[felix]

Originally Posted by lordshadowisle

In particular, the proposal of new challenges seems to open room for contention, and may be slow.

Sorry for the confusion, when I said a grace period of a week, I meant that as a minimum and maximum time. After a week it gets the thumbs up or thumbs down by the contest organizer (in our case papermario). So there's no slowness. You also are not forced to submit just one, or wait a week to submit another. The week is simply counted from the first proposal post.

Of course the challenge can be re-worked based on feedback and it can be proposed again. Also, because anyone can submit, even if say something silly like half of them don't make it happened, we would still have a ton of them.

Additionally, if they are contested, that's all for the best; that's what we want. It means contests would have very refined challenges, that everyone can work with.

Originally Posted by lordshadowisle

How about the winners of the story and poetry sections each add in two challenges? Not enough challenges? Also include the previous month's challenges, but make them contribute less points. The winners will have some advantage, but since they only know half of the new challenges their advantage is not as great.

Oh, in the proposal, you have a pool of lots and lots of challenges and winners pick only some of them. (in case there was some confusion about that)

Anyway, I'm not against the idea. The only problem I see is that, the challenges would be less refined since winners would propose them on a whim. They would still have to go though papermario, but if the way SotM works is any indication, this kind of system tends to get rusty over time, ie. sometimes papermario might not have enough time, delays might happen, etc. Community powered systems just are more responsive then any one person.

Also, the pool for picking challenges would be very very small.

Originally Posted by wassupimviet

That's the part that is getting just under my skin, with the challenges. I'm good with the idea of providing a general framework, but I can't think that supplying what to write by linking it to winning is a good thing.

So... you want to make them mandatory?

To make a analogy, in my proposal, replace all base ratings with 1000, and add two penalties each, one of -1000 for not using the theme, and another of -1000 for not writing within 1500 words (remove the -200 limit on penalties) and voila, the current system. Considering I only made things harsher, what does that make the current system...

Note that I clearly stated you don't have to do any of the challenges! You can play as the underdog, even go over the 1500 word limit. If you can show us you can get the 2 times greater number of votes then any other (and that's in the best case scenario) then I really think it's a fair win. Currently you could be a Shakespeare, if your entry doesn't have something like "unicorns" (example theme) then you lose by default.