By having what sounds like "the quake community awards as organized and voted on by the quake community" - you are basically turning what is currently a small user-base, pretty chilled-out hobby into a competition. Now, every single release a mapper puts out is essentially going to be considered a competition entry, whether they like it or not.

Is Mapper A better than Mapper B? I guess we'll know officially now! The judges have spoken! Awww, didn't make the grade? better luck next year (scratch my back and I'll scratch yours, if you know what I mean, wink wink!)

Mappers outnumber non-mappers like 10-1 here, so I can't see how this can be anything other than an exercise in self-promotion, with probably equal amounts of favoritism and ostracism going on. 

I'm not afraid to go on record as being uncomfortable with the process. The idea of the awards is great. I am aware of who the judges are and I do agree that they are a good selection. I also know that Shamblernaut has nothing but good will here and he wants to strengthen the Quake community.

I get all of it.

There is a continent of people in the community that abhor the negativity in parts of this community and want to mitigate it in their own way.

I get that too.

But I also have the experience of just having participated in the 100b4 jam and what #49 says in his post is pretty much spot on for that experience. If I had known the maps were going to be ranked, I would not have participated in that event. I guess I wasn't around for 100b 1-3 to know how this worked going in. I just figured there would be a first prize map and everyone else had the honor of participating. Instead we had a new mapper from a different community come in dead last with a map that followed the rules to a T and had a wonderful aesthetic. But it featured trick jumping.

So now with this award, a small subset of that community will be selecting, ranking and awarding "bests". That's not a community award that's a small group of "influencers" giving their opinions at best. Good people, no doubt - but it doesn't matter who it is: ranking creative endeavors with participants of varying skill levels is wrong minded in my book.

My real concern is that this was just decided upon announced - and not brought up to the community for input from the start. At least not here.

So I am uncomfortable I think for good reason. But I would guess I am in the minority. I fully expect a torrent of anonymous taunts and ridicule from this post but fuck it - hitting submit. 

Any competition like this MUST be "opt-in". The competition is announced, and mappers themselves decide whether they want to submit an entry (or a number of entries).

Call me a snowflake, but I just want to carry on making things for quake and not feel like I'm being ranked and rated against all the other mappers, in some official way. That sounds like the opposite of fun.