2 days was just not enough time to read such a wall of text in the writing section especially. Also, pages on the HA sections would've been nice to avoid computers crashing due to the massive amount to load (mine had a hard time loading the whole HA page).

I would love to see future writing contests split into categories. Artists had the option of drawing or sculpting. HAs were split between CW and non-CW. Writers...were lumped together on a huge list. This was discouraging for voters and writers alike. There could be three categories - one for short stories, one for poetry, and one for articles.

*Short Stories - Just like for the current contest, these would have the 5k character limit and character could be themed for the contest (pet or minion, NPC character, etc.)

*Poetry - I honestly think poetry deserves its own category - this contest could even be split into rhyming and non-rhyming.

*Articles - I'm thinking mock articles for the Subetapedia. These could detail historic Subetan events or little-known details about the lives of NPCs. This category could have a smaller character limit. (2-3k?) I think such a category would encourage newer writers who might not feel up to writing a full-length story.

Just my two cents as someone who is excited to see Subeta offering writers a chance to share their skills with the wider Subeta community. :)

The voting process wasn't perfect, but I actually liked the two day voting. And the quick turnaround with announcing the winners was good too. I hope there are more contests like this ^_^

I agree with what everybody else has mentioned here, there simply wasn't enough time to read through the stories. I entered the writing contest and wanted to see what my fellow Subetans had submitted. After nearly 5 hours of reading, I was halfway through the entries, and realized I didn't have enough time to read them all. I tried to skim through the rest, but I feel like I didn't have enough time to read.

The worst part of the experience was because I submitted a writing entry, I only voted for my entry. There were MANY that I wanted to vote for, but because the votes were divided up around all categories, and if it came down to a single vote between my story and somebody else, I didn't want my other handful of votes to help the competition. It made me feel like a total jerk.

Two days wasn't enough time. I've had a crazy week and didn't get a chance to look at anything past the HAs. And I wasn't happy with a lot of them. It looked like people just submitted a HA and didn't actually pay attention to the contest. Even though I've been super busy, I still put together a HA that looked like a camping one

Tbh I posted this on the news comments but nobody replied: 'Huh yeah, the randomness is weird. There seems to be 3 set 'randomisations' for each category.

Is it the same for everyone? Sculpture seems to rotate between Laure's adventures, Experiment and Elwood in first place. They're spread out about 1/3rd through the voting so I guess the sequence to set and it just moves between the three orders.'

This was really weird to me? That it wasn't random on refresh at all and actually more like... one long piece of string that sat in three different positions. In the sculpture category it didn't seem to have an impact, thankfully, but that'd be because it was much smaller. Would be interesting to know what advantage it gave those in lead positions in the other categories.

I thought the system was actually pretty decent for the image-based categories (though the non-CW HA section should have been paginated), but it didn't work at all for the writing.

For one thing, the bold font made everything kind of hard to read, and there wasn't enough distinction between each entry -- I would have gone one story per page, personally.

Some more time would have been nice, too. I didn't use all of my votes and I don't even have much of a life offline to worry about, so I can't imagine how most people did on that front.

I didn't mind a short voting time since it forced me to actually do it pretty quickly, but I also think I voted pretty quickly because the voting was so unfun I didn't want to spend more time on it than I did.

I think I only used about 6 of my votes, almost all on the image-based ones, because the wall of text was so off-putting. And even aside from that, I accidentally clicked on my scroll bar a couple times and completely lost my place... I tried remembering some phrases from the story I had been reading and CTRL + F to find it again. I definitely support the suggestions of having a title + blurb that you can click to read the full story + NOT RANDOMLY CHANGING THE ORDER. Holy carp, that was a bad idea. Maybe it's fine for the image-based ones, but even those I found it really distracting to try to go back to, say, the sculpture ones and see everything all out of sorts. I ended up not even bothering using up additional votes once I'd skimmed through all the entries.

