ocelot
Warming Up
Posts: 23
Registered: 09-03 |
We face the question here of which is better -- getting Compet-N back now, with a number of issues and questions yet to be resolved, and getting it back after an unknown amount of time.
Adam Hegyi has so far proven irreplaceable. He had the motivation and expertise to detect cheating and run a quality site in a professional way (he even was a top player on the side). Compet-N was one of the best things things the Doom scene has seen. Riding the wave of its popularity and prestige, Adam made the well-intended decisions of including PWAD's and the annual Golden Cyber Awards. These additions were enthusiastically received and increased the player activity and popularity of Compet-N even further. The tradeoff, however, was that they critically increased the workload of the sole administrator to the point where it became too much for a single, unpaid volunteer. It is apparently way too much work for volunteers to maintain a very high-quality site that at the same time accepts a myriad of categories and PWADs.
That is one reason I share Anders's vision of returning C-N to its roots by limiting it to the IWADs and the three original categories. This will presumably keep the maintenance workload bearable for unpaid volunteers while maintaining quality of submissions, fierceness of competition, and the prestige of the site.
As a secondary modification, I am also in favor of having the smallest time unit count, because I see it as being conducive to a further increase in demo quality and a further incentive for perfecting each record. Nothing with glitches would be safe, and everything would tend towards perfection. The track running World Records aren't rounded off to full seconds, and I don't feel like Doom World Records should be either. The policy of rounding the times down has resulted in that a few "less prestigious" -nomonsters records (such as map01 and e1m1) are of much higher quality and much more polished than the corresponding, "prestigious" UV Speedruns, since the latter are impossible to beat by a whole second. Introducing millisecond times would remedy this. However, I must emphasize that this question is way secondary, as it does not tie directly to the core problem stated above, and it could easily be debated at a later point, even after the hypothetical replacement site was launched.
The way I see it is as follows: getting Compet-N back immediately, but with unresolved issues, has the advantage of a possible resurge of activity that might be significant. Its disadvantage is a greater workload of maintenance and a greater risk of a cheater-infestation that might dissuade some of the most hard-core and passionate players (this resonates with me) from participating in it. Waiting until the issues are resolved has the advantages of reducing the workload of maintenance, attracting the aforementioned player type, and maintaining the prestige of the name Compet-N. Its obvious disadvantage is that the initial challenges of setting such a site up might deter the whole thing from actually materializing, which would portend more years wasted waiting in vain for a replacement and the possible resurge of player activity that such a thing might entail -- and we have been waiting for 7 years already. However, I personally would rather keep waiting for a good replacement than launch something incomplete and issue-ridden bearing the name of Compet-N. I feel Adam did such an admirable job with Compet-N that his legacy should be honored by withholding that name from anything falling short of its quality. They are huge boots to fill.
Just my two cents, though.
Last edited by ocelot on 08-04-12 at 17:34
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08-01-12 00:35 
