SASO 2016: Talkback

[referees]

This post is closed; thank you for your feedback. If you would like to provide constructive criticism, please contact the mods directly. All further replies to this entry are screened.

The mods still plan to reply to the topics listed at the bottom of the post.

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This is not the final wrap-up results/etc. post—that's coming in a couple of days. But while the mods tabulate final scores and create prize graphics, now's a good time to look back and reflect on your SASO 2016 experience.

Please leave comments giving us feedback on the event this year! What did you like? What did you dislike or find frustrating? What can we improve for next year, and how can we improve it? What was your favorite part of the event? Least favorite? Would you participate next year or not? Why? If you could mention your team when making your comment, we'd appreciate it.

If you would prefer to submit your comments in private, you can e-mail us at anime.espn@gmail.com or send us a Dreamwidth PM. We would prefer it if you'd put "Talkback" in the subject line.

Here's what the mod team plans to improve for next year:

• Voting program reliability. We'd like to apologize again for all of the server dowtnime, and definitely plan to make it much more stable for next year. The voting system in general, though, will remain the same.


• Bonus round program reliability. We think we got most of the kinks out during this year, but want to keep it stable for next year too.


• Dreamwidth capability for NSFW cross-posting. We didn't have time to implement it this year, but next year it should be ready to go.


• Clarifying the rules, especially on what "popular culture media" is acceptable to include in SASO work.

We also wanted to thank you again for being patient with us this year. We had a lot of technical hiccups, and you were all so kind while our heroic codermods worked out the kinks. We really appreciated your support.

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Mod Replies: (updated 12:55PM EDT 8/28/16)

Please note that inclusion of a topic on this list indicates that we're going to address it, not that we've made any decisions on judging/implementing or not implementing it.

Voting:

The preliminary vote system

Triggers in a participant's assigned vote pool

Juried panel (having the mods decide which entries were the best)

Voting mechanics

Bonus Rounds:

Promptless rounds

One day break between bonus rounds

Bonus round prompt and fill tracking/filtering

Recs round work count

Image size limit

Remix round

Remix/rec round timing

Rec round

Quality control (both prompts and fills)

What is allowed as a fill (tags and ratings)

Unscreening bonus rounds

Fairness to small teams

Comment screening

Main Rounds:

The anonymity policy

Professionalism:

Twitter tone

What information gets posted where

Considering a dreamwidth announcement community

Mod participation in the event

Comments

(frozen comment) Team Miyuki Kazuya/Miyuki Kazuya's Captain, Checking In!

[catlarks]

First and foremost: Thank you so much to all of the mods for running this event for everyone!

I know that so much time and effort and sheer hard work goes into moderating an event of this scope and I really don't think the mods are thanked nearly enough for taking time out of their lives to orchestrate things. You guys work so hard for us and I for one am incredibly grateful.

As somone who's participated in the precursor event since 2013 the thing I appreciated most this year is EDITING PERIOD AFTER MAIN ROUND ENTRIES ARE DUE. Having that extra time to finalize art and polish up prose was so, so helpful to my team, even just compared to last year. I'm incredibly proud of what my team produced in main rounds and we owe a lot to the editing period.

I'm one of the people who absolutely loathed NSFW posting to AO3 so like, I know this is being addressed, but I am super grateful for a dreamwidth option next year. It really sucked that for risque cosplay fills I could shove those wherever and throw up a link, but writing was held to a different, "higher" (harder) standard. Being able to post to DW instead of AO3 matters a lot to me.

The thing I appreciated the LEAST this year was (no surprise) some of the ways information was communicated to the users. SASO has a twitter and a tumblr for announcements, which can be a good system: twitter for fast updates that will quickly become irrelevant, tumblr for more lasting announcements in a place where they'll be easy to find and refer back to. I feel that this year there were quite a few updates ONLY made to twitter which should also have been posted to tumblr.

Personally, I would prefer a DW announcements community, much like a lot of AO3 gift exchanges use DW for announcements and tumblr only for advertising, or with crossposts. DW allows users to subscribe to a community's updates; for users who want email announcements, a DW comm would allow that without the mods having to maintain an email list.

Considering this was my fourth year participating in an event with this style, I absolutely will be back next year. That said... I feel like this year was competitive above and beyond the level of any previous event. Some of that was a lot of fun! But I also really want to make a blanket "Remember, you win nothing!!" statement to everyone who began taking the competition a little too seriously. SASO/HSWC has always been fandom "Who's Line" — everything's made up and the points don't matter. The points are there to motivate you to create the best stuff you can. Beyond that, everything is just icing.

