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LadyMistDragon

Cacoward winners being overrated.

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1 hour ago, ginc said:

 

Going off on a bit of a tangent, I have noticed that while the Cacowards don't have categories for WADs, the panel does seem to like representing a variety of WAD types. Basically, it seems like they like a variety of source port compatibility, WAD length, and gameplay types (difficulty is usually a function of this, ie. slaughter). They also like to represent a few oddballs or hipster picks (ie. WADs that didn't get a lot of hype).

Disclaimer: this is just speculation based on what I see getting the awards, I am not affiliated with the panel in any way.

 

Though I can't speak for anyone else, this was actively important to me when I was judging. It felt important for me that a celebration of Doom mapping would have a bit of something for everyone, rather than being dedicated to a particular set of tastes/interests. To me, that's the best thing about good curation, and the most important reason that it's better than a popular vote (and no matter how many people gripe about the Cacowards being a set of opinions, I don't think anyone actually wants to have a popular vote instead).

 

This happens almost 100 percent naturally, though -- it's not like the Cacowards team is sitting there with a list of quotas they're trying to meet. The selections are well-rounded because the team is large and everyone has different tastes. One person may be picking a lot of stuff that's art/story-driven, another may be picking a lot of stuff that's combat-driven, another picking stuff that's feature-driven (that's a vast oversimplification, but you get the idea). And since they all have to agree on a final list, it includes a lot of types of stuff. For me, it only became a deciding factor in edge cases -- like, "we have 9 out of 10 awards picked and for the tenth we're deciding between two equally good things, but one of those things has a style of design that's already super well represented and the other is pretty unique." And even if that did decide my vote, it would still only be one vote out of many.

 

When people are unhappy with the award selections, it usually seems to me like they are calling for awards that are more biased, not less biased. They want to see their own interests represented more. Obviously that's a double-edged sword -- you could specially engineer a selection of awards for any one disgruntled person, but then they're just going to make everyone else less happy. I'd love if people saw the awards as an opportunity to broaden their tastes and see why things outside of their own wheelhouses are exciting to people, or to realize that having a high production value and a huge fan following doesn't make something bad, or to realize that being an oddball indie cult darling doesn't make something bad either. At this point, award contrarianism is ingrained in popular culture, and I wonder how many people have actually thought about it or have any kind of an ideal they're aspiring to rather than just wanting to be annoyed by whatever they disagree with.

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23 minutes ago, Not Jabba said:

I'd love if people saw the awards as an opportunity to broaden their tastes and see why things outside of their own wheelhouses are exciting to people, or to realize that having a high production value and a huge fan following doesn't make something bad, or to realize that being an oddball indie cult darling doesn't make something bad either. At this point, award contrarianism is ingrained in popular culture, and I wonder how many people have actually thought about it or have any kind of an ideal they're aspiring to rather than just wanting to be annoyed by whatever they disagree with.

 

This is what i would have said if i was better at words (my longwinded way of saying 'this')

 

Also @Fletcher` i was about to go on a rant about Doom 1 wads being underrated until I saw essel's post. I still stand by it though. And I'd never tried Mapgame it's quite good so far

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22 minutes ago, Gougaru said:

What would you guys say are the top 5 most overrated wads ? 

 

Unless you were hoping to keep any responses to this post to "top 5 most overrated Cacoward winning wads," then this post just invites the thread to be derailed into a bunch of people musing about whatever maps or mapsets they think get more praise than they deserves. There are also a number of threads pertaining to the general question of overrated wads, so those could be reviewed and commented on without derailing this particular thread.

 

I don't personally agree with the OP's stance that the Cacowards are necessarily overrated. The bottom line is that different people have different tastes, and different people will think different things deserve to be recognized. Anything that is popular, or gets a lot of exposure, will inevitably attract lots of attention, and while some of that attention will be manifested as "this is great," some of the attention will be manifested as "this stuff is bad and people shouldn't like it as much as they do."

 

I haven't had the benefit of being part of the deliberations over the Cacowards, but I know people that have been/are, and the merits of the selections are discussed and debated. In fact, some of the selections are disliked by members of the committee choosing them; but they are still selected on their overall merits.

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17 minutes ago, HAK3180 said:

*Yes, these are just straight lines thrown together on Microsoft Word with Calibri font.

Times New Roman is overrated anyways.

