• Welcome to the Golden Gobbo painting competition. If you'd like to read some of the ancient history you can on the Realm of Chaos 80s blog.

    This competition is held some years and you'll find threads here describing how to enter and when the competition is running (typically after BOYL each year).

    Other than the fame and wonderment of your peers there is often a prize kindly donated and you'll have the wonder of being awarded badges for your profile here.

GG 2013 The Second Golden Goblin Competition?

Orlygg

Member
After pulling my finger out and getting the poll sorted voting can begin.

But my mind dwells over the first GG. From humble beginnings on a blog it grew with the community and the Oldhammer scene. It was always important for me that the competition was 'very easy going' with few rules or petty instructions, and looking at the entries with a fresh eye I think we succeeded in that.

So the paintbrush calls!

Time for a second go?

I am going to suggest two things for the second run.
1) A longer period to paint and enter a model.
2) Monsters this time!

Basically, any creature normally based on a 40mm by 40mm base (the big square ones!). Character background and rules remain! Closing date 1st January 2013.

What do people think then?
 

Thantsants

Member
Definitely up for a second round but you had to suggest monsters after I finished my giant! :mad: ;)

Seriously though monsters would be a good theme - I presume we wouldn't necessarily have to base it on a 40mm base?

As for time limits - personally I really enjoyed the rigours of the Lead Painter's League over on the LAF where you had to enter a team of at least 5 minis each week for 10 weeks. I'm not suggesting that here but I think a fairly short time limit spurs you on and means voters aren't hanging around for ages losing interest in the competition.

If this is to be a semi-regular thing I might suggest that we have a month to paint an entry, followed by a week's voting and the rest of that month off before the next round starts with a new theme.

That way it shouldn't become too much of a bind to paint entries (stuff that we'd possibly painting anyway for our own personal projects?) and we maintain a nice momentum, whilst building up a fantastic portfolio of brilliantly painted old school minis on Steve's site.

Another suggestion might be to either link to Steve's site here on the voting thread or host the images here too to save voters flicking back and forth between pages when deciding their vote.
 

phreedh

Member
I am all for a second bout, but think we have more important issues to sort out before discussing themes (as talked about in the other thread). Monsters is a good theme though!

To be honest, we lost a lot of momentum this round due to two things. First of all, the submissions being fragmented - we had some submissions with a lot of pictures, others with only one. Some were displayed separately from the text, others were displayed with the text. Some were embedded, others were only displayed as file-links and opened locally. It's been rather hard (and a lot of clicking!) to keep track of what goes where and which submission is the greatest. Secondly, time between publication and poll opening sort of killed the buzz. We had a good thing going in the build-up to publication. After that, it sort of died. Also, there was no easy way to keep track of the comments (if any) made on each submission which further lead to the feeling of a stalled event. A thing like this needs ongoing interaction and a tight schedule to keep the juices flowing.

I think we should consider the following changes:
* Keep everything on the forum There's nothing gained from having things hosted and displayed elsewhere. This is our competition and our place, it makes sense to have it here. It would also make discussion easy (both posting and reading).

* Stricter rules for the submissions. This to reduce the amount of work for the competition admin to post the submissions and also to make the entries easier to view. Say, each entry may contain 4 jpg at 1024x768 each. Any text submissions should be in a word document. Files should be named by a common standard.

* Voting starts when the entries are posted. I see no reason to have a window between posting the entries and voting. Voting should run for a week, tops! Any more than that and things start to drag out.

* Voting by ranking polls. Each entry could be posted as an individual poll, containing the whole entry on display (not linked or attached, it really should be displayed in the thread). With the poll options, each forum user can rank each entry 1-5 (where 1 is the lowest and 5 is the highest). Yes, users will be able to score each entry with 5 points, but why would we do that? We don't keep open registrations on the boards so there's no great risk for vandals. Ideally the poll results shouldn't be visible until the voting is closed. When the voting is over, the scores are made public and tallied by the Gobbo commissioner(s). Each entry would have a final score being the sum of all their votes. The results are published in a separate thread. I found it hard to pick out a single favourite and would prefer if I could just rank each entry. Another positive effect of this is we can get comments and discussions going in individual threads, keeping the competition alive for the whole run. Finally, we're not that many active users on the forums. Allowing each entry to be graded like this would give us greater granularity in the results.

* Why keep entries anonymous? Most of us have distinct styles and fetishes anyways, and it's not hard to recognize the photo setup of many of the entrants.

* Enforce the deadlines. Yes, the more the merrier - but waiting a few extra weeks for people to get their entries in isn't adding to the fun. It's not a matter of impatience, but if nothing is happening people move on and focus on the competition is lost and the nerve and excitement dies off.

