VOTING: *** February '09 Challenge - Political Map ***

[tcberry]

This month had some really stiff competition, and my choices were not easily made.

Hoel - First off, it's a lovely map, and I also like the great variety of standards. In a word: epic.

Steel General - I dig the attention to detail and story behind this one.

Qbista - Great map. Don't know if I buy the boundary line of the dark hemisphere... would think that would have been a less jagged line, but overall great job.

Great job, everyone!

[nolgroth]

When voting, I also add an "unofficial" category of usability to my decision making process. In other words, is the map something I would using in a role-playing game? That thought in mind, my votes in order of preference;

Steel General - Love the storyline and the breakdown in districts by guild. Beautiful detail.

Hoel - Lovely map with easy to understand icons.

Gamerprinter - I love the style of this piece of art. I can easily see the eastern influences in the map making process. The map itself could be useful, but I honestly see this as a potential player handout more than a functional map.

Great job to everybody that participated. As always, it was difficult to decide with all the entrants.

[Midgardsormr]

Steel General: Cities are hard and time consuming. Undertaking one for a monthly challenge was brave, and you pulled it off marvelously.

tcberry: I've seen this kind of map before, but yours is better than any other I've encountered. Great job.

mogul76: To be honest, I liked the colored map a hair better--I am not very good at interpreting patterns. Still, the use of both calligraphy and iconic drawings looks very good. Plus, as I said, I have a great interest in the Warring States period, so that probably pushed you out ahead of some others. You do have a misspelling, though. Fertile, not furtile.

Honorable mentions go to Qbista, Ascension, and Hoel. I wanted to vote for all of you, and those of you whom I can will get the rep to go with that.

[CBDroege]

I'm more than a little disappointed.

I know I wouldn't have won anyway, but I did put a lot of work into that map, and to have it not included in the final display means I didn't really get a fair shake.

I know it wasn't done on purpose, but I can't help but feel slighted.

[Redrobes]

Its been updated now. Sorry for being a little late. I don't get an update that the voting is about to start.

To CL's, do you think it would be better to lock the threads for one day before opening up the voting so we can sort out these issues. Ideally we should have the vote list up but you cant actually vote until its open for business too. That would have corrected the last time issue. Its a mere 4 hrs from notification to it being a problem and I am not always around every hour to ensure its up to date. There's a general comment in the thumbs sticky to say that you should look at the link to the thread not just the link to the image. It used to be the case that the image was not linked to the main pic for this very reason but it was changed from consensus that it would be easier to navigate instead of checking 20 or so links. I hope the advice to look at the whole thread is being heeded.

[torstan]

Can someone update the title of this thread to include the word Voting? I missed this thread for a while as I assumed that it was just an update to the discussion about the challenge.

[Steel General]

@Torstan - I have updated the thread title.

@RedRobes - My bad, I forgot you like to run a final update before voting begins. BAD CL! *smacks himself on the forehead*

[Redrobes]

I ran it last on 24th at 23:27pm so that was supposed to be a last run. Theres nothing I can do. The last submission by CB is yesterday at 5:46am which even if 6 or 7 hrs behind UTC makes it minutes to midnight on the 24th at best. Realistically, I just cant do any better than this. Its no ones fault other than the process could be improved to insert some delay in or the script could be automated at the server side which isn't happening at this point.

[CBDroege]

I asked for a specific (to the hour) deadline, and no one would tell me one, So I made sure to get it in by midnight EST. :/ Next time, I'll make sure not to cut it so close, even if it means not doing as much as I want with the map.

Also, sorry for hijacking the voting thread, I should have put my comment somewhere else.

[jfrazierjr]

I asked for a specific (to the hour) deadline, and no one would tell me one, So I made sure to get it in by midnight EST. :/ Next time, I'll make sure not to cut it so close, even if it means not doing as much as I want with the map.

Also, sorry for hijacking the voting thread, I should have put my comment somewhere else.

The problem is that there is not a specific deadline. Since all the CL's are volunteers who live in different timezones (Torq is in South Africa, which is I think GMT+1, Ravells is GMT, the rest of us are EST, CST, and PST (hope I did not leave anyone out!) and there is no telling exactly when one of use will have time to take care of it. However, as RR says, perhaps the best solution is to lock the threads and give some offset time prior to the actual posting of the Poll. There have been serveral times where the poll was not created until like the 27th or 28th day of the month because everyone was really busy, and unfortunatly, thats just kind of how it works.


I apoligize that your map was not updated, but at least yours was on the thumbnail page... poor Gimil's did not even show up (of course, part of that is because he did not follow the contest rules and it looks like RR's script did not pick up the edit by RobA yesterday to add that tag in.