This is something that has really been bothering me throughout the time I was playing Episode, story contests. Story contests in my point of view is a contest for writers to participate in, mostly unpopular authors participate for a chance to get popular. But, when I see new shelves for contests, most of the stories’ authors are popular authors with 100k+ reads, it’s really bothering me because these authors are already popular and aren’t giving chances for writers with good stories to get chosen. You might say that I’m just saying nonsense and that these authors won because they have the best stories. If you didn’t know about retention scores, basically they’re judge depending on how many reads the story has, and how many chapters the readers read. You might think, what does that have to do with authors being popular, famous author’s stories have a lot of reads because of their popularity and the big fan base they have, when their fans see new stories on the author’s shelf they read it, and that gives them a lot of reads, which highers their retention and rubric score. I hope I’m not the only one feeling this way.
So true, I support you 100% 
I just want to say that this particular statement could just be because you’re seeing the shelf a few hours after it’s debuted? I got the fantastical shelf before the announcement and I noticed that only one of the winners had more than 10k reads. There was a few between 1k-3k reads and there was one that had even less than 1k. Of course now, those numbers have sky rocketed.
I do agree that this time around there was a lot more experienced authors who won over newcomers. But as the reads seem a lot less overall compared to the H&V contest, I’m inclined to believe that didn’t really have anything to do with it.
Also just want to say that that’s not how the rubric and retention work either.
Rubric is like a guide on how to mark the stories. Similar to how in school teachers are given a guide on how to mark someone’s essay. It’s more so about the quality of choices, spelling and grammar, having no errors, etc.
Retention is about how many people start your story and continue with it. If you have a lot of people read episode 1, but the majority don’t continue to episode 2 that would give you a poor retention rate.
I mean their total reads, and the stories they’ve made before.
Ah ok. Well that is why I referred to them as experienced authors, since I noticed they all had at least another one or two stories aside from their contest entries.