Cool Wall is an intermittent challenge series first run in December 2021, meant to focus on the more subjective side of car shopping. Created by @Edsel with help from @Knugcab and @AMuteCrypt, it’s intermittent in nature, a bit experimental, and has unorthodox conventions that deviate from usual forum conventions.
Based on the CSR rules thread, this is a guide that explains how Cool Wall works from a hosts’ perspective, with emphasis on the parts that differ from other challenges.
What makes Cool Wall different from other challenges?
- The most obvious difference is the Cool Wall itself. In CW the highest-ranking score category has always been a rank of how “cool” (desirable) the owner considers a car. But players aren’t told what makes a car cool, or given any inspirations; instead, they’re presented with a “Cool Wall” that ranks real life cars based on the fictional client’s tastes. It’s up to the players to submit cars for the wall, collaboratively building a map they can use to figure out the client’s tastes.
- Cool Wall is also very broad in scope. In a traditional challenge, entrants are given a specific prompt to make (e.g. “a 2017 upmarket B-segment hatchback”), but in Cool Wall players are largely unrestricted in what type or era they submit. You’re given the client’s needs and wants, and it’s your call what you think’ll meet them. Here, a Lamborghini and Trabant could go up against each other, and depending on the rules have equal chances of winning.
- With the broad scope also comes a lower barrier to entry. Restrictions that would normally be rules, like emissions or realism, are only minor point penalties here. This is mainly because CW assumes the entries are used cars, which have often had wear and modifications. Also, Cool Wall was originally intended to be pretty accessible and forgiving for newer players.
- Since model year is often unrestricted, Cool Wall instead has a “depreciation chart” that varies how much budget a car should get based on its age; so 20 year old cars, for example, get a bigger budget than 5 year old ones.
- Cool Wall uses a point-based system for each scored category, including coolness. Once Coolness and penalties have been decided, results are calculated pretty automatically. Despite this…
- Cool Wall is a long-format challenge, where hosts are actually encouraged to slow down and take some time getting things done. The challenge itself only runs every few months, submission periods are on the longer side, and results are posted in serial category-by-category installments to build suspense. A Cool Wall can easily be expected to take a while.
Finally, Cool Wall is a pretty experimental challenge in nature; while a lot of the advice here details best practices, you are more than encouraged to try something new if it occurs to you! Experimentation with the rules is what made this a recurring challenge in the first place. Just make sure you always communicate what you are doing in advance, so that people can give feedback on your changes and learn from 'em with you.
Deciding who hosts
As with most challenges, hosting is passed onto the highest-finishing player of the last round that accepts. If no one accepts… I guess, the first person that volunteers, gets it.
Unlike most challenges, hosts are usually advised not to start hosting immediately, since Cool Wall is more of a treat when it’s rare. There’s no rule for how long to wait, but a good ballpark is between 6-12 months.
The flexible schedule and slow pace may make Cool Wall seem easier to accept than most. But be careful; Cool Wall is a long and often popular challenge with a very high scope. It’s still a lot of work to host one, so consider whether you’re willing to take that work on or not. And if you accept, but then things change for you, don’t be afraid to say so later.
Materials to prepare
Once you do make your initial post, you should have ready:
- Lore on the client
- Rules and Penalties
- Depreciation Chart
- Scoring system explanation
- Coolness criteria (not public)
- Cool Wall Itself
- Empirical Scoring areas
- Any other relevant submission details.
These are the parts that require the most explaining, so I’ll go more into detail on these below.
Submission Phase
Once the challenge starts, an optimal length for submissions is usually about 3-4 weeks. You need time for participants to send cool wall suggestions, for you to add them, for participants to analyze the wall, for this to repeat 2-3 times, and then for participants to build and submit their entry. And during this period, be ready to update the wall at least every couple days (ideally every day) as new suggestions come in.
Posting Results
Cool Wall results are like a race; much of the fun is seeing the cars move up and down the leaderboard, and players getting to talk about it between categories. That’s why results are posted category-by-category; and why, even if you can and do write them faster, I recommend picking a timeline between once a day and once a week, and post them no quicker. If you do need longer, that’s ok (we’re in no hurry to get to the next one anyway), but be sure to communicate such, so people don’t get concerned/restless.
Coolness results usually consist of a quick, QFC-like summary of each car, explaining why it ranked how it did. Penalties are presented in a similar manner, explaining what each penalized car did wrong (especially for realism penalties). The empirical categories, however, typically just highlight the best & worst cars.
Each round also includes a list of each car’s point earnings, a total of their position on the leaderboard, and a spot for additional miscellaneous notes if/as needed (hosts’ thoughts, honorable mentions, other statistics, etc.).
Also, it’s usually best to reveal the results from the smallest to largest categories. As scores get higher, score gaps get wider, so this ensures there’ll be more late-round upsets, and more uncertainty as to who will win. The exceptions to this are penalties and coolness; since they’re the hardest to rank, it makes sense to do those first if you’d like.
