Jordan aka FltAdmlWolf

Glad to have you with us

Wanted to let everyone know that the list of Writing Challenge Winners has been updated on our website to reflect all the winning entries for 2011. Also, I've created all the 2011 banners that didn't get finished, and they are now listed below. For 2012 and going forward, we'll have a new banner, supplied by The (Image) Collective team! The winners with banners below are: Cameron Bunag Jaxon McGhee Saveron Della Vetri

Glad to have you with us!

It's a lot to ask for someone to read every single sim through the the year that comes through this contest. That's why, if we're just expecting any set of judges to read the smaller group sims that have already won a round, it lessens the burden.

I think it's important that we just keep in mind the workload involved. I don't expect everyone in the fleet who votes in the Top Sims Contest to read every sim in every round. I think if you're going to vote in any given round, you should read the sims. But if I vote in one round and skip the next one entirely, that's okay. I don't want to get into a situation where we have to create an infrastructure for judging that requires a great deal of time and effort. The scalability is just not there. It's a nice thought to say we could have a rotating panel for every round, but in reality the question is where we're going to find those people. Who's going to take responsibility for ensuring that we have judges each round? That they're judging in a timely fashion? That their results are tallied and announced? FltCapt. Riley already has to do quite a bit of busy work to keep the contest going as-is, and I don't think it's fair to add more work onto that. I'll again reference back to the idea of having judges do the final round, and perhaps we can add a quarterly run-off or something, so that each quarter we cull down the group of sims to the top two for the quarter, leaving us with eight sims in semi-finals. The member base could vote, leaving the top three to go to the finals, where a panel then decides the winner among those top three? Something like that doesn't require the effort in putting together a panel of judges on a monthly or weekly basis. I'm definitely in favor of more PR for the contest, but I would mention that we already announce each round on the news, and I believe I've also posted on the fleet email list a few times for the final round. So, the PR then falls on the ships to ensure that they're doing their due diligence.

Hmm! Very interesting, very interesting! What does everyone else think about that?

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We can't do a judge's panel for every single round. It's too much to ask that three people read up to a 10 sims every two weeks and then rate them. However, what if a panel of judges, who are not from the ships of the top two or three sims at the end of the year, were to be the ones to decide the winner?

A few people have made suggestions in the shoutbox. Please re-post them here. We can consider them together.

The 2011 Award Ceremony is posted! http://wiki.starbase118.net/wiki/index.php?title=Awards_Ceremony,_2011 Special Awards Duty Post Awards Staff Awards Top Sims Contest winner Member Service Length Awards

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You rarely leave the ship anyway -- might as well just wear your pajama uniform! And instead of boots, we'll wear big fuzzy slippers as long as we're not going on an away mission.

I have an "Epic Playlist" for when I play computer games like Warcraft. It includes: Battlestar Galactica Season 2 Soundtrack Da Vinci Code Soundtrack Lord of the Rings (Fellowship of the Rings) Soundtrack The Village Soundtrack 300 Soundtrack Eve Online Soundtrack Sins of a Solar Empire Soundtrack If you have access to a free account of Spotify, you can probably get most of them without paying

Glad to have you with us! Good luck in the fleet

I've never played STO, but I was heavily into WoW, on and off, since the vanilla version. I think there really has to be a big effort to keep the game fresh to keep people involved. WoW does holiday events, releases new content every other year, increases the level cap, and spends a LOT of effort to get people involved in group play like instancing and raiding. Again, haven't played STO, but I don't hear a lot of that type of stuff going on with them.