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I only like 100% vanilla compatible wads. Everything else is out of touch with the current times (1993) and therefore overrated.

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Cacowards are awards given in moment and usually for doing something significant in that year. For instance, Action Doom and Chosen won a 2004 Cacoward, but nowadays we have full-on indie games coming out. They won the award because in 2004, the quality of their work was remarkable. So Cacowards are somewhat arbitrary personal choices based on then available knowledge. In some cases, the older work still outdoes current source port developments: Super Sonic Doom relies on a custom ZDoom build and is (as far as i can tell) still the only option to accurately play the WAD because of its hacky implementations of fog and colored lighting. Though this is an exception, as usually source ports either implemented the features needed in the master code, or rather create workarounds for it (As was the case with Caverns of Darkness).

 

Cacowards should definitely be viewed with a lens within the year it was awarded. Retroactively comparing Cacowards with a modern eye, and you will find that what was once a Cacoward would now be a good map/mapset/mod at best.

 

Consider the cacowards the Doom equivalent of the National Film Registry. Each year some are selected for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected for preservation and honoration.
 

22 hours ago, LadyMistDragon said:

This is a subject that I wonder didn't come to mind sooner, perhaps because of the ridiculous amount of quality that's available these days, but it's at least food for thought if nothing else. Mainly because people will play things like Cacoward winners and maybe Top 100 Wads without necessarily knowing too much about how Doom mapping has changed throughout the years.

 

I was prompted to post this after just playing the Outer Darkness, the Mormon hell and the Cacoward winner for 2007. As fantastic a swan song as it might be for Varun Krishna, the trouble is that beyond atmosphere, there's not necessarily tons there. Maybe that's a sign of where Doom mapping was at this point. It's just personally strange to see what is basically a highly competent and atmospheric but not necessarily blood-pumping map such as this get that golden Caco. The hub-like, wave-comprising hub fight was pretty cool and the lack of health is quite dread-inducing, but they don't necessarily would make Cacoward winners these days. Although that is one spooky ending, I should say.

 

So what about you? Do you think there are cases where a wad gets overrated because it had received accolades in the past? Like nothing like the marquee names of Memento Mori and Hell Revealed that everyone knows, but stuff like Outer Darkness, or maybe the maps Trevor Primmett was making around this time (though I somewhat doubt the latter, if only because I really liked his Back to Saturn X entry)? Ultimate Torment and Torture is certainly out of place with modern doom, however, it's not an especially talked about wad these days.

 

18 hours ago, Murdoch said:

Awards are nice, but ultimately meaningless. It's just somebody's subjective opinion. Different people like different things, and those things change with time and tastes.

I think this does the peer review set by the Cacoward team a little dirty, for lack of a better word. I find (but that's an opinion) that the team does a good job selecting works that are rather universally regarded by the community as great. The mentionation thread helps tremendously in that regard.

To me, the Cacowards are the equivalent of a seal of quality - When someone's work wins a Cacoward, its usually quality-wise good, and good enough to stand the perils of time. Great mapsets are classics because of their quality.

 

Having said that, i am still bummed out that NJ Doom never recieved a mention for the 1994 wads or an award for basically being the first megawad with rather good levels :P Its still a good mapset even today.

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Cacowads are written by people with - surprise - their own subjective opinions. They have no obligation to match their tastes with anyone else's. Personally, there is a handful of cacoward wads I find boring too - as there are loads of mapsets with no award to their name that in my opinion stand above most of their contemporaries. Just like with music or any other form of art, everyone is entitled to enjoy or not enjoy whatever they like. Besides, comparing wads from over ten years ago to modern wads is kind of unfair - doom mapping has been on a constant rise, 2022 being a prime example. I've lost count how many high-quality megawads have already been released this year, and we're only just over halfway there!

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Honestly i think the cacowards should be more like let the community vote for the finalist of every year awards, and which ever one wins get it and which ever one doesn't win...well they don't win. 

 

I may not know how it works from the inside out, but i just wanted to toss my option out there and everyone has an option.  

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25 minutes ago, xScavengerWolfx said:

Honestly i think the cacowards should be more like let the community vote for the finalist of every year awards, and which ever one wins get it and which ever one doesn't win...well they don't win. 

That essentially turns it into a popularity contest, who can somehow mass the most votes rather than judging the content based on it's actual merits.