(Because you can see the final ranking in advance, you could even manipulate the order of reveals to make it more exciting; such as by putting the winner’s best category last, so they don’t take first until the very end.)
Client Lore
It’s up to you who’s buying these cars, and how much detail you want to give them. While Cool Wall isn’t a hyper lore-centric challenge, the premise does revolve around a unique character and their tastes. So you should have some lore, but how detailed it is up to you. You’re perfectly free to craft long, multi-page backstories and do all your reviews in-character if you want; but if you can get by with a single paragraph, that’s cool too.
Rules and Penalties
Rules are the things that a car must meet to qualify for the challenge at all. With how broad in scope Cool Wall is, you should aim to have as few rules as possible; the bare minimum to meet your hosting needs, prevent cheese, and maybe ensure lore or era appropriateness. Anything else your standard CSR would need- realism, street legality, buyer preferences -should go in the “penalties” section.
There are several reasons for this. Firstly, Cool Wall usually centers around used cars. So what might be unrealistic or unacceptable on a new car, like a lack of radio/mufflers/plates/etc, can be perfectly believable on a used car. Related to that, there are qualities that might not be preferred by the client, but that they’d be willing to live with if the rest of the car makes up for it; Given Cool Wall’s super broad scope, it’s ideal to penalize such a quality by 1-5 points, and give a chance for a car to overcome it.
Finally, Cool Wall is meant to be accessible to newer players. That’s why penalties, especially regarding realism, often give lots of feedback and foster discussion about realism, without actually hurting people’s chances that much.
(…or do they? At the time of writing this, only once has a vehicle that received a penalty ever won the challenge, that being the Knightwick Puma in CW5. Are penalties a bigger hurdle than I thought? Is there another way to do them I haven’t thought of? There’s certainly room for experimentantion there…)
Depreciation Chart
The depreciation chart is kind of a holdover from the first CW, which had less a focus on subjective tastes and more on simulating used-car shopping. In short, The older a car is relative to the challenge’s setting, the more budget it has to work with. (Unless it gets too old, of course).
This can add a lot of dimension to a challenge; for example, if the buyer prefers cars from an era that’s too expensive for them. But it’s also an area I think isn’t as essential to the challenge, if you want to try omitting it (or experimenting with it further?) All depends on what fits your lore!
Coolness Criteria
Your goal is to define the purely-subjective tastes of a fictional client, so that they’re unique and interesting, but predictable and consistent enough that people can figure them out and cater to them, and so you can then use it to rank both their cool wall submissions and actual challenge submissions.
Note that being “consistent” doesn’t necessarily mean being “simple;” real people’s preferences can be absurd, petty, self-contradictory and even blatantly wrong, and so can your Client’s. But you should be able to name the preferences in question, and explain what qualities of a given car influenced its score. There will always be some subjectivity to this, of course, but that subjectivity can’t come from nowhere.
To that end, before you open up the challenge, I suggest making a private list of the client’s tastes, as well as your own “hidden” cool wall. This will help speed things up when placing real entries, and also gives you a guiding set of criteria to keep your rankings on track. Do remember not to show this information to participants though; past rounds have shown that the less revealed outside the cool wall itself, the better.
As an example, here's the criteria and private Cool Wall I made in CW4, which starred a teenager wanting something expensive-looking to impress her friends:
- The most important thing, by far, is that it has to look VALUABLE; or at least, “not cheap.” She hangs out with the richest kids in the state, and is pretending to be one of them; she cannot afford to be seen in anything “budget” or “entry-level”
- A car’s prestige, including the stat, is going to have an impact on how well a car does. But remember, the appearance of prestige and value is more important than the actual value.
- Almost as important as value is that the car be as new as possible, as age is a huge determinant in how valuable a car appears; she’s going to be critical of anything 10 or more years old, and anything more than 20 years old will struggle to even get a positive score.
- Sports cars and performance cars are generally more valuable than their mundane equivalents. But she’s not necessarily looking for a sports car, and speed & value aren’t intrinsically linked; a cheap, old sports car is still a cheap, old car.
- Size is good. The bigger a car is, the more valuable and important it looks, all else considered.
- Having trained as a mechanic for years, she has a very thorough understanding of cars from a mechanical perspective. She is not going to be tricked easily by fake performance or luxury accents and badges. She does know, however, that her friends don’t understand cars nearly as well as she does, and that they will be easily tricked.
Private Cool Wall
Last but very much not least, remember you’re grading the car alone. In real life, a lot of factors beyond a car itself influence its perception; its brand history, its nationality, its presence in popular media, and more. But since people are submitting cars and names they made up in a videogame (possibly in the past week), you have to forget all of these things, and just grade the car itself.
This is especially important for real cars on the Cool Wall, by the way:
- The Toyota AE86 Trueno is incredibly popular because it was the star car of a popular TV show. To you, though, it’s just a fine-for-its-time hot hatch.
- The Ford Mustang Mach-E is hated for appropriating the name of an unrelated sports car. To you, it’s just a dull-but-competent family crossover.
- The Aston Martin Cygnet is funny because it’s out of character for the Aston Martin brand. To you, it’s just an unusually-well-appointed city car.
