Sat Dec 12, 2015 10:40 am by pyrlix
Its very sad to see that the challenge subforum is dying of a bit.
The problem of dying is caused by - in my opinion - a couple of reasons.
1. Hosts disappearing
That is a serious issue... hosts abandon the challenge, people get disappointed and may lose their faith in other challenges or just stop entering those because they can't be sure that it will happen again and making all the work worthless. If you host some kind of challenge, finish it. Hosting one is a huge amount of work, think wisely before starting one and dont just abandon it because you thought it wouldnt be so much work.
2. Stuff is too complex
The most recent example I have is AMWEC. Its a really amazing challenge - kudos to sillyworld - concept seems really good! But I lost interest after i saw the 2+ page ruleset, which happend to some challenges here already. I like complexity, but reading through lines of rules and having to tab all the time just to double check if everything is allright? Thats not for me.
3. Stuff is uninteresting
There are some challenges that sound dull or are not interesting enough to make people participate - which can cause a disappointment for the host and let him cancel it or people think "Eh, noone is participating, not interested" or "My nemesis is not participating, cant beat him there". Make it interesting, make people WANT to participate!
Add variety to your challenge, make it stand out. The BRC stood out by random tracks in the first iteration and then had a full race simulation with live race commentary in the second iteration! Its hard to beat that, but if you do something clever people will still particpate in a race that is not that fancy or exciting to watch. AWMEC is an outstanding example in that case.
I see a huge trend for reviews right now... but soon that will shift, because having a ton of reviews will make it bland.
Innovate, go back to older challenges and revolutionize those! I haven't seen a TEC Styled challenge since 2013! Or combine stuff with real life, like NormanVauxhalls idea of choosing the race tracks by real lottery numbers.
4. Planning
If you make a challenge... try to make it so that people have enough time to enter. And please try not to set your challenge at the same time of other seemingly interesting ones. Once again i can only speak for myself, your opinion might be different. Right now I see maybe 1 interesting and open challenge on page one, while there are 9 running and 1 closed. Either they all started on the same day or I simply missed those. Don't let them run too long aswell, people will lose interest! On Brobot races a weekly interval for Training, Qualify and Race was pretty optimal. For normal races something like results every 2-3 days seems okay too! For reviews: once they are done.
And now comes something that will go hand in hand with #5.
5. Updates screwing with Challenges
While I siad that you should let people have enough time to enter, it shouldn't be weeks or months. Updates will come and some point and break your challenge, and you _really_ don't want that to happen. For that i recommend watching the Little Dev Updates, as they can give you a rough idea how close the next update is. Plan ahead! Mostly you can finish the praperation of the results in one or two days after the deadline, posting them can obviously take longer.
@Tycondero:
Yes people are spoiled by Brobot - that is pure fact. But to be honest, for how long could you keep people interested with simple track times, innovation had to come at some point. Brobot is one way to innovate, AMWEC another. My next challenge is in preparation already, I just wait for Brobot 2.0 to release and can instantly start the thread about it. And by that you can exactly sense: I am not hosting a race without Brobot anymore, I don't see a simple track-time as "satisfying" as they were in the beginning anymore.
Christmas season is also a bad idea for challenges in general. I hosted the first communist trohpy around that time and it ended up to be quite a pain because there were the holidays where i drove away for a few days and got off track. I can remember saying "tomorrow last result" and ultimately releasing it 7 days later.
However: Another Communist Challenge is coming!
<Killrob> you commited a lot of crimes... among others against: 1) international minimum intelligence laws 2) human rights to a brain 3) act against devolution of the human mind