The Future of CSR

Community Challenges & Competitions
21

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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22

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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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23

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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24

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.

25

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.

26

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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27

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.

28

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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29

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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30

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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31

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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32

On the other hand, we have AGC, TMCC, CSC and now also QFC as continous challenges. Feels a bit oversaturated to squeeze yet another CSR-ish challenge between QFC and CSR.

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33

PDC (ok ok, on hiatus, but not quite dead), ARM…

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34

I agree. It’s clear that CSR has snowballed a lot since its inception and I think it would be messy to try and stop it (as evidenced by the very existence of this thread).

Right now, it seems like QFC can become the CSR of your rose-tinted dreams. It’s just a name difference at that point, and what’s wrong with marketing QFC instead of CSR? If your aim is to attract new players to this game, it doesn’t matter what the challenge is called. It’s all gonna be new to them.

If you don’t like the longform style of CSR nowadays, that’s fine. You’re entitled to your opinions, of course. But I don’t see why you would want to ruin the fun for those that do enjoy it. The host that enjoy writing elaborate reviews and the entrants that enjoy reading them.

If you don’t like it, don’t enter! No one’s forcing you. There’s so many other challenges out there. TMCC, AGC, CSC, PDC, whatever.

Sure, maybe some of them are a little dead right now, but I think if you focused your energy on those instead of trying to wrangle the CSR monster, they probably could get kick-started back to life.

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35

Though I don’t think that people mainly are criticizing CSR but the long turnaround times. “Don’t enter if you don’t like it” is not really a mindset I like. A challenge like this is something that should be of benefit to the whole community and if 5 people likes it as it is now and 500 wants to see a change, it really should be open for discussions. Notice that I said “if”. I have no idea about the numbers myself and probably nobody else has either, which is the reason why the topic was brought up I guess.

Also, I remember a disappointment over the few entries in the current CSR, but as it is looking now, how much longer would it have taken if it should have had a regular number of entries?

Though I am not very keen about using the current CSR as a scapegoat, it is a bit harsh on Portalkat really. The phenomena has been going on for a while and is not one single person’s “fault”.

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36

Fair point.

If those 500 people want change in CSR, there’s no reason why they can’t have their change now. Like Xepy said, they’re free to create their own challenge as they see fit, and I think that’s what happened with the creation of QFC.

So I encourage people to throw their support behind QFC if that’s what they wanna see. I think it has the potential to be a popular series if the demand is really as strong as some people claim it is.

Maybe over time it’ll even overtake CSR in terms of popularity. I understand that CSR has this “flagship” status for most people in this community, but who’s to say another challenge can’t hold that title?

Of course, if the next CSR host decides they wanna bring it back to snappy reviews and short turnaround times, then they’re free to do that. I feel it should be up to the respective host(s) as to how their round should be run, without any moderator intervention unless things get out of hand.

And yes, let’s be mindful that Portalkat is still running the current round of CSR. Some may consider them “part of the problem”, but the blame definitely does not lie on any one host or round, so let’s not point fingers.

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37

As it is, looking at the discussions that have taken place regarding this challenge and all, I have decided no matter who wins the current CSR, or who it gets passed down to (even if that is me) I want no part in it. A standard of expectations has been set and I don’t want my head on this toxic totem pole. This current CSR was a breath of fresh air as far as forum challenges have gone for me and the response to it a stark reminder of why I don’t come here for challenges.

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38

First, let me get this out of the way.

Thank you. I’m trying my hardest to keep it moving at a decent pace, and I’ll admit, it was a bit ambitious, but I’m working with it.

Now, onto the topic at hand.

I haven’t participated in CSR in a long, long time, but I can say I was there at the start.

I’ve seen the progression from Kee Era 5-fixture-wonders being considered good enough to the first generation of UE4 cars where people really started paying attention to details. The beauty of Old CSR was that if you hated the theme of this round or that round, wait a couple of weeks and there’s something new to check out.

