Results for the RCF: Midnight S1 Token Contest

The officers have spoken and we have a winner for the Race to CORE First (RCF) Midnight Season 1 Token Contest!

I knew there was a chance of me winning and this being awkward- and here we are! The designs will be featured beside the discord names of everyone who participates in the RCF Midnight Season 1 and achieves AOTC- with the winning team getting the fancier token.

We had a total of 4 entries in our first contest. Here are the designs that were entered.

I wanted to make the contest as transparent and fair as possible- especially since I was not only running it, but also entering it. To hopefully accomplish this, I set some rules for the officers before they voted:

1. Entries would be as anonymous as possible. No one was told who entered what. The one exception to this rule is that I could not make the entries anonymous to the CORE Council. We share an inbox, so there's no way for me to restrict access to entry emails.
2. Voting would be a "ranked ballot" system with 1st place receiving 4 points, 2nd receiving 3 points, 3rd receiving 2 points, and 4th receiving 1 point. These points would be added up, and the entry with the highest point count would be the winner.
3. I would not be voting.

Here is the exact image given to the officers to vote on:

Image

A shout-out to Taz who submitted their designs with the dummy discord text so we could see how it looked beside names. I liked this so much that I decided to place everyone's tokens in the same layout.

I made a spreadsheet to keep track of who voted for what and to tally up the points. You can find that here in a Google Sheet I've made publicly available.

For those of you who don't care about the source data and just want to see the final scores, here they are!

It was a pretty close contest with A and B tied for number of "first place points". The real deciding factor though was second place points. A and B seemed to be polarizing to people- they liked one and disliked the other, so D (my entry) got a lot of second place points.

I also requested the officers explain why they voted the way they did, and that feedback has been collected and given out to the respective entrants.

One thing that becomes pretty obvious looking at the results is that a ranked voting system might not be "fair" to the entry who got the most first place votes- and that's fine criticism to have. However, I generally find ranked voting pleases the most people.

Let's take an example of we have 4 raid leaders: Wolf Boi, Captain Crustacean, Mr. Fizz, and Randy and 11 people needed to rank them on who's the coolest. Wolf Boi gets 4 first place votes, Captain Crustacean gets 3, and both Mr. Fizz and Randy get 2 each- but everyone who didn't vote for Randy as the coolest, said he was the second coolest. If we had to choose a winner that would please the most people, then obviously picking Randy would be the correct choice- not everyone voted for him as their number one, but they did vote for him over the other 2 remaining people.

P.S. Thank you for taking the time to read my thinly veiled shots fired are our lovey raid leaders.

I have to say, I was a little worried when I announced this contest that no one would be interested in entering. I was excited when one person reached out to me to shoot ideas back and forth for their entry (and mine), and then even more happy to see more people send in their entries closer to the end of the submission window!

I do hope people aren't discouraged by the outcome. I personally really liked each entry- obviously some more than others but such is the way with contests and comparisons. I think I'd like to do this kind of thing again in the future, but maybe make it some sort of collective brainstorm/workshop where we can all come together, work on a few options for the tokens, and then have the officers vote. We have a lot of creativity in the guild and I'd like to celebrate that.

If you have any questions, comments, concerns, or ideas give me a shout either on the Discord (@Velmathris) or send me an email at nick@coreguild.gg.