README: Mapping Challenge Rules

[MarkusTay]

Ack!

Another thread mentioned the thread naming rules, so of course I immediately said to myself "Rules? There are rules?"

So here I am... I guess I'll have to make a thread soon...

[Robbie]

Just wanted to remind people of the Legal section of the above rules. There may very well be some cross-site promotional useage of challenge entries in the near future. Entering this contest automatically grants consent for the guild to use your images for promotional material and cross-site awareness.

[Hoel]

are participants allowed vote?
To vote for themselves?

[Gamerprinter]

Back in the early days, lots of people voted for themselves - all members get to vote on the challenge whether they are participants or not.

Now a days, its pretty rare for someone to vote for themselves, except the newbies who don't get it. These days we do multi-voting, that is you get 1 vote for every 5 participants. Since we had a couple drop-outs this month it may be only 18 participants, so that would give each voter 3 votes. Multi-voting also posts who votes for whom. Because of this, most don't vote for themselves - everyone gets to see whether they do this or not.

Its not against the rules to vote for yourself, but as a practice most consider this a bit tacky. There are enough voters, usually, so that the fact you don't vote for yourself, won't affect voting, as the best maps always gets the most votes.

In other words, voting is seldom very close - the winner usually has a large margin ahead of second place. Though that's not always true. Last month we had a tie for first place (and I will print more than one map, if there is a tie again, this month!)

Hoel, I'd say, don't vote for yourself - vote for your favorite 3 beyond yourself and if the community thinks you should win - you will.

GP

[Hoel]

Ok. I'll start looking for my three favs then

[RPMiller]

You are welcome to vote for your own if you want. We've never restricted the voting in anyway. Just be aware that voting is public so if you feel guilty about voting for yourself you may not want to, but for the record I would vote myself if I entered.

[bartmoss]

How "from scratch" is a challenge entry supposed to be? I ask because if/when I submit an entry, it would make a lot of sense for me to take the oppotunity to add detail to a world I am already working on, and it likely has at least basic maps existing.

[ravells]

I think that has to be a judgment call from you, bartmoss. After all we are never going to know if a hitherto unposted map had been worked up in advance of a contest - although we may suspect

I guess a good rule of thumb might be that if you have sketched out general ideas, world building etc, then that shouldn't count as working up the map (unless the contest is specifically about world building). It's probably best to explain in your initial post how much previous work you have done if you're not sure.

[Jaxilon]

I seem to upload my WIP a lot.

Do all these WIPs, at least the larger files, get deleted once the contest is over? Unless we just have lots of disk space in which case I won't worry about it.

I don't want to be a resource hog and would like to know how conscientious I need to be.

[Gamerprinter]

I upload lots of WIP maps myself - and No they aren't deleted afterwards. Don't worry about being a resource hog - those WIP maps you upload make for great teaching tools for people reviewing your thread, especially if comments are made by others on how to improve your map. Your updated WIPs show the progress in following the given critiques - and in a "kind of sort of" way acts as a tutorial for others to review and learn.

So don't worry about uploading lots of WIP maps - it only helps others in the long run. I do it all the time.

GP