Well, I like to surprise people
I was actually told I could use my own system since I was judging the entries.
Surprises are one thing. This is certainly not the time or place for surprises, but whatever. The issue is that we were told to expect one way and then is was drastically changed with no warning. Most of us would have approached our cards entirely differently if we had known how completely different the weighting would be for these categories. By your own pie chart, you've clearly deflated Wording by 80% and inflated Believability/Playability by almost 200%.
I didn't dock points for using a standard blank. That's like the base, the "0". It can go up or down. You may make an original blank that is confusing and doesn't improve on standard blanks, for example, and you might get even less points than a standard blank. You may even use a low-quality standard blank, too, and it's not gonna grant you the 2 points. It doesn't have to do with the fact that it's standard or not but the quality of the blank. However, I do award points for all the effort that goes into making a new blank. Otherwise, if all the blanks were the same, Nyan's blank would be as valuable as a poorly taken picture of a computer screen displaying a standard blank. It's not a matter of having the tools either. It's a matter of how well you use them.
Docking or not getting enough points - whatever. It's the same result in the end: participants are not getting the points they should be getting just because they're using blanks made by Asche or whoever. None of these blanks look "low quality", whoever is defining that here. Awarding points for making a new blank is fine, but having a whole category just to tell people they really need to make a custom blank to get points is not. Aesthetics and Creativity covered this fine in the previous system.
I agree with you on that one. Flavor is a miscellaneous category under "Fun". It mostly deals with things that are left over from the rest of the analysis such as having the correct PokéDex info, having creative ability/attack names, flavor text (that's what "vanilla flavor" means btw), etc. It does have a subjective component of only 2/5 points and it's based on how the card "tasted" to me as a whole. It's the "je ne sais quoi", as French say it.
Again, these things should be mentioned in the comments under that category instead of just having what looks to an outsider as just a random score with a barely-related phrased ("Aircraft-themed!") as the only caption. The point of the judging is to help people improve their cards and you haven't given any advice for how the cards can be improved for a lot of categories.
Whoops! I can see how it can be confusing. To reach 100 points I just multiplied the base 50 by 2 to decide most of the ties.
I mean I gathered that. The point wasn't that I didn't understand it, the point was that it's inconsistent. The only reason I can think of for expanding the point total to 100 is to eliminate ties, but seeing as 5 of the 8 entries for this month's CaC share a score with another entry, that evidently hasn't worked or isn't the aim.
I partially agree. But since you were using elements of SM blanks for the stage, I think you should keep SM conventions for that particular part.
Omnium very clearly takes elements from all eras of the card game.
I could be more specific with my feedback, for sure! The reason I wasn't is because I didn't want to sound robotic lol
In reality, receiving praise but not having a perfect score means that you didn't go the extra mile to make the card look fantastic as SFX goes. In your case, your card didn't get full points because you didn't add EX-like effects, for example. That'd be the perfect score for the kind of card you made.
Are you sure you're not just short-sighted?
I can't help you with that lol
But I can certainly make the explanations flow better. This is a new system after all and I'm still ironing things out.
Well, the card isn't an EX for one, so...
Sounding robotic is exactly what you did from my perspective, putting everything in a bulleted list instead of talking about it in paragraphs like most previous CaCs have. And as above, these things need to be noted instead of being glossed over with no explanation about how the scores were reached.
What do you mean lowest score? I'm pretty sure you've never scored 69! XD
I am a strict judge, yes. But I'm also fair as I don't cater to anyone in particular.
If there's anything to be improved I'll improve it. But keep in mind not every choice is worth the same. And that's an element that was not as strong in the previous system.
A higher score with a higher cap is exactly the same as half that score with half that cap. If this were adjusted to match the old maximum, my score would be a 34.5, which is easily my lowest score by far. But that's its own thing. Being a stricter judge is fine. We've had stricter judges before and I'm not worried about that. But in addition to that, as an "outsider", it feels like there are a lot of arbitrary and, dare I say,
biased point reductions in this contest, which is a very bad idea, even if these reductions are not at all arbitrary or biased behind the scenes. You need to be transparent for the strictness to work.