And I tried to be a good sport about actually looking at the non-CW HA ones, but once I saw that my scroll bar was barely moving and I was already feeling done, I just stopped. I totally get having some nominal participation prize, but when the "participation" is "submit whatever crap your HA currently has on to get free stuff, even though you have no intention of winning and clearly won't" it just made that entire section awful to look through. I also think having a slightly less narrow theme for future HA contests would be nice, because even with the thousands of items in the wardrobe, there are only so many "outdoorsy" ones, and after a while, they all started to look more or less the same to me. Even the CW ones had that problem. But I suppose that's bound to be a side effect of trying to cram so many different things into one contest. I think I would have preferred five or six separate contests spread throughout the year instead.

Can I say that I'm not even sure if I fully won on my full merit, or I only voted because my story was in a shorter format and therefore, was easier to handle than longer stories for most people. A lot of people are saying that they didn't vote for writing and I cannot blame them.

I didn't even vote myself, it was just a long wall of text to me and i had to CTRL+F to find myself.

It was that bad

I would have loved to have put a caption with my avatar "Reading is an adventure"

I'm sure some other avatars had good intentions too, but I didn't quite know what was going on with them, and maybe a caption or something would have swayed my vote over to them

HAs had to add descriptions of how their avatar was an adventure, right? So why didn't they appear in the finished product?

As somebody who entered the writing portion, I also felt pretty demoralized when I saw the format and knew we'd get blown off by the majority of voters.

Yeah, I put all my votes towards the non-writing stuff. Too busy with fall semester about to start, making a costume for a convention, Grandparents coming to visit, etc. Maybe if I had more than two days, but as it was I just threw votes at whatever caught my eye. /shrug

Human avatars had no descriptions. This was requested a few times during the contest but (afaik) not at all acknowledged by staff. I supported descriptions, it really would have helped figure out some of the ideas behind the HAs that weren't as obvious.

This. THIS THIS THIS. It was kind of infuriating to try to wade through the writing section. A real pain in the rumproast.

A. Writing should have been 5,000 characters minus formatting. B. Everything people have said about writing and then some. I knew it was a waste of my time as soon as I saw the section. I figured it would be a few votes on merit + friend votes for some of the winners (staff said people were free to tell anyone/advertise off site). I have a feeling that's at least part of why we won't see any 'here's how you did' or even winner vote totals.

And I'm still sad that people were just allowed to wear their avatars. "You CANNOT solicit votes for your entry on-site... unless you made a HA and then it's cool bruh". I don't really know a good way to address it other than turning off HAs (which I fully recognize is a shitty solution, especially if voting is extended as people have asked for) but damn.

I read what I could, (since I'm a fast reader, I think I managed to read them all), but yeah, it was really cluttered and hard to follow. I think putting each entry there as just a title that you can click on and get a drop-down would have been much better. I didn't have an issue with the other pages, save for the fact that I couldn't even tell what some entries were in the sculpting section, mostly because of tiny, poor quality pictures.

Not sure if it was suggested or not, but maybe on the writing, be able to have titles of the stories that you can click to bring you to the text? For HAs, I really liked the voting they had for Epicon, that way it wasn't a popularity contest. But this was more time constrained.

I thought it was fine. Minus the writing section because I didn't really look there. Obviously not great, but not miserable.

i honestly didn't vote just because the entire layout was atrocious and hard to work with. i couldn't see 99% of the human avatars because there was so many my browser just showed broken images - and nothing pagination wouldn't have fixed. like i get that it was "done quickly" or whatever but pages would have been so much better than just one huge page. that, and it was clear that a lot of people had just submitted random avatars so they'd get the participation stuff so maybe these could have been screened out somehow but still given participation prizes.

i briefly looked at the drawings and sculptures but with no descriptions on anything it was hard to see how it related or what some things were.

the writing section was probably the worst. the font was far too big and just produced huge walls of texts without paragraphs which i'm guessing was forfeited to regain some characters for writing.

I would've liked it better if the HAs had been paginated or something.A few look like they didn't fit in or have anything to do with adventure,and could've been omitted.They same with the blank HA and the broken HA.I couldn't be bothered with reading the stories because of the way they were placed.They could've had the writing category formatted better,like maybe have the stories be in multiple small squares in similar fashion to Firefox's Speed Dial,but with the titles at the top.Then a person could click on whichever small square and it would take them directly to the story.Pagination would also make a difference.

I also feel two days of voting wasn't enough,especially because it didn't give us enough time to read the stories.