#1
1st Sep 2013 at 5:46 AM
Last edited by missroxor : 2nd Sep 2013 at
8:57 AM.
Official Competitions: Winners Showcase and Other Announcements
Those of you with long enough memories might recall that we hosted two official competitions earlier this year. Well after what seems like a never-ending run of hold-ups we’re happy to be able to announce the winners of the Cultural Diversity Create and Photography competitions. Better late than never, ey?
There were a lot of great entries and some of the scores were very close but we managed to narrow it down to two photography winners and 4 create winners. Congratulations to all those who entered but especially to the winning six!
So let’s not delay this anymore! Here are our official competition winners:
Since there were almost twice as many TS2 entries as TS3 entries, we initially planned to have two winners for TS2 and one for TS3. As it turned out, we ended up with two TS3 entries tied for first place so here are our
four winners:
Congratulations to you all and thank-you for your patience in waiting to hear the results!
Trophies, ribbons and achievement stickers will be on their way to you all shortly. Participants will also receive participation achievement stickers. It all has to be sent out manually and there’s a little bit of a backlog (especially since the calendar winners need to be sent their trophies and achievement stickers too) so it won’t be instantaneous. Yes, more waiting but it’s nearly over.
If you haven't received your prize by the end of the month then please comment below in case you were accidentally missed.
As most of you know, it’s taken quite a while to finally bring this run of competitions to a close. It probably didn’t seem like we were doing much of anything from a user point of view when things went quiet but I can assure you there are a few moderators with a lot more grey hair and wrinkles than they had this time last year
In theory the competitions were supposed to be a fun way to encourage creativity and bridge the gap between those who upload and those who use the creativity forums. In reality they required a
lot of work behind the scenes and put a heavier burden than we anticipated on the various moderators who made up the competitions team. That coupled with the fact that we were short staffed anyway
and helping to build and test the new upload system meant that the competitions fell by the way-side since moderators were just too busy to work on them (and in the midst of all this, some moderators even insisted on having a life outside of MTS! – You just cant get the staff these days!
). So that was a very TL;DR way of saying we’re sorry that the competitions were left hanging for so long and we’re sorry that you had to wait beyond the limits of reasonable patience to hear the results.
At the very start we stated that the plan was to have these competitions run in cycles (Photography competitions, themed months, create competitions and so on) and that there would be three cycles per year. With one complete cycle over we had a discussion about how we thought it went and how we wanted to proceed. We quickly agreed that while our intentions were good, we’d just been too ambitious in terms of how big and how often we wanted to run these competitions with the few staff members we had on the team. The last thing we want is to re-start the cycles only to find ourselves unable to keep up again so we decided it would be best to lay this big competitions master plan to rest. We tried something and it didn’t work out as well as we'd hoped; it happens unfortunately.
There will still be a calendar contest at the end of the year and there will still be occasional official competitions/challenges but those will likely be more ad-hoc like they used to be rather than trying to stick to a rigid schedule. Also, due to their underwhelming popularity during this cycle, we will no longer be continuing with regular themed months either.
In the mean time, the contest forum is thriving with user submitted contests happening on a regular basis. So if you’re missing the competitions or themes at all,
head on over there and see what’s happening. If there isn't an open contest running right now, check back in a week
Guys, rules are good! Rules help control the fun. ~ Monica E. Geller