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I'm assuming there will be a SM63 one afterwards? We won't be having WITBLO14 at this rate.

I really don't think a cooldown period is all that necessary, honestly.

My ideal system would be SM63-LL alternating every month, a contest officially starts on the 1st and ends on the 30th- even in the case of non-leap-year February that leaves 28 days, with six of each contest per year. I think if you can't finish a level in a month, the idea is way too ambitious for a contest. Following this, judging would extend 15 days into the next month, so even if some judges were competing in the next LDC, they'd still have half a month to put something together. Seems more than reasonable, assuming they don't attempt a 16-part story entry with fully programmable block boss at the end of each installment, right? The judges should ideally be able to wrap things up in half the time it takes people to make entries, too. It's a commitment, and one that comes with time restrictions. I remember doing the math for the 25quared contest back in April and estimating about 10 hours of of work per judge- yes the levels were small, but there was a lot of them. At an hour a day, that's about ten days. Not really seeing an excuse here, barring something crazy coming up.

So yeah. This gives clearly defined start times and deadlines, and while they are perhaps a little on the short side, I think they're a pretty reasonable compromise between spending ages on a perfectly polished level and dragging the contest out so long nobody cares when the results eventually come out. That's where a lot of the hype (and stress) comes from, and anyone who's ventured through the latest contest threads can see the huge number of people beating themselves up while waiting for things to conclude. It's pretty morbid. Not many of our users do LL and SM63 super regularly, so the duration of one contest would be like downtime for the other guys, and even if you want to enter both, it's more than possible to do so by not procrastinating your entry.

If judges are that hard to find, I could judge both games pretty much whenever. Bottom line though, I think we need to handle the next few LDCs with a "tough love" approach. Sometimes things happen. It's not the end of the world if you have to sit out one contest, but proper time management could greatly reduce the impact of things like computer crashes and deleted code. (That and saving your work, USB drives are very cheap these days and are almost universally compatible between operating systems, home computers, laptops, and school/work/library/whatever setups.)

Speaking of extensions, we often talked about getting rid of them completely for a few months now. How about we do exactly that? If somebody doesn't have the time to make way too long entries with full story and other stuff nobody really needs in a platformer they should either make something smaller or don't enter.

when does the poll end

MessengerOfDreams wrote:I'm assuming there will be a SM63 one afterwards? We won't be having WITBLO14 at this rate.

Well, let's say the LL LDC starts up on the first of July (this is hypothetical), and the deadline is till the 1st August, and judging takes ages and longer than a month but because of this it means we can start the SM63 LDC at any point after the judging stage takes 4 weeks. So that means we would have one in September, and that's just assuming that the worst will happen. So I'm sure we'll be fine. Besides, we could always have more mini-LDCs to finish off the year on behalf of SM63 just so we can have a WITBLO14, and then LL users are still happy because we will then have a fair amount of LDCs.

Also Nwolf, idk when the poll ends, it seems like we've made a decision now anyway though.


EDIT: OJ has made very good points in his post. To be fair judges have always had deadlines, but we were never strict on it. So how about we say, a 3 week deadline for judging, then if it takes longer than that, the next LDC has permission to start at any point afterwards. Everyone will be having 3 week breaks then at least from level designing, and if there are 4-5 week (and perhaps 6 week) deadlines, they can probably still spare a week or two at the beginning of the next LDC.

Nwolf wrote: If somebody doesn't have the time to make way too long entries with full story and other stuff nobody really needs in a platformer

<\3

*shoots self*

I should let you know my long levels almost always make it for the deadline.

Proposition: appeal for an extension if you ABSOLUTELY MUST by pinging the level code off to the host; they'll be the judge of whether you warrant an extension or not

wasn't talking to you MoD/MP3, can't really remember you needing an extension except maybe once :>


k let's start LLLDC *hides*

I find it funny that SM63 had about 5 votes at the start and it's gone down to 3 xD

I've still kept mine there, but okay as we've agreed an LL LDC will go next, as soon as the host is decided they can start asap. :3