 

This doesn't really make any sense for the cacowards, because it would mean the "winner" is whomever can achieve meme status. But being popular doesn't automatically make something good. It's not hard to have that popular thing incidentally be whatever Kotaku vomits up as journalism about "someone just put my ex wife in Doom" or whatever new dumb thing has occurred, overshadowing basically everything else as the virality spreads. And where all the effort goes into other works is suddenly ignored for the meme.

Edited by Edward850

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32 minutes ago, xScavengerWolfx said:

Honestly i think the cacowards should be more like let the community vote for the finalist of every year awards, and which ever one wins get it and which ever one doesn't win...well they don't win. 

 

I may not know how it works from the inside out, but i just wanted to toss my option out there and everyone has an option.  

 

idk why this needs to have anything to do with the Cacowards. Someone can run that themselves and publish the winner. That way you have that and the Cacowards.

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I do find "Cacowards are just a popularity contest, let's make it a popular vote instead!" to be pretty funny.

I get the sentiment though. If you don't agree with the Cacoward judges opinions, it can be easy to think "oh, well if real people chose these they'd look like -list of wads i like

 

There's been plenty written about why "professional" criticism is important and I agree 

You can read a bad review of something you like and vice versa but still come out with a fresh perspective, the "ahh i never thought of it that way!"

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I'm overrated and I find this highly offensive.

 

Also, I need to stop being a lazy ass and work with a couple other fans of this "Doom" game to come up with a proper "Doomer's Choice Awards" or something of that nature. Could be as simple as having a thread where people can cast single-point votes for various wads over the course of a year, then myself and whoever else could just tally 'em all up, release the list, and maybe do writeups about the top 10.

 

These days getting a "proper" list would probably be hard since I know there's a huge chunk of wad players with no account on any of the classic Doom forums - meaning votes would possibly have to be sourced from places like Discord (hisss) or, uh, whatever else you kids use to talk Doom these days. I do love the idea, have for years in fact, and maybe it's something we should actually spitball about properly.

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23 minutes ago, Worm318 said:

what is bad

 

It should be mentioned that with the "worst wad" award being discontinued over ten years ago, the Cacowards don't really talk about what is bad.

 

I'll talk in grades because MtPain made those easier to grok, but if the awards corresponded to grades the crew gave as a whole (with A+s being given out properly stingily), in modern times they'd probably be something like:


A+ (minority even of Cacos, usually under 4 a year)
A (rest of Cacos and around half (or a bit more) of runner-ups)
A- (rest of runners-up and many HMs)
B+ (many HMs, some pseudo HMs)
B / B- (some pseudo HMs) 

 

So that's ultimately a pretty compressed band of quality judgments. 

 

There are very rare smaller mentions that make it in more for being unusually 'interesting', but those still aren't 'bad'. 

 

Omission isn't really a negative either because that last category, and even the second-to-last one, are not and can't be fully comprehensive -- because there are so many releases that at a certain point you have to pick and choose what is notable and interesting. 

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2 hours ago, Redneckerz said:

I think this does the peer review set by the Cacoward team a little dirty, for lack of a better word

 

Not at all. Like i said, they are nice. They draw just attention to good works. But they shouldn't be considered the be all and end all, some objective measure of quality that is beyond question. It's fine to agree but it's also fine to disagree. That's why i generally try to avoid the word overrated when it comes to art myself. Unless something is really obviously terrible, it's all subjective. 

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38 minutes ago, baja blast rd. said:

Omission isn't really a negative either because that last category, and even the second-to-last one, are not and can't be fully comprehensive -- because there are so many releases that at a certain point you have to pick and choose what is notable and interesting. 


I agree, but to be fair some people doesn't get this idea and complain every year if my memory doesn't fail. Anyways, I didn't think about the whole content of that post too much, so sorry if it seemed like I implied that Cacowards non-winners are bad... or underrated.

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To be honest, I find this thread a little confusing coming from you, @LadyMistDragon. Participating in the Shovelware Society, ER/IWA and (especially) WADarcheology threads as you do, you contribute a damn lot to this community by excavating forgot relics of the past and giving them their due. I don't pretend to read everything you write, but I've definitely uncovered a few gems because you spent the time writing about them and telling me why they're good.

