Gripes? Only that the next few first-time hosts will have a hard time meeting the standard set by the clear brief, fair rules, quick turnaround, transparent scoring, and especially the excellent writing displayed here. In particular, how the final story was a suspenseful feature-by-feature buildup of hints towards the final reveal, each narrowing it down further, was outstanding. I knew I was out from the start of the finals, with the mention of a quiet engine (I let mine sing a little; a smooth old-school straight-six is just aural sex), but I didn’t expect to get as far as second.
I’ll take second place with a quality review like that any day. Bravo!
As for this generation of the Sharriallat - previous incarnations, in order of making, were 1995, 2003, 1968, 1959, 1990, 1980, and 2006 - I guess I just wasn’t in an angular mood…
EDIT: On further reflection, while the alteration of cars was a sensible enough decision, that’s only within the context of strict period correctness. Examining that context, it comes down to the importance of declaring, in the rules of any car design challenge, what the expectations are. Rear DW was rare on production cars in 1964, true, but the technology existed, and I can state with some confidence that were I running a car company back then, I’d’ve quite likely used it - that’s just my engineering ethos. For rear DW specifically, given its unfamiliarity to auto engineers back then, I think a better solution is to allow it but affix a price penalty to reflect longer engineering times or having to hire more specialized engineers.
I agree. I don’t want to hang out some certain host (because it is not the fault of one person, and even I am to blame as the one starting up the series, not having any clear guidelines sometimes) but it feels like sometimes JOC has been on a decline and this one shows that it can revert to a good challenge again.
Fred Lugoff Jr, what a guy! I love that you went with that. Fun fact: When writing my ad, for inspiration I zoomed in on a random area of South Carolina on google maps. I found a little town called Lugoff that seemed to have a high concentration of car dealerships for its size. I don’t think it’s too farfetched for a place like that to have emerged around a pioneering family business and eventually be named after its founder.
I have to admit I was worried when I read you altered the cars for realism. But ultimately I think that felt more fair than having an arbitrary points penalty applied (or even worse getting binned for an unwritten rule). And I do remember thinking “this is cheesy” when selecting phonograph. I think that item would be more balanced if it gave less comfort and more prestige instead.
I’m expecting the next stage of this JOC to take place some time in the 1970s, given that the previous stages took place in 1959 and 1964, respectively.
I think this is a misunderstanding of how realism/design scoring was applied. Entries were selected as finalists based solely on the entrant’s vision. No realism/design scoring was applied until after finalists were selected, and even then it was applied only to ranking finalists, not re-ranking other entries. I did not do any re-tuning of the cars beyond the identified changes to parts and resetting the rear brake force to the same strength as it had been with disc brakes.
This brief was written as one that would give fairly wide latitude on realism but that would give an advantage to particularly good realism. By tweaking only the finalists’ entries for realism, I was operating consistently with the brief by giving an advantage in the finals to more realistic cars without otherwise penalizing any cars that might not have been quite as realistic.
Also keep in mind that under the brief, I could have simply said that I felt some finalist or other was particularly good or bad at design/realism without offering any clear basis for that conclusion. Similar things have been done in other challenges. Instead, I was transparent about exactly what was being considered realistic or not and clearly laid out the basis for how differences in realism would be scored.
I think it would have been helpful in hindsight if I had worked out precisely how I was going to apply the realism/design scoring in advance, since maybe some of the current disagreement could have been avoided if I had done so. But I ultimately do not agree that anything about how I applied realism/design scoring to finalists was inappropriate or inconsistent with the brief.
Again keeping in mind that nobody was binned for having a phonograph, the linked source only confirms my understanding that phonograph players were only ever a rare option in a handful of models. Especially in the context of the brief that has a relatively modest budget and emphasizes that cost is a significant consideration, it simply seems unlikely to me that such a car would have a rare phonograph player option.
I think this also explains partially why I was hard on phonograph players; the way they are balanced in the game seems to make them a way to sort of mindlessly spam comfort levels.
