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VLDCX - New Leaders, the Overworld, & World X.

I believe that judging the VLDC levels is like:

1) Playing 1 hour the level entry and write the score. (We have 178 entries)
2) Everyone have 2 weeks of free time before of judging the next entry. (2 weeks means 336 hours)
3) Making the calculations, it'll be 514 hours. (21 days and 10 hours)

This is my theory, just correct me if i'm wrong.
Originally posted by Roberto zampari
2) Everyone have 2 weeks of free time before of judging the next entry. (2 weeks means 336 hours)

No, that'd make it take far, far much longer.

Also, there's no point in making calculations on how much it should've taken to judge all entries because like leod said, real world and human aspects that are out of control interfere in the process.

Just... be patient and wait for the results to come. #smrpg{argh}
Originally posted by gloomy
Just... be patient and wait for the results to come.

Okay, i understand...
I'll be more patient...

Maybe i don't know about the SMWC users' real world, but this is just a theory.
We gettin' there boys
It's easily the best thing I've done
So why the empty numb?
A minor update:

This isn't big enough to really warrant it's own new thread, so consider it a mini-update. As of right now, Lolyoshi has completed judging, Noivern has completed judging, and Koopster is like 6 levels away from finishing judging. Sinc-X and Rameau's Nephew are both in the triple digits as well.

Vitor Vilela will be taking care of all the scary ASM related things regarding this project, as Medic has stepped down.

I anticipate results won't take terribly long now (hopefully), and then we can go full grind putting this boy together. Thanks for the patience y'all.
Originally posted by idol
As of right now, Lolyoshi has completed judging, Noivern has completed judging, and Koopster is like 6 levels away from finishing judging. Sinc-X and Rameau's Nephew are both in the triple digits as well.


That's really good. Can't wait.
Want to see my Super Mario Timeline?
The hype is real
*Insert witty footer here*
Can't wait to see my level make it to the bottom 50. lol.
Want progress on 100 Rooms of Enemies: The Nightmare Edition? Go here to see.

(rip my other userbars momentarily)

Rumors have it another judge has finished...
Your layout has been removed.
Come on, you're supposed to wait for me to circulate the rumors. We talked about this.
Yep, I've finally finished judging!
few pages late but if the idea is to include everybody regardless of the level's quality then why is vldc even branded as a contest any more

if EVERYBODY'S A WINNER and deserves a place in the collab regardless of their level's actual quality then what's the point of judging? Would be a lot quicker to start building the collab right away and let the community decide what the best levels are and aren't. The only actual contest-related part of the collab is the inclusion of Best World, but if the idea is that every level deserves a chance to be played then why have a best world at all?


I'm fine with having a yearly vanilla collab that's open to any and all participants (especially people who have never opened lunar magic before (the level that's literally 1f screens of flat land with 1-2 enemies per screen sticks out in my mind pretty vividly)), but i dont really understand the point of forcing judges to play through an endless barrage of mediocre to straight up bad levels if the idea of the contest is that every level deserves a chance anyways. Seems like at this point the judging, scoring and placements only serve to make the top-tier designers feel validated in their abilities, and everybody else gets the unimpressive score they expected. Plus, without scores and Best World people would be more inclined to give every level a try, rather than skipping over anything that placed under 50th, for example


#smrpg{mlem}
ask me if i give a f*ck...
I agree with just about everything you said (exception being that I still enjoyed judging even near the end). It's not sustainable to have the judging process of previous contest, what with the sheer number of entries we got this year, unless we're doing some sort of VLDC thing (submission/judging/collab) literally all the time. Idol said here that the method used for next year's VLDC will be heavily discussed beforehand in a public thread.

VLDC going on for so long has swallowed at least one other contest (the overworld contest), so I'm 99% certain the method used next year will make for a shorter contest.

That said, I'm not entirely certain the community as a whole can determine the quality of levels. I can't help but think that if we did this, the most popular levels would be rated higher quality, regardless of actual quality.
Originally posted by Hobz
Seems like at this point the judging, scoring and placements only serve to make the top-tier designers feel validated in their abilities

Yep basically this, because it feels better to place 5th out of 180 entries, instead of 5th out of 100 entries, even though it's around the same in terms of actual accomplishment. I will argue, however, that the top-tier entries are big improvements over last year (especially a few designers cough MATTERHORN cough UNDERGROUND THEATRE). Getting in like, the top 30 or so is pretty competitive, and honestly, I think a lot of these designers are trying to compete with each other, rather than compete with the 120 entries that aren't exactly noteworthy. I can definitely see the slight ego-boosting nature of the 5th out of 180 entries mentality as well, and I definitely never really thought of it. I argued this before on another page but good designers don't really materialize out of nowhere. We do, however, want to give new designers a chance to try out lunar magic. It's kinda interesting though that really solid designers are competing with people who have never downloaded lunar magic until entering VLDCX, and their ranking is going to be *that* much more significant because it beat out another mediocre level, getting 5th out of 180 instead of 5th out of 179.

