2023 Atlas Awards Intro & Discussion

[wminish]

Hi Everyone. After a one-year hiatus the Atlas Awards are back.

We will be launching the nomination threads in about a week, hopefully on Saturday the 21st of January. In the meantime I just wanted to announce the awards and post the instructions for nominations to be followed once they go live.

As we have a new group of us running the awards this year we will just keep things simple and run the same categories as were run two years ago. There is one notable change to the awards this year though, as there were no awards last year the awards will cover the last 2 years of maps posted to the finished maps thread (any maps submitted in the 2021 or 2022 calender years). Maps that have been posted since January 1st 2023 are not eligible as these will be covered under the awards next year.

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The categories for 2023 will be as follows

Best Large area map (Space, World, Continental, Regional) - NOMINATE TWO
This will be a heavily overloaded category, so we're asking you to nominate TWO maps, and there will be TWO winners. In other words, the first and second-placed maps will BOTH get an award (if there's a tie at the top, only the tied first-placed maps will win).


Best Local area (City, Town, Village)


Best Small area (Building, structure, space ship, dungeon)


Best Black & White Map
Maps in this category can be hand-drawn or digital, but they should be almost entirely black & white, or monochrome.


Your favourite map from last two years
We want to see the maps that you simply loved most from last year. For example, you might feel 'Map A' is technically superior to 'Map B', but 'Map B' ticks all the boxes for you and you can't stop looking at it. That's what we want to see in this category, and any style is acceptable.

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Those are the categories and here is a link to view all the eligible maps. We are covering a larger time period this year so have a browse through the maps and get yourselves reacquainted with the maps while you wait for nominations to open.

Atlas Awards 2023 Eligible Maps

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PLEASE NOTE...
On the thumbnails page, if you click directly on the picture, it will show you only the picture. However, if you click on the title below the picture, it will take you to the thread. When nominating a map, PLEASE include a link to the THREAD, not just the picture by itself. This will save the CLs much time and effort when it's time to set up the polls. So your nomination should look like this (note that the map linked below is from 2020 and is not eligible for the awards this year):


The sea of the 6 kingdoms by - JO -
https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...170#post416170


Please nominate up to two maps for the 'Best large area' category, and only one map for all the other categories.
You cannot nominate your own maps.
Please keep all discussion to this thread. The nomination threads are for nominations only.
Nomination threads will close 4 weeks after opening, and voting will start probably a week or two after that, once we've compiled the poll.

If you have any questions, feel free to post them here.

[Naima]

Hi I just saw that the thumbnail for my own map (The LAst Sea of Ausur) doesn't work showing a wrong Thumbnail, I sent you a detailed message.


That said here are my nominees...


Best Large area map (Space, World, Continental, Regional)

1. Default The Wheel of Time - the Westlands in the Third Age By Dimension Door
   
2. Illustrated map of Noss By joabaldwin

Best Local area

Unnamed Isle By Ifrix

Best Small area

High Horn Keep By J.Edward

Best Black & White Map

Turélia By Brendo

Your favourite map from last two years

A Song of Ice and Fire - A Westeros map By l'Arpenteur

[Kellerica]

Hi I just saw that the thumbnail for my own map (The LAst Sea of Ausur) doesn't work showing a wrong Thumbnail, I sent you a detailed message.

That is a known issue we often have with the thumbnail scraper: if your post has more than one image in it, the thumbnail doesn't always pick the correct one. The same issue occurs with challenge threads with the ### Latest WIP ### tag if the post has more than one image. I assume this one is set to pick out the image in the first post of any given thread.

There unfortunately isn't anything us CL's can do about it. If you do want it fixed, I would recommend that you go edit your original post and remove the other two images to make sure the correct one gets picked for the thumbnail. I can of course do that for you as well, but I don't really want to go edit anyone else's posts, unless I've specficially been asked to.

That said here are my nominees...

As Wminish's post above says, we'll have separate nomination threads again, same as the previous years. You can post your nominations there once we get them set up.

[Naima]

That is a known issue we often have with the thumbnail scraper: if your post has more than one image in it, the thumbnail doesn't always pick the correct one. The same issue occurs with challenge threads with the ### Latest WIP ### tag if the post has more than one image. I assume this one is set to pick out the image in the first post of any given thread.

There unfortunately isn't anything us CL's can do about it. If you do want it fixed, I would recommend that you go edit your original post and remove the other two images to make sure the correct one gets picked for the thumbnail. I can of course do that for you as well, but I don't really want to go edit anyone else's posts, unless I've specficially been asked to.




As Wminish's post above says, we'll have separate nomination threads again, same as the previous years. You can post your nominations there once we get them set up.

Ok thanks, I have edited, does it work now ?

About categories there are so many entries and its a pity to have to scrap some because there isn't a specific category to fit them in like sci fi maps or others .

As sugestion perhaps I would have :

World map
Regional map
City/area map
Building/dungeon map
B&W map
Sci Fi map
Favourite map.

[Kellerica]

Ok thanks, I have edited, does it work now ?

Looks like it is!

[Ifrix]

About categories there are so many entries and its a pity to have to scrap some because there isn't a specific category to fit them in like sci fi maps or others .

As sugestion perhaps I would have :

World map
Regional map
City/area map
Building/dungeon map
B&W map
Sci Fi map
Favourite map.

Thanks for the suggestions, but given that many of the CLs running the Atlas Awards this year are new and still finding our feet on the back-end, we decided it would be easiest to just go with the previous categories as it went well last time. After it ends we can at that point take on feedback and look if we want to make any changes for next year, but for this year we are sticking with these categories.
Regarding the number of entries there actually isn't as much of a difference as you might think. There were 480 entries for the year of 2020, compared to 616 for the years 2021 and 2022 combined.

[Diamond]

Best Small area

High Horn Keep By Diamond

Um........

[Naima]

Um........

Isn't a Building?

[jshoer]

Hi Everyone. After a one-year hiatus the Atlas Awards are back.

Woohoo! This will be fun. Thanks and I'm looking forward to it!

[Greason Wolfe]

Isn't a Building?

It is a J.Edwards map, not Diamond's.