And this is very personal and subjective, but I feel there should be a hard cap on recs round fills. I know this is a little hypocritical, because my team was one of those using recs round as an opportunity to "make up" points from not creating as many fills in other bonus rounds as we would like. But I feel that even while writing an ungodly number of recs, I still worked hard to make sure every, single, one, was something the original creator would be happy to read, whereas some recs I saw from other teams took "two sentences" to mean "three words is totally a sentence let's grind out recs as fast as possible for points!!"

One of my teammates received one of those recs that was all emotes and no substance and confided to me that it felt more like an insult than a compliment. I don't intend to ever "go hard" on recs round again but I know that won't stop people in the future, so I beg of you: hard cap on recs. In my opinion, this will still motivate people to make recs, because we'll do a lot for (Jihye voice) ten points, but will decrease the likelihood of people making empty recs just for the points.

Anyway, I believe these are the majority of my thoughts on this year's SASO! I genuinely believe that despite how many hiccups there were, they were largely things that can be accounted for next year and which returning users won't have to worry about. I look forward to seeing everyone in summer 2017~

(frozen comment)

[platina]

Why is it not possible for us to actually vote for something we like in the prelims? I get the equal exposure for everything yadda yadda thing, but I sometimes end up with mainly stuff I don't really care for at all. I feel like you should have at least one option to actually vote for something you want really like and isn't on the list.

I just.. honestly don't see the point of voting if I cannot vote for what I really want to vote for or have to vote for something can't properly judge anyway if I'm not familiar with the canon. I think it's also a measure that can actually backfire for some teams, especially overall less popular teams that, however, do have a fixed support base who cannot help them out because their supporters can't vote for them.

Voting is biased as is anyway (be it because it's simply the fandom you prefer, oh look girls!, or other reasons), why make it even more complicated.

also, fuck remixes.

My favourite part of SASO is being forced to create, especially the main rounds. That's what I signed up for. I'd never make a VN or video in a month, as short as it is, without the deadline pressure of the event. I love that. It's fun just for the sake of creating, because I never expected much from the votes anyway.

During bonus rounds, however, I do struggle with the quantity>quality approach. I made some really shitty fills I'm not too proud of just so my team could scratch the 20 fill mark (which are a lot, even among 8 people when RL and MR are a thing as well) only to realize we are way behind other teams and their 50ish fills. It was kind of discouraging, haha.

(frozen comment)

[adamantine]

(team matsuoka rin/nanase haruka)

Yeah, so my big issues with preliminary voting is getting entries with triggers I'm not touching. I think we should be allowed to request not getting entries with certain tags beforehand for our ten random entries, please ;___;

ETA: Half of my fun with bonus rounds was making prompts since I like ships that aren't popular. Once we didn't have prompts anymore I kind of lost interest in everything everyone else was doing for the bonus rounds and was only focused on myself, kind of making it a lonely round (and I loved the theme of the round!). So yeah, not a fan of promptless rounds.

I also understand the idea of not letting us remix teammates work but. I'd rather not do a remix round at all then and instead do something else.

(frozen comment) Team Grandstand

[tempestuously]

I wanted to address some issues about grandstand and MR2 participation. I have read several of the mods' Tumblr rundowns on waning participation in MR2. As a Grandstand participant, I can safely say that I lost a lot of motivation for following this contest once it was clear that Grandstand no longer had a role in the Bonus Rounds. From the Fantasy Bonus Round on, Grandstand had nothing to do but vote. Which made it very hard to stay interested long enough to vote. I believe that allowing Grandstand to participate through providing prompts throughout the contest would help with this matter. It was so disheartening to not be able to contribute to the contest for pretty much a month and then be expected to care enough to review/vote on the contestants. I get that remixes and recs and the like can be fun, but I would like to see more Grandstand-friendly options for the second half of the contest in future runs.

On this note, as someone who reviewed every single entry in every round to ensure fair voting, it was deeply frustrating to rarely be able to vote for the 3 teams I most enjoyed. I get what you're trying to do in giving everyone a fair shake, but I want to be able to give support the teams that I most enjoyed. I understand the concern is people voting for their favorites and not being impartial, but that's going to happen regardless of what measures you take to mitigate it. Either you hold participants to their integrity or recognize that a game like this will always face a highly "popular" slant. The current system doesn't quite reflect the true spirit of voting.