The previous system was okay for the most part! That's why I haven't changed the criteria all that much, just the point distribution. It just needed more polish to make it more adequate for judging image-based cards. As it was, it felt like a carbon copy of the text-based rubric. For example, Aesthetics only being worth 10% makes literally no sense for an image-based contest. I didn't want the visual aspect to be too powerful, though. That's why I've made a 50-50 system to remain fair.
Creativity is in Art, Blank, SFX, Effects, Flavor.
Wording is in Text, Effects, and possibly other categories.
Fonts/Placements is in Blank, Text, and possibly other categories.
Believability/Playability is in Art, Blank, SFX, Gameplay, Effects, Flavor.
Aesthetics is in Art, Blank, SFX, Flavor.
The categories are part of each other in a way. This is how I managed to balance things out.
I reckon is hard to make any outside analysis without knowing the inner workings like I do.
Basically, I took apart playability from believability/authenticity and sprinkled the latter over most other categories. I did the same with creativity/originality.
As you can see, the system I use hasn't substantially changed creativity and authenticity point distribution.
However, I did take most of the power of fonts/grammar/syntax and gave it to more important areas in my opinion: aesthetics (obviously, it's an image-based contest), and playability (what use is a fine card if I can't never play it and expect to win?)
As bb said, you
have changed the criteria quite a bit. Splitting categories and quartering/quadrupling the weight of certain categories counts as pretty drastic changes. Not to mention there are places where entirely new categories are popping up. Blanks have never been a problem before, and neither have plenty of other things that were conjured up. The only thing in your pie chart that appears to not have had a massive change is Creativity/Originality. Wording is worth a
fifth of its old value, which is probably where most of my points disappeared to, because that's easily the part of the card I focus the most on, and then Fonts and Placement has been less than halved, which is probably where the rest of my points went, since that's where I put the next most effort in. Believability/Playability has been split into two categories and now is worth a whopping 38% of the total score, where it used to be 10%, and Aesthetics is worth more than double. I agree some of these are valuable, but the weight given to them is increased massively. 20% of the old rubric is now 60% of the new rubric. Aesthetics, while important, is far from being as important as it's weighted here, and apart from which is much more subjective than all the other categories (see below for more on that). Fonts and Placement is a category that only exists on image fakes and contributed perhaps just as much to a card as Aesthetics (indeed the two are intrinsically related; a card with the right fonts and alignments is going to look aesthetically better). Authenticity is already covered by every single category (except arguably Creativity/Originality), so I really don't get why that's been factored in to a category at all. That's pretty much the point of the rubric as a whole.
SFX refers to special visual effects, actually. I would agree on you if it weren't the case that AlphaLad's and FourteenAlmonds's cards scored pretty good on mechanics and art, respectively. I have explained more about how I judge blanks in my previous post. I do have checks and balances for this kinda stuff. Don't you worry. Bottom line, nothing on its own is decisive because I look at the card as a whole. That's my main focus.
SFX belongs mixed in with the categories it came from precisely because of cards like FourteenAlmonds' Greedent. If the card weren't holographic at all, as many CaC entries aren't, then what's the SFX score there? 0? That's completely unfair. A very large portion of CaC entries over the years have been non-holo cards and they should not lose out on points just because their card isn't shiny or blinged out, having elements that pop out of the border, textures, crazy lighting, or animated graphics. Common cards are just as valid as Ultra Rare cards.
Well, if you are going to make the case that art is subjective, then docking X points for anything is also arbitrary and subjective.
I don't even know where to begin with this sentence. We have an objective guide for those categories. Nothing about what you just said is valid.
I don't agree at all that art is subjective. There's objectively good art out there. I know this because I've been tasked to measure it in the past without art style bias. I've always been considered fair when it comes to judging art. There's more to it that than quality as well, that's why I check for creativity/originality and believability/authenticity in most categories, including art.
Quality of art is not always possible to put a value on, and particularly for popular art like you'd see in museums, the value of the art is extremely sensitive to who created it. Some art is better than others, but after a certain point - a point which I think isn't that hard to reach - what makes a piece better than another piece is 100% subjective and cannot be quantified. That's why it was worth what it was worth in the old system.
