Ya heard yar gal pal, it’s time for some rant!! Let’s rant peeps! About all the contests Episode created so far!
Don’t get offended y’all. No problematic behavior, please.
So there’s this thing called “spot directing” which many people can’t understand. Ehm, it’s using the X and Y in the portal and using SCALE to place your characters. So can somebody tell me how come you can say “Nice spot directing!” to somebody that never used even the SCALE option???
There’s this thing called "OVERLAYS" welp. Overlays are my favorites to do, especially the ones about powers. But there are some folks who think the overlays are just couches, pets etc. Like, um no? We put time and work to do our overlays and you just somebody because they didn’t use a blanket overlay in their story and you forget about amazing overlay animations…
CC. Oh yes, CC, I love it sooooooo much. Jk hate it. Why? Because some people won’t read your story if you don’t have CC. Despite using that to create facial expression overlays. (Example Fine Line by Evil Ebonni) And what does that do??? It affects our reader retention! Because they will start the first episode and they will see that there’s no CC and leave the story! Wow! Good job my friend! Didn’t see that coming did ya?
Soooo, these were my rants. Reply in the comments with yours, we can discuss and rant all day long!
I am ranting about contests? I’ve seen many contest story reviews and people were upset that there’s no CC, and by the “Nice spot directing!” I could see that they’ve only read episode 1.
Nvm, I see what you mean. My biggest rant about contests itself would be the time.
Recently they gave 2 months to write a contest entry but before that, they would only give a month. That was clearly not enough for many authors, and they never got to participate in the contests. Also to win a contest you need to publish your story as early as possible to gain an audience. And keep updating it to maintain the audience. But the fact that the overlay and background approvals gets slower than it was before, doesn’t help at all.
Second rant would be about the recent contest. Heroes and Villians. I mean seriously? Just because you added the new “superhero” clothing, doesn’t mean that you have to make a contest about that.
For contests, you need reader retention to win. It’s best to publish just before the deadline and only 3 chapters because people are likely to read the 3 chapters all the way through, especially if it’s a good story. Updating before the contest is over can ruin the retention ie: people don’t come back to your story to read the new chapter or they don’t realize you’ve posted a new one. Which results in looking like poor retention so Episode doesn’t take it into account if retention scores are low.
I like the Heroes and Villians theme. It’s something different, and it is not as if they said it has to be superheroes or villians.
They left what kind of ‘hero’ or ‘villian’ up to interpretation.
I think the last one point I really agree with. The author is not obligated to put in CC characters. There are amazing stories without CC character story but at the same time it’s the readers choice to not read stories they don’t like. Yeah it sucks some readers won’t read a story just because they can’t custimozs a character and they probably miss out on good stories. I think the most annoying thing would be when readers beg you to customize characters like dude chill, not in everybody’s story does the MC need to look the way you want. I think I kind of got of track but anyways yeah I understand your last point.
It’s a deep topic, but the fact that they made “superhero” costumes and then announced the contest, makes me think that they didn’t really leave it up to interpretation.
Well, I didn’t use any of them since I wrote my story in INK and also because I never wanted superhero costumes for my characters, but I still think it was a nice gesture from Episode. I don’t see what’s your problem with this.
The last contest was 1 month because it was a spotlight contest. There’s no directing in spotlight so less time makes sense. They even stated the reason for making it only 1 month in their original contest post in the old forums.
They didn’t make the contest theme because they had superhero clothing. The contest theme was announced BEFORE the costumes were released. The costumes were made because of this contest.
I think it’s a good theme, but I think they should add sci-fi to the theme, or just make a sci-fi contest. There are plenty of sci fi plots that could be winners, but they haven’t done much with that.