(frozen comment) Team Kuroo Tetsurou/Tsukishima Kei

[prillalar]

Mods, thank you SO much for all your hard work in running such a great event! I had a really fantastic time, met a bunch of awesome people, and will definitely participate again.

My main frustration was I wanted to read and comment more in the bonus rounds but it was hard to find fills to read without going through all the prompts pages again and again. It would be great to have a fills post for each BR, like a kinkmeme, where people could optionally post their fills for more exposure.

(frozen comment)

[starrwinter]

I just wanted to start off with sending nothing but love to all of the refs, coders, organizers and MVPs behind the seams of SASO for your tireless work (and wrangling those damn voting form monsters for all of us!)

Now my points are going to be on the voting system, but adding in a couple of possible suggestions if we are keeping the same prelim voting system for next year.

I was upset and very choked for the voting rounds when I saw the voting choices (and always secretly scared the three I really wanted to get to the top 15 wouldn't make it through). They did in both rounds, but my stomach rolled over the possibly a team might lose a spot by the one vote I couldn't provide with the 10 screened choices.

So as s possible add-in, I was wondering if either a 'fan favorite' or 'team grandstand mvp' type choice could be added in? One extra vote for the top team out of ALL voting options (minus your own team of course) that you would vote for over all others. It would have to be different than your top 3 choices of the given 10 votes. And possibly after the top 15 have been determined by overall votes, then the 'fan favorite' can be a #16 or for special bonus round points.

Was also thinking maybe this same type of 'Bonus Round MVP' for a top choice in bonus round contributors for extra points at the end of each round that everyone could vote on.

But overall I had SO MUCH FUN this summer participating, and will be back next year for more fun (and smut!) ❤️

(frozen comment) Team Grandstand

[mother_herbivore]

this was my first SASO, and i loved it! the mods did an amazing job running everything despite the technical difficulties, and they responded to all my questions in a timely manner. above all, they were approachable, which is really important to me, personally; in other events i've participated in, sometimes the mods have seemed a little intimidating and i hesitated to talk to them, but i didn't have that problem with SASO mods! i truly appreciate their hard work c:

the myth & lore bonus round was a bit rough; i think that the theme was good, but the "no prompts" thing made it really difficult. without prompts to fill, i was just tossing stuff out there with no reaction, which was discouraging. i really like the giving/receiving aspect of the other bonus rounds

i liked the voting system; i've always felt that it's unfair how fandom ignores rarepair content but totally loses it over (sometimes mediocre or even bad) content of popular pairings, and, considering how small some of the fandoms in this event are, i think that the randomized voting system was a good choice. i wasn't familiar with several of the fandoms in the main rounds, and wasn't interested in many of the pairings, but the voting list motivated me to look at the entries and the workmanship in them. it lowers the chances of people just going "THIS ONE IS MY OTP, THIS IS WHAT I SHALL VOTE FOR" and kind of forces them to judge the content. and honestly, if someone wants to let a team know they loved their entry, but didn't get them in their voting list, then they can leave a comment on the entry! i think the teams will remember a nice comment a lot more than a vote.

i also loved the mods on twitter. you all kept it fun, inclusive, and still informative.

i'll definitely be back next year! overall i really enjoyed participating, and i look forward to next year :3

(frozen comment)

[catlarks]

Chimes in to add, I think having two promptless rounds in a ROW was hard. I actually loved the theme of mythology and love remixes, but having them back to back was really rough and did feel really isolated for me, too.

(frozen comment)

[horchata]

Agreeing, here. Spacing those two out would have been great. One promptless BR for each MR cycle makes sense to me, too.

(frozen comment)

[referees]

We're sorry that you felt that written NSFW fills were held to a "higher" standard. It's just that AO3 has word counts built-in that we could scrape, that's all. Implementing a dreamwidth system will definitely add extra work for both the users as well as us, as advance warning, but we hope we can make it as accessible as possible.