Your ad gave me such a clear inspiration for a car salesman character that I couldn’t help but run with it! I’m glad you like how I ran with the character.
the main disadvantage of rating design based on likes - early posted cars will have more views and higher chance to get liked than late posted cars. for example, first posted mediocre looking car can get more likes, than beatiful car that posted right before deadline. i think separate voting created after submissions closed would represent it better.
as for fixtures - i mentioned that it takes time to get fixture to load properly while sending .car file. idk why it happens, probably because of modded body or some bug. you can see in your images that on rear view not only tail light got messed, but also chrome trim along the side body is not conformed to the body, but on front view it’s layed properly
I’ll just jump in with my own thoughts quickly because I’ve spotted something I want clarifying.
Why would you do the tallying of points this way, disregarding half the entries purely based on engineering and then doing a second re tally of points using looks and engineering combined, it makes no sense. I haven’t seen the spreadsheet but surely there might’ve been a winner further down the order? How can you be sure you haven’t robbed someone of a higher placed finish.
Not that I would’ve finished highly by any means, but it explains why I finished so far down because looks weren’t even a thing for the first scoring.
It’s just an odd thing to do, I tend to advocate for looks quite strongly 50/50 with engineering, other challenges like CSR maybe 20/80. But for this challenge you could’ve sent a brick, a literal 5 fixture brick and got into the final based on engineering.
Presuming you mean this part of the brief quoted below, nowhere does it actually say what order you do the judging in. Just that you will use your own eyes to do so. That’s perfectly fine, saves time over hosting a community vote or any other method.
However, not judging looks at all was not on my bingo card.
Finally, this brings me to my last point which wasn't on my bingo card either.
HUHHHH???
Changing someone’s entry??? This defeats the entire point of the competition??? If the car wasn’t good enough to be there like Martin says, then it shouldn’t be there!!!
What it looks like to me is that you’ve added up all the engineering points, posted a result here, then you’ve added the “bad” engineering negative points in, added the looks into play and ended up with the finalists where they are. Clumsy, not forward thinking and a mess.
Eh. Yeah I didn’t read up on the alteration part, spotted it right now, but that actually makes me change my mind about this being a good round…
That is absolutely NOT a thing that is OK to do.
I can really see not wanting DW rear suspension, disc brakes etc. here - but then they should have been banned from the start. The general rule is more or less “if the rules does not ban it, it is allowed”. First allowing something and then fiddling with contestants entries are never OK. Period.
One good reason? Disc brakes and DW costs more than drum brakes and STA, and maybe someone left out something to not break budget, that they could have fit on a car with drums and STA, now leading to a worse placement.
Yes, thats ruining an otherwise good hosting, but thats a first-time-hosting error that propably won’t happen again, so please guys dont grill him like a medieval witch.
The only time I am touching entrants is when I want to avoid a very unfortunate bin, like being 50 over budget after export-import goofs or a naming error or if custom materials dont work.
It’s interesting. I ended up not entering this round because I didn’t have inspiration enough for my car’s looks, as well as because I felt I couldn’t compete with the European-style entries with a period-correct American car; now I read that design was irrelevant beyond making a flashy ad at the right time of day that would get likes, and that the engineering was corrected towards “plausibility” manually by the host. Damn, I might have to say something now.
Now, maybe this is some manner of self-deprecation on your end, but “trust me”, your eyes are far less likely to deceive you than the fickleness of people liking posts - I know that I’ve never been consistent in giving out mine. This is doubly true when you take out the bias that naturally comes with designing your own car as opposed to judging others. You’re been here for less than half a year; I was seriously bad with that forum time, as were most other people here - often regardless of their playtime prior to joining the community proper. The fact that you’ve gotten “savaged” entering the highest-esteem challenges around is not a reason to despair in your judgement or your ability.
