Neverwinter Nights Forum News (Apr. 22, 06)

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Here are today's Neverwinter Nights forum highlights, collected by NWVault. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Chris Priestly, Quality Assurance

12 Apr 2006 - BioWare Writing Contest Winners
Well, we said that we have been looking into what happened, and would make known any decisions we made regarding the contest results. So here is what we found. The scores and choices for winners were correct at the time that Maximus took the snapshot on the Vault and from this snapshot Jay selected the winners based on the scores and the quality of the writing. But we do realize that there were some honest misunderstandings with the snapshot. Things like Walking with the Ghost’s submission date and module word count were overlooked in favor of what was considered the best writing. However, we realize that this might be different from some expectations so we are keen to make a few exceptions in the spirit of good writing.

To this extent, we are going modify the results of the contest to include 2 Honorable Mentions. The two modules are: Grains of Truth by Jared Evans and To Hell and Back by Silevran Moonflower. These are the next highest scores on the snapshot. They will each be receiving the full BioWare prize pack (BioWare coffee mug, BioWare wool cap, Jade Empire soundtrack, Jade Empire t-shirt and copies of all Premium Neverwinter Nights Modules) and the conest results page will be updated to reflect their honorable mentionness. Check out the change here: Click Here

So there you have it, the finale in the first BioWare Writing Contest. Once again, a huge thanks to all who entered and congratulations to the winners.

More:

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I think holding this contest was an excellent publicity stunt for Bioware. It has rekindled the interest in NWN of a part of the community that had drifted away, and it even attracted some new people. So Bioware: you definitely want to do it again. *SNIP* Of course, next time you'll have to manage the contest a bit more professionally, to avoid stepping on a great many toes, and loosing credibility and goodwill. But I guess you got the message by now.

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That is why this thread is still open. We currently have no plans to have another contest, but we are certainly open to the idea of holding another contest of some sort in the future (and I mean a writing contest, not a simple "enter your name and win something" type. Those we will keep having from time to time).

Dwelling on who "should" have won, what the scores were when or what might have been done really has no further point at this time. We will not be changing the results or adding more honorable mentions.

However, we still want feedback from you all, wether you were involved in the contest as an entrant or not. If we do hold another such contest, it is good to hear now of ways we could improve the next one. Suggestions of things like different rules, submission restrictions, voting/judging, or any suggestions for improvements would be great. Any suggestions you make (and the feedback we've already recieved) are being looked at and kept in mind incase we hold another such contest.

So, as I said, please try now to move on. We will not be changing or adding to the list of winners. But we are listening to feedback on the contest and would appreciate hearing suggestions from you all.

If you do still wish to discuss the winners as Silevran Moonflower is suggesting, please feel free to send a PM to either myself or Jay Watamaniuk.

Stanley Woo, Quality Assurance

12 Apr 2006 - BioWare Writing Contest Winners

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2) That contestants names be withheld from the public view. This is to ensure that well known contestants get no unfair advantage because of Hall of Fame status or something like that.

3) That all votes are scrutinized by impartial judges, looking for signs of bias or self-voting with the help of fictitious logins.

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How would this affect the discussion thread devoted to the contest? How do contestants remain impartial and adhere to these conditions while still talking about the contest and their own modules? Would comments like "Hey, guys, check out my constest entry, "Monkeys in Pants" and tell me what you think?" How about links to one's module in one's signature block?

Would these things render any community voters biased? How would something like this be enforced, disqualification? warnings? lowering of the ultimate maximum score of the module?

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Quote: 5) That all contestants should be held to a Code of Conduct about like this:

a) No self-voting
b) No payback voting (superfluous if 4)
c) No soliciting of biased votes. ("Biased" includes family members/ personal friends/ colleagues. It does not necessarily include community friends, as these should be expected to know what's what.)

Because it seems that some contestants genuinely believed that such behaviour was acceptable...

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Isn't it? Who's going to know about the modules enough to want to vote for it, then? Random chance? I know that some community members attempted to play through all of the modules in order to judge them, while some simply didn't have the time. BFlowers suggested the daily random list in order to get people to play more modules or highlight some that still needed enough votes, and that was awesome, but why then would a voter choose "Monkeys in Pants" over "Go-Bots in Chult"? And should they?

I'm also interested in hearing about enforcement of such rules. Who would be the ultimate arbiter, and how much should the community be permitted to sway that arbiter? For example, it's likely that BioWare or a BioWare-appointed entity would be the final arbiter, which is to be expected. But what if writing wunderkind Joe Contestant alleges that the popular and talented Jane Writer has broken the rules by linking her module in her sig, thereby running afoul of the "no biased voting" rule? Who decides whether that is indeed a violation, and what punishment, if any, to enforce?

And if Frankie Arbiter does mete out some punishment, does that mean Joe Contestant is biased against Jane Writer and has unfairly eliminated some of his competition? What if Jane Writer thought direct linking was permitted, since it wasn't explicitly stated in the rules (ie. she didn't consider it as a bias for voters and merely wanted to highlight her contest entry)?

A lot of questions to answer, and I'm interested in what the community thinks, since we're on the subject of making rules clearer and perhaps stricter in potential future contests?

EDIT: I do like your #4, nereng. Blind voting, I think, would certainly be an asset to any contest that relies on public voting.

James Henley, Technical Designer

How to add a quote?

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I would like to know how to put quotes from other people into my posts when responding to something someone has said. I have seen it a lot, but don't know how to do it, all I can do is Cut and Paste the relevant text.

How do you Quote properly?

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There is a "Quote" button at the bottom of each individual post that will propogate a new post with quoted text. The actual text for quoting is [ quote ] and [ /quote ], minus the spaces.

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Also, how do you bolden or italicize text?

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[ b ] [ /b ] and [ i ] [ /i ] respectively. Again, minus the spaces.

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also, what is a PRC? And a CEP? I have no idea what half these abbreviations are Can do smileys though, had plenty of use from this one! ...And this one.

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PRC = Player Resource Consortium, a community released hak that adds a number of classes, feats, etc. to Neverwinter Nights.

CEP = Community Expansion Pack, a hak containing a large amount of community released models and content.

OC = Official Compaign

SOU = Shadows of Undrentide

HOTU = Hordes of the Underdark

KOTOR = Knights of the Old Republic

Those are the most common abbreviations I can think of.


Cheers!


12 Apr 2006 - BioWare Writing Contest Winners

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In that case, I think the number of judges should be much higher than it was. Or perhaps all Bioware employees could be judges jointly? (How many are there, BTW?) Or maybe one could set up some kind of "Voter's Guild" and let the members there be the only ones allowed to vote. Or it could be them and the Bioware employees.

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I think there are close to 300 of us now in the Edmonton studio, if we haven't already breached that marker.

I think it would be best to keep the BioWare-specific judges to a selective group. After all, there's nothing saying that I, a Cinematic Designer, am going to know exactly what it is that I should be looking for in the writing. I can certainly tell what has or does not have a "BioWare feel" to it, but I imagine there would be other things I may overlook.