. Poll
When the submission period has ended, the host or the appointed moderator must start the poll. Polls last 15-20 days, and must have 1 additional choice for every 6 entries. Voters must be able to change their votes, and votes must always be visible.
When the poll has started, the judges can start their work with reviewing the submissions.
It's recommended for the entries to be packed together into one .zip archive or something similar, and provided in the thread, to ensure judges won't accidentally download and judge an updated and improved version of the submission some time later.
If at any time a user gets disqualified from contest, they will be also disqualified from the poll.
In such cases a new poll is a possible way to compensate lost votes, if it could change the result, for example. You're encouraged to contact the staff in this situation, if you recognize such a problem and nothing happens on its own.
4. Result
When the judges and the poll finish, the contest results may be presented. The results must always be checked by the judges and the appointed moderator to ensure no mistakes were made. The calculation formula is:
FinalScore = (30*Poll_Votes/POLL_VOTES_TOTAL) + (70*Average_Judge_Score/POSSIBLE_JUDGE_SCORE)
...where the weight for judging is 70%, and the poll 30%. These values may slightly change, depending on the contest. You can use this tool to help you to automatically calculate the results. For convenience, use this spreadsheet to calculate the scores before posting a snapshot in the results thread.
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