Regarding this section, the whole “cheesefest pitchfork” thing isn’t what you have to worry about; what you do have to worry about is messing with people’s design choices without warning that this would be done. One can say that because the finalists were good regardless of the alterations, no grievous harm was done - but the reality is, these people would have made different design decisions were they limited to the “realistic” choices detailed here. This is why hosts either ban/penalize stuff they don’t want explicitly, or place disclaimers of “realism expected, do research and cheese at your own risk” so that there’s a guessing game. The latter you actually stated in the brief yet proceeded not to follow through.
Now, like Hippo said, it wouldn’t do to grill you at the stake. While I did not end up entering, the brief was pretty good, as was the writing; generally, the setup part of this round was executed very well, and I congratulate you on that. As for judging, I think what went wrong is that you focused too much on trying to eliminate “arbitrariness” and not enough on simply judging the entrants for what they were. It’s an interesting word, too, because as the host of the challenge, you indeed are the arbiter, the referee, the judge. You don’t need to pretend like you’re just the spreadsheet-keeper, and attempts to do so make challenges drier and less rewarding. Speaking of host powers and responsibilities, remember now that you’re catching some flak that as the host, your word is final for this competition. Don’t take the criticism as a call to shitcan and redo the result; definitely don’t take it as an indication that somebody doesn’t like you. Instead, take it as genuine advice for the future. You’ll host half a dozen more of these before you know it.
So initially I did not catch both those things, but yeah, I think Texas said it well and I won’t say much more. Take it as a learning experience for the next one.
Some tips: if you do not want arbitrary penalty, one option is to give Realism a star category and rate them 0 to 10, comparatively. Or explicitly call out engineering choices that would result in a bin.
As for design, it should factor in the finalists if it’s a starred category. Also judging (and executing) our own designs is a lot harder than judging the final design of someone else, you should be confident making the call next time, or do an explicit public vote instead.
Other than that, the brief and writing were excellent! Thanks for hosting it and grats to all the finalists.
As for hosting next round, still need to post and host ARM so I will leave hosting opportunity to @moroza
I appreciate those of you who are trying to provide constructive criticism to a new host. That said, I feel like some of these critiques are cutting in different directions that are a bit confusing, and I also feel that for some reason the judging and brief here is being held to a standard that I have not seen other briefs and judging held to in the few months I’ve been active here.
I do wish in hindsight that I had approached this challenge by setting out some clear criteria, similar to the rules for cross-ply tires only, concerning suspension design, gears, disc brakes, and phonographs. That is something I will take as a lesson learned to apply in any future challenges I host.
That said, I feel like the criticism of “modifying entries” is overblown. The point of creating clone versions of just the finalists with what I perceived to be a very limited number of more realistic engineering was to try to calculate what degree of realism penalty I felt should be applied to these entries. To me, this seems more fair and more consistent that simply saying, “I though this entry’s use of rear double wishbone suspension wasn’t very realistic, so I put it lower down in the rankings” or assign some arbitrary numerical modifier.
As for design vs. engineering scoring, the brief was clear from beginning that design was not a scoring priority, and I think it is actually consistent given this brief for design to essentially be a bonus. Earl and Wendy are trying to get as much comfort and/or sportiness on a budget, so it completely makes sense to me that they would start their research by narrowing vehicles based on the rather ‘objective’ criteria and then see if they can also get something with some style out of those options. I think all of the criticism about design scoring would make much sense if this were, say CSR162 where both the listed scoring criteria and the brief made clear that the shopper was placing a high priority on design. As for the weight I assigned to design or when I applied that scoring criterion, at least in my experience, I have not seen other competition briefs state upfront the precise weight that will be applied to design vs. engineering or any particular scoring factor. Rules for this competition were open for discussion for a while, and at no point did anyone request that I break down the specific distribution of design vs. engineering scoring.
This is one criticism I particularly don’t understand. I did say in the brief that realism would be considered, but I left it to each entrant to decide what that meant. I then did follow through by taking realism into consideration in the scoring. There might be disagreement about how I went about taking realism into consideration, but I did consider it.
