An Act of Revenge Story Challenge 2017

Wouldn't that look weird? That fourth place might have a higher score than second place?

Would not be weird if the scores were not posted. Any author can find their own score by simple request to admins. Time to get away from this point thing. Of course this is only my recommendation IF I was going to suggest any changes.

CS

I realize one purpose of the challenge is to get people to write (and to read), but it might be nice to limit each author to one entry. I suppose we'd need more authors to participate for that to work.

I guess it could be required that you needed to leave a comment before voting, as just looking at the scores of the winner and runners up, even if every person who left a comment for each of these entries had awarded a ten for it, then for example the winner would have scored 260 rather than 627, and same differentials can be seen in all the entries.

Is it a case of, if it is not broken then why try to mend it?

Gloup is the Champion and all praise/acknowledgements are due to him for being so
But yet again, it is those who had the pleasure to read these fine challenge entries who are the winners.
All the authors who put their creations into fine words for the readers pleasure, are deserving of much gratitude, thank you one and all.

I notice that CS hasn't yet officially made any such proposal, but if he were I would respectfully disagree with it. If I remember correctly, Gloup wasn't our first multiple place winner, nor is he likely to be the last. Let's not "dumb things down". A winning story should win...period. If we have a writer good enough to win multiple places, then the rest of us need to take a lesson from that person and then up our games accordingly.

That is actually one of the reasons for my proposal. The high score goes to the story which had the most readers; it does not gauge quality. For example if 20 people read a story and each votes "5" and 10 people read another story and each vote "9," the 1st story would get a higher score despite having less quality in the eyes of the readers.

Thus, an average is a more accurate gauge.

I would say authors only regardless of whether they participated in that particular challenge. The idea is that the people voting for this particular challenge would have better understanding of what writing involves.

That sounds fair to me, a sort of "closed" challenge for a change. And in addition I still feel that the average score would be a better indicator of a story's popularity among the readers and we'd get away from the need to find a catchy title to attract views. We can still have three open challenges a year, just kick in an extra "private" one as bait for the authors to see where that one goes in comparison.

I agree with teresa. I believe scoring needs to be corrected. As good as Gloup is, there is no reason He should win all three awards First place I agree. Let the other authors compete and believe they have a chance. Awarding 1 2 3 to same is wrong . Allow new authors to contribute thus expanding the library.Just a thought.

I'll have to respectfully disagree with the above comments. First of all, this is a challenge to make authors create new stories that meet a theme within certain parameters. Competing is a motive to some but it shouldn't outweigh the overall purpose of the challenge, which is to stretch your own writing.

First, limiting it to one entry per author would hardly make it worth the effort of holding it. Gloup entered four stories; so did I (and yes they were all written specifically for the challenge). Off the top of my head I remember that Canadian Spankee, Bashful Bob, Guy Spencer, DJ Black, Good Gulf and who knows how many others contributed multiple stories. So if we'd all been limited to a single story then we would have lost ~30 stories for the website. I don't see how that is a gain.

Second, what harm is created because Gloup happens to win? As Guy noted, it's happened with other authors as well. Evidently he knows to write what people want to read, but there was no way I could have looked at the top three and said with any certainty that he'd been the one to write any of them (i.e. he doesn't have a single style like Grace Brackenridge for example).

I've entered three challenges so far. Last time I had a story that finished third, which was a pleasant surprise. But I'd much rather have a story finish third on its own merits than be told that it was really only the fifth most popular but since Gloup had multiple winners mine was elevated just to make me feel better.


A fair comment. There have been some readers since the challenge ended, but as of today my four entries had been read 170, 201, 217, and 260 times. So I'd guess my 260 reads story scored the highest although the 201 was by far the best story in my opinion (and the 170 never had a prayer of winning anything).


That would be interesting, sort of a "Best of the Best" competition judging ourselves?

I'll shut up now...