Phase one is finished entirely. We'll be closing this contest section in a couple of weeks, it's still open in case people have questions for DevilDogFF's Unfallen. :)

This is the grand finals, 12 get in, only one comes out!

The contest is officially over as far as submissions are concerned. You may still comment on submissions, or ask questions to their authors.

That's the plan we have for the long term, but our current voting system cannot be modified at the moment. We had long discussions back in the day on our preferred and fairest ways of selecting winners, and that's pretty much what we'd landed on.

We're still far from being able to implement it yet, unfortunately.

The next part of the contest will probably feature an e-mail submission system so we get your submissions and then publish them at the same time. However, due to the platform's limitation, it will still have a "posted first" kind of issue insofar as some will always appear before others in a list, even if posted by the same user in quick succession. We might be able to skirt this limitation depending on the number of submissions we receive, but until we get there, let's focus on what we have ahead of us.

Some of you made great points regarding the number of entries, so where we'd usually have three finalists this time we'll open up to a bunch more, which will reduce the slant of the top submissions (even if not quite overcoming it).

I'm only going to answer specific points, insofar as I've mentioned in the main contest thread that we're looking into the situation.

At lot of the proposed solutions that ease up the voting process by making us vouch or pre-select entries are contradictory with our vision for such contests: these are about allowing players to make their choices, not about us effectively making the choice for them by saying "would you prefer faction A or faction B (repeat with n+)" and pretending that you've been given a choice altogether.

Moreover, having us pre-approve entries also means basically riveting several team members to the forums to provide the necessary feedback and approval process. We might have grown as a studio, but we're yet to reach the stage where we have that kind of manpower.

Similarly, having the Amplicrew summarizing all entries with a line or two is a recipe for disaster. What if you are unsatisfied with the way you've faction has been summarized? If you think a faction has received a description that is way too catchy? Basically, opening up to editorializing by our team gives entirely too much agency over entries altogether.

electronben wrote:

I participated in the last few contests (both on the old site and on the new site) - I will use the most recent contest as the example.

I did not enter this current contest (to give someone else the opportunity to win is only fair and the right thing to do) - but it would have been nice to know "Hey, you can enter these MINOR contests, but if you win you wont be eligible for this super secret MAJOR contest coming up." It's a VERY minor gripe, but one nonetheless.

You're allowed to take part in the contest. Restrictions on participation were just meant for the previous line of contests, which is now over. I'm not sure where you got the impression you weren't eligible.

As for the differential in voting power, this is something we're fine with. We've always wanted to reward players for being involved in our games, owning them, and for participating in the life of our community. 

BlackBird1696 wrote:

Not to mention that this entire vote has honestly been started far to early, though that just might be SEGA riding up Amplitude's rear being the money grubbers they seem to be these days. trying to get them to push the game out earlier than they had planned or something.

I'm gonna stop you right there: we went full steam with this contest because of production constraints, and only those. If we want the faction to be ready by the date it is currently scheduled for (that is, in the last weeks or months of the early access period), the faction needs to have ships, which are what takes longest to do. These ships will be up to 8 different models (3 small, 2 medium, 1 big, 1 bomber & 1 fighter), with in some case a possibly huge amount of detail going on. Once you're done with the models, you need to make sure SFX and VFX are implemented. Nothing in this contest has anything to do with Sega, and if anything they've always been advocating that we take all the time we need to ensure early access is as high quality as we can make it.

Troy_Costisick wrote:

If I were them, there's no way I'd respond in this thread.  It's a minefield.  However, I would absolutely take the suggestions into account for future contests.  There are a lot of good ideas here.

We're more in the business of owning up to our mistakes.  As you put it, while we may not be able to fix them entirely for this part of the vote, we can at least try to find a satisfactory compromise, and try and find better methodology going forward.

Thank you to all of you for taking the time to not only express your feelings on the matter, but also to offer potential solutions. As mentioned at the start of this post, we're looking into ways to make things better. It won't be perfect, because we're operating with limited dev resources at the moment, but it'll hopefully be better than this.

Exhausting. I'm just turning up now because Monday-Tuesday were my first days off since the 14th. RE: Voting, we're aware of the situation, and are looking into possible solutions internally.

Pretty much.

Yeah the question was more related to the "actions per turn" bit, which was confusing. :)