We agree to some degree about announcements. We didn't use our tumblr as much as in previous years, which was a mistake. We definitely plan to utilize our tumblr more next year. With that said, we're not planning on a dreamwidth announcement community at this time. One reason is that it would just be too much work for the mod team to post to three places each time we had to make an announcement. The other is that we dug around a bit and found that tumblr has an RSS feed option -- you can find ours at http://sportsanimeolympics.tumblr.com/rss -- and you can utilize the RSS feed to send you e-mail updates, by using a website such as feedmyinbox or other sources which we will probably dig up and vet between this year and next year (we only figured this stuff out the other day, so sorry we can't be more specific!). We'll definitely try to make the participant base more aware of utilizing our RSS feed once we get it pinned down, so please look forward to it.

The level of competition has always been something we negotiate. Shipping olympics are literally the only fandom event in existence that has a competitive slant, as far as we know, and we think that's part of why people might get so caught up in it. But we do always try to encourage people to have fun over anything else, because that's the only real way to win SASO anyway. Do you have any ideas on how to put a "limiter" on competitiveness?

The mods have quietly been discussing recs for the same reasons you brought up in your comment. One option we've discussed is placing a word count (obviously one much smaller than the word count expected for normal rounds), because a sentence is perhaps too subjective a way to enforce a base minimum of quality, and it's also hard for our bonus round scoring program to work with. I don't know if a hard cap is the right answer either, but we definitely hear and agree with your concerns.

Thank you for your thoughtful feedback!

(frozen comment)

[yusukesjeans]

I agree with this as well. It coincided with me just being busy towards the end of the summer -- but not having prompts for inspiration/the feeling of Gifting Someone Something Nice That They Want really contributed to me losing steam at the end.

(frozen comment) Team Grandstand

[yusukesjeans]

Seconding the comment above mine! I think the randomized prelim votes 1) gave me some actual focus since there's no way I have time to read everyone's work as much as I want to 2) allowed me to evaluate more on worksmanship. There were many entries each round that I enjoyed a great deal despite not knowing the canon.

I think the remix round is a super fun idea but it is tough to keep up on everything to know what I'd want to remix and coming into that right off of another promptless round it was tough to build up my steam again. In the end I never did but I know a lot of that is on me and next year I'll know more about what to expect (no wonder you all love your spreadsheets and lists of prompts).

Thanks mods for all of your time and hard work!! This was a lot of fun, I pushed myself a lot creatively, and got to know a lot of cool people! Seeing all the main round works come together makes me really want to challenge myself to join a team next year.


Edit: I never really checked the tumblr so I can't speak to that but I do feel like the official Twitter got a little too meme-y sometimes? Knowing I could have fun with the mods was definitely fun but even knowing some of you guys it DID have times where it felt a little in-joke heavy.

(frozen comment)

[kazuyaloveseijun]

Someone already said this but I want to agree that a way to weed out tags in prelim voting would be nice; both rounds I had entries that I couldn't read because the tags were Nopes for me so letting people who are alright with the content judge them properly seems best.
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The anonymity rule seems silly to me. I understand why it's there but looking at art and reading words (if you're familiar with the writers) is really easy to tell who did what. Preventing popular participants from getting votes because they're popular is kind of defeated by people RTing to their followers anyway.
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A few bonus round suggestions:

Quality control. One fill I received was just a picture of the gift + tag in the gift tag round and it was disheartening to know that got the same amount of points as things that people obviously put a lot of work into. Many of the photo fills and poetry fills were low quality. For example, poetry fills that were just prose broken into lines, if you reformatted it they'd be 3-4 sentences of an unfinished fic, or read like an outline or fic summary. I feel like changing 14 lines of poetry = 400 words of prose might help that. Poetry fills should have to be longer, or prose fills shorter, I think.

Point gradient. This might help with quality control. I suggest that different types of fills receive different amounts of points. Example: rough sketch might be 5 points, 10 for lined and colored art. Same with word count. It would let people choose whether they want to make a bunch of small, low point fills or put a lot of time and effort into something that could be worth more points. I wanted to make things I could be proud of but seeing people put a lot of low effort fills put a lot of pressure to put out content for the same amount of points they were getting, it's frustrating.

Tags. I don't think people should be allowed to make fills with things like violence unless the prompter has tagged it as such, or the filler has asked permission. I got some disturbing fills for prompts that I was not expecting and it was distressing. So making permission a rule, or having prompters list a bunch of triggers would maybe help, although I also had someone ignore my request for no death and write a fill with both death and violence; honestly it made me not want to prompt anymore because I was scared of the fills I might get.

