This site has plenty of challenges, but so often it seems they are dominated by highly experienced players. Older accounts, Platinums, or players who went through an account reset for whatever reason (Sorry, Monarchii).
And this isn't inherently a bad thing, per say, but it feels like it might stop less experienced players from getting a moment in the spotlight.
If 50K point Platinum posts their 17th incredibly well made aircraft, that's fine, great even, but if an entire challenge's podium is just Platinum after Platinum, or otherwise very fast-climbing player, it becomes sorta pointless to bother contributing if you don't have that level of skill. Why spend hours on a craft that'll have next to no chance of doing well enough to wind up seen among the winners.
Hell, the one time I participated in a challenge the winner was a player with over 200k points! Sure, maybe I'm a little salty that I couldn't post a faux-angry comment to congratulate them after they rapidly surpassed me because for some reason they had blocked me, but I digress.
I mean c'mon, what did I do!?
I don't want to invoke the wrath of the moderators, so I'll move on.
Its not about my craft, it was dumb anyways and wasn't a serious attempt to compete, it's that a Platinum came in and so quickly blew past everything else.
Fortunately the challenge later changed away from upvote-based ranking, which is literally this problem-incarnate, but still, it crushed.
Point is, unless the challenge is really low-profile, there isn't really a spot for DeFenestrator2381 and their lesser-skilled ilk to have a real chance.
My idea (just an idea, not actually saying I intend to do anything with this):
A challenge, whatever topic (obviously not FunkyTrees), where players above a certain point number/account age/climb rate (points per year/month/etc.) or, if that fails, general quality of craft.
Now, obviously this has flaws.
In terms of point count and account age, I'd be disqualified. By quality? Maybe, maybe not. Points per year? No idea.
I'm not fit to judge, of course. That'd be too biased.
Judging who would and would be disqualified, unless reduced to a formula, would end up being very arbitrary. This would be bad.
Really, this is more just me trying to float an idea than anything.
Let new players into the fun, at least for things bigger than challenges from other new players.
A 80K player taking first place bumps a bronze down from 10th to obscurity.
Not sure where I'm going with this, but it kinda bugged me.
Might wipe this if it pisses too many people off.
@5 finally
Thanks for the answer, long-description person
With that out of the way, I hope someone picks up the brackets idea and succeeds with it, it seems promising but we will only see once it actually gets used in a popular enough challenge
@Noname918181 as a simple plane, I can confirm that this is fact
@Graingy they did alot of discord things back in the day and trolled the site mods a few times
For example, I remember Wii asking me to raid the discord server SPCS/skyward since it had more member count and I had admin perms from being one of the first 5 members, and I also remember their bans caused a lot of drama on the forums and harassment of the mods on discord, heck even Andrew had to respond to the drama and specify the rules back in the day because it was so immature
@Noname918181 ahhh
… What’d they do?
@Graingy WiiMini is an infamous user of this website, mainly due to drama, he left the community a while ago, as for the dogfight challenges, those are challenges held by the discord server SPSC(now called skippers aviation and maritime) where you build a plane to compete in a dogfighting contest.
.
Additional information: WiiMini was the owner of SPSC.
@Noname918181 "WiiMini, and no I am not referring to the SPSC dogfight challenges"
Great because I don't know who that is (people keep mentioning them. Who were they? I literally know nothing), and don't know what an SPSC dogfight challenge is.
I can say, this challenge idea is a good one. I’m not sure if I will be able to participate or not, but I have experiences like you mentioned. I don’t have the greatest skills nor the worst, but I do create some great planes overall. I have a fighting chance in challenges. But whenever I post a plane that took hours to make only to loose to 103638 platinums and late golds, I’m now starting to get upset about it. I now have to participate in challenges that ether I have no competition in, or small tiny challenges created by silvers or even bronzes. Overall your idea for a challenge is a great idea
Challenge didn't really gain that much traction so the concept never really caught on, but I still remember that bracket aspect of the challenge
@Graingy it was WiiMini, and no I am not referring to the SPSC dogfight challenges, it was a building challenge with 3 categories based on skill level. According to my memories and some server digging, participants were categorized via point count with some exceptions. It also had multiple judges to make stuff easier to handle (I was one of them)
@Noname918181 You know who did it?
@Graingy if I remember correctly it has been done before, it was a cold war challenge or something, but yeah, there were brackets.
@Monarchii Oke thank :)
Really doesn't move well
@Strucker I don't because I live a depressing cycle :)
@Noname918181 That.... that's a good idea.
Sounds like it'd be a pain, but I think someone should consider that.
@Whatamievendoing disqualify them of course
@Noname918181 good idea, but what if there are, for lack of a better term, "trolly" people who are skilled, but for whatever reason decided to enter the beginner bracket?
Here's an idea: brackets
.
Set up 3 brackets, one for beginners, one for intermediates, one for experts
Participants will choose one of these brackets to compete with those that have similar skills based on how they think of how skilled they are. Each bracket should have a winner and a runner up
.
Of course there are cons to this: higher work load for the challenge holder and a more complex ruleset, but I think it's worth a shot
Lol, the 2 reasons I don’t participate in challenges are:
Every challenge I see is for replicas
Most of the non-replica stuff I see is some very specific thing that I have no skills in.
Lmao
@Graingy eh, it's decent at best, the trick to good boats is basically to have one large wing(no control surfaces) on the middle section and one equally(or atleast 80%) large with a control surface on the back, pretty much. speaking of which.. I think ill take a look at the Morrayge later(maybe tomorrow)
@Monarchii Regardless, you're damn good at boats, at least in terms of looking good.
Still hadn't a chance to download anything...
That may change tomorrow!
Be on the lookout for the 21st, assuming all doesn't go to hell.
@Graingy high platinum my ass, at best I'm a late-gold(in terms of skill), i just crank out a lot too back then, at slower rate yes, but pretty much the same way i do it now
@Monarchii Yeah, I figured that point/time would be the best.
You're only at 12.3k as of typing, but clearly having the skill of a high Platinum... because you are one.
I've seen a MAJOR jump in points recently, but still am not managing anything very impressive.
Speaking of which, I need to update my bio timeline...
the easiest way to counter this is limiting by rank, granted it won't solve all, but it weeds enough, if anything, you can also weed out fast-risers by just.. not letting them join lmfao(oopf)
@Senkopilot Stinkysaywhat