In particular, the Writing and HA sections were a huge-ass pain.

Yeah, no kidding. I took one look at the writing section and immediately clicked away. I feel bad, I'm sure there were some great stories in there, but there was no way I was wading through that mess.

You know what they should have done? Paginate the avatars. It also would have been nice if all the stories had titles. Even "Entry " and so forth would have helped. They also could have made just the first couple sentences of the stories visible, and then put a 'read more' link at the end of each entry that loaded the rest of the story. That way that section wouldn't have been one great big text wall where everything ran together.

I honestly don't think there's a way to improve writing sections for contests like these? Because you're either going to have people that are too busy to go through dozens of entries, or too lazy. But maybe it could be pages like "next story" or a way to tick off every story that you read like highlighting or a temporary box separate from the voting box. That sounds like a lot of coding issues though. Same for the HA as far as number is concerned. There were too many to go through and people had issues loading them on their devices. But maybe "next HA" buttons or something could work for those. That or have a more strict requirement or maybe even have people have to give their avatar a title or name or something?

I was neither too busy or too lazy, and I like to read and be judgemental. :)

The writing took time to read. It didn't matter how much time you put in though. if you needed to click away and come back all the entries would be re-scrambled. You no longer had any idea which one you'd already read anymore. Some authors were smart and used some of their allowed characters to make a title for their story, but not everyone was so thoughtful and some of those were really good and worth voting for.

Similarly with teh HAs even if you could load them all at once it took a lot of scrolling if you wanted to compare something you'd seen before with one you were looking at now. So yeah, laziness and business are both issues, but they still didn't make it any less awful if you weren't.

Also since the Camp Veta is a game and just for fun and users are not being paid, I don't think that Subeta should make folks be industrious and dedicated just to make a vote up or down.

If you have Suggestions on how to improve (and I think yours have merit), I have another topic similar to this in Suggestions. Please chime on in over there.

Yeah, I didn't get around to voting for the writing section, because my brain just went "nope" - and I'm a good reader. But you're right, it would be difficult no matter what, I'm not really sure the best way to improve it.

I'm glad I took the time to read through the stories,there were some really good ones! The art and avatars were fun to look through too! This was a fun event.

I think the writing section could have worked better if the voting page just showed the title and first paragraph of each story. Then if you enjoyed the first paragraph you could click to show the full story. I think this would have made the page less overwhelming.

It would also have been helpful to mark which had been read and to maybe make a short comment for personal use only (such as "possible vote" or "not keen on this one."

: /

As someone who wrote a story, quite frankly, I feel like it was a waste of my time. The chances that enough people even saw/read my story is pretty slim, thus making the chance for a vote even slimmer. It makes it unfair VS, say, the CW avatar section or the sculpture section who had like 10 entires each and were easy to vote for. Without even knowing the results, I feel cheated.

For suggestion starters, TWO days for voting was too short. Period. Whether it was just HA's or a full range of multi-media entries, people have jobs and shit to do in general. Voting should have taken place over at least 5 days, one for each category.

Second, WHY on earth did it overlap with another event? Before "well we had to extend because of the writing entires being messed up", no, you didn't. I had a board that went unaddressed for a week. You wouldn't have had to extend it if it had been taken care of in a timely manner. Perhaps it should have been a priority to make sure the even at hand is fully functional?

Third, pagination. As has been suggested, there was too much per page to look through. There needs to be some sort of tick box system where we can just tick everything we like, then go to another page where we can "lock in" our final choices.

To help with reading/HA's, maybe code a way that once you've seen the current batch of stories/HA's, a pop-up box with dialogue that you've looked at XX/XXX entries, and you won't see these entries again once you leave the page. Thus you would be able to go through all of them, tick the boxes as a bunch of maybe's, then make a final selection.

I agree, two days was waaaaay to short to try and read stories when you couldn't keep track of what you read. I went for HA's just to for ease.

Perhaps, as someone suggested somewhere, add a feature that allow us to "save" those that catch our attention? Similar to a list of favorites. That way, we could cast our votes from a much smaller, already filtered selection.

Personally, I tried to read some of the stories (a few were quite nice, can't remember which) but had to give up. It was giving me too much of a headache.

As soon as I saw how the voting was set up and how long I had to do it, I hit back and moved on to something else. I knew there was no possible way for me to vote fairly in the time allotted.

Chiming in to agree with basically everything said. I wrote a story, and it was really discouraging to see so many people immediately saying "Yeahhh not even bothering with the writing page sorry writers lol". But I can't even really blame them because of how horrendous it was.

And there was basically no clarification on how formatting would work? Like, I learned maybe 2 days before I had to submit the story that I could use scode (which of course took up more characters), but were we even told if we needed to code in line and paragraph breaks?

I really feel like the entries should have been at least screened, considering how long we had to enter. And then if denied, they could get reasons like with the spotlight or CW. There were a lot of stories with bonkers formatting and lots of spelling/grammar mistakes. I feel like critiquing them after staff had a glance would've helped make things a lot easier to read :/

And yeah having 2 days to vote when you had a good amount of writing entries on a page that was a total clustertruck... not thrilling.

I actually much preferred the past EpiCon contest style of voting as opposed to this. Didn't even use all my votes because it was too much effort. Like I've said before in news comments, if you're putting everything on a single page, there better be an option to hide the ones you didn't like (highlighting the ones you voted for is a start, but there was only max 25).

As for the writing section, I didn't even bother.

I didn't bother reading any of the stories once I saw how much there was to read. I felt it wouldn't be fair to vote if I didn't have time to read more than a couple.

I kind of feel like if you do a writing contest again, it should be its own thing so it can get the attention it deserves. It's ok to mix up HAs, sculpting, and drawing because they're all image-based and very easy to vote on, but writing is a completely different medium and shouldn't have been lumped in with the others.

As someone who entered the writing section, I'm extremely disappointed.

Writers should have been allowed to create a title and synopsis for their story. These two items should have appeared on little page or book images (or something else that looks pretty), that would link to the full story when clicked. That way, voters could keep track of which ones they read. The mini book/page images could have been set up like the grid-style of the reflection game. This would have been better than the giant wall of solid text wtf.

It really was too hard to keep track of the writing entries while trying to read/vote for them, as has been said on here already.

And I have to agree with , , and . Two day was way to short for voting. Some of us have really limited internet time.

I'm not sure about writing, but did the entries have a "finalists" judgment? I feel like that would at least make sections like writing and avatars easier to vote for on such a big scale.

Yeah, I basically didn't vote at all because I just didn't have time to. I also didn't look at the news page enough to realize it was only two days so I thought I had time to do it when I actually had a day off from work to go and do it. We should have at least the weekend to vote instead of two days in the middle of the week.

And a title for the stories should have been another field to enter without the writers needing to use character limits. Titles and authors together are the best ways to differentiate between stories and I also think you just need a summary and 'read more' link to read the full. If a short story didn't catch your eyes within a paragraph, then you probably wouldn't vote it.