Was waiting for the feedback survey, but if we're doing the feedback publicly, I might as well throw in my own take.
First, the broad positives. The tournament was run well, there didn't seem to be any major hitches or catastrophes. Issues that did crop up (which is normal) were addressed relatively quickly, ensuring that the overall tournament stayed healthy and responsive. The framing device was excellent and passionately executed. It is evident a lot of effort went into the presentation. The selection of prompts was also of a high quality, and thankfully free of too much Mario pandering (except for the cases where it was unavoidable, like in the kaizo rounds).
All in all, it was a well-executed tournament. I know you've felt a bit anxious about how you would perform, but I'm here at the end to tell you that this is not necessary. You did fine. No two drawings are not on fire.
On to specifics.
Inversion
I think I have to echo Rose here. This is functionally solid as a warm-up round, but is hard to really talk about it substantially since it is another "you have one extra color" round, and those have already been proven to be functional. To quote an irritating man who happens to be right on this one occasion: "
It just works".
So we now have "use your partner's color" and "use your opponent's inverted color" as quintessential round 1 gimmicks. Maybe we can find a third one and then put them onto a wheel, so we can spin it whenever we try to decide the round 1 gimmick of a given tournament.
Eyedropper Tricolor
It is difficult for me to talk about this one because of reasons. This format is clearly conceptualized for digital artists first and foremost. Since I was drawing traditionally for this round, I felt like I was participating in a heavily watered-down version of the gimmick. So I feel like I can't really talk about it in a practical sense. I barely engaged with the gimmick, just picked three colors from the image and then chose approximations in felt pens that ended up looking nothing like the colors I chose.
So I can only comment on this in a theoretical sense. And in that theoretical sense, I think this is probably the best iteration of tricolor yet, as well as the stand-out gimmick of the tournament. I sort of interacted with it a little bit in the sprite round, and that was fun. But that was also kind of a joke format. The necessity to pick from a pre-established picture eliminates the thing I heavily disliked about the first iteration of tricolor, that you could just google "pleasant color palette" and be set easily.
I still don't think the search for the "ideal" tricolor setup is over yet. As I said in previous tournaments, I am a stickler for sticking with your chosen color and would like to see an iteration of this format where you cannot discard what you've brought in. So while this is the best version yet, I think we should still keep looking.
Coloring Book Relay
I have to admit, this one I didn't really like. The first phase was kind of fine, if a bit hectic. The second phase was... I don't know, boring? I had very little agency with how to shape the image in front of me, and limited to one color, I also couldn't make any meaningful additions (that didn't look bad). To me, the beauty of relay is that you can add to what your partner provided for you. You can also take it a bit easier in phase 1 because you know if you fuck something up, your partner can pull you out of the fire. Here, if you fuck up, your partner can maybe plaster over your mess, but it is very difficult to patch a mistake without it looking awkward.
So yeah, this one was kind of mid. If I had to make a suggestion on how to improve it, I'd say give every artist two colors. Like, say, I declare "I'm using black and my color" and my partner next week says "I'm using black and white". That way the person going second has a little more control over what they are doing.
Partner Pilgrimage
As the inventor of the Olympus format, I am always ready to bat for its legitimacy. I have to say though, olympus is already such a demanding format that it doesn't need, or rather, shouldn't have too many additional bells and whistles. Doubling the canvas size was pretty brutal, and it drained pretty much 90% of the energy I had left for the rest of the tournament. If olympus returns for future tournaments, please keep it at standard rules.
As for the pilgrimage part, that was pretty cute. Working on one big image instead of two smaller ones is fun.
One thing I found odd about this round was the scheduling. Having one person sit out while the other busts their ass drawing a double size image, then in reverse next week. Since it is an olympus round and partners are communicating anyway... wouldn't it make more sense to have them draw simultaneously? They can connect the images while they're drawing them. Or keep the two week rhythm and divide the big picture into four 600x600 pixel segments a la ABCD, then for week one the partners draw A and C, and then week 2 they draw B and D (connecting to A and C). That way they still functionally draw a double size picture, but staggered over two weeks instead of one.
