The following will contain specific information about applying to join a competition, dueling, and what happens if you lose.
Tournaments
Tournaments will be tournament style, this means that two parties will go against one another to advance and go against someone else who won until there are only two contestants left. The winner of the tournament gets bragging rights.
To join a tournament, post such in the tournament's main thread. You will be entered into the roster for that tournament.
The dates of the tournaments will be posted on the main post which announces the tournament, along with what medium should be used, and a general idea for the topics that will be given. The actual topics won't be given until the first day of the tournament.
Topics
Each tournament will be composed around a specific idea or themes. These may be holiday related, or just related to a phrase or theme in writing. This could mean that there would be a Love Poems Tournament, or a Death Short Story Tournament, or even a Clarity in Word Wars Tournament. During that tournament, there will be themes for each round. The qualifying rounds theme for a Love Poems tournament could be Sonnets, or Unrequited Love, or even True Love. The semifinals would then have a different theme, and the finals would have still another new theme all relating back to the theme of the Tournament.
Occasionally, there will be tournaments that are just focused on excellence of a specific craft, such as Poetry Tournaments and these will provide a varying of themes which relate to writing in general such as clarity, rhythm, and metaphor.
Duels
For each round participants will engage in a duel. The rules of engagement for a duel are simple.
1) The first contestant who finishes their piece between the two duelers must create a new thread in the club and post only their work with the title offset at the top (This might mean centered, or bolded, or larger, or whatever suits your fancy).
The name of the thread should include the tournament name and the names of both contestants.
2) The second contestant of that duel then posts only their work with the title offset at the top of their post as well.
3) All duelers must have their piece up in their threads within three days of the beginning of the round (qualifying round, semifinals, finals, etc.).
Basically keep an eye out for the person you're dueling to make a thread, and if they don't, make one yourself when you finish your piece.
*Note: These threads will be deleted after the round has ended!
Judgement
To keep things simple, this will be a popularity vote. This does not mean vote for your favorite user. Vote for the work you like the most. Your integrity as writers is the only thing keeping you from constantly voting for your friends because they're your friends, or voting for the writer you feel most comfortable competing against.
That being said, votes should include a reason why you voted for one over the other much like a review, and also include the name in bold of the user you're voting for.
Voting should happen within 48 hours of the completion of the dueling thread. Basically keep an eye out for when the second dueler posts their work, and vote within 48 hours of that time stamp. Threads will be deleted after voting is done to keep the forums clean, so keep up to date and if you can't find what you're looking for, it's probably already gone.
There will be a complete chart of who won what round in the main tournament thread, so feel free to prepare as early as you'd like to compete against the next person. However, the new topic won't be posted until the last day of the voting period. Once the topic is posted, feel free to begin the new duels.
Please continue voting through the entire tournament so the finalists actually have voters.
You may also vote in tournaments you're not a part of if you are a member of the club.
Do not bother voting for your own duel.
Losing
It happens to all of us. We lose sometimes. When you lose, you have the option of awarding the winner a review on one of their works. This will be considered their winnings for that round if you choose to comply. If you don't, don't expect other people to review you when you win.
Losing also has another clause with it. If you lose and there is an uneven number of contestants, you may be re-entered into the competition as a back up, or as a contestant depending on how you are needed. If there are only 6 contestants, for example, then the 3 losing works for round 1 will be faced off in a three way duel posted by the host of the contest for voting in a 2 day window before the next round begins.
If you are someone who lost, you don't have to do anything to be entered in, and you don't have to write another work. The work you submitted for your duel will be put against the other works which lost. If you do win this round, you'll be put in the place of the 4th semifinalist.
Suggestions
Think we have something set up wrong? Tell us! This thread is open for your suggestions on how we can make the club better.
Facts and Questions on Tournaments
17 posts in this topic.
-
-
I am still sort of confused, so basically we have a writing contest with a topic we use, and then we vote for the best?
-
Yes, so it's a tournament. So you know how teams face off against one another to earn points that will then advance them onto the next round? Like if you had a chess tournament you'd have to face someone and if you lost, you'd be knocked out of it and have to try again next year, but if you won, you'd move on and have to battle someone else until it's down to just two people and those two people are considered the best of the best until one of them wins and then that person is The Best of that group? That's what we're doing.
It's a writing tournament, so using our writing skills, we'll go up against one or two other people and see if we can write something better than them in the same amount of time. If we win, we move on. If we lose, we might get a second chance, or we might just have to keep voting for other people and see who wins. -
Aley, I just have a question, does this have to be realistic(the stories) or can they also be fantasy? What genre would you like them to be in?
-
They could be anything within the boundaries I have already set. I'm not going to say that for every tournament you could use everything, but with The First Tournament you're pretty open to use anything. Just don't write a book for the tournament. You can use any realistic, fantasy, or otherwise that you want.
-
Aley, I just have a question, does this have to be realistic(the stories) or can they also be fantasy? What genre would you like them to be in?
-
I'm just going to bump this up by answering Pretzels long since answered question.
It can be in anything! -
Can the participants be anonymous? The posting will be done by the host, so participants only need to submit their pieces. Duels would still be done, but rather than between usernames, they're between the assigned numbers given privately to the participants.
-
I've considered anonymous duels before, but the host would not be able to participate in voting if that was the case because they would know who the individuals are. If you feel like you need privacy for what you're posting, then you could create an alternate account to participate or vote.
-
Eh? I thought it's the same thing when it's not anonymous because the participant would make a thread and post his work. I mean, every tournament up until now we know who are the writer of the pieces. Making it anonymous would only serve to limit the voters knowledge of who writes what, which would reduce any chance of voting based on writer and not writing piece. The regular rules applied to the host because they are applied to voters who know who write what.
-
If you'd like to try it out, you can go ahead and make a tournament with the rules you recommend and see how it goes.
In my opinion, if the writers are sending their pieces to be posted to the host, they aren't posting the dueling threads and thus won't know who they are paired against. -
Ah, yes. That's one of the side effects of using these rules. I don't think it's significant though because at least to me, the knowledge of who's my opponent doesn't affect my writing. Thanks for the permission! <3
-
The main reason why I didn't try to find some way to make things anonymous with these tournaments is because I was just trying to get something together so that I could see how well it worked and if it worked, how to get people to vote.
Voting is still a problem today although I think this relaunch has a lot better response from voters than the first time I had this club up and running. That was my main concern.
With people having the potential to post their works from YWS as a submission, I felt like it would defeat the purpose of anonymous submissions when you could probably tell your friend's writing style anyway. -
Well, the host can always create more rules to prevent the participants from publishing their pieces within the time of competition. Currently, these pieces are usually submitted through the threads and not publishing center, so I think it won't be a problem when they are being handled by the host.
About being familiar with a friend's writing style, that is no certainty to it. One can be sure and one can't, but the theme of being anonymous would certainly give no guarantee to one's guess, which means the piece would still be evaluated by its writing style.
All in all, I think there's no harm trying this out. I'm going to hold a tournament soon using this system. I hope you can allow it? I'm not sure about the theme of it yet, but I have an idea in mind. -
Of course I can allow it!
I'd love to talk more about this in a PM so we don't give away any spoilers >3
Sign in to reply to this topic.
Delete this post?
Are you sure you want to delete this post? This cannot be undone.