I don’t really want to open the can of worms of “what games deserve a 1?” but it’s safe to say that it’s not ideal to have games receive 1’s based not on content or implementation but on exercising a feature given to authors on the backend. It would be like giving a game a 1 solely for containing cover art, or for the author taking advantage of the lifted muzzle rule.
Unfortunately, this is no longer a hypothetical discussion, exactly. It was a hypothetical discussion when it took place on pages 3-10 of a thread ostensibly discussing Spring Thing rules that became almost entirely about the upcoming comp. It ceased to be a hypothetical discussion when the comp started and the possibility resurfaced. The key word here is “possibility”; since I posted the thread there have been a number of updates swearing to the high heavens and the italics and the bold that they aren’t ACTUALLY going to do it. I’m replying to here because the posters involved are unwilling to “explicity [sic] reject [intfiction.org]'s totalitarian so-called ‘Terms of Use’” and do it themselves. (This forum, according to that post, has also “lost the right to be taken seriously by reasonable adults,” and I in particular am peddling “the usual sort of hysterical nonsense from people who use that forum.” These discussions always reveal themselves as proxy wars, don’t they?)
Which is fine, in the way that actually following the rules of a contest is “fine.” But why is authors updating their entries something that needs to be vented about, or “got off one’s chest,” to begin with? Where, exactly, is the problem with authors doing something that has been explicitly allowed them by the comp rules for several years – and, as Steph pointed out, tends to be correlated with good entries, at least this year? Clearly this is not a lone opinion. I don’t actually expect an answer to this to be forthcoming, nor do I expect to change anyone’s minds. I just want to make authors aware of it. When I mentioned elsewhere to some authors that some voters might think less of them for updating your entry, the very next reply, within minutes, was someone surprised that this was even possible.
This is what I mean by “unfinished business.” The rules get changed, people resent that the rules got changed, and instead of being dealt with the resentment is left to stew until it bubbles over into judgments of authors based on the rules. Meanwhile, new authors come to the comp unaware that this is even happening.