VLDC9 Results - Judge comments added

It's their job. They won't be "fair" with your stance of what position you should've get according to you.

Your level ranking "low" doesn't necessarily mean it was bad, there were just better levels.

Also you should be a bit more willing to accept feedback - please remember it's supposed to help you improve, we're not insulting you or anything.

The judge commentary is a good way to know what you did wrong!

You call it 'not suitable for VLDC,' I call it a failed risk. Basically my deal is I literally cannot make an easy level - I've tried, I just get bored - so instead I attempt to make extreme difficulty 'work,' so to speak. Trouble is, above a certain point peeps start to take issue with it no matter what you do - presumably why you say it's 'not suitable for VLDC' to begin with - and needless to say I went quite a bit above that this time. What Koopster apparently having some measure of fun with my level tells me is that I did something right behind the largely impenetrable and excessive difficulty.

@Zyglrox Odyssey: for what it's worth, I don't your design, personally. I don't think anybody really has a right to say a level "is not right for the VLDC" unless it's an outright impossible level to beat without tools (disclaimer: I haven't played your level this year, but if it was like butts.zip from VLDC8, it shouldn't be that terrible).

71st place, huh? I was hoping to place better than that (I predicted I'd place somewhere in the 20s-40s), but I'm not too upset about it or anything. I mostly entered this contest for fun and because I wanted to participate in a SMWCentral contest for once. And hey, at least I'm not in the worst world. XD

However, I'm a little surprised about why I got 71st place. The opinions of the judges were very mixed on my level, with them giving me a 11/60, 31/60, 42/60, and a 52/60. I might have placed in the 30-40 range if that one judge that gave me a 11/60 gave me a score similar to what the others gave, and it makes me wonder if that judge was having a bad day or something when he/she played my level. But, I'm not going to fuss about it. There is always next year, and I congratulate everyone else who participated and put a lot of effort into making their levels, even those that placed lower than I did.

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Mario's Strange Quest V1.6
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Other stuff:
My SMW/SMAS/SMAS+W disassembly
Yoshifanatic's Discord Server: A place for fans of my stuff and/or Yoshi to chat with others.

Regarding unexpected placements or scoring:
I think there were just a lot of great entries this year with 115 entrants, which could have made it a lot harder to rank high or well enough.
A 50th place this year is definitely not the same as 50th place in VLDC8 or 7.

Also to be fair to ninja boy, he really doesn't have as many scores in the 50s and 40s compared to the other judges I think; could easily be why he had such a huge influence on the rankings.
A 30-something-scored level could still be a great level to him.

It's part of being a good level designer to know how to design for other people, not just yourself. "You literally can't do it" is a lame ass excuse. It's just a little aggravating that it doesn't seem like you're taking all the feedback about its obnoxious difficulty into consideration and only seeking out anyone who had the patience enough to like the level.


Nothing like ninjaboy's inconsistent scores, but just scores I think are very weird like excavator's, christian07's, and dax's. Also the perfect scores for levels that are, tbh, objectively not perfect, like Wakana's. There also seems to be a harsher scoring for anything a tad bit more challenging than usual (and this is coming from the guy who actively wanted to goal sphere 7 levels because of their difficulty). "Out of whack" is probably not applicable to yours compared to ninjaboy's, but still, I gotta question some of your scores.

I honestly thought your level was going to score better too. Hell I thought it was going to score better than mine (52nd place). The whole triangle gimmick was extremely creative.



11/60 is just too low IMO.

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Formerly known as nick 139
My YouTube channel

At the same time, you have to accept that some people just have different opinions than you. No level is perfect, but that doesn't mean I can't give a perfect score. Nor does you not liking them mean I can't find them great.

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<Adam> I feel like smwc is a prostitute now, because we put up a porn ad for money

btw I like how Eternity's and Koopsters' judging pages have been replace-all-corrupted with things like "Medic%" and "2Frost" because they were originally numbers.
My personal favorites though are PaperdomoChristian07 and "The Medics Challenge"

In fairness, never in my life have I claimed to be a good level designer by any metric. That said, I'm aware "I literally can't do it" is a poor excuse for an excuse; it doesn't excuse anything, it's just a statement. My excuse is that for the most part anything more than a few steps below 'dude what are you doing submitting this to a contest this is probably a felony' in difficulty just outright bores me - why that's the case is a whole other question I couldn't even begin to answer - and I'm not inclined to continue designing a level I'm bored of messing with; that kinda entirely defeats the purpose in my eyes. If that makes me a bad designer then so be it, I can live with being a bad designer if the alternative is forcing myself through the design process of a level I don't even like myself.

I understand it may look like that, but that's largely because I'm like, barely even an entity over here. On top of that - perhaps partly because of that - most of the feedback I've been seeing has been along the lines of 'it's too hard,' 'you have like no room to work with,' stuff like that, all things I kinda figured going into this could be problems. I'm not so delusional as to have thought this was gonna go well when I submitted it, the core conceit of it is utter nonsense and I have a long and storied history of going waaaay overboard in difficulty over on the talkhaus. Not a good combination.



Basically I went for 'kinda like butts.zip in how it's really hard but short and totally doable-ish with switches' except longer and with an actual midpoint... buuuuuut overshot the difficulty. Hard. Also the gimmick is even more 'out there' and inherently terrible of an idea.

I didn't fair that well I guess, oh well, hopefully I'll improve next time. I just really wanted to participate.

....what?