Tallying the FKFicFest '20 pre-game poll results

[brightknightie]

I've tallied the results of the 2020 fkficfest pre-game poll. Both with overall totals and with only those self-identifying as likely to play, we come to exact ties on the two most important questions:

• Should we play challenge or exchange?
• On what date should our stories come due?

I'll break the date tie based on my currently-predicted work-projects schedule.

But challenge or exchange? I wish I knew which would truly bring more happiness to more people!

Still thinking...

Comments

[ride_4ever]

While exchanges provide the pleasure of a gift-giving feeling, I favor challenges because if someone has to default it doesn't risk someone missing out on a thing being exchanged to them. If confident about no defaults or about pinch hitters, then challenge or exchange.

[brightknightie]

I've thought as hard as I could and decided. I'll post later tonight. Here's hoping they're the right decisions.

We're going with challenge.

Challenge is certainly easier on the mod. And it theoretically lets people jump in at any point, if they hear about the game late. And it should reduce hurt feelings from bad matches. But, good golly, the most committed players (except me) say they genuinely prefer exchanges. And the only year we played challenge, we dropped down to 6 total players; if we drop much more, we cease to exist.

(Still worrying!)

[pj1228]

I'm wondering if it's possible to merge the two styles. If we add a prompt to the new sign up template (I only now noticed that it doesn't include a prompt) and send you a ranking of preferences to the public sign ups, those who prefer exchange could proceed as usual and those who prefer challenge could regard the prompt as the challenge. The recipient would then at least get their prompt addressed. And the challenge writer would make the ranking based on the offered prompts. Does that make sense? Just a random thought.

[brightknightie]

I've thought as hard as I could, and I've come to decisions. I hope they're good. I'll post them before I go to bed tonight.

We're going to play challenge-style. A challenge lets people join in later (or drop out) seamlessly, with no pinch hitters, and with the opportunity to promote the game throughout its run, and with no hurt feelings by bad matches. We'll nominate and vote for 3 challenge prompts (1-10 words per prompt, not counting any citations needed for quotation prompts).

Because it will be a challenge and therefore no one should feel short-changed, I think we should also reduce the required minimum words to 500; I think most people will write 1,000 or more, regardless, but perhaps some people who are nervous to commit to 1,000 will commit to 500.