But constructively, the nominations are too map centric.

There should be awards for tools, streamers, graphics, fan art, modeling, music, new progs, animation (I nominate shitting Ogre!) best Quake related Tweet, photchops, memes and so on. Something for everyone.

The catch-all category at the end of the page is too limited for a number of reasons. (you think maybe ericw has a shot at this one right?)

How hard would it be to add categories that move this beyond simply mapping? 

#6: Good idea, honestly. but I think it's also a good idea to limit the scope in someway as a test run of sorts. 

Looking at the award categories I get a feeling that most of the awards will go to experienced mappers. Since our community continues to grow every year something like Best Debut Map award would be nice. 

my concern is that there aren't enough "other things" released in a year in order to warrant categories of their own...

What I was planning on doing is having the judges write in-depth reviews of releases if there weren't enough nominations.

I can extend this idea to other content.

Interestingly I had more categories, but removed some of them after feedback. We can always grow the awards in future years. But lets try and keep it somewhat manageable in its inaugural year. 

Others have mentioned that as well, it's a great idea and I'll make sure there is something on the site to encourage newer mappers. 

Pulsar is right about the best debut section, this is a great idea imo. There have been several excellent beginner maps that clearly deserve a spotlight. 

Can you please explain the methodology this will use? Now I am seeing "judges." If there are judges, how many, who are they? Does the community vote on narrowing the short list or on the finalists? How do ties work? 

Mapping experience brackets? Something like 0 to 2yrs, 3 to 5, 5 to 10, etc experience mapping for Quake (other games not counted, purely based on start date).

E.g., Award for Best in Class - Beginner, Midlevel, or Veteran mapper.

Tools don't get added often so not really workable to have one every year. Maybe like a best feature added or something.

I also agree that we need some sort of community plus moderator/judge voting scheme. 

No rankings. Trophies for everything including tweets. Everyone's a winner in this community! 

It seems like there are some concerns, let me try and ease some of your worries.

I've thought a lot about biases and conflicts of interest. Here are the things that I'm planning to do to alleviate some of these.

There will be more than one set of judges, judges will not be allowed to vote on their own map.

One set of judges will shortlist, while another set will make decisions on the winners based on that shortlist.

The judges know, and I will be reminding them not to judge maps based on their personal opinion of the mapper. I don't think that any of the judges that I've chosen would do that.

The community won't explicitly be voting for maps, except for the people's choice award.

The part that the community plays in the awards is by nominating their favourite maps to the category that they think they best fit in.

I don't want to keep judges for consecutive years and as such, if one year we get judges that don't like a particular style of map, the next year those judges might have different opinions.

I've tried to get a variety of people to do the judging, we have mappers, content makers, players, and people who work as game devs.

I have set out a basic guide for the judges to follow, having said that, the judging will be qualitative, not quantitative... There is no likert scale for their scoring or anything. They will sit down, have a discussion about what they liked and what they didn't like, and how well the mapper / content maker executed their plans, and order the shortlisted maps accordingly.

Some people will be happy with the results, others will not. Unfortunately this is the way of awards. I have a group of people who I feel to be competent.

At the end of the day, if the public voting is important, maybe I can include the score that the maps received on quaddicted alongside the Judges opinions / verdict. 

I expected people to have varying opinions about this, he's entitled to ask questions. 

Oh another thing... I won't be judging on any of the maps myself. 

good to know how this will work 

Seems to me there's two points at hand to be considered.

1. Obviously it's a good idea to hold some sort of annual awards for the best releases. (And if anybody thinks otherwise, their opinion might hold more weight if not posted anonymously.) Quake is slowly regaining mainstream momentum thanks to primarily SleepwalkR & ericw, and the dozens of mappers who turn up to chip away at brushes.

Holding "official" annual awards is a bang on idea to capitalise on this momentum and to push it further forward, and doing it in a similar style to the Cacowards (a panel of judges, each of them being in the panel for a good reason) lends credence to which releases were awarded.

2. If it's been mentioned that community won't explicitly be voting for maps, that implies the organiser has some sort of intrinsic Quake knowledge that the community at large does not; that they are better suited at picking the judges and categories than anybody else.

The Cacowards were first held by Scuba Steve (creator of Action Doom), now they're hosted by Linguica (Doomworld cofounder, doom_txt administrator). They're judged by exceptional reviewers (including the de facto Doom equivalent of TEAMShambler) and exceptional content creators. All is well there.

