Yeah, what’s with all these oldsters holding us back by embracing outmoded dogmatic concepts like right and fairness?
This is a fine point of view, so why not just release your game instead of entering it in a competition?
We all know the answer: no one would pay any attention to it otherwise.
It seems to me that many of today’s authors want the promotional opportunities that come with participating in IFComp without all the rules, constraints and other nasty business of actually competing.
Don’t worry, IFComp is well on its way to following in the footsteps of Spring Thing and becoming a coordinated game release instead of a competition. Some veterans will say that this was always the main point and that the competition was merely a mechanism to make that happen. Maybe, but competition is a delicate mechanism that fails to function (to motivate, to dissuade) when its integrity is damaged.
Right. My post 2 up from here had an unfortunate blanket statement of “the veterans”. I’ve updated it to say “some veterans”. Point being, no newcomers would be against the rule. Sorry if I offended any veterans who I accidentally shoved in a box.
Personally, I find it bizarre that this is an issue at all. Everything is perfectly fair. You think another author is “taking advantage” of a rule to update? Guess what, you can do the same thing! Make your game better, add an alternate ending to inspire replays, etc…
Then different judges have vastly different experiences with your game depending on when they happened to play it. The deadline exists for a reason. I don’t get why it’s so contentious to ask people to abide by it.
I find this statement to be pretty nasty, like a big ugly troll. Who are you to say no one would pay attention to my game outside the competition?
Again this comp if perfectly fair. Spring thing is too, it’s just different. Everyone has the right to make their game better or fix it during the comp.
And I see nothing wrong with different judges having different experiences. It reflects in the score that places entries. You should point out why that is such a big problem.
Read it as the generalized you and not you specifically. For all I know, your game is great and would garner tons of attention outside the comp.
It’s such a big problem because it makes the results less deterministic and therefore less fair. My game’s chance at victory might depend on whether a judge compared my game against your original game or your updated game.
To clarify my point about “no one would pay any attention to it otherwise”: people submit games to the comp, even when they’re not really interested in competing, because they are guaranteed downloads and reviews by doing so.
I never claimed to speak for anyone. I used logic.
Let’s have a thought experiment to illustrate my reasoning. If I as a newcomer came, made my submission, and then came onto the forums to complain about the rules, what sort of response do think I would get? RE: Well, why did you enter a contest which has rules you strongly oppose?
It’s a little bit less weird for a veteran to do it because they have stakes in the community.
What does that have to do with anything? Should I wait until my tag has a certain age before I can participate in the forum?
Sure! That’s part of why we have forum.
You’re missing a quote where I made a personal attack on someone.
If I get banned for anything I’ve said on this forum, I’d be surprised. I’ve only expressed that I like the current rules of the competition, and explained that my reason is to give people good experiences. In addition, I suppose I’ve challenged people who are strongly opposed to the rule ask themselves why.
The desire to have people experience their creations isn’t the problem; it’s that they enter a comp and then try to decompify it because they don’t really care about it being a comp and find all of the rules that facilitate it being a fair comp to be burdensome.
For the record, I don’t perceive anything that Jeron has said as a personal attack, and I’d like for us to drop that thread of the discussion.
You don’t think it’s possible a potential entrant would see the IFComp, consider entering, see the updates rule and decide against entering? Or does “logic” cover that happening as well?
For someone who loves the comp, you are very averse to entering it yourself. Most of the people weighing in on this discussion have entered the comp in the past, sometimes several times in the past.
It kind of looks like a lot of people are posting opinions and arguments about updates that are exactly the same as the opinions and arguments that we’ve posted before. Is this productive? If we want to explain our positions to newcomers, maybe we would do a more effective job of that just by linking to our previous posts instead of going round and round the merry-go-round again?
(FWIW, if you want to see some of my opinions, they’re here and elsewhere in the thread.)
It’s not irrelevant, because your argument boils down to the idea that the opinions of the people who are entering the comp, actively supporting it, and keeping it alive (arguably, bringing it out of a fallow period in the late '00s, both in quantity of votes and overall quality of entries) are less important than the opinions of people whose investment in the comp amounts to complaining about the lack of purity and influx of “outsiders.”
I have beta testing credits in IF projects that were released in the 1990s. I have beta testing credit in this current comp. You have zero knowledge of how many hours I’ve spent judging the comp over the years, or providing bug reports and feedback to authors. Your claim that I haven’t released a game in the comp, while true, was also an assumption based on the name attached to this account and not something that you knew until I told you earlier in this sentence.
None of that bears on the arguments that I’m making, which have to do with fundamental principles of what fair competition is, not the popularity of the conclusions among invested parties. 97 of 100 children polled think that their bedtime should be later (the other 3 were already asleep at the time of the poll). So what?