Ironically, Old CSR created a different problem: Everyone was holding onto potentially good challenge ideas in hopes that “when I win CSR, I’ll have something good to run.” I know, I was guilty of it myself. CSR, for the longest damn time, killed the short-form challenge because everyone wanted to get their 14 days of fame.

This somewhat changed when UE4 dropped and people started wanting to do other challenges at the same time, and we had a flood of challenges after a long drought. It was also in this time that I started to back off from CSR because, well, I wasn’t finding it fun anymore.

New CSR, or modern CSR, or whatever you want to call it now, has changed from the original “Quick turnaround regular car buying simulator” it used to be. Now people are writing stories around it, and normally I’d say that’s fine, but the problem is, the old strategy of “If you hate this round, sit it out and wait” falls apart when it takes a month or two or three to complete a round.

Like it or not, CSR is one of the prestigious challenges on this forum, and it draws people in.

I have no issues with long form challenges or going heavy on roleplay or story - After all, I’m running a challenge that if everything goes according to the schedule and I have absolutely zero delays, will wrap up the last round on July 25th, and take an additional week (August 1) to completely wrap all of the story up and complete the challenge, and anyone who’s read even a little of the Shitbox Rally can tell there’s story and roleplay involved.

CSR with story isn’t a bad idea, I’ll grant that, but the problem is that it shouldn’t take a whole month between the opening date and the final reviews and winner announcement. I’m not throwing shade or dirt at anyone who wants to write a huge story-form challenge, just please, don’t do it in CSR. Set it up as a standalone, you will get people into your challenge. When I opened Shitbox Rally and got 17 participants, I was expecting half of that, mostly because of my crazy ruleset, wild characters, and unusual choice of location. Clearly, there are a lot of creative people here on this forum, and if these long-form CSR Stories could be branched into their own challenges, then they could run under their own set of guidelines.

CSR has moved so far from the roots of being that friendly, easily-recommended challenge that everyone pointed new players toward. Now, new people looking for a challenge have a whole list of active challenges stuck somewhere between Entries Closed and Completed.

Quick Fire Challenge is a step in the right direction. It’s a perfect “get my feet wet” challenge for new players, it trains new round hosts, and it’s a callback to pre-CSR days, where all you would get is a one or two sentence blurb about what you did wrong (if you were lucky) or a one sentence blurb basically saying your car was junk (if you weren’t lucky).

CSR should return to some form of shorter turnaround. Maybe we run 3 weeks, maybe we run 4, letting QFC take over as the lightning round.

For the people who want to write stories while reviewing cars, please, do that as a standalone challenge. Yes, you might not get as many participants as in CSR, but it’s not a guarantee. I can’t speak from a whole lot of experience, but my one CSR round, the one challenge in Kee I’m willing to name (Hybrid Beaters), and one I’d like to sweep under the rug for reasons of salt in all directions, were all about equally popular. Shitbox Rally seemed to be popular despite my unusual rule-set, story, characters, and inexperience in such a long form challenge. People will join your independent challenge.

Plus, if you like the CSR ruleset, there’s no reason you can’t tell people, “Hey, this challenge behaves like CSR, but it’s independent.” People show up, they try hard to win, maybe you pass the torch and maybe you don’t, or maybe someone gets inspired and picks up the torch and runs another round.

TL;DR - QFC is a good step in the right direction, CSR needs to return to a shorter format with no more than one month between rounds, the story-tellers of the forum (myself included) should create their own independent challenges, because then you’re not under as much pressure to just “get results out” so the next person can get their turn.

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39

To answer this - I’ve been wanting to do it for a while now, but I’ve been wanting to do it right and I didn’t think CSR was that bad yet. Literally every time this discussion has come up, my response has been “someone should do it”.