You can't judge image-based entries as text-based entries. That should be a given. If you're able to make image-based cards already there's no transition to go through. You just do it.
They aren't judged as text based entries.
Also, if I understood correctly, are you proposing beginners should score the same as experts?
That's how contests work. Everyone is graded on the same scale. And this rubric does not look like it favors beginners at all in the first place.
I don't want to get too specific on how I grade stuff because it's kinda complex (the previous system was, too).
The previous system is not complex. There was a set way to determine scores and the participants knew what was expected to be graded in each category. With your system, I have no idea what some of them are even referring to.
True. But in this case, the way I organized the feedback doesn't show as transparently how the points were restructured and distributed. It's like peeping through a key hole. You can't make any based analysis of what's inside the room, if that makes sense.
As a judge, you need to be transparent about why you gave the scores you gave, especially when you're proposing an entirely new system and expecting everyone to be okay with it. The entire CaC Community is sitting on the outside of "the room" and the community's opinion is what should matter, not the opinions of a single person.
What I mean by not having changed the criteria is that I tried to keep the things that grant/dock points there. In any case I added to the criteria. I did change the point distribution, as I said. And again, creativity and believability power remain mostly the same, even slightly closer to the text-based rubric. I only shifted power from text to art/gameplay. Not only because I think there are better areas to be focused on but because text should be the realm of the text-based contest. That's how the two contests are different yet kinda similar. Otherwise it's just a carbon copy, I think. As if the visual aspect was an afterthought, you know? I also asked around friends and family and they only cared about two things: the visuals and what the card could do. They didn't brought up text once. Therefore it shouldn't be as important, especially for image-based, as I said. 50% is way too much for something that doesn't require much skill.
In other words, you changed the criteria. A lot.
EDIT: I meant to note this before, but I guess I forgot. (There's quite a bit to say about this new system, if that's not obvious.) You said you asked your friends and family, who may or may not even play the card game, let alone make a hobby of making fake cards. It's like asking a farmer what's the most important thing about spacecraft design. They may have zero interest in the inner workings. This contest is meant for people who
do make cards, and by the sound of it you didn't ask a single person in the community. Maybe Jabber, and what he says is certainly valid, but far from representative of the community as a whole.
For the record, I think Wording, Balance, and Believability are far and away the most important parts of a card. Everything else is there to make it pretty. Functionality over looks, even if it's an image-based contest.
Nah, man. I hear you. But you were using inaccurate info to base off your arguments. Besides, you may be judging the system too soon. There's just not enough data to claim that certain cards are favored unfairly over another. I might test the new system against previous contests and see how does it fare, if I have the time. But just so you know Jabber agreed with the top and he looked over and corrected my feedback/points a couple of times.
See above. Transparency, yada yada. The community needs to know what you're doing and why you believe your system is better, despite how vague it is to us right now.
I created a new system after reading how the old one worked multiple times because it didn't account for some aspects that go into making a card as strongly as it should in my opinion. I was tasked to do many things: not just judge creativity or accuracy. Effort, skill, teamwork... Also making more people join the contests. My focus is always the community, of course. But the community is potentially larger than regular card-makers like yourself. I have to consider other kind of artists, too.
It's arrogant to walk in and just start heavily changing conventions that have worked perfectly for 9 years. You're changing things based off your opinion, which so far every single comment since the results were posted has shown to disagree with, and writing off any concerns about how we think it's a step in the wrong direction. The rubric has gone virtually unchanged for almost 9 years and there's a reason for that. Attempts have been made to change the way it works and use new systems, etc. back in 2014, and they were short-lived. The system before this month was easy for both the judges and the participants to understand and clearly laid out what was expected in simple categories. It has had very few lasting changes over the years because it works. If it needs any lasting changes, that should be brought up with the community or at least a good number of the people are most active in it.
It goes without saying at this point that I'm still not on board with the new system (in fact I think I like it less now that you've attempted to explain things) and I expect I won't be entering in any more CaC contests that use it as a scoring system. At least not in the image-based category.
