Can’t believe I won! Lots of tough competition in this challenge. @Sky99 your car worried me up until the very end, as did the MAHG from @S31 !
I really enjoyed the format of this challenge. Even with as many entries as you received, there was still a lot of engagement with the different cars. It was also nice to see such a wide variety of cars (both in year and style) able to be competitive with each other. Great job!
@DuceTheTruth100 Thanks for the support! I’ve owned a couple people’s share of these kind of cars from GM, kinda hoped my familiarity with them would help me in the competition lol.
As I expressed earlier, a lot more people submitted sports cars as I thought; the idea of the challenge was that a minivan and sports car (and many things in between) would have about equal chances of winning against each other. But I didn’t get any minivans; here are the reasons why I think that might be:
If the maximum possible score in a category is 10 points, and the worst possible is 1 point, than that category is actually worth 9 points, not 10. I think I forgot to account for that when designing the rules, and made all the stats areas less valuable than I meant for them to be. (@Knugcab look out for that when doing your challenge)
Also, I underestimated just how good stats people could get from a sports car. I thought the qualities that made the car sporty would take away from all sorts of stats areas, but the cars submitted performed pretty well in areas like fuel economy, drivability, comfort, and so on. I compared these stats to a minivan design I already had, and while the minivan’s stats were good, there was nothing exceptional about it (except for in practicality, where it humiliated everyone else). Looking back, I don’t think it would have been probable to make a competitive minivan.
I do wonder if I advertised sportiness way more than I meant to as well, making it seem like a sports car was what Nathan was actively looking for, rather than just what he vaguely thought would be cool. I also wonder if the cool wall being so skewed by entries to one side may have affected people’s entires.
This is a forum of car people. The prevalence of sports cars could just be a result of the contestants leaning towards the kind of cars that they liked, especially after hearing that it would help in one area.
Regardless of why, I don’t think the prevalence of sports cars took away from the challenge in any sense. It just provides a few aspects to think about and learn from next time I do a challenge with this broad a scope.
Longer to grade than I thought?
One of the reasons I chose to use a fixed, point system was because I thought it would be quick to grade; that simple math could be calculated in a few hours, providing a near-instant turnaround. As it turned out, calculating and submitting each category took a few hours each, causing me to devote a lot more free time than I thought to it (and by the way, I was actually hurrying to get these results out, since my real life deadline that I thought wouldn’t be a problem ended up nearly being a problem…)
Some of that might have been me working in an inefficient manner. Either way, I found what took most of the time in this challenge was not calculating the results, but presenting them effectively to the forums. And because of that- a heads up to anyone else considering hosting -I don’t think a point based system makes grading any faster or less time-consuming than other systems. They do require less mental analysis on your part, though.
And I think that’s all I can think of! See ya’ll in the next challenge! (:
(Definately real footage of Nate and friends enjoying the new Armor Valencia)
Man, in MY opinion, you graded that challenge fast as shit. With all the categories, I thought this was gonna take another month lol. But then you started posting results with the quickness…like Smokey in Friday I was like DAAAAMMMMMMNNNNN!!! Great work!!
This might be asking too much but is there any way you can send me the specs on my car? I want to re-make it again in 4.2 and dont have the patience to put 4.1 on then go back to 4.2. I dont even remember what body I used smh. If not, no worries…I’ll go back and read my advertisement and read the critiques again.
The “cool wall” had quite a lot of cars pinned to it, to start with. That made it quite obvious what he was looking for, and the added cars were probably mostly there just to confirm what people already were suspecting. I mean, not many uncool cars added, lots of sub zero cars added. And about every car in the round had a rating of “cool” or better. So, I think that I will start off with way less cars to challenge the mind of people a little bit more.
Anyway, thank you for the challenge and thank you for letting me borrow ideas form your scoring system, that is appreciated a lot.
Congrats to the Armor Valencia for winning and showing that being average is better then not.
@Edsel This competition has been incredibly fun and I have enjoyed reading everything and partaking in it. Can I suggest you continue the Nathan story and do a project car challenge?
I don’t want to derail this thread but while mods are incompatible you can convert mods over and if they have the same guid they will still work when you import the cars. I did it with my car for this round and I just lost the bumper bars, grille and badges
I’ll be too busy over the coming weeks to host another challenge, unfortunately, so I’ve no plans for a “Used Car Shopping 2” (though if anyone else wants to make one, go ahead. (: ). I’ll have to stick to participating for a while; which is fine, seeing as there are some other good ones going on/coming up.
I’m doing the last writeups for SCC at the moment, so expect a new challenge in the spirit of this one pretty soon actually. That is, if 4.2 is stable enough to hold challenges in now since I really want to make the change.
Props to Edsel for organising this amazing challenge, and congrats to GassTiresandOil for giving an aweseome early-90s sports sedan to an unappreciative kid who knows nothing about cars and will probably take full advantage of whatever engine this has!
Also, I’ve made a calculator that I suspect is how Edsel calculated the scores. Maybe it will make hosting easier. Link to it here.
It’s a very ugly sheet, but it works. To use it make a copy and don’t touch anything in grey. It will take 50 entries with 15 scoring parameters. It also counts outliers so crazy entries like the Wells will skew scoring (which makes the competition more interesting imo).
No man! I loved your car <3. It was crazy because you made a track day car for a teen who just learned to drive which I found to be absolutely hilarious! And because it was either top or bottom it was really great. I didn’t mean misunderstood yet understood in a bad way, sort of in an unexpectedly good kinda way The calculator is just a calculator, it would’ve put out the same results as Edsel.
The calculator is just a calculator, it would’ve put out the same results as Edsel.