 

So if you feel that certain things have been under-exposed* in any given Cacowards, why not compile those thoughts? A year-in-retrospective - a review of a review - a compilation of things that are equally deserving of players' attention today. Not a hitpiece to shit on the 20XX panel or recepients, but a platform to elevate those that you think got left behind. That would be a worthwhile project, and you'd probably get more than a few contributors so you're not doing all the lifting yourself.

 

@Doomkid's idea is also mint: whatever gets people recognising the efforts of their peers is invaluable.

 

*

Spoiler

Totally prefer that phrase because the sheer bloody eloquence of @HAK3180 coming in here with two literal lines and summarising the whole damn mess just tickled me.

 

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Considering the Doom Community is not something as big as, let say, the movie community, for example, I don't think the selections for the awards over the years are overrated. In fact, I do consider the opposite, for most maps not being able to get the price. But happens with everything, there are many wads that may go overlooked, considering the abundance of wads out there. These days, most of the maps reach the "front page" of the forums and it's not as easy to miss a map, though.

You may not like it personally, but there isn't a single megawad you can say "this is not as good as people think, this is not the Avengers: Endgame of Doom-Mapping"

Even for wads like Hell Revealed (One of the most overrated if you want to say it is), had its charm back in the day, and now it looks outdated, but not overrated, it has the recognition it deserved.

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Also reminder that anyone (themselves or in a group) can just do something like the Cacowards, or with a similar focus but a completely different format. (MtPain27 and Decino are even bigger than the Cacowards in reach, so it's not like the Cacowards automatically obsoletes anything else.) 

 

It's not the responsibility of the Cacowards to cover everything, any more than it's not MtPain's responsibility to do 50 reviews in the time he does 20, or Decino's to do Let's Plays of 3x more wads than he does. 

 

So if something is getting overlooked, and you're whining that the Cacowards didn't cover it, it's actually your fault that it's overlooked. :P

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After having seen a few responses, I feel I need to clarify one thing (I don't really have lots of time today though) after acknowledging I'm horrible with titles of most sorts that aren't either edgy or pretentious somehow (and those are just as bad to most). And once again, thanks to Omniarch for dishing out a TL;DR response. He always says things the best, despite his wordiness.

 

I have nothing against the concept of the Cacowards. I actually enjoy the writing of rd and Demon of the Well especially, but also the others to a lesser extent, for their perspectives, and the sort of poetic language that they utilize to great effect.

 

This was basically a thought exercise prompted by me playing through an admittedly 15-year old wad and finding it to be a slightly above-average corridor crawler for the majority of it. It just got me thinking about subjective opinions, which is part of the reason some people just shitposted because of course, why would anyone even bother to question something that most people like, despite the complaints?

 

I don't think that really addresses the title though. I guess I should have said something about how even back in the old days, there were wads that were either forgotten about and ignored. Although I don't think it's inaccurate necessarily to say that the Outer Darkness for instance was one of the better wads of 2006, I guess I just wonder just what that year may have been ignored (and I apologize for not playing more wads from that year, but you know, priorities). The only thing I can really say here is that perhaps in some place, Cacowards from years past can be debated to a certain degree, while taking into account when wads in question were made of course (except for Hell Revealed, sorry;p)

 

I see that once again, I failed to address the main point;p) So I'll just emphasize again I'm far from the biggest critic of the Cacowards and how winners are decided. Maybe the music thing could've been broader for instance, but I understand why it wasn't. Honestly, it's quite inspiring to see a community that cares enough to do something like this every single year (though the same may not be going for another event I'm overseeing)(:

 

 

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There's certainly something to be said about the much higher profile that WADs achieve once they have been granted a Cacoward and the relatively small set of community members that works to decide which WADs are worthy of receiving one. Ultimately, the selection process IS subjective. There is no community vote each year, and thus it IS possible for good work to slip into the cracks if the (small and overworked) team of Cacoward writers doesn't manage to cover it in some capacity.

 

With that said, I truly believe the Cacoward team does its absolute Darndest (capital D) to cast a wide net each year, giving ample writing space to runners-up, and with the most recent 'wards, dedicating an entire page to a massive list of WADs Worth Playing. Despite those efforts, it's simply impossible for the Cacowards to prop up everything that may be deserving of that spotlight. Inevitably, there is going to be disagreement within the community. This community produces more noteworthy work now than EVER before. To be quite honest, with 2021's output I genuinely did not expect Arrival to be chosen for a gold Caco.