Ratings. I was confused a few times because there were fills rated M that were posted directly to dreamwidth (and my inbox) that weren't sexually explicit but were violently explicit. Hiding the sex but letting violence fly seems weird to me, so making a clear rule about whether or not that's allowed would be good (I don't think it should be allowed, obviously).

Remix and Recs. This is purely personal but remixing made me uncomfortable. I didn't want anyone to remix my work, I made it the way I did for a reason, and I felt uncomfortable remixing other people's work. And then the fact that it was all for points makes it feel insincere, if someone makes fanart/fic it's supposed to be fun and pure not just for points. Same with recs, it was a really cool chance for appreciation but tying it to points at all feels so wrong, a point-less rec rounds where people just have a chance to gush about their favs simply because they're their favs seems better. Instead of remixing fills I think it would be cool to allow people to go back and do fills for prompts they didn't get a chance to in the earlier rounds.

I know some people didn't like the prompt-less rounds but the promptless fantasy round was my favorite, that one was really fun to make content for.
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I don't feel like mods should be allowed to be on teams that are competing. It just seems like a recipe for bias to me, I was surprised when I found out it was allowed. It makes more sense that mods should be on grandstand.
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It's already been brought up but communication was an issue, it was unclear whether things should be coming from twitter or tumblr so having more consistency across platforms is important. Also maybe even 2 twitters...tbh I had the twitter account muted most of the time because I didn't want a bunch of jokes or memes, I just wanted relevant information and announcements and it mostly felt like inside jokes which was alienating.

(frozen comment)

[catzuya]

First, I'd like to say that even with all the hiccups that happened, I did have fun and I was able to collaborate with a group of amazing people. I wouldn't change that for the world.

Now for feedback. I was more than disappointed honestly. While it was a fast paced competitive event that created a fun environment full of memes and put out top notch entries that were amazing to look at, the lack of organization overshadowed that for me.

SASO, "sports anime summer olympics" is a competition based fandom event. And with that, I expected a higher standard of control for this type of event. I want to make it clear that I am in no way blaming the code mod for this, but there should have been more communication from the main moderators to the public. If mods knew that problems were happening and kept happening, please make a universal announcement for all participants to know about it.

Major kudos to code mod who had to work through all of this, i know it must of been tough for you.

However, in the spirit of making things nonbiased, the voting turned out to be the major downfall. With a system meant to be random, people who did go through all the entries prepared to vote for their choices, couldn't, if they had a bad pull. It became unfair in all its fairness. I'm more than positive that Teams most certainly lost votes because of this.

BR commenting.
Im guilty of not really participating in the comment rounds because (this is personal opinion) but i am on my phone 90 percent of the time and it is not very mobile friendly. Not only that, but there is no way to filter through all the entries. A "top-level comment' can only do so much, but when you're shifting through 23 pages and over 1000 comments? I'm sorry.

With all of that, I have a few suggestions.
-Change the voting system to a Juried Panel.
There seems to be enough mods to do this.
Final rounds can be a combination of Mod Votes and Fan Votes. (i have a handy dandy google doc with further information bc I'm Just Like That if anyone is interested in looking) But honestly, the voting system needs to be changed and I hope that the mods consider this. It wasn't downtime that turned people off, it was the system.

-Cap the Bonus Rounds
others have commented on how to improve but, for me personally, quantity does not not mean quality.

-Make DW comms for each bonus round for easier tagging.
(individual posts means people can use tag and fill easier)
Creating a community will allow participants to add their own tags based on ship, bait, tw/cw , filled/unfilled and anything else. Fills can be commented directly into the post and it wont clutter up pages and pages of comments.

Personally for me, things need a major overhaul. But as it stands, I probably won't participate unless its grandstand to give prompts for my friends to fill.

(frozen comment)

[catlarks]

I do understand why it was implemented that way, no worries. And fwiw when I say "higher" I am mostly referring to the meta data AO3 requires in posting fics. Posting to AO3 involves a whole lot of fields that just take more TIME and THOUGHT than linking a NSFW piece of art or cosplay. (I take for granted that DW posting will likely require a specific format from users, but my fingers are crossed that it'll be very plug-and-play, do these exact things and you're set, versus AO3's subjectivity.)

At the last time I'd heard, tumblr had no RSS feed option, which is 90% of why I'd prefer another option for announcements. It is still very much my opinion that if the mods were to choose between DW and tumblr for announcements, DW is the superior option, but if the mods do the research and teach the userbase how to set up RSS email updates, I will say that this does meet my needs.

