How did you know what my next game was going to be about?!?! Hastily starts page1 re-write.
(but seriously, thanks :3)
The problem is that the ifcomp.org play links always pointed to the competition releases, which made it hard to get people to play the post-competition ones instead. If the ifcomp.org play links are brought back, I hope they can be made to point to the same location as the top IFDB links.
The detailed results statistics (overall votes, distribution per game) can’t be found on the new website anymore. Are there any plans to reinstate them? I found those very valuable!
Yup, for this year’s entries, after the 2014 voting closes.
And for all the previous years?
That, as they say, is a separate project. (I have the data, and can re-apply it to however I decide to represent this information to the new site format. But I have to design this new representation first, with an eye for the current year. And between then and now, I have a competition to run. [emote]:)[/emote] )
There may be some fun around the blog stuff, but I can’t see any advantage of killing all the web referenced links about results or historical rules. The new website seems more to be an expression of a kickstart into a new age of comments and babble than a matter-of-fact of an historical grown institution. We have enough blogs, for a competition site I need facts and the new site doesn’t seem to deliver that.
So I’ve heard a rumor that the data will be replaced after IFComp sometime. Not sure where I saw that.
I, too, lament that volunteer work cannot do everything I want, as quickly as I require it.
Just leave the old links, that’s not quite stressful. It’s a good idea for a website concept to support some important persistent links.
Question: will the upload button be active so authors can submit fixes at will during the comp?
(With the usual caveat that reviewers could be on an old copy.)
An astute question, and one I plan on addressing on the blog and such this week.
In short: Yes, you’ll be able to update entries by contacting me-the-organizer. I don’t plan on letting mid-comp updates be automated, at least not this year. (This carries forward the way that Sargent treated updates last year, to the best of my knowledge.)
My current stance towards mid-competition updates is to make them possible, but inconvenient. The thing that authors submit by the deadline should be their final draft. Six weeks is a long time to sit on one’s hands if players discover a painful technical flaw with the work early on (believe me, I know the feeling), so I want to make available a route for emergency repair. But I’d rather not have authors treat their entries as ongoing drafts post-deadline, updating them as they please.
(To a certain extent, this policy arguably favors authors with online-only works. I will make clear that these authors are essentially on the honor system to not continue freely developing their work during the six-week judging period, limiting any edits to bug-fixes.)
You could potentially control this by disabling the button at the deadline, then enabling the button temporarily at fixed intervals (like the first and third weekends for example) so you wouldn’t need to shepherd updates. I Find the upload button with preview very convenient and useful btw - thanks for the work!
Am I understanding this correctly to mean that you will only be allowing bug-fixes, and not game design improvements? If so, that seems to be a reversal of the previous policy, whose stated purpose was to encourage more people to improve their games.
That seems like quite an interesting change. When the updates during the comp rule was introduced a few years back, I felt it was a terrible idea because it basically allowed people to cheat (i.e. you get a review criticising your game early in the comp, you ‘update’ it to remove whatever it was the reviewer felt was bad). Changing the rules to allow only bug fixes is a much better idea.
Saying that, I’d be a whole lot happier if the rule went back to the original version: you enter a game, that’s it. If bugs show up between now and the end of the comp, bad luck - but the onus is on you as the author to get it tested properly beforehand.
I apologize for my lack of clarity earlier; I don’t plan on radically changing anything about handling updates, versus last year.
As I see it, the intent of allowing updates (like so many other things about the comp) attempts to strike a balance between running a judged competition and recognizing that said competition is our community’s annual high-visibility showcase of brand-new IF work, and that work should therefore be as good as it can be.
Just like last year, if an author wants to apply an update for any reason, they’ll contact the organizer about it and work it out from there.
I don’t have a problem with it working that way (especially as I’m not entering this year, cough), but that’s not how it’s worked in the past.
Previously, contestants could upload updates to the website at any time during the competition. Every so often, roughly weekly, Sargent would then collect up all the latest updates and release them as a group. It didn’t mean that you could update the publicly available version of your game whenever you felt like it. But you could upload an update any time you fixed something, and you’d know that when Sargent did do a round of updates, the last version you uploaded would be the one he’d use.
That said, I don’t know if many/any authors were uploading updated versions that often. I only ever uploaded milestone-type updates (one for It, two for Robin & Orchid), and I got the impression that’s what most other authors did as well. I don’t think a new “contact the organiser directly about updating your game” policy would make much practical difference.
Oh! Well… hm. The misunderstanding would appear to be mine; thank you for the correction.
Allow me to meditate upon the sea over this for a while. Suffice to say that by the time the issue becomes immediately relevant, the process will be ready to use and documented. (Why, yes, that is only a week away…)