Jail_Bird

If that is your goal, that is an admirable one but, keep in mind that it is strictly YOUR goal. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I would wager that most people play this game for fun and, writing an MA arc that is trying to be the next great american novel is not going to fall into most people's definition of fun. Furthermore, if someone felt they had an idea that fell into this category they would be a fool to publish it here as opposed to spending the time to work it into something that they could attempt to make money from through a professional publisher. Looking for high end literary content in MA is like looking for a ticket to the clue bus at the train station, in my opinion.

And we would bother doing this because...?

And this is where I get confused. All of these arcs where already chosen by devs to have been made nominees in the first place. So, why does there need to be a second round of vetting at all? The fact that they were nominees and selected by devs makes them DC by definition. Ultimately, I would hope that the original poster was right and that they are just trying to milk the process for all it's worth.

While you can make the distinction between movies and arcs, I think that most players voting will not. As long as the name Epic is attached to this category I would bet you any amount of money you care to lose that there is going to be confusion over exactly what this category title means with most players voting for the "save the world" arcs over others. Like I said in my previous post, if you want the category to be all about voting for that style of arc, then that is fine. However, I got the distinct impression that the category was purely a designator for arcs for level 41 to 50 characters based upon how the other categories (TO, DO, and SO) where named. If this is the case, then I would recommend purely naming the categories by level bands (i.e. Best 1 to 15 Level arc, etc.). Ultimately, it is Bubba's decision and, while I agree that the term Epic does sound cool, I strongly feel that it is a term that is going to create more problems than it is worth in the long run.

I would like to third this motion as Wrong Number came up with the same idea as I was getting ready to leave for work this morning.

I had expressed this concern privately to Bubba during the voting process.

I agree that it is not perfect but, I really think there should be some minimum number of categories someone should have to vote in for their votes to count. People will, of course, still game the system but, if you suddenly get a bunch of votes with the exact same votes in the same five categories it would raise more of an alarm.

I have no problem with authors voting for themselves either but, as Dalghryn said this will lead to gaming the system. I’ll note that I’m pretty insensitive to this problem myself because, in my experience, no matter how well you build a system people will find a way to game it.

I agree that this sounds too convoluted and, too time consuming, as well. I would recommend that nominated authors be contacted by email with a deadline by which they have to answer and, if they do not then the arc is ineligible for nomination. The downside, of course, is that this creates more work for you so, if you didn’t want to go this route I would totally understand.

First of all, I would strongly recommend renaming Epic category to something that isn’t as loaded a term like High Level Arc. Epic means too many things to too many people. If you want to do an Epic category in addition to this, that’s fine, too. I personally don’t see a need for such a thing but, others may.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record I really didn’t have a great deal of problem with the voting time and, I’m not exactly overflowing with free time (although I will easily agree that Dalghryn has me beat there, as I remember what it was like when my kids where that age). I ended up prioritizing categories in that I basically voted for the two-parters last in case I ran out of time. It turned out that I ended up having plenty of time to cover that category anyway. I would add one or two weeks at most to the voting period as I really would worry about the awards overstaying their welcome.

I just wanted to say I agree with you on this and, really don't see where the issue is here. My toon was partially TOed at best and the EB was really no problem at all, especially compared to other nominated arcs which have racked up some pretty impressive kill ratios on the same toon.

The funniest thing about this comment to me is I genuinely wonder whether Venture realizes he has insulted the intelligence of pretty much everyone involved in these awards. This is, yet again, another demonstration of why I don't take his reviews seriously and wonder why anyone would trust his judgment as a reviewer on any level. The wisdom of Solomon, indeed!

Well, I would bet that of all the posters here I have the absolute least time to play CoH (due to a ton of RL responsibilities) and, I'm going to be able to get votes in on the two parters. So, I think your one extra weekend was plenty of time. Ultimately, it is your decision. However, I just don't want this to end up like a bunch of the five part arcs I have played that easily could have been four but, where padded to five because of the dogma that a serious arc must have five parts.

Absolutely, and you should be commended for achieving that.

I'm glad to hear this, as it is well deserved. You should be very proud of what you have accomplished with the MA Player Choice Awards.

In my opinion they are. I'm a fan of shorter arcs and I can easily name a number of arcs more entertaining than any of the other four entries in this category. Given that yardstick, no award was the obvious choice.

Most but not all.

Except for the ones that didn't make the player's choice.

In the Oscars, the nominees get many weeks of publicity as opposed to 48 hours.

I agree with this final statement completely. As it stands now, the fact that an arc was a nominee is virtually meaningless. The arcs don't get moved closer to the top of the list and are effectively banished to obscurity as a result. At this point I would have prefered to see the winners not having received dev's choice because, given their very generous RL prizes, it seems that adding the dev's choice on top of those is the equivalent of kicking the nominated player's when they are down. This basically has the effect of, yet again, devaluing the whole dev's choice concept.

Fortunately, we do have something better in the MA player's choice awards. Since these are awards that were initiated by and are being selected by the players, they will have considerably greater value to me personally. In fact, the one thing that has been much better with these awards is the delay between the nomination and final selection process. This is obviously for the practical need of giving people time to play the arcs to be able to vote on them. This gives the nominees considerably more time in the limelight as well as getting more plays for them. Getting arcs more plays does not only drawing more attention, it draws exactly the sort of attention (getting the arcs played) that you want MA to be receiving.

Why only some? Weren't all the nominees picked by the developers?

[Doing my best mid-western accent] Wrong, you're a sucker.