As for the use of “likes” in design scoring, I did in fact consider that these were not perfectly reliable measurements because people are not systemically going through and deciding whether or not to like another entry. However, a brief skim showed that there was no clear correlation between how early something was posted and how “liked” it was. I also did look at the cars from my own perspective and found that I generally agreed with what the “like” numbers were saying, so I was not simply throwing in numbers blindly without considering the limitations of the data. I agree that doing some sort of formal voting process would be better than relying on likes in the future.
I frankly find it frustrating that there has been, what seems to me, a rush to judgment before anyone even bothered to ask for the spreadsheet. So here it is:
I in fact did run a 50/50 design engineering calculation of overall scores; however, I continue to believe that doing initial eliminations based solely on engineering made sense in the context of the brief and the sort of car Earl and Wendy were looking for.
A few comments on cars that score highly by this metric but that did not make the finals:
Ponto Fiorenzi - Why would Earl and Wendy buy a car that is the least comfortable they tried and of only middling sportiness? It scores well on operating costs and practicality, but it just doesn’t add up that both Earl and Wendy would sacrifice their individual priorities for this car.
Winson Sapphire Touring - I have pretty much the same comment on this one as the Ponto, except that this one scored only below average on comfort, instead of the absolute lowest.
Skyhawk Mayflower Club - This one does score well on comfort, but it doesn’t blow others out of the water on comfort while also being not particularly sporty. The Skyhawk also gets a big scoring boost from offroad capability that seems overkill for the offroad need that was described in the brief–which was just the ability to handle some dirt roads.
Armor Valencia - This one scores pretty highly on comfort and decently on sportiness, perhaps enough to make it one Wendy would want and Earl would be OK with. But there are other cars that offer a lot more sportiness and nearly enough comfort, and the Armor is dragged down by one of the worst cost of ownership scores.
Centurian Regalia - This is one that I gave a sort of honorable mention to as one that Wendy lobbied for but Earl vetoed. It’s a good car with very good comfort but, again, it just doesn’t make sense to me that this car with poor sportiness would be picked over something offering both comfort and sportiness.
Ultimately 6 out of the 7 finalists blew everything else out of the water on sportiness, and all of the finalists other than the Ariete - which was the sportiest by a long shot - had above average comfort as well. It just doesn’t make sense to me that Earl and Wendy would look past these cars.
I am not going to comment on this competition any further. I continue to believe that my scoring was conscientious, well-thought-out, fair, and consistent with the way that the priorities were briefed. And frankly, I feel frustrated by the scope and speed of the pile-on here that came before I shared the scoring spreadsheet–or before anyone even asked to see it. It’s especially frustrating considering that I poured time and effort into turning around very thorough reviews in a week. I have seen competitions that dribble out two-sentence reviews with far less explanation of the scoring over a two-month period take basically zero flak for the quality of the judging.
I understand the frustration of having a competition entry flop, and I am guilty myself of venting that frustration. But the intensity and number of comments here seem, to me, disproportionate and over the line.
I think there is one key thing that should be reiterated before this closes out: we loved the challenge. The presentation was well laid out and mostly clear, and the reviews were great to read. It was a good challenge not just by first-timer standards, but in general, and it made us happy; Remember and take pride in that.
Also understand that (most of) the people here aren’t trying to “pile-on” salty criticism, even as the limitations of text make it seem that way; they’re responding because they enjoyed and were invested in the challenge so much, because they appreciate how much effort you put towards it and want to help you achieve your goals better in the future. Many of these criticisms are valid, not all may be useful or well-phrased, but none are malicious.
Also, in my opinion I kinda like it when a challenge tries something different, even if it doesn’t turn out that well in the end. It gives us a nice change of pace, and introduces some new ideas into the community. The fact that we’ve something to learn from this round is a perk, not a problem.
