Role Play Idol Suggestions!

For anyone following the competition here, I would like to ask that you post any ideas, comments, concerns regarding the competition in general.

Anything you feel would help it run smoother, and with the mechanics, I'd like the hear some feedback on it. You may now suggest themes for the challenges as well. ​

 

Well, competing was fun, and I noticed very few flaws.

However, this is probably a dream of mine that won't occur, but an extending of the time for challenges? Perhaps just a single day longer than what it is now, or at least partially on the weekend. The schedule would occasionally be, in my case, on days I'm at school, for the entire time period. Admittedly, my school schedule is somewhat unorthodox, but perhaps fitting or changing the schedule a tad would be useful, for myself and perhaps others.

Also, is there a community ad in the works, in order to perhaps persuade more non-competitors to vote and follow?

 

I noticed that the majority of drop outs was due to not being able to post on time, so I will consider that. The hope was that Season 2 would have started September 8th, but because it's so...Dependant on people's schedules, I was thinking about erasing the hope that it'd be a dedicated monthly thing, and maybe make it a whenever-the-last-one-ends-a-new-one-starts thing. If that was the case, then I would extend the deadlines when needed, to give more people a chance to post.

As for the community ad, yes. It is in production now, actually. I've been kind of busy with some things, but now is the perfect time to start it, with season two coming up. :]

Edit: The ad is for the RP Arena in general, though. It's hard to make a an RP Idol ad. I'm thinking about maybe creating an RP Idol sticky that's always there, besides this one. I'll keep track of the winners and link to the current seasons in that thread. If that's the case, I'll make an RP idol ad as well and link to that page so people can join and see the progress of current season, etc. ​

 

Well darn. Nothing on challenges? Bummer. Just wanted to say I would have liked something more unrealistic but eh. Your shots. This was fun and can't wait to do it again. I didn't really have trouble getting stuff up but then again I mostly don't have plans and stuff. Maybe finding a way to get people not in the competition to vote or something? Think it'd make it a bit more fun and maybe people wouldn't find something to loathe the other members about. Y'know, since this is friendly competition.

 

That's fine, just no scenarios. I would prefer it to remain a mystery, so in the future challenges, the lack of redundancy is less expected? Season one was pretty lax, imo. There's more in store, of course. xD I think I understand what you mean by unrealistic, but I did try to incorporate unrealistic things into this season. Well, the only challenge that was pure real-life was the romance one, so it might help to elaborate. How far unrealistic do you mean? We did demons and dragons and powers, etc in season, so what kind of...unrealistic do you mean? c:

Also, well...The problem is that I can't...force people to vote and follow the competition. But the hope is that the community ad will at least attract some attention, as well as a scoreboard sticky I plan on making when this season is through. Also, the contestants can invite friends to watch the competition so long as it isn't VOTE FOR ME HUURRR. But yeah, definitely trying to find a way to increase that.​

 

Maybe we could have a (stickied?) thread in the spam zone to further advertise the voting, have someone link to the challenge/voting thread every time they're created? The Spam Zone's where most of the members seem to be anyways, so we might get some more awareness that way.

 

I don't really feel comfortable throwing RP stuff in the Spam Zone. xD But the main RP section gets more traffic than the Discussion Section, so I could post something there. :] I was planning on making an RP Idol scoreboard type thing so we could put it there in the main section.​

 

Two suggestions at present:

1. Abolish the no-editing-post-posting rule. The intention of not allowing contestants to alter their entries based on what their opponents see isn't bad in itself, but the execution is flawed, as it gives an unfair advantage to those who post second, as they get to view the other contestants' posts before they send theirs in, and thus use that knowledge to their advantage when writing their own. Instead, I suggest that you either replace it with a 'No editing after the deadline' rule, so as to allow the early posters the same advantage as the later ones, or you change submissions so they are done via PM instead of posting in a thread, and later get posted by you, so that no one is able to view the others' posts before the deadline.

2. Get an RP Idol section. If it's gonna be a constant thing, and there are gonna be individual threads for signups, suggestions, each challenge and voting for each challenge, you may as well give it its own section. It'd also make it easier for members to look through past contests.

 

1. I agree with this that we should be able to edit after we've posted up until the deadline or in the ones where we're interacting with eachother, up until the other person posts. As this does give an advantage to the lattr posters. It would also mean that if we broke a rule by accident but realise as soon as we post, eg. Britishism's recent post, then we can quickly edit the rule breaking part out. However the pm idea would not work as in the challenges where we have to interact with eachother, that's a bit difficult if we can't see eachothers posts.

2. I strongly agree with this. It will make things a lot easier and also it means the discussion area won't get clogged up with the millions of rp idol threads, making it easier for people to discuss rping like it was meant for.

