We’re back with the winner of the Trades & Sails Community Contest! This article will be a short one as we’re cooking something fierce for our next news - so keep an eye out for June 10th, which will hold June’s Community Stream at 9am PDT / 12 pm EDT / 6pm CEST.
Hey guys I just rolled 12 on my Stealth Check, do you think it’s going to be enough?
And the winner is!
Without further ado, we present to you the winner of April’s Community Contest: Captain Tucker Stoutarm, aboard their ship The Sea Mermaid.
With its shipment mostly comprised of alcoholic beverages, the Sea Mermaid will make many locals merry and slightly less productive for a period of time.
Congratulations! We will be contacting the winner shortly by mail with the rewards.
You have questions, we have answers
As you all know by now, our line of communication has always been about honesty and transparency - so when we saw questions arise after announcing the results of the previous Community Contest in March, we decided that we’d go ahead and give everyone a little more context.
The main question we want to answer today is: “Hey, how do you actually choose the winners?”. A very fair question! After all, many of you put a lot of time and effort into participating in these contests, so you might want to know a little more about the process.
How did we select the winner?
First things first! When a contest ends, we usually have a LOT of submissions to go through. Usually what will happen is that we’ll first quickly go over each of them to strike those we deem invalid - for example, referencing copyrighted material, not following the rules of the contest, being incomplete, asking for content that we wouldn’t be able to implement, etc etc…
Once those are removed, we are usually left with… a lot of entries still, which is not surprising since many of you put a lot of thoughts into your submissions (for which we are ever grateful). Now, from there we’ll have two different “types” of contests - those with long answers that are usually related to design or creative writing, and those with short answers that are usually more about names or images.
Of Quills & Ink, March Community Contest, is of the former type. In this case, we will read through every single remaining entry (that wasn’t in the first pass) and we make a rather large selection of favorites. Then a core group will step in, which usually consists of me (your community lead), our game director, our lead gameplay designer, our creative director and our writers plus sometimes others depending on the nature of the contest (for example if it’s a contest about designing a new subclass, we’ll involve our technical director as well to make sure that the subclass features are feasible). This group will make a final selection by voting to crown a winner.
Trades & Sails, April Community Contest, is of the latter type. Choosing between several hundreds / thousands ideas of ship emblems is much harder than judging someone’s creative writing or design suggestion, as we did not want to limit submissions to actual drawings (which would make it harder for non artists to participate). In this case since all the remaining submissions could be winners, the fairest way we found was simply RNG - we randomly pull a selection of twenty to thirty entries, and we vote on our favorite within that selection.
What did I do wrong?
When you put time and effort into your submission, it is understandable to feel a little down when you’re not selected. We want to reassure you that not winning does not necessarily mean that your submission was “worse” - there is no objective way to judge here, there isn’t a right or wrong answer.
Sometimes we really like an idea even though the writer’s skills may not be fantastic, because it’s original or it resonates with one of us. Sometimes something oozes flavor, but unfortunately would be too costly to implement. Sometimes it simply comes down to preferences, or the reader’s mood! That also means - if you’re worrying that you’re not good at writing or that your English is bad because you’re not a native speaker, it’s alright! Writing is a medium to convey ideas and feelings, and you don’t need to do it perfectly to do so.
Let’s be honest, we’re constantly amazed by the creativity you have shown. To the question: “Why don’t you give more specific guidelines as to what tone/topic you want to see?” the answer is that it is not the point. The goal of our contests isn’t to replace our writers by giving you clear instructions about what WE want and have you write it - it is to let you write what YOU want so that we can add it to the game.
Long story short - don’t let failure prevent you from joining future contests. And with this, we’re out!
Article by Tactical Myzzrym
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