Cool Wall Itself
The usual way to represent the cool wall is to put together a visual image collage, with photos of all the cars in the graph organized like the one above. Though sometimes it’s been done in, say, a separate Excel doc, or a forum table for readability. It’s really up to you how to format the Cool Wall; as long as it’s readable, easy-to-access, and you update it regularly (don’t forget to update the main post!)
Empirical Scoring Areas
Your goal is to define empirical needs for the client, that contrast the client’s coolness preferences in interesting ways; much of participants’ challenge is deciding how much they should sacrifice coolness for the empirical stats. Now, the client’s needs and wants don’t necessarily have to be complete opposites, but there just should be some meaningful contrast.
Make sure to choose scoring areas that are purely numerical, so that the values could be entered into/calculated by a spreadsheet if desired; if it has to be assessed subjectively, it should be part of Coolness. It also saves you a lot of time to use stats that can be taken direct from the CSV exporter, whenever possible.
The exact number of scoring categories doesn’t matter, but a good ballpark to aim for is to equal/exceed coolness; since Coolness is usually worth between -20 and 20 points, that means at least 40 points worth of scoring areas (usually divided into 10-point and 5-point categories).
Other relevant submission details
This is most of the stuff you’d expect from any challenge. By when should the car be submitted? With what naming convention? How should people send in Cool Wall suggestions, and what information should they include? (usually, make, model, year, and if relevant, trim). Not much to elaborate on here that isn’t already covered in, say, the CSR rules thread.
Scoring System
The most “traditional” way to calculate is explained as follows (and you’re free to copy-paste & modify this explanation into your own challenge if you’d like):
A car’s “coolness” will be ranked on a scale of -20 to +20, with 20 being the coolest possible, and -20 being as uncool as possible. What qualifies as cool is explained in the “coolness” section.
All other categories are worth either 0-10 or 0-5 points. For each category, the best car will be assigned the highest value, the worst car gets the lowest value, and every other car’s value will be assigned in relation (rounded to the nearest tenth). Here’s an example with real-life cars:
(Assuming “practicality” is a 10-point category,) The Transsport has the best practicality, so it gets a score of 10 in that segment. The Seville has the worst practicality, so it gets a score of 0. And the Astra? Its practicality is 1/3rd the difference between the best and worst cars, so it gets a score of 3.3.
Now let’s add a 4th competitor:
Since the Eclipse now has the worst practicality, it gets a score of 0. And since the bar is now been set lower, the Seville gets a score of 4 (2/5 the difference), and the Astra a score of 6 (3/5 the difference). The Transsport, still the best, still gets a score of 10.
This system is demonstrated in practice by @mart1n2005’s scoring sheet from Cool Wall 6, which you’re free to reference & copy as desired:
This system is popular, works, and has been used in most Cool Walls, so you’re recommended to use it. Someone even once provided a spreadsheet that calculated it for you, but the link doesn’t work anymore, so you gotta make your own for now. The equation to calculate a given car’s score is (GivenCar’sValue - WorstScoringCar’svalue) / (BestScoringCar’svalue - WorstScoringCar’svalue) * ValueOfCategory.
(e.g. the calculation for the Astra above, including the Eclipse, is (50 - 20) / (70 - 20) * 10)
Know that this isn’t the only possible way to calculate scores; you’re free to play around with different systems if you have an idea, or if something fits your narrative better. But whatever system you use, make sure you declare and explain it from the outset.
And that’s everything I can think of! Finally, here’s a summary of past rounds for reference. Happy hosting!
- Used Car Shopping by @Edsel - In this inaugural challenge, the Cool Wall was but a secondary gimmick (where cars were already provided upfront) in this one-off about balancing conflicting needs and wants.
- Yet another cool wall challenge by @knugcab - This more-experienced hoster saw the potential of the Cool Wall as a game in and of itself, if made mostly empty at the start. Also, one of the few Cool Walls to not be set in the present day so far (other being CW5)
- Cool Wall Three: Not Cool by @AMuteCrypt - The one to properly enshrine it as a series, Crypt successfully experimented with some alternate scoring methods. They also made the mistake of allowing unlimited Cool Wall suggestions, which spiraled hilariously out of control.
- Cool Wall 4: “I’m Rich!” by @Edsel - This soft-reboot combined elements that worked from the last 2, and was the main precedent that the next few came to be based on.
- Cool Wall 5: High Proof by @Texaslav - The first time Cool Wall passed to the previous winner, rather than the first person who volunteered. Was also the first that had to deal with techpool.
- Cool Wall Six by @mart1n2005 - Another one that successfully replicated the format of the previous 2, and also provided the above scoring template.
- CW7: Golden Age Memories by @abg7 - This host tried to be a bit more ambitious than usual, which was ultimately accomplished, but also struggled to handle the scope, and brought on controversy over poor communication with the ruleset. Was after this one that this guide was written.
Any questions and feedback are welcome in this thread. Especially since this is my first draft at this sort of thing.
