If you mean one month from rules announcement to final results, you might be right. CSR 145 launched two months ago, but it hasn’t reached the final judging phase yet, so a faster CSR definitely makes sense.
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FNG guy looking in but instead of flavor text and all the weird shit about going on a date and staying over at a place or whatever, can we do it more like Wheeler Dealer, where someone comes in with a budget and a goal, and instead of car shopping we present our ads, as if Mike is reviewing them? Simpler, meatier where it counts, etc.
I have been playing Automation since 2018 but only discovered the forums a bit less than a year ago, because around that time I found out people host challenges. I have never participated in CSR, CSC any of these partly because I’m not as interested in the styling as I’m in the actual engineering, partly because interiors are mandatory and I’m not willing to spend hours trying to make them (have tried many times but they were objectively and subjectively bad), but my biggest reason is every time I checked if a new round had begun, the submissions were already closed, then a week, two, three later a new round hadn’t begun yet and so I check again maybe a month later and the submissions were closed again (if they weren’t, I built a car but didn’t bother with the design so I didn’t enter, that’s on me). I’m not exactly sure what I’m trying to say, something about the time frame being too wide. When I’m looking to enter it’s already closed, (bad luck?) or the judging takes so long that I already lose interest in the to-be next round that I forget to check again. I’m just giving my point of view for everyone to consider.
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I skipped the last one because I was not confident in even surviving the interior making phase. Now I can at least make one, whether good or bad is another thing. It’s easier now that the undo button is no longer the nuke button.
I like the engineering part as well (which is why I made the thread and database related about stat-tracking, join in if interested) and I especially enjoy competing on the numbers at least partially. Not that it’s the deciding factor but it should be stated that engineers don’t really care about what has or has not been done before, if THEY can do it and are able to prove it works.
Now that I brought up the Wheeler Dealer idea I may host a challenge around that if nothing else comes of it.
One of the thing i have against CSR, is mostly of how long and their very very requirements that take people who aren’t as good away from it, like vehicle interiors required, or certain things, and of course, the stupidly long deadlines, CSR over the years has changed very drastically, from a simpler challenge, to a novel you’d find in a book. 3D interiors is basically what puts me off, and probably many others, considering how the Automation camera is in terms of car interiors. There is a potential turning-point for the challenge to make it easier, by dropping the whole 3D Interior mumbo jumbo out, Novels aside, it still is like a traditional Automation challenge, build a car that appeases your buyer, wait a bit, and then results come in about yours, and the other’s cars. However, people seemed to liked the novel aspect of CSR for years. CSR, what i’d like to call it has became “The Real-life Car production and Government regulations” of challenges.
CSR Should just be a challenge, not a turn-off point for many many people because of an 3D interior requirement, Buyers can be very specific, i understand and respect that, And it sort-of basically is an advisory when it comes to an instabin, when your car is instabinned, they tell you what’s wrong with the car, There is things you can learn off those challenges when you get instabinned.
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Honestly I’m somewhat surprised that there’s a separate thread with a discussion needed, as the overall CSR rules should deal with the issue quite clearly… if they were actually followed. Let me quote:
This might seem strict, but, as much as I can interpret Strop’s intentions, was made to prevent what we’re having now. I mean, the stuff some hosts do is amazing, but quite often it’s also… too much. Both for themselves (too much work for the typical CSR entry count), and for the participants (or just readers). I personally stopped following CSR partly because it became too bloated - slow, intimidating, full of - fancy and usually high quality, but - additional stuff to read through, too over-the-top for a recurring challenge.
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There’s a lot of complaints from entrants saying it’s too long etc, I feel there is a huge disconnect between people with both the ability host a decent round and those who want to enter a car every week after making their pride and joy in an hour. Hosting is time consuming even in the quickest of rounds. And limiting the host’s freedom will also lower the pool of people who both want to host and have time to host. Because why host a challenge where the only benefit is more entries, particularly from people who literally say they don’t care about your writing, when you can host something you can have something appreciated by the entrants, with quality entries to write about? The current CSR may be taking its time, but it does in depth with the strength and flaws of each car.
If all you want is to be told that your car is garbage is less words, we can make that happen. We can do it with CSR, but don’t be surprised when the quality drops down drastically as well.
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I thought quality spam got you binned in CSR though?
It’s clear that people hosting really want to write up some detailed backstory, but it’s usually far too much in my opinion.
CSR back when I participated was about learning the game, trying to submit something and seeing what went wrong on how to build for the target, and then seeing what everyone else came up with at the end. Not particularly about how the NPC we were selling to didn’t like the color of the car, had a bad day this morning, and felt the shifter was a bit too touchy.