 

Ultimately, I think this is a problem that can be solved through community organization, rather than any restructuring of the Cacowards as they exist now. The Cacowards is simply one, albeit very significant, method of annual celebration that the community takes. There's no reason that an "Annual Community Choice" awards couldn't come up along side the 'wards, something that puts the hottest WADs of the year to a vote, with the winners getting their own spotlight. This requires action and people willing to commit themselves to running such a thing though. But I wouldn't put such dedication past the Doom community :)

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8 hours ago, Murdoch said:

 

Not at all. Like i said, they are nice. They draw just attention to good works. But they shouldn't be considered the be all and end all, some objective measure of quality that is beyond question. It's fine to agree but it's also fine to disagree. That's why i generally try to avoid the word overrated when it comes to art myself. Unless something is really obviously terrible, it's all subjective. 

But by some degree, they will be. Because generally a cacoward is rather indicative of a wad's quality. I agree its not the end-all, be-all, but there obviously is some measurement to quality.

 

Maybe we are talking about the same coin but from different sides.

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16 hours ago, Daytime Waitress said:

To be honest, I find this thread a little confusing coming from you, @LadyMistDragon. Participating in the Shovelware Society, ER/IWA and (especially) WADarcheology threads as you do, you contribute a damn lot to this community by excavating forgot relics of the past and giving them their due. I don't pretend to read everything you write, but I've definitely uncovered a few gems because you spent the time writing about them and telling me why they're good.

 

So if you feel that certain things have been under-exposed* in any given Cacowards, why not compile those thoughts? A year-in-retrospective - a review of a review - a compilation of things that are equally deserving of players' attention today. Not a hitpiece to shit on the 20XX panel or recepients, but a platform to elevate those that you think got left behind. That would be a worthwhile project, and you'd probably get more than a few contributors so you're not doing all the lifting yourself.

 

@Doomkid's idea is also mint: whatever gets people recognising the efforts of their peers is invaluable.

 

*

  Hide contents

Totally prefer that phrase because the sheer bloody eloquence of @HAK3180 coming in here with two literal lines and summarising the whole damn mess just tickled me.

 

 

 

If I only had the time....see, I already shot my moderate chances of being asked to write for the Cacowards in the foot with this dumbass post but there's at least one person who was higher on the list than me even before that. But at any rate, I'm doing some writing for some non-Doom related stuff that may or may not last a while, though I just got paid which makes that more worth it. I could still find more time if asked, but you know....

 

PS: Also, I'm the only person doing the newstuff guide for the wadazine and I basically try to play everything I don't think everyone has heard of yet (up to a point, I don't do entire 10 map sets or whatever) so there's that.

Edited by LadyMistDragon

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My take is, it's not that things are "overrated." It's that a lot of other stuff is criminally underrated. Try wads from authors you haven't heard of.

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5 hours ago, LadyMistDragon said:

If I only had the time....see, I already shot my moderate chances of being asked to write for the Cacowards in the foot with this dumbass post

 

I totally understand that there's not enough hours in a day to do what you love, and I don't mean to seem like I'm shouting for someone else to write this while I sit on the couch and stuff my face with tatey chips, but...

 

Why does being asked to write for the Cacowards matter a damn? Does it have to be "official"? I'd like to think that if most any random user decided to put the effort into a re-review of a particular year for the awards, digging into detail about what might have been under-exposed, a comprehensive compliment to the actual awards themselves, well... I think that's gonna help a lot of people.

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59 minutes ago, Daytime Waitress said:

 

I totally understand that there's not enough hours in a day to do what you love, and I don't mean to seem like I'm shouting for someone else to write this while I sit on the couch and stuff my face with tatey chips, but...

 

Why does being asked to write for the Cacowards matter a damn? Does it have to be "official"? I'd like to think that if most any random user decided to put the effort into a re-review of a particular year for the awards, digging into detail about what might have been under-exposed, a comprehensive compliment to the actual awards themselves, well... I think that's gonna help a lot of people.


This is the post we need, it's does NOT need to be a official Cacoawards jury or writer to talk greatly about a .wad

 

If a group of people can also have the intentions, ideas and writting potential to make a awards pages, so be it, like more opinions the best, i'm hopping to do the same but in my country language and with more time on preparation to play a lot of wads.

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