72hr Mapping Contest - Summer 2014 - Prelim Stuff

[Fruity Snacks]

It's getting to be that time of the year again. The time when people go "holy shit, why am I putting myself through this D: " It's time for the NEXT 72hr contest!

Alrighty, so the Winter Contest was quite good, barring the horrible theme on my part (Sorry!). I already have plans for the next theme and it'll be far better than last time, I promise. That all being said, I just now need to know when people are free for the event, so answer these few questions for me:

• Whens your finals done and over? When will you be available the most for the 72hr period? Do you want a midweek thing, or weekend?
• Right now, I'm looking at Mid/Late June for the next contest. I'd like to use the 72hr contest as a springboard for the next Major Mapping contest coming up, so remember that the date will be slightly affected by that, if the schedule line up. (If everyone is like, Lets do it late July, then I'll ignore the contest starting date).
• Did you prefer the judging from last winter where it was just a large chunk of time and no prelims? Do you want prelims back?

Let me know ASAP!

EDIT: Probably going to be a weekend. Maybe Late june?

 

[Berry]

I can't say poop for finals, but I think June-July (preferably June imo) is a nice time for this (72hrs don't even take much planning compared to big ones do they?). And I think the last voting was pretty okay.

What I did not like last time was the theme. I hope you either have a good theme this time or just scrap the theme thing altogether.

Edit: Yeah, a weekend is much better for me too, but I'm not super fussed.

 

[NoodleCollie]

Personally I'd prefer it to happen over a weekend as it would mean that any potential summer work wouldn't get in the way. I'm good any time from mid-June to late August, outside of 11th-22nd of July.

 

[Fruity Snacks]

I will say (and this will be a big hint to the next contest for some) that IF this 72hr contest is used as a springboard for the next Big contest, the theme will be related to that and I know that has a lot of fun things (Since it's a personal expertise and favorite movie genre of mine).

 

[Crash]

If it's mid week there would be 0 chance I could participate. The usual Friday through Monday is just about best case scenario for me and my job.

I definitely think preliminaries are a good idea, it seems to help get a lot more votes, as the average person is more likely to take the time to look at them if the wheat has already been separated from the chaff, so to speak. The downside is that some cool maps might get missed by the "spectators" of the event, but the finalists will get a lot more exposure and the voting will have a much larger pool by the end.

 

[ManBeaR]

I really wanna participate in this, and I think after 20. june but before 10. july fould be perfect for me. Preferely mid-week. I haven't participated in any contest before, so I can't say anything about judging.

 

[SSX]

Sometime on a June Weekend maybe.
20th-22nd maybe?

 

[Crash]

Oh, I suppose I should mention that I'll be busy the June 28th weekend, so I'd personally prefer before or after then.

 

[TMP]

I wanna try to enter this! Yaaaayyy we got one coming up soon!

I'm good weekdays definitely, could do weekends, don't want to do mondays for sure though.

 

[seth]

I'd like to participate but school doesn't let out for me until mid June and I'm tied up the rest of June afterwards. Post-June is the only time I could make it.

 

[Grizzly Berry]

Will there be any exceptions to the schedule? I know for the Winter 72hr, you let a few people start earlier. Weekends are the busiest time for me job-wise, so I know I can't get off. But I always have Mondays and Tuesdays off. If it's done on a weekend, is there anyway I could start maybe Sunday evening?

 

[Fruity Snacks]

Yes, I'll be able to do early launches, if I am given enough heads up.

 

[LeSwordfish]

Personally i like the sound of the first weekend of July. I like the sound of it because I am literally unable to do any other weekend for a month or so in either direction.

 

[Egan]

I'd be free whenever unless I get a job, but of course that doesn't look good anyway so it should be fine. Looking at the stats from previous 72 hours:

72 hour summer 2012 (35 entries):
prelim - 22 votes
final - 20 votes
72 hour summer 2013 (22 entries):
prelim - 15 votes
final - 10 votes
72 hour winter 2014 (30 entries):
final - 24 votes

I wonder if the ease of access was enticing to people voting last winter, it's what I'd prefer anyway so my vote's on just finals, no prelims.

 

[Crash]

Feel like we had more publicity with the last contest though, so I'm not sure if that affected the amount of votes we got.

 

[Pocket]

I will say (and this will be a big hint to the next contest for some) that IF this 72hr contest is used as a springboard for the next Big contest, the theme will be related to that and I know that has a lot of fun things (Since it's a personal expertise and favorite movie genre of mine).

You're doing a poor job of hiding that this is going to be a moonbase contest, Mr. Astronomy Student.

early launches

OK now I know you're dropping hints on purpose.

 

[zpqrei]

As long as it's a Friday through Sunday contest, I'm in. Will need to book that Friday off work though

 

[Fruity Snacks]

Feel like we had more publicity with the last contest though, so I'm not sure if that affected the amount of votes we got.

We did, and I did push that one a bit more than the others. I plan to do the same this time around, as before.

You're doing a poor job of hiding that this is going to be a moonbase contest, Mr. Astronomy Student.

Mr. Planetary Scientist and Astrobiologist, please.

 

[puxorb]

I have been done with classes for about a week now. I am pretty much free all summer, so any time would work, really.

 

[nightwatch]

I had a bit of an idea for how to get more people involved (in the mapping aspect anyway, if not the playing and judging):

Choose a period of 10 days, say like this:

Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

"Advertise" the contest as taking place that entire period, and change the way the rules work. You can map for any straight 72 hour period, at the earliest on the first Friday. Then we'll get mappers working in a staggered timeline, so there will always be something to watch (the various streams) or play. If Geit is available and feeling particularly generous he could fix up a nice page with a link to all the maps currently in progress with a timer ticking down (or just the deadline for each particular mapper). If you really wanted to automate the process you could fix up another setup page a mapper could visit to start the countdown for themselves and submit their streaming url / map page / screenshots. That way there would be a bit more spread of exciting things going on so people could participate in more (I know personally that I always wanted to watch multiple people streaming at once and also work on my map but there was no time! ).

The downside to this idea is that it requires a ton of effort and stretches the amount of time needed for someone to administrate over the whole thing. That's part of the beauty of keeping it in one weekend, because it wraps up nicely and doesn't get in the way of real life. An automated process to take care of a lot of the problems would help a lot but I don't know if we really have any available web developers at the moment and to be frank we would only get to use it twice a year. It may be too late to get something like that off the ground anyhow.

tl;dr: let people map any time between two weekends.