I applaud the initiative, and appreciate the effort made but in the end I think round 1 was an anti-climactic affair. I understand the reasons why, and the limitations we faced and I'm not looking to hang neither Orlygg nor Steve. =) I might come off a bit ranty here, but I've been writing the post over the course of three hours while watching our 20 month old boy demolish the house so I couldn't focus on anything but getting my point across.

I'd be happy to help organize round 2, setting up the infrastructure and general rule sets.
 

Thantsants

Member
Well said Phreedh and not at all ranty- you obviously thought things through in more detail than I did this morning!

I did find clicking around the different formats of the entries a bit of a pain too - voting by ranking polls would be a neat way of solving that. It'd also be nice to show appreciate to all entries. I'm sure I'm not the only one who had a really tough time allocating my one vote!

I know we'd like this to be easy-going but I think enforcing rules on deadlines and standardising the entry format would ensure a more pleasurable experience for everyone.

As for the anonymous bit - I could spot one or two familiar styles in there and didn't let it affect my voting.

Last thought - is it worth promoting the voting on the Oldhammer and our personal blogs as we've got a similar turnout to a local council bi-election at the moment ;)
 

Thehermit

Member
i think now the forum is up and running it would be best to submit GG2 entries to the moderator and keep it all here in one place. So much easier and more compact that way!
Learn from GG1 and keep it fun :)
Well i best go reread all these entries and VOTE!!!!!!
 

bug16

Member
Monsters is a great theme but the 40mm base causes problems because a lot of 3rd edition and earlier monsters don't fit that because they're allsorts of weird base sizes.
 

Blue in VT

Moderator
I'm ready to roll!

I agree with most of the suggestions above...this Forum is the place to do it all...just to streamline things and keep momentum. I look forward to seeing what everyone comes up with.

Cheers,

Blue
 

bug16

Member
Just started cleaning mine up and discovering how fiddly it's going to be to put together. No idea how to paint it though as I'm always at a bit of a loss when it comes to painting big models!
 

Zhu Bajie

Member
TBH the different formatting and the endless clicking around trying to open them up made me give up. Great effort guys on putting it together, but I'm just a bit too lazy.

That said, can I suggest an annual competition? That way we all know long in advance when we've got to get stuff done by? I know you bunch are a lot of prolific painters, but maybe the GGs could be something a bit special. Also might give time to get the word out and maybe get some prizes in order?
 

treps

Member
Ti Pouchon":lda8b3hu said:
Seeing as folks are already getting started, is there a deadline yet?
I was asking myself the same question...

By the way, I can open here a subforum where each participant could post his entry, his WIP, etc. in the same way that theterra genesis competitions ?

Bruno
 

phreedh

Member
treps":2xsfxx9v said:
Ti Pouchon":2xsfxx9v said:
Seeing as folks are already getting started, is there a deadline yet?
I was asking myself the same question...

By the way, I can open here a subforum where each participant could post his entry, his WIP, etc. in the same way that theterra genesis competitions ?

Bruno
Don't think we're enough people on this forum to have a competition like that with open heats... we need to have a central moderator who collects all entries by a deadline and then post them up here within a few days and make everything public in one go at the same time as the voting is opened up. Most importantly, we have to keep the speed up and have things accessible.
 

phreedh

Member
Zhu Bajie":2fjbzrmg said:
but maybe the GGs could be something a bit special
I think it would be really cool if we had four or five competitions each year and crowned an annual Golden Gobbo based on the results from each individual competition. I like leaderboards and tables. =D The only thing I don't like about the Lead Painter's League is the insane tempo!
 

Thantsants

Member
Hmmm I like the idea of one special annual competition.

But I also like the idea of a range of competitions that feed into an annual league table...

How can I ever decide....

FIIGGHHHTTTT! :twisted:
 

phreedh

Member
Thantsants":2hdhyvgo said:
Hmmm I like the idea of one special annual competition.

But I also like the idea of a range of competitions that feed into an annual league table...

How can I ever decide....
Let's do both? =)
 

Just John

Moderator
I'll volunteer my services as the moderator for the next competition - I used to spend my days writing reports and illustrating them so I should know what I'm doing :grin:

If we could agree on a few things to standardise the entries such as a word limit for the back story/ special rules and the number of photos for each entry then it would be easy enough to create a pdf booklet for each competition with each entry on say 1 page or something along those lines. Each competitor could then receive a booklet by return e-mail as a memento.

If competitions ended on a Thursday then no reason why everything couldn't be ready by the following Monday.

For showing it on this forum if a new thread were opened for each competition then I think we could post each entry either individually or as one long post. People can then view to their hearts content and vote early and often.
 

treps

Member
John,

Phreed is testing some stuff to manage the next competition here on the forum, you should contact him to see what you could you together !

Bruno
 
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