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And the results are in!

Winner: Mizal with "Ancient Heart"
Second: Leora with "I Can Hear You"
Third: ericyopy with "Vindicta"
Also Third: Orange with "The Cliff"

Votes were kind of split for third place, so they both ended up getting it. Ultimately it seems this contest failed, as none of the entries were particularly strong. For whatever reason, most entries went with the idea of following a person over their life, with their death being the sad part. That could of worked, but none of them really tied in any sort of reason for the death to be sad, like them dying before they were able to fulfill their dream or something. Them dying was just the natural end to that kind of story, so there wasn't a reason to feel bad in most cases.

Fun facts:

• Berka and I had the exact same top three entries
• Mizal was the only contestant all four judges gave a place to (and it was always at least second)
• No one got sad, or shed any tears, but everyone was left disappointed

There's not a whole lot I can say in terms of feedback. Lack of effort was more or less the cause of this not going so well. Perhaps the theme was just too tough, or maybe giving more time just backfired tremendously. WouldntItBeNice actually put in a good deal of effort, but they also had awkward prose and spent way too much time telling us what characters were like rather than showing us, resulting in a story that wasn't all that engaging.

Anyway, points will be distributed shortly. Everyone that submitted something will get their points back (even Cricket). Mizal will get the mandatory commendation, but I don't think we can justify giving more out givin the stories only earned around a five.

Hopefully the next contest can build on the failures of this one.

Reposting this in case others want to look through the entries

Contestant Entries

Chris113022's Entry: Last Days

Cricket's Entry: Ineptitude

ericyopy's Entry: Vindicta

Fluxion's Entry: The Cottage

Leora's Entry: I Can Hear You

Mizal's Entry: Ancient Heart

Orange's Entry: The Cliff

SpartacustheGreat's Entry: Lone Star

WouldntItBeNice's Entry: Neon Genesis Evangelion

Ugggh I wanted to win an official contest, but not like this.

Don't commend the story, I'm putting up a new version tomorrow night.

Congratulations anyway, Mizal. You beat the rest of us without even trying or wanting to win.
Also, I still beat Ebon since he never submitted anything. Hurray.

Ebon just looks even MORE pathetic in light of this contest's results, smh.

While it gives you boasting rights equivalent to beating to death a decrepit old man immobilised by rheumatoid arthritis, congratulations for your contest win Mizal!

E: oh yeah and whoever else entered whatever nice job

Oh, I'll be recruiting you too. See below.

whatever don't talk to me I'm going into hiding for a bit

Turns out winning with a 6k story I wrote in six hours is its own unique flavor of normal, lowercase shame.

Like, if only it had been really amazing I could be super smug about that but that didn't quite happen.

My top 3 were:

Mizal
Eric
Chris

And Orange was in 4th place

As far as ratings go:

Mizal, Eric, Chris - 6
Orange, Flux, Wibbons - 4
Leora - 3
Coins - 2
Cricket - 1

On another note, good thing the results finally came in, Cricket's story was coming dangerously close to getting unpublished for not meeting site standards.

Teetering on the edge of the SHAME pit there.

They'll have a chance at redemption soon. EPIC contest will be announced in the next week or so, and failure will be punished... severely. @Romulus @Will11 @BradinDvorak - I will be actively recruiting you to enter, so keep your eyes on the forum.

Anyway, I figured mizal would make all four ballots and essentially win by default. There were compelling arguments for and against the other competitive entries.

A few thoughts...

@ericyopy - I actually liked your story better than others that I ranked ahead of you. While most people missed the theme, I really struggled to see how yours fit at all.

@Orange - Your story really needed to be edited better.

@mizal - I find it rather pathetic that you wrote more for your story in the week since the contest ended than you did over the two months prior.

@Fluxion - The biggest drawback on your story for me wasn't the writing, which was fine, but the lack of creativity. That variation of Hanzel & Gretel has been done before, and you didn't really do anything novel with the concept.

---
My reluctant top three: Orange, Mizal, Chris

I didn't see much difference in deviation from the theme between him and Mizal tbh. Both seemed to be going for following the main character until they died to get you to care about them and their death (at least that's what I thought the goal was).

Neither really worked, and the only thing Mizal did different was have a slightly sadder upbringing. Although she did go into more depth about the getting old part as well I suppose.

End made a pitch about the protagonist's friendship with Teach, but it just didn't click with me. Maybe if it had been developed more. Otherwise, I think there's kind of a default expectation of death for most pirates, so you really need to give a reason for any sorrow stemming from that kind of death.