 

@P:

#1. PM would not work. Too much hassle. For the first suggestion, the rule is in place for that reason. But it's also there for later challenges that work differently. It -is- a competition, but we had no problem with the rule in Season One. It's a matter or earnesty. The judges diccuss it when a member obviously mimics what someone earlier did. If you look at the fist Season, I acknowledged who did what first and who copied who. You get marked down for it, so it's a matter of scoring as well. The same policy goes with Britishism. He made a mistake but instead of breaking the rule, he called himself out on it and was honest.

So it's there so: people who post first can't change their minds.
see who in the later posts actually copies someone else.
See who's honest with their mistakes and who edits anyway./ who can follow the rules as they are. (I can tell.)
Trust value. It's a competition but it's still RP-based. You all should be able to trust each other, and the judges. More goes into voting than content. The final challenge is different, though. Those will be PM based from now on.

I'll still consider it, but sometimes those last three factors matter.

#2. I asked for one as soon as Season One started. You know how things can be. :P But alas. It will be implemented along with the post counting mod/other things, you know.

 

The word count challenge was fun, but it'd probably be a good idea to pick an 'official' wordcounter, so everyone's on the same page. Some counters count slightly differently, and it can interfere. For example, although all my posts in the recent challenge (Season #2 Challenge #3) were within the limits of this counter, they were over the limit in others.

 

Good idea. In the future where word count matters, I'll provide one for everyone to use. As for this challenge, I'll tell the judges to keep that in mind as they debate.​

 

Like I said a few months ago, I think that to more accurately judge people on their Role-playing, there should be more challenges that involve extended contestant-to-contestant interactions.

 

If I remember, the responses you got to this before were;​

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Also...​

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I prefer to speak privately about challenges rather than in-thread, but I understand this one and it's not very specific, so it's fine. As you and others should be able to see, I welcome suggestions for specific challenges and put them into the competition. Not all of them are mine.

The reason for interactive & non-interactive challenges has been stated. I think interactive challenges are fun and necessary, and help with the competition, but I also think non-interactive challenges are necessary as well to hone into a persons individual skills and weaknesses. You're right to wonder why there are so many non-interactive writing prompts in a role play competition, but the reason for that is because a role play is a bunch of individuals coming together to form and/or contribute to one storyline/world, or a specific set of scenarios, etcetc. In order to come together successfully, you still have to pay attention to the individuals themselves.

The prompts are usually to strengthen that individual part of it, so that when you leave the competition and go off into your own role plays, or join other's, you strengthen that personal part of you that you're specifically contributing to the role play itself.

Also, as stated by Bushy, I don't mind interaction ones. They just typically take much, much longer to do, and judge on time. I have my doubts. If a season with a few interactive challenges take three months for everyone behind-the-scenes to consistently judge/post/respond to each other/etc, (first season took two months) then ones with larger amounts of extended interactions is going to take like a year, lol.
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I'm jumping on the interaction train to give my uninvited opinion.

Why not create a post for the contestants to respond to? So there's a scenario described, and a single post done from that scenario. The contestants then have to respond to said post.

 

I see what you mean.
I'll give it a go, at least for some challenges in Season Three. It's not a bad idea. I'll also try to divide the different types of challenges more equally.​

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Just as an offhand suggestion, may I recommend not taking longer to judge a challenge than the contestants do to complete it?

 

That's more of the judge's fault. They're supposed to pretty much do that but people are sometimes hard to reach, are busy, or just forget.

 

I'm not sure why you're bringing this up when we've spoken about it already and discussed some possible remedies for next season.

I'll just say that this is probably not going to happen and that the suggestion is impossible to fulfill in it's entirety.

When you're dealing with multiple other people with lives and stressors and unpredictability on a kid's site who aren't getting paid or compensated greatly in any way for helping, you're not going to be able to guarantee that the ones who signed up for the job will actually follow through.

Throughout this season, one judge semi rage-quit, then was replaced, then the other three judges vanished off and on and stumbled through their judging. Until finally we got to the season finale and two of the judges continuously said they would post until one dropped out in full (after promising to post) and the other one just never showed up again after promising twice. Then one of the back-up judges said he would step in and post. But obviously did not do that.

So then instead of, you know, waiting any longer I just wrote up my two-cents and am now waiting once again for the final thoughts on who should win the entire competition. And we're still waiting for someone unrelated to the entire thing competition to finalize the pin stuff despite saying they would months ago.

But there's nothing much to be done at this point. Humans are fickle. People are people. That's like expecting all of the contestants to post on time with more complicated challenges. No, I naturally make those deadlines longer. Midnight and you needed an extension, it was granted...more than once. Compromise is inevitable in this competition, considering it's much more hands on and interactive than any of the other's--excluding KHV Chorus which I enjoy running completely alone to avoid having to deal with people and the same issues.
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Jeeze, I'm longwinded.

'Kay, so I updated this to say that I will be taking and using suggestions for themes and challenges for the next seasons. At least for now. <:​

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