(the "competition" part of my post was honestly more in the hopes that the rest of the userbase will read it, imo the mods only can and should do so much to moderate the participants' competitive drives; this is something we gotta handle ourselves.)

I think a word count would also be a fair solution to the recs problem of "two sentences is way too flexible (and difficult to judge with a program)." I suggest hard caps because it's really, really easy to enforce, but if codermods are up to writing something that works with word count... That would go a long way toward ruling out fluffy, substance-less recs.

(tbh it's just not what I would have suggested because what's "most fair" is if only the rec blurbs themselves are counted for words, because there's a huge difference in words between "tags: none" and "tags: [a thirty word list with qualifiers]" and I assume this would be An Enormous Pain to code for. So... Good luck, sweet coder mod.)

(frozen comment)

[catlarks]

FWIW, I would also love a post on the main comm for cross-posting bonus round fills. IMO it shouldn't be difficult to maintain, because it's entirely optional, doesn't need to be carded through in any way for points/scoring, and could be used across every single bonus round. And it WOULD make it so easy to just see content and not unfilled prompts: top level comments is your best friend here.

(also, encouraging people to use kink-meme-esque subject lines since it's not for points! It would be sooooo much easier to find ships and themes you like that way.)

(frozen comment)

[catzuya]

Im seconding the bit about the anonymity rule too. Everyone has their team in their twitter handle or in fill prompts. It doesn't take much to figure out who might be doing what. Especially in art styles.

(frozen comment)

[catlarks]

Mostly these are suggestions for the mods to evaluate so it doesn't matter if I disagree with them, but FWIW bonus rounds HAVE been capped in the past, and I vehemently disagree with the thought that the most creative and productive part of SASO should be limited.

IMO the event is a two-sided coin, geared towards getting its members to improve as creators. Main rounds involve specific limits and challenge you to work within those restrictions to create something as polished (and "quality") as possible. Whereas bonus rounds subscribe to the belief of turning off your inner editor and just CREATING, as much as possible, to get better. Quantity is literally the goal. Capping the bonus rounds does members a disservice.

(frozen comment)

[bluedreaming]

This was my first time participating in SASO and disclaimer! (I ended up not being able to participate as much as I would have liked due to unexpected issues) but in reading the comments above, while I feel that I can't necessarily provide a constructive opinion on some raised concerns, I wanted to note that I really enjoyed the remix bonus round (and lest it be seen as a points issue, I really did take it seriously and made podfics of fills I strongly enjoyed/connected with; I didn't see it as a "quick points" thing at all.)

Regarding announcements, I did find the Twitter a little confusing to follow in terms of tracking important announcements amidst other Twitter content. I do think that the fun community aspect of the Twitter also had a very important place! It was just a little difficult at times to quickly check for announcements. . As the mod reply to the first comment quite reasonably explains, it would be a lot for mods to update three or four places each time there is a quick yet important announcement, but as services such as feedmyinbox were mentioned, I wanted to highlight a service like ifttt.com that could be used to consolidate announcement posting for the mods: if all announcements are posted to tumblr with the tag "announcement", a recipe can be set on ifttt.com so that all tumblr posts tagged announcement are tweeted (with or without a link to the relevant tumblr post for more information), which might simplify things for mods and also allow participants to assemble an easy personal email notification system by using their own ifttt.com accounts to have ifttt.com email them whenever a tumblr post tagged announcement is posted. In any case, it's of course completely up to the mods and what works best for them, but there are definitely a lot of options that might make things a little easier for mods and participants alike.

In summary though, it really was a lot of fun and I want to thank the mods for all their hard work. Thank you!

(frozen comment)

[platina]

+1 on having trouble with the twitter account being more weird inside jokes than actual event related information. i don't care about your weird egg fetishes.

if you are not part of that circle, it makes you feel really out if place.

(frozen comment) Re: Team Kuroo Tetsurou/Tsukishima Kei

[platina]

+1 for optional kink meme style fill list

(frozen comment)

[catzuya]

I'm not asking for creativity to be capped? I can't go through pages and pages of prompts and fills to see if something catches my eye, to fill one out and then it gets lost in the comments. If the mods don't have a tagging system to find or fill comments, things get lost.

