Okay after a bunch of rounds of musical secret judges, we FINALLY have a winner. And we might as well get on with announcing that.
Mystic won.
Technically it was a tie between her and MHD, however after the addition of a FIFTH secret judge who I shanghaied into breaking the tie in the first place, his rating put Mystic over the top.
Considering she wrote a damn book and apparently nearly died while doing so, I guess she deserves the win.
(I should mention, yeah there were ties between others, but they weren't in first place, so who gives a fuck because if you're not first, you're last)
So besides Mystic and MHD, other top ranking authors included Tim, Thara, Sherbet and Ogre. While they're all some of the more visible CYStians, other than Ogre, the don't usually write as many stories (Especially Tim and Sherb) so getting a good one out of them proved that they're not just within the "upper circle" for nothing.
Ryboi, Ben, elad, Cel, Flux were next in the upper mid tier. Ryboi probably is the most surprising out of all given his relative quietness. In fact he and elad both pulled themselves out of the SHAME pit to stand tall with the rest.
Chris, Mara, Maz, Mizal, Darius, 325boy, Yummyfood, DBNB, and Stargirl would be next on that lower mid scale. Mixed bag all around. Some of them like 325boy and DBNB did pretty good for their first entry ever while others probably could have done WAY better had they not succumbed to sloth. (Mizal) Maz probably did the best considering he pulled themselves out of Triple SHAME and can actually participate in contests regularly again.
Axxius, Abge, Ford, Digit, Enter, Lux, Ace, and Wizzy round out the lower tier. Still special mention goes to Lux who at least still scored in the double digits for her first contest. Ace, who managed to finally crawl out from the lowest level of the SHAME pit after years of being in there. And Ford who somehow managed to score higher than Enter and Digit. Though all three did pretty terrible.
Speaking of terrible...
Paradox, the lone outsider who entered the contest representing ALL his people from the land of KAE (The Kingdoms and Empires community) not only managed to come in last, but he also managed to achieve the absolute LOWEST possible score.
Truly a credit to his people and I bet they're all very proud of him. Lol.
As for the rest of you that didn't turn in shit, well you know where you lot are. You're stewing in the SHAME pit, with the rest of the losers. (Chef now being at the lowest level of that pit.)
Anyway, so a little extra info about the greater purpose of this contest.
First off as I said, this contest was planned to be our biggest one yet because I wanted to see how big of one we could pull off. 29 is more than we've ever had before and more than half of the prompts so I'm calling it a successful experiment.
Also this was a good example of how we're a self-sufficient and self-contained IF community that can easily have large contests with enough motivation. The IFaggots on the Intersexed Database can have their circle jerk contests where they praise all the gay and depressed games and delete all the negative comments so nobody gets triggered. We got our own contests with blackjack and hookers.
In keeping with this mindset, this brings about the secret judge thing. Originally I had the idea of Gryphon, Gower and myself judging everything, but then I decided that besides the fact of me not wanting to potentially read 50 stories, I'm just a little bit biased on what I like and chances are Thara or Cel would have won.
So to make this fairer and fun, I planned for a secret judge because you know how I like to have random elements happen during a contest.
Originally I was going to have Green do it since that would ALMOST be like me judging what with her being an extension of myself of course, but then she had school shit so I ended up going with Sent as a secret judge since he's fairly even handed individual.
Well all would have went to plan, but then Gryphon had shit to do and wasn't going to be able to finish all the stories in a timely manner, then he got sick and REALLY wasn't going to be able to. So falling back on Green who now was done with all her school shit, I asked if she could be the second secret judge. Unfortunately she had other shit to do, but she could do some of them.
Not ideal, but I figured I could take the half scores from Gry and the other half from Green and just use those to tally up the final ones.
Of course then shit started stretching out and everyone just wants this to be done with. Gry's dragging himself along like a deadman, and Green's just up and disappeared on a party bender so seeing that Ugilick had practically already rated all the stories I just asked him to be the fourth secret judge.
I originally had the idea to just have him give me his ratings for the stories Gry and Green hadn't done and I'd just take their scores as that "third column" like I was planning when it was just Gry and Green.
However, the contests that the IFaggots have do something similar to this shit. Judges don't have to read everything and they just rate the stories they want to read meaning you end up with a weird mish mash of ratings that skew oddly because of the inconsistency.
Well fuck all that, the whole point was NOT to be like that, so I just threw out all of Gry's ratings (and Green's lone rating) and used all of Ug's for consistency.
Now you might be asking, wait what happened to the third secret judge? Well that was technically me and I was only going to judge if there was a tie. Which there was as you well know, but the problem is Mystic wrote a fucking book and there was no way I was going to read through it tonight when I wanted to just get all this shit over with. Plus I probably would have been biased towards MHD so it wouldn't exactly be fair.
So that means I needed a fifth secret judge and I was planning on just press ganging this one into service based on if they read both stories or not. After scanning over who actually read both stories and DIDN'T rate them the same (Which wasn't many), I ended up picking Sherb as the fifth secret judge since he reads everything, tends to be fair and was one of the high ranking contest members so it was fitting he was the tie breaking judge. (He rated Mystic's one point over MHD's)
Anyway, this turned out a little more complicated when it came to the actual scoring, but after it was all said and done, I threw the biggest and most successful contest on CYS and I did it without having to read anything!
Final Scores
Mystic - In Moonlit Waters: 21 (+1)
MHD - Mission Sunshine: 21
Tim - Ranger: 20
Thara - A tale of a white lie: 19
Sherbet - Warden: 18
Ogre - Dark Night: 17.75
Ryboi - Fake it till you make it: 17.5
Ben - A graveyard smash: 16.25
Cel - What a terrible world: 16
elad - The Shmorps: 16
Fluxion - The SHAMEful dead: 15
Chris - The Thief and the messiah: 14.25
325boy - An unusual mirror: 14
DBNB - Blow my whistle baby: 14
Darius - Our last talk: 13
Mizal - The Protagonist is a Kobold: 13
Mara - Red Mirror: 13
Maz - Hyperborea: 12.5
Yummyfood - The wolves of the sea: 12
Stargirl - Vira and cupcake: 12
Wizzy - Visceral: 11.5
Lux - The Misfortunes of a Traveling Merchant: 11.25
MrAce - A city lost: 11
Axxius - Alpha Centauri: 10
Abge - The fables of namesake: 10
Ford - What?: 8
Enter - General Butt Naked: 7
Digit - The Naughty Nachos: 7
Paradox - The demon of Hurtgen: 3 (Lol)
You may now unpublish any of your stories to make whatever additions or changes to them. Or just delete them, if that's what you so desire.
Some of the various rewards, achievements, pointless points, commendations have already been handed out, but there might be more if some admin gets around to it.