I just want to see designers try their hand at actually making hacks. I know that this isn't really the case though, unfortunately. Scroll through the submission page for VLDCX and see all the dark purple inactivated names for yourself.
Originally posted by GbreezeSunset
Getting in like, the top 30 or so is pretty competitive, and honestly, I think a lot of these designers are trying to compete with each other
this was a point i originally touched on, but scrapped in favour of getting directly to the point. Because yeah, there is a competitive nature, albeit a playful one, between the various level designers striving to one-up their friends who are also competing.

Also especially ya @ inactive users lol. My original point focused on vldcx being used as a way to branch out to other romhacking communities to try to invoke some interest in smw hacking, when in reality these are the people that only come for the contest, and leave a week after its over, waiting for the 1 remaining lurker to post the results thread in their respective forums. I'm fine with that, it's always fun to see people enthusiastic about being a part of the contest. But my issue comes when they clearly are not capable of properly competing with the standards the mid to high tier levels set for the actual competing range, yet are treated as competitors anyways because thats the fair and polite way to do things.


At this point i think it'd be cool to keep vldc as a general collab open to anybody, and try to shift oldk into a more focused contest for actual level designers to try to compete against each other... which i absolutely understand the irony of considering it was creating as a way to give level designers that aren't able to compare with top tier vldc levels a chance to compete on a more level playing field. Maybe if top tier designers want gratification for their levels, they should make demos to release at C3 :D


#wario{:sweetjesus:}
ask me if i give a f*ck...
I mean, your question/argument of "why is it even branded as a contest" is pretty easily answered/defeated by just stating that the contest and collab are separate things.
We could just not have a collab, or, as we are likely going to do for all following VLDCs judging by the discussions had behind the scenes, trim them down to "best of" collabs to both simplify the collab creation process (no need to rely on custom LM versions, SA-1 dual ROMs or level extending patches etc.) as well as "cut the fat" you've been talking about.
The latter isn't -really- the goal and will likely lessen interest ("luckily" when thinking like you do, "sadly" from the viewpoint of all the people wanting to be a part of it without the necessary skills), but as it stands the VLDC process is a little too unreliable to be done this way every year.

What implications the results have or how the winners feel about being 5th out of 30 vs 5th out of 200 entries isn't really our concern.
The only contest-related thing the collab has is all of the contest's levels and rankings. The collab has 0 influence on the contest.
At least in this installment, we will likely change some stuff around for the contest portion of VLDC11 to improve the collab, such as limitations on level size/playing time, getting rid of the trend of incredibly oversized levels that's been plaguing even the current top-scorers and ditching the stupid dumb emphasis on moons this year had thanks to the genius idea of marking them as official collectibles in the intro cutscene.
Your layout has been removed.
I did some thinking... and I think I have an idea:

-First, assume there are four judges.

The entries should be split into four groups, and each group is randomly assigned a judge.

The judge need only judge all the levels in their group at first.

Then, the top 25% moves on, and is judged by the rest of the judges. From there, we decide the winners. They officially score whatever their average was.

The bottom 75%? they are not judged again. They are officially scored as their rank against others by the same judge (i.e. Noivern-32nd).

This system is very high precision at the very top- which is exactly what a contest needs. After that, it becomes very vague, which isn't too much of an issue.

The people who didn't do the best still get a general idea of how they did, which is nice.

Plus, how the groups are made has a lot of flexibility. We could group people:

-Randomly
-Against people with similar themes
-Away from people with similar themes
-As they would be best suited to the judge
-Upon request (but have the judges randomized) (say two users who aren't great designers want to be scored against eachother- there we go)

Plus the percent for moving on can change- 40% for a larger group, 10% for a smaller one (but it can't be too small, or some people who otherwise would've done great wouldn't make it past round 1).

What do you think?
Want to see my Super Mario Timeline?
if 25% of the levels are only scored by one judge and all the levels that one judge doesn't like are dumped before getting any other judge's opinion, that's pretty unfair and is completely controlled by bias
That's basically the system I've been suggesting (except we would use more than 4 preliminary judges just so every level is judged by multiple people anyway), so we might see something like that, yeah.
Your layout has been removed.
I understand that i should be more patient, but what's happened with the VLDCX?
I'll quote the post from idol.

Originally posted by idol
This isn't big enough to really warrant it's own new thread, so consider it a mini-update. As of right now, Lolyoshi has completed judging, Noivern has completed judging, and Koopster is like 6 levels away from finishing judging. Sinc-X and Rameau's Nephew are both in the triple digits as well.

Vitor Vilela will be taking care of all the scary ASM related things regarding this project, as Medic has stepped down.

I anticipate results won't take terribly long now (hopefully), and then we can go full grind putting this boy together. Thanks for the patience y'all.

Renembering that this is from almost 2 months ago.