It’s taken much longer than any of us could ever have anticipated, but at long last, we have a worthy and deserving winner - and it turned out to be the right one, although a few entries came close. Well done to Falling_Comet for finally winning a CSR round for the first time ever!
And as the biggest (and in my opinion, best) CSR round ever, this will be an even tougher act to follow than the previous one, such was the diversity among all 64(!) entries. However, your decision not to host any subsequent CSR rounds is understandable - this one took an awful lot of time to complete due to your work commitments. Hopefully the next round, whatever it’s about (and regardless of when and where it’s set), will be wrapped up sooner than later - after it has been announced, of course.
To be completely honest, a lot of procrastination was involved too, but I think a discussion about how to make these easier on the host, whether that be submission limits or whatever needs to happen when the time is right.
Here is a sheet with most of the stats of entries entered: (download to be able to sort columns)
I removed some of the unfiltered subjective stuff to avoid salt, but feel free to ask me if you want help with your car or are confused with where you placed.
One thing that could be helpful is to get the players themselves to fill out the stats for the cars in a spreadsheet, could even be a google forms (which comes out in a spreadsheet format), therefore reducing the burden on hosts, especially for the first round of elimination.
And then, once the weeds are out, it could lead to an easier decision with fewer remaining cars.
Thank you for such an amazing challenge! And my first CSR to be won! I’m still in the process but i’ll probably end up hosting with someone, as this is my first challenge to be hosted. I’ll see if I will be able to host. Give me around 2-4 days since this is my first time, thank you for understanding, sorry. Got some personal stuff happening rn making it harder to create a challenge quickly xd.
I’m going to be honest: it was well worth the wait. Excellent effort, and certainly differs in a good way from what I thought it was going to be, opting for a simple, refreshing approach. What I liked the best was that there was genuine human emotion in it, which made it all the more unpredictable and fun.
It’s not a huge amount of effort plugging the stats into a spreadsheet; it is a huge amount of effort going to the trouble of producing such a complicated write-up at the end.
The solution is simple, as I’ve demonstrated before - in your initial write-up, keep it simple, no more than a sentence or two per car. You don’t need a great big diatribe about why this car doesn’t make the next round or the finals. And let’s face it, even in a round this big, maybe ten cars deserved to make the final judging, where you can take more time to delve into details.
Great stuff everyone; lots of innovative, intriguing cars that make my entry look plain. Hopefully I do better next time, and as such I’m looking forward to the 125th CSR to do so.
CB has done just that on this challenge, for example, yet it was still extremely time consuming. I have been on the same boat, having to handle ~50 cars and it was a pain.
Downloading, checking if cars comply with regulations and ensuring a reasonable reason to eliminate a car take time, especially when we are talking about anything beyond 30-40 entries.
If we could leverage all potential aspects, we could make it less burdensome and ensure we don’t have a string of people passing down hosting, as always.
To summarize, my ideas for saving time would be:
Stat input into spreadsheet
People understanding binnings from stat input and/or ad/preliminary pictures only
Minimal writing for worse cars (which has been used for over 100 rounds)
The shorter reviews are very valid, but personally i dont feel right giving a 1 sentence review for something that mightve taken an hour to build. You know the spreadsheet might be a valid option for hosts and also help entries because even in a round almost as open as it could possibly be, I still had some people miss the regs. People might catch their own mistakes entering it in. Downside is everyone knows your stats. I guess its natural to have a trade off with quality and quantity.
The experience I had with the spreadsheet entries is that it is way faster for the host just to check (and maybe correct) values already entered by the player entering the challenge. Sometimes they mistype stuff, but it’s quick to fix and really quick to just check when you don’t have to type everything in as a host.
The “all the stats are revealed to everybody” issue is a real problem, yes. Another option would be to put up a spreadsheet for everybody to download and enter their values privately, sending it back to the host. Then you as the host can just copy all the columns into a single spreadsheet. This approach still does not help when you want to evalute the realism of the cars of course. Then you really need to go through all the tabs and see for yourself what has been done to the cars.
But no matter which way you choose, writing a few words for each entry seems to be a must-have for me in order to show respect to the effort the people have put into their cars. I completely agree with Chickenbiscuit here. Hosting challenges with 30+ cars is a big task and I can understand that not everybody wants to commit to that, especially given the expected fast pace of the CSR.
My recommendation is to slow down a bit - quality over quantity. A new CSR challenge in a 3-4 week period is completely fine in my opinion. This will increase the quality of submissions and put less pressure on the host.
Another option would be staggered CSRs - two parallel streams with double the time to finish a single challenge. Let’s say a new challenge every 2 weeks with 4 weeks to finish each challenge (2 weeks for submissions, 2 weeks for reviews). Then players have a new challenge every 2 weeks, while the host has 2 weeks to finish a challenge. Or make it 3 streams - 1 week for submission (this hopefully reduces the number of entries) and 2 weeks for review.
I feel like the staggered CSR is basically CSC, maybe we just could use more one-off challenges so it isn’t all concentrated on 1 or 2 challenges at a time. Or maybe we could have another “”“weekly”"’ challenge that is more open with the format and not just “this person is buying a specific kind of car”. Something that allows stuff like 5 fixture wonder challenges or other things that focus more on the mechanics of the design editor or calls for 2 car submissions for example.