I’m aftaid I see it differently, and it doesn’t seem like I’m alone. You did not factor in realism in the “race to the finals”, making it a different competition (I will take you at your word that this didn’t affect the eventual results much; that does not remove or justify the problem). Then, in the finals, the cars that had unrealistic features were removed from consideration altogether and replaced with different cars - looking the same and credited to the same people, but engineered differently.
In justifying this choice, you floated the alternate scenario of “arbitrarily” (that word again…) taking points off entries; having entered challenges aplenty, I know that a verdict stating “Your company built a car with this advanced suspension, but because of a mix of engineering challenges and customer tastes it didn’t play as well with this or that shopper” would be much more palatable to me than one stating “Well, your company actually didn’t build it this way…”. Simple as that.
Regarding the rest of that comment, I understand that reading a whirlwind of controversy can be disheartening after having run a tight ship of a challenge. I agree: there’s worse things to do than to use an unorthodox judging system. It just so happens that personal problems and writer’s blocks leading to longer wait times and shorter reviews - that’s sadly commonplace. A host revealing two separate judging tactics in the same post that people take issue with is quite a bit more uncommon - and extraordinary situations both require, and invite, extraordinary scrutiny.
I think its the best to sleep over it for a night and come back to it later - there we’re many good things in this hosting, and with that one aspect, well, avoid it in the future and there is not much else to do better.
After doing exactly that, sleeping on it, here are my thoughs:
I noticed that none of the people whose cars were actually altered seem to have taken any issue with it.
While I do think it would have been even better if they were left as is or if the realism rules were concrete to begin with, I think this was the most elegant way of handling “do your research” realism I have seen on this forum. The fact that @oldmanbuick here decided to make the effort to reveal what the finalists would have looked like if the realism rules were properly fleshed out is something I will commend rather than criticize.
On the topic of the judging criteria being different in the finals versus the qualifying rounds; If they were the same we might as well have skipped straight to revealing the winner, no? That would be boring.
With the writing taken into account, this was all in all the most fulfilling challenge I have participated in here so far.
OK, I said I was done commenting, but I didn’t want to leave things on a sour note.
After taking @Happyhungryhippo’s sage advice of sleeping on it, I have a few things to say:
It’s pretty cool finding a group of people who are as weirdly obsessed as I am with cars and this virtual playground of designing/building them, and it’s actually pretty great to find folks who care enough about these things to be debating the finer points of how we’re scoring them. I know we all have various things going on in the real world that can be stressful and that we all come here for a little fun and friendly competition–but that also means that because we care, that can create some friction when we don’t all see eye-to-eye. So, thank you, all of you, and I hope we can all move past this bit of controversy and keep enjoying competing against each other.
I have definitely learned a lesson that I will be clearer about laying out realism/design criteria–and scoring criteria generally–upfront in any future challenges I host, so that we can have any discussions needed like this on the front-end and hash things out before entries start rolling in, instead of having discord at the end of the contest that leaves a sour taste in everyone’s mouth.
There were some seriously good designs/builds in this competition, and I could tell a lot of time and effort went into these builds across the board. In fact, even the builds that didn’t score that well by the criteria in this contest showed a lot of effort and had some strong points in their designs, which I tried to make sure to give credit for in the reviews.
I think that we can all agree that, however we feel about exactly how I did the judging, @karhgath had a very good build that was worthy of a win. Maybe a different judge/host would have picked one of the other very strong contenders, but I would hate for any of the controversy about my judging to somehow diminish the credit due to karhgath or put an asterisk next to his win.
I’m looking forward to seeing how our next host moves things forward in the next round (and you can bet Flint Motors will be throwing an offering into the mix). Speaking of which, @moroza, since karhgath is tied up with other hosting responsibilities, are you willing and able to host the next round?
You did great man, up until the fumble I had no idea you were a first time host.
Guess people that came in 20th think they would have won the event with no prize haha
(like loosing on whos line because the winner got a random million points)