Then we get to 11 PM at night, and this discussion comes up yet again. I’ve just run one successful challenge and I’m in the middle of a third, and things are going well elsewhere in my life. I’ve just begun another hubris-filled, non-automation project. I decide I have the standing and experience to actually do it, and to do it my way.

This was an action heavily motivated by emotion, I’ll own that. That’s a part of why nobody else has done it. Hosting anything is daunting. Trying to create a new challenge from nothing is even worse. Trying to create a competitor for “the flagship challenge”? Yeah, I wonder why nobody has done that.

Also, CSR has gotten caught in an inevitable series of feedback loops. People who can spend more time on auto are more likely to win, because that means higher quality but also because the judges tend to be the people who can spend more time on auto. The judges tend to be the people who can spend more time on auto because hosting CSR is a massive commitment, and because they’re more likely to win. Hosting CSR is a massive commitment because of the number of entries, but also because judges tend to spend a lot of time on auto. This is natural and inevitable without intervention… but so are malaria, cancer, poison and the like. Doesn’t mean it’s good, or that intervention doesn’t have benefits.

Also, wanna hear a hot take? What we are seeing in CSR isn’t really role playing, in the sense that a lecture isn’t a conversation. I know I sound cliche, but “proper” role playing - like Shitbox Rally - involves multiple people working together. It’s like the difference between a lecture and a conversation, or how it always sucks when you go over to your friend’s house and they just expect to watch you to watch them play a game. How would you feel if you were expected to read four pages of lore per entry as a judge, and it was fully reasonable for people to get salty because you missed something in the lore? That’s where challenges are right now, it’s just tough on you if you missed a crucial element that was buried deep in the lore.

Finally, I know it’s been stated elsewhere, but please get rid of “optional” interiors that give benefits to judging. They aren’t optional then. It’s my opinion that every entrant to a challenge should be making a reasonable attempt to win… And leaving literal free points on the table doesn’t work there. Even worse, they reinforce that feedback loop of time requirements. They also heavily pressure entrants to use them, which isn’t great. I disagree with requirements too and don’t use them as a result, but “optional but required if you want to win” is even worse imo.

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40

Here’s the thing about your argument about making a competitor to CSR: it’s literally been done several times just framed as something else. TMCC and PDC is literally just CSR, with a guise of being something different. Hell, the last one was getting CSR entrant numbers. “Someone else will do it” sounds bystander effect with everyone agreeing, but clearly it’s also not the case. As for making the competitor to the flagship - remember when you made what was potentially a stronger flagship challenge in ACDC? You’re already not in the majority of the crowd you’re in, because you already are willing to at least try.

The way CSR is structured is the very flaw - you want to host, you get better and win. It also keeps a good quality control, but as you said, is a feedback loop that is also a massive time sink. Perhaps that should be changed? No one suggested that, should we really be trying to force a flawed hosting system to work?

You want to hear something amazing about your hot take? There has been the same kind of list of requirements since I started. There’s been complicated worldbuilding in CSR since before I started. That’s CSR80 ish fyi. Long before this problem you think is here. If the entrant can’t be bothered to read, they can’t be bothered to win. Funny enough that also makes CSR go faster from the virtue of more bins. People get salty regardless of it being four pages of lore not being read or one click in the game.

Funny enough, reading your last paragraph, it’s very agreeable, until you think about it a little harder. Why shouldn’t someone make an interior if they feel like they want to go through the pain? I’ll agree it shouldn’t be made mandatory, but if someone wants to make it, they can and it probably will passively sway judging. Just human nature, they look nice. And if you don’t like requirements, man, do another challenge. The fact is that car shopping is not a thing where the absolute best numbers win, there is reasons a host like/dislike a car. Sometimes those reasons don’t make the most sense, just like when buying a real car. You think the the requirement is stupid, great, but you’re not the one buying the car. Plus, there is literally a feedback period on the rules literally every time there’s a round. It’s funny how many times a complaint on the rule/ requirement happens only after a person got binned, without having asked the host about it at all.

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