Creative caps are different than quantity caps imo, especially if things are going to be based on points. If this wasn't a point based competition, I wouldn't mind. But since it is, there should be something in place to gauge or handle how points are dealt out.

If someone can push out a well thought out 1k fic/full illustration and get the same amount of points for a 400 word fic(since its word count based)/rough sketch, that isn't fair. It discourages from creating quality content to give to someone who will enjoy it and not get short changed.

If bonus rounds are to just create ANY and ALL type of content, then why have a point system for it and not just a "x members made y amount of fills so this many number of points to team y" that way quality and quantity aren't relevant. Just the number of fills they did. im sure there's a better way to articulate this, which is why i didn't elaborate more on the comments and fills because it's a hard thing to judge on what is and isn't worth full points.

(frozen comment) Pax from KuroKen

[hapaxlegomenon]

I will probably come back and edit this a few times, and I'm not going to bother with making it all pretty or anything. Point form and such. Anyone (mods or otherwise) feel free to ask for elaboration on anything I mention.

These things are presented in no particular order because I'm tired and lazy.

1. Prelim voting: Option to opt out of a set number (3? idk) of tags or ships. I consistently get assigned to at least one of the two major sports ships that I "notp" and I have a very difficult time being objective with them. Conversely, I have been hosed in previous years by people who wouldn't read my team's entry because of a tag and then told me after the event that they'd given it a try and really liked it. So an opt-out would be helpful from at least two points.

2. Prompt-less rounds: It was hard to get going with them but they were fun! Seconding the suggestions above, though, that they not be back-to-back. Personally, I'd have loved to have the fantasy/lore round earlier in the event, when I'm less burnt out and have more energy to focus on the world-building part. Remixes are really fun, despite being a lot of extra pressure, and I'm glad the round exists. I think I get more excited about having my own fills remixed than I am to get original work in response to a prompt.

3. BR themes: I liked them!! Overall very pleased. I wasn't a huge fan of the Gift Tag one (it felt super limiting), and I was really relieved that there wasn't a FST round this year. I would love to see a "missing scenes" BR in future years :')

4. MR formats: Not a mod issue, really, but I'm going to complain about it anyway. A lot of the entries were very much not mobile-friendly, which was frustrating. And I absolutely hate it when MR submissions are downloads. Compounded by the fact that I dislike the whole "visual novel" format in general, but when an entry had a download attached I was immediately turned off. Stop that shit. Not all of us have devices that can handle/store downloaded content.

5. This for other participants, not the mod team, but it's important to say -- stop being assholes to the mod team. Events like this can be super frustrating, especially with the technical difficulties, but acting aggressive towards the people who volunteer to put it together just kind of makes you a jerk.

6. Announcements: I personally had no issues with announcements but I also checked the SASO twitter account fairly regularly.

7. MR limitations: Great improvement from last years' feedback! The graduation between word count/image number ratios was awesome. I'm super glad you guys made that change. And it hasn't come up here (yet), but I know some people have mentioned wanting higher caps; I disagree, I think that the 4k word cap et al. are reasonable restrictions and make the judging process so much more manageable. Also, glory and blessings to the editing period, I can't say enough how much I appreciated that, especially as a team captain.

8. Recs round: Not personally a huge fan of having it be for points, but I understand that it's a good way to encourage people to actually do it. I'm on the fence about that one. But I'm also biased bc I kind of hate doing them, so.

9. Receiving fills: I do not agree with the idea that fills should be restricted in any way. I have received fills that didn't align at all with the prompt, or fills where the filler straight-up ignored the pairing I requested (one instance was particularly disappointing, since they changed one of my fave feel-good ships to a lowkey notp of mine), or fills that I was uncomfortable with or just straight-up disliked -- and the people who wrote them had every right to do so. I don't believe that, in an event like this, the purpose of a fill is to write something that a prompter will love. It's to challenge the filler to produce something, and the prompters more or less just provide an inspiration or a vector to do so. Nobody is obligated to make a fill you want just because you provided the prompt. I found it seriously off-putting when people added all kinds of restrictions to their prompts.

10. Mod Sunny's alphabet-fudging is terrible. Fire them immediately.

11. Despite the issues with voting, I am a big fan of the changes compared to last year -- I was really off-put by the fact that, after voting, you could see the results and re-vote. It seemed to be begging for people to fudge the votes in favour of-against certain teams. I also appreciate not having the points tallied up immediately for BRs -- while it was a feature I used heavily (and maybe obsessed over a little) last year, it was a relief this time around that the numbers weren't so easily accessible and I could just focus on having fun, rather than forcing myself because x team was only y number of fills ahead. I know you've gotten a lot of flack for points and votes systems this year, and they're obviously not perfect yet, but it's definitely an improvement over last year and I think you guys are doing great.

