With Quadficted being there already, why do we need an award or a poll of any sort? Just list maps and sort them per their ratings. 

Whoops! Sorry for double posting! 

Because awards make it a splashy thing. That generates exposure and may even get it onto news sites that normally wouldn't cover Quake 1. 

Quake's community is much smaller than that of Doom's, not to mention Doom has much more content, ranging from fantastic, to a complete waste of time. With Quake, releases are sparse, but they are never not worth a playthrough.

I don't think a cacoward event would be a good idea, it would single out those who maybe put a lot of effort into a map, only to be overshadowed by someone else's.

Further still, there are Doom wads that I find are very deserving of a cacoward but never got one, and wads that did get one, I felt didn't earn it. It all boils down to the judges decision, and not necessarily the community's choice, which I think would matter more. 

Everyone gets a trophy, yay! 

At a minimum, it would be cool to have an option on the quaddicted database to group by year, sort by descending rating within each year, and maybe hide speedmap packs.

Real awards would be cool (though a lot of work).
It should be yearly, that's a good chunk of time to look back on and see what the community was doing. it doesn't matter if there are weak years that only have 3 or 5 great maps. The selection process can allow selecting fewer than 10 winners.

I don't know if open voting or judges would be better. With judges, we could have them write a couple sentences commentary on the win. Tronyn did a great set of top 10 lists back at the 2008 qexpo, here 

A sort-of summary or end-of-year review would be better suited, in my view. A little bit of text on each of the 15ish releases or maps, mini-reviews if you will, putting all of them in the context of the year or period. 

 

Yeah there won't be enough for Cacoward-style top-10 lists. But you could possibly award "best"/"runner-up" in a few interesting categories like architecture, combat, jam/speedmap. I dunno. Some sort of yearly retrospective would be fun in any case. 

Haven't read the thread, but I propose a couple of categories:

1. Best use of old-skool Id style.

(e.g. that sock map that was awesome)

2. Best innovative style.

(e.g. RRP) 

 

 

to nominate Shambler to do a year-retrospective each December. It could be divided into just those two categories of "classic quake" and "innovation." I liked Spirit's old best of the year poll, but I don't think there's enough releases per year (despite the flood of great releases in the last year, many of which I have yet to play) to warrant an awards situation with a panel of judges.

On this subject, once Drake is done (stop pestering, I am resolved) I plan to update my history of Q1SP level design to the present day, and of course, catch up on all unreviewed maps. 

Thanks for thinking of me as a judge but I am not interested in that. Got too many Quake plans for next year already and I generally don't like reviewing that much (surprise!).

I'd suggest adding some random players to the mix. If you just take the grumpy func oldtimers, you get very narrow views on the maps where things like build quality and professionalism count more than "fun". I had more fun with FranckQ's Home map than any other map this year for some reason.


The polls on Quaddicted had so little traffic that minor cheating did a too big impact on the results. It required closely monitoring votes and that felt like Stasi (not to mention false positives).


One idea that would be fantastic would be a full extract-addPAK1-and-go bundle of engine (crossplatform) and selected high-quality maps and mods. Setting up Quake is freaking hard for most of its audience so having some showcase of community works that requires nothing but adding the official PAKs could work well as introducer. Even that might be too complicated though. 

 

+1 for negke's approach.

While a yearly award system like the Cacowards would be fantastic, I don't believe there is enough release volume per year to make it worthwhile. Many projects will likely make the list regardless since quality around here is often high. There was a small discussion about this too within the Duke community not long ago, which quickly died off...

I've been considering a similar idea on TAW but haven't figured out a proper format yet, possibly dedicating it toward Duke, Quake & Thief (+TDM) content. Haven't been on the ball with reviews for several months myself though with my focus being elsewhere, so even that idea remains on the backburner. :( 

 

Ok. I agree that there isn't enough content posted every year to do a top 10, although I like the idea of bringing the best releases (however many that is) to the forefront in an end-of-year review aka what Negke said!

I had a very similar list of possible judges as OTP although spirit makes a very good point in that you want to get opinions from people from different parts of the gaming community.

Another idea that I really like is a releasable pack with ALL the chosen levels + an engine to run them in + all settings selected. This isn't really necessary for func_ers but for the wider gaming audience that see cool levels in this awards show and want to play them.

Now there are probably issues with releasing a pack like that as levels have dependencies in progs.dat etc that could cause conflicts. But some sort of combined download with something simple and easy to run all the releases (simple ui, batch files or whatever) would be needed.

Maybe waiting until Qexpo 2016 and the Quake 20th birthday milestone might be best, then we could organise a big celebration of each year of Quake while showing off the best releases for that year? 

is a good shout for a "best of" kinda thing. 

Community-based: just create a discussion thread in december/january where people can talk about the releases of the year, post reviews or anecdotes, whatever. And then have someone distill a proper article from all of it.

Btw. I don't like the idea of bundling all releases. It would devaluate the indivudual maps/releases in a way. A good article should create enough exposure (with the right bit of advertising maybe). 

I would suggest that we do this in a cross-community way. I'm now a quakeone.com staff member and post news there, and I would be more than happy to collaborate on something like this.

I have been posting a lot of links to func_msgboard in the front page news there for a while in the course of reporting on map releases.

It is my opinion that the remaining Quake community needs to start doing things together instead of each of us sitting in their own little niche. Serving the greater good together >> taking the piss at each other.

I can always be approached at the three main forums if there is an interest in cross-community collaboration. If you want something newsed at quakeone.com to reach a greater audience, or if you want to talk about events, feel free to contact me. 

and I think the quake facebook page is good at highlighting stuff too.

The community is fragmented with no one site the main focus so having all these different areas across the web pointing to the cool stuff is nice.

In all truth I doubt Quake will ever reach the engagement that Doom reaches. 

Sure, I'm just saying we should network more, especially when it comes to events of any sort. 

off topic : How on earth do you submit news to quakeone.com ? I looked for ages to submit news for map jam 5 but couldn't find out how :P I ended up sending some sort of form or email but no idea if anyone read it!

it would be great if we can orchestrate something large and cool between all the Quake sites for the 20th birthday next year. Each site could specialise in whatever they do best and we could tie it all together with social media and some sort of guide. 

There is no form or anything (to my knowledge anyway, the forum system is ancient, confuddled and due for an overhaul.) You should contact one of the people who write news, which currently are mainly myself, talisa and mindzy. If you post a thread with something like [news-request] in the title (probably in the "finished works" subforum), I will see it and news it, as well.

I'm usually quicker about mapping news, the delay last time was just due to me being ill.

I would totally welcome it if people submitted their own news articles.