Even the ones that I felt were closest to the theme only really got there in a remote or indirect fashion.

Kind of surprised there wasn't a story about a boy losing his dog.

Orange's story had potential as the setup was decent for sad feels. Sadly she never went anywhere with it, instead heading in a seemingly random direction for some reason.

Can you tag me when you announce the next one please? And how long do you reckon it will be, looking at this shit show maybe something shorter, like two weeks or something would work better?

EPIC contest has a goal of producing a top ten caliber story on the site, so the contest will have a longer deadline, but a high point entry cost and mandatory updates at predetermined intervals. It will be the contest to rule them all.

But yeah, I'll tag you when I put it up.

Top ten is pretty ambitious, but yeah what the fuck I'll give it a shot

Nuts! Was gonna join the next contest if it was non-Epic... Only got one Epic in me (and it's not top 10 lol). Welp, am happy to beta-read any and all entries for the big one! A worthy cause! :D 

By EPIC theme to you guys mean an epic story, like one of grand heroism and so on (epic fantasy, etc)? Or do you mean poetry (God please say no).

Huh? :) I have like zero time these days though I could probably help judge or something? I didn't even notice there was a competition :D

I mean it's been on the front page of the site for two months but ngl I was half expecting you to post a story five minutes before the entries started rolling in anyway.

None of these people you tagged are capable of producing a top 20 story and should definitely not try.

I've got this covered, don't worry.

I probably won't have that much time either the next few months or so, which is also why I didn't join this one. I might check it out though. 

So a contest about fee fees was pretty much dominated by womyn. (Mizal, Leora and even Orange is sharing 3rd place)

Glad to see that CYS is more or less adhering to traditional gender norms.

Not like anyone cares but I'll be doing the same thing as Mizal, that is taking my story down and publishing an improved version of it. Probably not gonna be done as fast as her but still.

Also congrats people who won, you're all slightly less disappointing than the rest of us.

Congrats to @mizal and to everyone who worked on this contest.

I wrote my story in roughly 3-4 hours and tied for third. I'm ashamed of myself and everyone else.

I liked your story, Orange, and you did better than 99% of the site.

Congrats to the winners and thanks for the feedback everyone.

"No one got sad, or shed any tears, but everyone was left disappointed"

 

Cheer up, this turned out better than the Co-author contest.

I'll at least be able to take this "compliment" regarding my lame Brother's Grimm ripoff as consolation:

"The only real gripe I have about this is the extreme depression running through this story. I get that it's a theme, but damn was this story straight depression through and through."- RoyalGhost_007 in the story comments.

Oi, we got at least one proper game with effort put into that that was good and according to the theme.

Alright, so we had a fucking shit ton of time given out to everyone for this contest. Like, everyone had enough time to write a fucking huge story, with proof reading, branching and a bit of scripting.

What we've got is three of the top four stories, at least, were done in a matter of hours or a couple days at most, with the third one having literally nothing to do with the actual contest theme, which I remind you was so broad that it was one of three fucking emotions.

Someone fucked up this shit storm. Let's start assigning blame.

It's obviously Killa's fault which is why we should take his admin powers and give them to me.

You? Just because you're king of the shit pile this whole thing was doesn't mean you're any less on the shit pile, Miz. Let's take the administration international and add an Irishman to it.

Just because Killa didn't actively flog you all with sticks doesn't make your failures his fault.

Congrats all!

Although there was a lack of effort and rushing of many entries, I will say, my entry for this contest is the most complete I have ever written, even in its short form. Thus I will keep it on the site until I finish writing a revision because I need to at least put one of my works out there, even one that has a rough start. Also I guess I did not realize how difficult it was to write an emotional story, I need work on that.

Whenever that next contest starts, I am extremely determined to work like there is no tomorrow but what this has taught me is that when interested enough, I can write decently. I want to make sure that next time, I write a true CYOA. However congratulations to those who actually submitted an entry.

Yours was a true CYOA. It's biggest flaw was that it wasn't very sad, it was mostly just cool pirate stuff with a happyish ending. The only sad thing was letting the slaves die.

I definitely thought you improved over your last contest entry in terms of quality. So you're trending in the right direction.

Congratulations everyone, especially Mizal. And don't worry, soon End's going to publish Rogues and we'll all be too busy reading it to remember about how shameful this contest was. :)