CSR isnt CSR anymore, mostly for the reasons Hshan just noted in their post here. It would be nice to go back to faster paced rounds under the CSR brand again. It’s not like we dont already have plenty of good RP contests on this forum already (pointing to Shitbox Rally right now at least).
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It’s one thing to write a lot about the car, another to write a mini-novel about the characters who are supposed to just buy the damn thing. If it’s done in a reasonable time, fine, it adds to the experience (to a point) but when it makes a round drag on for over a month, not so much.
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And here’s my question to you, if the fast form CSR was wanted back by so many, so badly, for so long, why is it that only this month did an alternative challenge with those ideas pop up? What was stopping QFC from coming up earlier, the secret cabal of CSR? There’s a lot of people that enter, they can just post a thread and host a challenge here. Clearly some people are upset about it, but it took a damn long time for anyone to try anything else other than complaining.
It’s still just a community ran challenge, with rotating hosts. Literally nothing, aside from the name “CSR” was stopping anyone from solving this so called “issue” that ya’ll up in arms about , yet you have wait till the community manager step in to force other people to host it the way you want it.
This demand is literally just cause the public likes the name and a nostalgia for a process that the majority is too lazy to even do themselves.
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I think that we should be more organic about all this instead of just laying down the law and saying ‘CSR will be short and sweet or you’re fired’. As far as I see, there are two very specific problems that delay CSR:
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Some hosts have developed a knack for turning their review session into an action movie, romance novel or something of the sort. Some story and writing is fine, but we’ve had 2 rounds (both about SUVs, funnily enough) where the writing combined with special effects for God’s sake (CSR138’s photoscene props that at that point were actually cars, and CSR140’s discord messages that somehow took like a month to write and format each time). The problem wasn’t even long-form reviews, it was long-sighted ambitions to make a game build competition into a goddamn visual novel.
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We have a very civil culture in this community, where we strive to make everybody to feel welcome and comfortable. Obviously, this is a good thing. But it also results in situations where all of us just stand around and wait for 2 weeks at a time before a single person has the boldness to tell the host to get a move on. And even when we do pipe up, everybody on this forum has school, work, etc., so they all have an excuse for why this challenge or that one has been halted for weeks, and to ‘give them space’ and ‘not make them uncomfortable’ we just tend to shut up and accept that we’re going to be standing around doing nothing some more.
This is very easily remedied by hosts: Just run the challenge. If you have accepted hosting responsibilities, you should keep in mind the twin solutions to the above twin problems:
(1) You are reviewing and ranking cars made in a semi-simulator video game with design elements. In CSR, you largely do so from the point of view of your specified prospective buyer. So
“John drove to Dealership X”
is fine, whereas
“John woke up, made himself a coffee, kissed his sweet girlfriend and got into his beater car. On his way to Dealership X, he listened to the Roe Jogan podcast”
is wayyyyyyy too much fluff and flavor. And
(2) You accepted the host mantle, after a no-penalty offer not to do so. This means you consciously accept that in the next 2-3 weeks, you will have to set aside time to process entries in a timely manner and then do some writing to present the challenge’s results. Emergencies happen, of course.
Otherwise, Xepy’s right; no need to muscle CSR into its own formula when we haven’t followed that formula or associated it with CSR in a very long while. We should first see how QFC fares.
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Well, when CSR becomes a constant source of drama and aggravation for the community, as well as the moderation team, then yes, it’s absolutely time to step in.
CSR will never be an official competition, nor do I have any intention of moderating it in a heavy-handed manner; it is, however, very clear that the overwhelming majority of people - over 70 percent, at this time - want it to be nudged back on course, to a degree.
As for marketing, CSR is the largest recurring competition on the forums, and it produces some absolutely fantastic car designs that should be celebrated and shared as much as possible - all I want to do is go and say “look, someone made a cool car, in a competition that our community runs, you should come be a part of that too!”, and that’s as far as that alignment goes. Is that really any different than sorting through Discord every day to find a car to post on Instagram?
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You know when I mentioned that Wheeler Dealer idea, I didn’t realize how simple this really is.
It’s a change of scenery but if you simply take the customer to the market instead of taking the market to the customer, then this really gets more simple.
Mike Brewer doesnt get a life story from the buyer, but he does get enough to make the reason for the visit compelling. That’s probably enough.
But if we have a buyer come in, find out what they generally want, “pause” the roleplay and make our cars, then unpause the action and go out to the “car lot”, we can all enjoy how that goes.
