Guys.

Voting for the people's choice awards is up...
http://www.quakeawards.com/peoples-choice-awards/
and the shortlist has been published.
http://www.quakeawards.com/2018-awards-shortlist/
Remember to get in and have your say :) 

I only see a Conspiracy of Cartograp

Tried clicking all over it in case I didn't have the full page open in the hopes that was just a screenshot snippet of the list, but no luck. Desktop shows a few more choices but still cut off. 

Direct link to the form.

https://goo.gl/forms/lYHFlUdzyA3bX8nH3 

For the People's Choice Awards (Award? Awards?) I'm seeing a giant list of all the maps and I can only choose one. Is that as expected or is it supposed to be per-category? 

yeah, vote for your favourite of all the maps nominated.

its a category unto itself, the other categories have judges

this lets the people have their say regarding which map they thought was best 

OK. And I noticed on further looking that the PCA list is actually bigger than the "shortlist" group, which is nice.

I do feel BTW that the shortlists coulda/shoulda been not quite so short. I'm curious about a couple of things & hopefully once all this is tied up y'all will be willing to do a bit of postmortem chat. 

It kinda rhymes with Cacowards so I suppose it has a nice familiar ring to it. 

I really don't think having only one vote for the People's Choice Awards is a good idea at all
.
First of all that category should have the same sub-categories as the judge's nominations, and second you should be able to select more than one map. The winner for each sub-category should obviously be the map that received the most votes, but there could be runner-ups as well (maybe two of them).

As it as the moment, I have no desire to vote because I can only choose one map. Why even bother? 

...may one vote if one hasn't played ALL maps released in 2017 yet? I did play most of them up to early October, there's one that stands out quite tall above the rest IMHO and I highly doubt it's gonna get dethroned by a late map. 

I've only played six (!) maps from early 2017, so I don't consider myself eligible to vote, though. 

Isn't it enough to sign in & log in? I don't want Google to monitor my online activity... 

I haven't checked the retain information of submitters option for the google form, so at the very least I don't track that stuff... I'm not sure if I can say the same for google itself.

The reason why I used google forms is it's super simple to set up. I could allow anonymous voting, but the requirement to sign in via a google account prevents serious voting abuse. Otherwise it would be crazy easy to vote a million times for one map. 

Otherwise it would be crazy easy to vote a million times for one map.
Yeah, I can appreciate that. You don't want the QuakeAwards to become The Voice... Oh well, I guess I can create a Google account to use only for this. 

One of the fun things about this was that it got me to play or re-play several 2017 maps and really think about what I liked about them.

The website says that the winners will be revealed tomorrow, and they'll get their well-deserved moment in the spotlight. Before then though, I'd like to call out a few other maps that didn't make the shortlists.

Hopefully this is taken in the spirit it's intended; I want to give props to some more good work, and no shade intended toward anything else.

First of all, Retro Jam 6 was a fantastic release. So much good stuff in there! I would particularly highlight retrojam6_mukor (Sacrifice Unto Sebek), for both looking and playing great. Visually I might give this the edge over the actually-nominated mukor map, and I had a lot of fun with the pacing and variety of the map & the way the routes criss-crossed back over the main areas in different ways.

Map Jam 9 was another killer collection, and I want to give a nod to jam9_shotro (Ruins of the Elder God) in the "oddball" category. I know some folks just won't get on with the "retreading" involved in playing all the way through this map, but it was a cool ambitious idea, and for me it worked and was fascinating to play.

While I'm here I'll mention that I gave ad_sepulcher a nom for best visuals (along with the rest of its nominations haul). Just the initial view alone gets it there IMO, and it's dripping in atmosphere.

Finally megad2lvl3 (Wenl Mine) had some terrific classic fighting and exploring. I wasn't sure how much the gameplay category was intended be about innovation, but this map was super solid in a good ol' familiar way. And like any good map it has a few clever setpieces or other touches that give it character.

Was a good year. 

Wenl Mine was a great one, good call. Don't forget the awesome moving geometry in the endgame.

Looking forward to seeing the winners! In the meantime, good call on posting judge interviews. Reminds me of the old mapper interviews on Quaddicted. 

Oh well, I guess I can create a Google account
Nope nopey nopes. These wankers ask for a phone number so they can send me a text message. Ha ha. Very funny, guys. Even if my phone wasn't currently dead, I certainly wouldn't give Google my personal phone number. They can go fuck themselves with a dirty toilet brush. 

You can click skip 

They insist on wanting my number. 

and I'll add it to the total at the end 

What else? Thanks Snaut. 

The awards are up guys, go check em out :) 

All winners truly deserve it. Congrats y'all! I coincidentally discovered Bal's map yesterday and it is fantastic!

BTW, does Bal always speak of himself in the 3rd person? xD

I would have liked to have the judges' names appended to "judge 1, judge 2, judge 3".

I'm quite surprised that Sepulcher won the people's choice with only 26% of the votes. I thought it would be a landslide! Can you please inform us on how the votes were distributed for this category? I'd like to know the percentage of votes for each map.

I have a suggestion for the 2019 awards: a mapper should only be nominated once per category. As it is, vanilla has MissBubbles nominated twice and even worse, gameplay is split between Sock, Giftmacher and... Giftmacher+Sock! 

Yeah, unfortunately there wasn't much engagement with the voting, I chalk that down to

1. my website and how poor it was for mobiles
2. the choice to use google forms
3. people having run out of steam for the awards once the voting came around.

Next time I think it would be better to open up the voting to all the maps released in the previous year. OTP suggested this in a previous discussion with him, however I wanted people to engage with the nominations, so the "your map will only be eligible for the people's choice award if it is nominated for a category" was to get people to engage with the categories and maybe this worked, because there were a heap of nominations. Lots of doubles too.

There were lots of individual votes for maps, and only a handful of maps got more than a single vote.

During discussions early on people made it pretty clear that they wanted the focus to be on the maps, not the mappers. So at the time I wasn't too fussed about some mappers getting more than one map in. I didn't want to have too much oversight over what maps went where as I'm attached to this project long term and don't want too many accusations of bias or cronyism. So when it came to choosing the maps, all I did was shuffle things in spreadsheets once the judges had chosen the shortlist. In hindsight I could have made that an explicit rule.

It does beg the question though, do we want to primarily reward the map? or the mapper?

Anyway, all this aside, I plan on having a debrief thread here on func in about a week, once the dust has settled a little. I can post the percentages of the votes at that point too. If you think of anything else you want to raise, that would be a great time to do it... or, raise it here in the meantime and I'll post the best answer I can then :)

Cheers,

Shamblernaut 

It does beg the question though, do we want to primarily reward the map? or the mapper?
Fair point. You made it abundantly clear that the focus was on the maps. Yet, having the same people more than once per category seems odd to me. I'd like to know where others stand on this, if any of you guys feel like chiming in.

If you think of anything else
Nope, that's pretty much it for now. If I do, I'll make sure to let you know. 

I'd say it's good to focus on the maps. The main purpose of the awards IMO is to show players some good stuff to experience. The fact that the author gets kudos is nice but not the main thing. We shouldn't artificially discard some maps just because an author made a lot of good ones that year.