Another... I hesitate to call it "problem" because I don't think it is one yet... The arrangement of the final results. Results in scribble are very deliberately arranged side by side. We do this to avoid recency bias, i.e. the viewer gravitating towards the first thing listed on page. Arranging one image on top of another one carries the risk of having it be perceived as superior, or at least that hosts may suggest it is.
We don't really have enough data to conclude that this is happening here. The sample size is too small. We'd have to run this a hundred more times to observe if placement has an effect on vote distribution. But I think it's something we should keep an eye on.
No, I don't know how else to arrange these very wide images either. Maybe the solution is to have them connect vertically instead of horizontally. I don't know.
Lastly, I want to address this:
Some artists voiced feeling really stressed about this round and the amount of work they needed to put in, and of course I value this position, but I think it's worth remembering that Scribble is all about the effort and time you want to put in, and from my perspective it doesn't seem like most people found the workload here too exhausting.
I am some artist who voiced feeling really stressed out about this round and the amount of work I needed to put in, so... This is very sound advice. It is indeed all about the effort and time I want to put in... in theory.
In practice, this kind of falls apart when you realize your opponent is TPG. There are few things more exhilarating and terrifying than going up against one of this community's most fiercely talented artists in an olympus round, and if you don't give 150% when given the opportunity to do so, you will find yourself lightly toasted with a fine legume garnish relatively quickly.
So yeah, reminder: It isn't always so easy to pace yourself. Especially when opportunities are on the line that don't happen that often, so you have to seize them when they arise. It makes things complicated.
Absolute fucking chaos round where everything is possible
Fun round in theory. Very exhausting as the final round in a long tournament, after double size olympus, in practice. I think I spent the first 20 minutes of my session trying to comprehend what I was even supposed to do. I think this was okay as a one-off. If it returns, I'd suggest maybe putting it in an earlier slot, when energy is still more abundant.
Some comments on individual concepts.
Imposter is an interesting gameplay mode. Has a lot of potential. Execution is maybe not all the way there yet. The imposter is essentially drawing a different prompt and might get screwed just by the setup. There is kind of little agency on their part. And as Rose said, it incentivizes non-imposters to be as literal with their interpretation as possible, to trip the imposter up.
If I had to think of something to do about that... Okay, I don't know how to schedule this, but imagine the non-imposters get their prompts as normal. Then once they are done, the imposter doesn't get any prompt at all, but is shown the three other images and must guess the prompt from them. This in turn would incentivize the others to be as abstract as possible instead (or your partner could stay literal to clue you in, but risks exposing you that way). I don't know, could be a fun dynamic.
Whatever you end up doing though, I would ditch the "you get extra votes if you stay undiscovered" thing. Vote count should NEVER be messed with, under any circumstances. It's too critical of an element to be tampered with. Please find a different incentive.
I've already given my thoughts on
post-submission sabotages. I don't think they're fair and kind of go against the spirit of scribble. Especially the ones that let you destroy the image's color composition.
Quad-color is cool. It works in kind of the same way as the other round 1 gimmicks do.
Brushbreaker is just fucking insane. Really cool in an off-the-wall way. Should definitely stay a bonus round thing though. The skill ceiling with this is so high, it may be frustrating for players who signed up for a simple tournament and don't have a lot of experience with digital painting (or embroidery, or baking).
Scheduling
The scheduling was overall fine. There weren't any massive slips I could identify. Nothing really to complain in that regard.
One thing I noticed though, and kind of wondered why you were doing it that way... From how I understood it, you set the drawing deadline to a certain point, and then you went to sleep right after. Then when you woke up, you formatted the results and posted them. Is there a specific reason why you did it that way? If there was a large chunk of time where you wouldn't be able to manipulate the results, wouldn't it have made more sense to put the deadline at the end of that chunk, so it would fall into a time slot where you actually had time?
Like, from my perspective, if you were asleep, you wouldn't have been able to do anything with the images anyway and thus didn't need them then, so giving players that extra time wouldn't have damaged the schedule. It would also have had the benefit of severely reducing the perceived turnaround time between submission deadline and result posting.
It is, admittedly, very possible I'm missing something. I can't really see your schedule and there might have been a good reason to do it that way. Like a crazy volatile work schedule or something. Just, from my limited perspective, I've been wondering why you put the deadline into a time slot you were usually going to be busy at.
