State of the Contests Update

[Tarkur]

@Tarkur

Lastly I want to address an issue that TTV can’t really do much about but I feel like I have a neat enough idea for what they can do to counteract that as much as possible. Now there is no rule against vote brigading and as the staff has said before there does not need to be one for this contest however another issue has cropped up very closely related to this I think.

This is that a lot of people only vote in the semifinals and finals of each contest because they do not care to keep up with the contest.

Keep in mind none of this is TTVs fault and that’s not what I want to say. I know in the past that TTV, more specifically Meso and Eljay, has wanted to highlight the creativity of the community through these contests. So keep this in mind as you read along, now what’s the problem with people only voting in the finals and semifinals? and what are we going to do about that?

To answer those questions we can’t do much to stop people from voting only in the final or semifinals but the main issue I see is not necessarily that people do this but that it’s affecting the goals of these contests. By having only a small percentage of people vote in the earlier stages makes for unreliable results while also hurting smaller content creators. There is no denying that well established mocist or artist are gonna have an inherent advantage in contest like these. The problem however is because of the small percentage of voters most votes in the early contest goes to these larger mocists and artist earlier effectively shutting out lesser known creators and highlighting just the same mocs that every other platforms highlights which makes the goal of featuring community creativity redundant because only a small percentage of the entries will actually be shown to the large amount of casual participant and that being mocs from creators they are already familiar with so they have no incentive to really vote for anything else but that which they know. Which in turn means that community creativity is no longer focused but how much you can ride on your mocist/artist career. Don’t believe me we can see this already happening where lesser known creators models are already forgotten in the public eye or never there to begin with because the votes are naturally skewed but also because the early voting isn’t big enough to make any lesser known creators model stand out.

How can we change this then? I think the easiest and most effective way to highlight contest entries would be by doing moc and art spotlights for the contests in a slideshow format similar to the format of the recent self moc spotlight TTV made on their channel. Why? Well first of its free advertisement for the contest letting people know they’ve started. It’s also a good opportunity to simultaneously vet entries and make sure they are all following the rules. Models that slip through the cracks could more easily be pointed out before the voting starts officially. More lesser known creators works get featured and maybe reach a new audience it couldn’t before and in doing so fulfilling the purpose of these contests. It may also split up votes from larger creators and could lead to less biased results in turn making the contest more fair to all participants.

Here is a suggestion I posted in the rules topic a few days back