Will the Quake awards receive the same kind of credence with the current setup?

The award categories page splits maps into two categories, ones that run in DOS Quake and ones that require BSP2 support. How about all the maps that aren't BSP2 but require protocol 666 to run - aka nearly every single Q1SP from the past several years that wasn't made by negke? I'm not sure how it was possible to overlook that.

How about getting negke, Shambler, quakis, etc. on the panel? We're currently facing a problem where more people are making maps than there are playing maps, and getting actual reviewers to judge the maps would be good.

How about getting metl, Baker, dumptruck, etc. on the panel? Using this term lightly here but getting the "community leaders" involved would be the best way of giving credence to the awards.

How about getting Kinn, Tronyn, and other influential mappers/modders on the panel?

If there's going to be an official Quake awards "ceremony" it needs to be done right. I suppose metl's moving of this thread is further reaffirmed. ;-) 

Now gone. Completely wrong response to a typically positive contribution from Snaut.

I agree with a Debut category. 

my discord rumblings:

Clench Throckmorton - Today at 1:57 PM
Instead of just a "best map", i think instead we need two different but equally important categories for quake maps: "best gameplay", "best visuals"
it makes it more accesible to noobs and really just makes more sense
imagine a stunning art map but gameplay is just "ok" - you don't want this to win some "best map" award, you want it to win "best visuals" and then you have "best gameplay" to give to the olskool-looking map that is fun as fuck but ain't necessarily a looker
of course a single map can win both "best visuals" AND "best gameplay", like the oscars
 

Thanks for the feedback OTP, yeah... The limit to the bsp2 meant that protocol 666 was implied. That was my mistake for not mentioning it, the maps will have to load in dos / win / glquake for them to be eligible for the vanilla category.

In terms of the judges, I'm happy that I have competent people on board, not community leaders per-se, but people who are known and respected. Like I mentioned in the earlier post I plan on having different judges each year, to combat long term conflicts of interest and cliques forming. So perhaps next year I'll include some of the people you mentioned (if they're interested).

Also, this years awards should behave somewhat like a shakedown for next years awards. I don't expect to get it perfect from the start. We can look at the result at the end and make adjustments if need be.

@kinn

I'm confused... There ARE categories for best visuals and best gameplay 

sorry i didn't look at your website.

I just assumed it was a placeholder and we were discussing the awards format here. But yeah, good call then. 

that post was based on a discussion I was having in discord before even seeing this thread, so I probably should have read the thread first too lol :) 

haha no worries 

"The Quake Awards" is not as catchy as the Cacowards. Quakawards? idk 

Perhaps consider adding a section to acknowledge maybe 3 people who stepped forward to help out in the community in the current year who are brand new or started helping out.

Like didn't pritchard do an exceptional amount of bug reporting last year and finding some really obscure but eye-popping ones? For ericw tools, for my engine, probably other things.

And there might be someone relatively unknown that helps out with speedmapping or Quaddicted or edited the Quake wikia a ton that no one knows about or maybe someone who makes a tutorial or utility for a map editor.

One obvious example for this year would be dumptruck_ds, but while definitely not excluding highly visible heros, there have to be invisible ones or ones that have helped that don't get noticed.

When new people step forward and help out, makes things better.

/2 cents 

 

well I did consider calling them the Shubbies or Quaddies... I like the term "Pentagram of Perfection" for the overall award winner.

I'm happy for the community to come up with a catchy awards name. 

I kinda like the name Quaddies! But if I've understood correctly, these awards are only for the first Quake, right? So isn't the quad damage a little bit too inclusive for all the Quake games, since it's in all of them?

If we go with an award named after a cute iconic monster (like the Cacoward), there's really no substitute for the shambler! Besides the monster isn't included in the later games (if we don't count little cameos). Maybe they could simply be called the Shamblers (kinda like the Oscars) or Shambler awards?

However, when I really think about it, I'm not very keen on this whole award idea, in general. I'm afraid the Quake 1 community is just too small to prevent the clique of self-awarding from forming. Are there really enough judges to rotate between the years? Will the same funcies just keep awarding the same few funcies every year?

Either the awards would have to be awarded far less frequently (every 5 years??), or we should wait for the community to grow quite a bit more, or the other Quake games should be included to increase the pool to draw judges and nominees from. Just my two cents to add to Bakers'.