Welcome to the 2024 Open Setup Design Challenge!
hosted by Something_Smart and the worst
What's that?
It's pretty much what it says on the tin. You have a certain amount of time to design a new open setup, and then there will be a vote to determine which setups are the best. We used to have these all the time, but the last one was four years ago (run by me before I became a listmod!), and I think it's about time to bring them back. I was thinking as a yearly thing, but if there's a ton of interest in reviving the bimonthly challenges, I would be willing to facilitate that.
This challenge is
open to everyone
, regardless of previous modding or setup design experience. If you love open setups and have an idea you want to share, don't hesitate to post it! And feel free to ask questions; there are plenty of experienced designers around who would certainly be willing to help out. I am also happy to provide setup design tips to anyone who would like them; reach out to me in this thread of via PM if you're interested.How does it work?
If you do remember the past Challenges, this one will be a little different. There will be two categories:
Standard
and Experimental
. Setups submitted to one category will only be judged against other setups in the same category. As such, there will be two winners, one for each category.Initially, each entrant can submit to only
one
of the two categories. Once the challenge has been running a few weeks and I get an idea of what turnout is likely to be, I may decide to open it up (get it?) to allowing each person to submit one setup to each category. However, you are always welcome to (and encouraged to) help others out and provide feedback on their setups. While this is technically a competition, it's also a collaboration-- we're looking to create awesome setups that will be played for years to come. We will award the Lab Assistant Honorable Mention
to the person we judge to have helped the most with others' setups.Playtesting
Sure, the design challenge is all well and good, but how can you really know if an open setup is good if you've never played it? Well, we have something now that we didn't have before: the Sandbox. If you've come up with your idea, posted a rough draft here, a few people have given some feedback and you've made some revisions, and now you're feeling pretty good about it... take it to the Sandbox! Let people know here that you are doing so, and hopefully we'll be able to muster up enough people for a quick game.
Again, I don't know exactly what the interest in this is going to be, but if there do happen to be a bunch of people running their games in the Sandbox, try to be considerate. If someone joined your game, consider joining theirs, and don't run yours a bunch of times especially if you haven't made changes to it.
Timeline
This challenge will run until
November 15
at 11:59pm EST, which is in 35 days, 1 hour, 4 minutes
. At that point, submissions will be closed, and there will be 7 days to vote. If you do not vote for the category your setup was submitted to, you will be disqualified
; however, you are encouraged to vote for both categories.To vote for a category, you must rank all the setups from most preferred to least preferred. You can have tied setups, but please make an effort to evaluate each setup individually. If you don't feel your setup is the best, you don't have to rank it first, but you can still rank it first if you want. We're not the thought police. Rankings can be posted in the thread or PM'd to me and the worst.
The winner will be determined by Copeland's method, using this calculator. If there's a tie, we'll break the tie by determining who helped more with other people's setups; if that's still tied, we'll just pick the setup we like the most. Deal with it.
Prizes
The winner of each category will receive a custom banner and (if they want) "
Open Challenge Winner
" title. We'll also guarantee that each winning setup gets run in the Open Queue at least once-- if the winner or anyone else wants to run either of the winning setups, they are of course welcome to, but if not then the worst and I will co-mod them soonTM
after the challenge ends.The worst will also make you a custom trophy. Cherish it.
The
Lab Assistant Honorable Mention
will go to the person who contributed the most to reviewing other people's setups. The winner of this will get the "Lab Assistant" title, if they want it, and will also get the right to ping me as much as they want over the next year to review their open setups. (Anyone else is still open to ping me, of course; I'm very responsive on Discord. But the Lab Assistant will get special priority.)