I actually tried two of my own short form challenges here on this forum. One of which lasted a few rounds, and another that didn’t get off the ground because “it’s not CSR”, a few months before CSR went into visual novel territory.
I generally won’t enter a CSR round every time, but recently it’s not been a great incentive for me to even attempt a build for them because the sheer amount of fluff makes it hard to even find the basic rules for the contest sometimes. Then you add the “it must have X design” which drastically ups the minimum bar of entry and it’s just no…
When/if i get moved, I’ll 100% try to reboot my old challenge ideas which will work better with 4.2 and 4.3 in full. For now though, I don’t think I’ll participate in challenges as a whole.
Also, as so many other times, the answer is somewhere in between. I agree very much with what @Texaslav said, and my point of view is like this:
Everything moves on, and so does CSR. We will never get the “old CSR” back, simply because Automation today is more or less a totally different, and much more complex game than in the Kee era. If we want Kee era CSRs we have to revert to Kee era Automation too, and I am pretty sure that nobody is going to want that.
On the other hand, a CSR will never be so good that only the quality of it will justify for the challenge taking months to finish (then, other stuff can of course happen). And I think that it is pretty annoying with long winded CSRs both for entrants, and for the ones that is skipping the current round, that can never jump onto the next one. Sure, some good writing can spice up things compared to “car is red, goes vroom vroom, has popup lights so I want it”. But honestly, the priority for most participants will be to read the verdict of their own car, while the backstories etc. will be a pure bonus.
And when challenges are taking forever because people are building photoscenes out of 3D fixtures etc. I feel that things are going a bit too far. Not because the work is not impressive - because it is. Myself I can’t do anything even remotely close. But most people won’t care much about if their car is photographed in a standard environment in the photoscene, or in your 3D fixture castle, which is probably better suited in the “other things done in Automation” thread.
Then another important thing is to really look things over. Will I have time for the upcoming weeks to judge loads of cars? If I know that work, school etc. will be a struggle, ditch the prestige and just move on. And do it quickly. I mean, are you completely out of time, reverting to Kee era CSRs would not solve anything, you still would not have time. You can do an amazing CSR in just a few days? Then do it.
CSR 140 is mentioned in this thread and for me I was somewhat surprised to see that challenge winning the Automation award for “Challenge of the year”. Not because it was bad per se (so this is not an attempt to sh*t on the hosts), but I think that it is rather a prime example of when things get overcomplicated to a point where there result does not justify the waiting. I am not really sure that’s how I want to define a “Challenge of the year” winner TBH.
Then, on the other hand, with a failed challenge in my luggage, I don’t know if I should say anything, but at least I learned a lot from it how to NOT run a challenge.
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Strange that the option to go back to the Dinosaur era is there, but not to version 4.24. The developers seem to have decided: ‘you absolutely have need to appreciate our work’, and have completely deleted the previous version, demonstrating everyone who is the boss here.
looks like there will be a big reform for CSR, sound exciting to me
to me, a shorter CSR would be quite fun compare to waiting weeks, and sometimes even months for the result to come out. and I think that it should not be too short either, since rushing a result often end up as a big mess, so 2-3 week for a round would be pretty good imo.
also will we have official competitions in the future, or there is some already and I need my eyes checked?
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To be fair, CSR is too much work for what it is.
It’s not that it’s a bad challenge, for me it’s my best challenge experience on the forum, but all the wolrd-building around is not worth the effort, time and energy put into it.
It’s my personnal opinion again but I think the fun lies in making a car in a clear and simple context and having a judgment on it, but not into an uterlly complex story with details that aren’t necessary to understand the needs of the buyer.
It can be very intimidating to host too, more over when you’re not necessarly good in English.
I haven’t participated in a while and I did not know that interior was now mandatory in certain rounds, which for me is a problem too, since making interior is a pain in term of time consumming.
I don’t know if it’s a good idea to reform the CSR to go back to monke, but if we don’t, we certainly need a challenge as fast and fun as the hold CSRs, and make the promotion of it.
I react hot to your post MrChips, but why not make something like “Light CSR”? I don’t know myself, it’s just an idea I’ve got just now haha.
To conclude, I’d say that CSR as it is now is not very welcoming to new players. And CSR was my only reason to play for a long time back in 2018.
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good point, mandatory interior is going to be a pain in the ass and might make it much more un-welcoming to new players, and I think that would have to change.
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AMuteCrypt’s Quick-Fire Challenge is basically CSR Lite. Personaly, I think CSR has just evolved into a different challenge, and other challenges can become old CSR. We could even have an actual CSR Light (CSRL? LSR? CSR Classic/CSRC?) to bridge the gap between CSR and QFC.
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