(frozen comment)

[catlarks]

I think we're using "creativity" differently. It sounds like you mean "imagination" while I mean "creation" as in "production." So what you're saying is a cap on creation, that's what a cap on quantity means. I don't think there should be a quantity limit.

We're going to fundamentally disagree because as soon as you say "what's worth points" you lose me. Not everyone has the same skill level, and I really love that SASO is an event that makes itself accessible to people who might be new to writing fic or drawing fanart, as well as to "seasoned veterans." I find the idea of arbitrating quality and telling some people they "just weren't good enough" to be given points when what looks phoned in to you might genuinely be the best they can do to be elitist and really disheartening.

IMO the points exist as motivation, and not a lot more. You get literally nothing for winning the event. To place more value on the points than accessibility and fun with the event is, imo, a mistake.

(frozen comment) grandstand!

[elucidatedlucy]

Thank you for this year! I am really glad to have had the chance to participate.

I wanted to say in particular that I'm deeply glad we continued with a 2 week cycle on bonus rounds! There were two where I felt anxious and unsure about how to approach the prompts I wanted to write for, but being able to move onto another round and settle into something new recharged my feelings about creating, and allowed me to jump in when I struggled in other times. I wanted to voice the fact of how helpful the 2 week cycle is for me! I enjoyed all the rounds provided this year, and the mixture of previously used rounds versus new ones - the gift tags one in particular was Very Cool, for what it allowed people to do.

The introduction of an entirely promptless round was, in particular, very cool to me. While remixes are technically "promptless," approaching other people's creations still feels like a strong prompt to me (another event I always look forward to). The myth round was one I hadn't expected, and while I was a bit sad I couldn't make prompts, it was easier to read other's works, as well as create myself. Having the option for a promptless round allows for approaching writing & relationships in a way that prompts otherwise would not allow for. There are many potential relationships and canons that are hard to find prompts for in SASO, due to rarepairs or rare fandoms - and it's hard to really engage yourself, when it's Rare - but having an option for a round where we could create regardless of what other people prompted, and indulge in our own concepts within the lines of the round, was a fantastic opportunity!!! I understand other people's struggles with it, but it was the easiest round for /me/, so I do feel it's good to give potentials like that from round to round.

I do agree though that Myth and Remix back to back was a bit trouble in terms of "no Active Prompts." But I feel like that could be fixed as easily as ordering the rounds differently in the future to make sure "no prompts!" aren't back to back, so people don't feel like they're trailing off the edges, depending on their personal specialities and comforts.

I do believe that the Recs round could have been benefitted (to a degree) with a cap on how many fills get points, but even that is a little difficult to say, because I think that was the case last year and I know that people will often only comment as much as they have to to get the points. But at the same time, I don't want people to have to push to think of something to say for hundreds of fills over more points. That's a difficult issue to balance, and I'll trust what the mods go with, because I understand neither option is necessarily great! The issues that come with events involving tons of people.

I'm grateful for the time extends on voting when there were issues with the system! But I'm also grateful for how voting works. Giving people good reason to explore any given work is a wonderful thing. I do agree that the issue of tags is a bit of a struggle, but I'm not sure how it could be approached without people gaming the system to blacklist out tags just to narrow down what might come up to what they specifically want to vote for. I was still happy with how voting worked though.

With regards to bonus rounds, all I would like to say is that I'd very much appreciate if it was more normalized for people to express any tags or content warnings that they do not want in any fill made on a prompt they make. I saw that a couple of times, but if the faqs or the post for each bonus round mentioned an optional line in the post about "content tags to avoid," or something like that, I'd feel much more confident about approaching people's prompts! I realize that I could approach that by simply asking the prompter, but anxiety and time sort of get in the way of that.

Though by any rights, I feel as though this year went quite well, and better than last year? Or I feel like people came to the table with their best, and people wanted to stay and participate, and that the mod team approached any issue and question to the best of their ability. I know things can always Improve, but I'm grateful to everyone behind this event, and everyone who chose to participate. I very much look forward to next year.