Sabotage points
Okay, this is the big one, isn't it? Essentially the main gimmick of the entire tournament.
I am of two minds about it. On the one hand, what Rose said is correct. It is a cool gimmick and in some situations it can actually enhance your performance rather than hinder it. So I think the basic idea of escalating sabotages is probably a sound one.
On the other hand... the sabotage system as it is right now has the potential to severely, pardon the pun,
sabotage the format. Scribble, at its inception, was created as a competitive tournament framework. As such, to keep things somewhat fair, two core tenets need to be identified and upheld: Match conditions must be
symmetrical, and voters must be
informed.
As it is now, the sabotage system contradicts both of those tenets. It is possible for one opponent to get an easy hand while the other ends up with wretched, unworkable dogshit. I would argue a lesser version of this has actually happened, in our match vs Team Freelöders, where we got relatively easy sabotages while theirs were much more prescriptive and constraining. It is actually casting a bit of a shadow over that match for me, knowing they had a bit more of an uphill battle to fight.
And likewise, If you get a severely constraining sabotage like "image must be shot flatly from the front and feature no perspective or shading at all", the audience really needs to know that this is the case. Otherwise they may assume you are just too inept to compose an interesting scene properly and potentially write you off as an idiot. I don't really see the thought that this could happen as fun.
I suppose whether you see this as a problem or not depends on how you view scribble itself. If you think of it kind of as a party game where you just put an image and see what happens, asymmetrical sabotages may seem as a harmless way to shake things up and add variety. And I want to be clear that this is a valid way to interact with the format. But if you engage with this game as a tournament, then having your matches messed with in arbitrary and random ways that may completely unbalance them... it's potentially game-ruining.
Like, there is a reason I opted out of sabotages when I drew against Kright. It was our first ever match together, and I wanted it to be a clean one. If one of us had gotten "Draw a flower" and the other "Picture must be an accurate metaphor for the life of Frank Sinatra", I would have been pissed.
If I had to make a suggestion on how to alter this concept while still keeping matches somewhat balanced... Hmm...
I would keep the point system itself exactly as it is. Get one point per win, lose one point per loss unless you opt into making them permanent. Then, with each match I would have a list of random sabotage conditions. This list is identical for both players. Each condition is numbered, like:
- Every character must hold something in their left hand.
- Picture must feature at least three chicken.
- Picture must somehow reference the 80s.
- Draw a Honda Civic.
- Draw someone making out with the Honda Civic.
The players must then incorporate an amount of these sabotages equal to their current point count (either in order, or they can choose, whichever the host prefers). The voters will be given the list alongside the pictures to vote for. This makes the match symmetrical, informed, and fair. Bonus point in that it allows the player with fewer sabotage points to optionally take on more sabotages if they want to make it extra even.
As I said, maybe the concept is fine as it is now. It definitely works if you want scribble to be a very casual "anything can happen, nothing matters" kind of experience. If that is what people want out of it, I don't want to take it away from them.
Bluhh...
Conclusion
Anyway, this was a lot of text, so let me wrap this up.
This tournament was good. It was a success. It looks like I have a lot of criticism, but I always have a lot of criticism, even if a thing is good. Often especially when a thing is good. The closer something skirts against the threshold of wonderful, the harder I feel compelled to nag it to push it over the edge. I hope what I had to say was at least constructive.
So in closing, I would like to thank
FWD and
Kright for hosting this tournament and not letting Scribble die. I'd likewise like to thank every
opponent I faced for giving it their all, and everyone who
participated in the event and elevated it to the height it stands as right now.
Most of all, I would like to thank
GBA, my partner. For putting up with my inane nonsense ideas and suggestions. And for pushing each other to even greater heights than either of us could reach on their own. This is veering dangerously close to self-praise, but I believe our teamwork was impeccable, and it would not have been possible without you.
Be proud of yourself. And believe in your abilities.
Take care, everyone.
...
SUNNY
His prompt was "The Secret Society of Ghost House Enjoyers"
He was caught with 11 votes. He gained no extra votes.
