It has come to both the attention of both myself and DML that some winners of the Dragon Model of the Month contest have not received their prize kits. Can anyone who has not received something in the past several months please contact me.

We would like to resolve these as soon as possible.

Also we are thinking about making some changes to the contest to allow for both a popular vote (in the gallery) and a panel vote (by staff) to select two winners each month. Does anyone have feedback on this idea?

Thanks,
Jim

I would like to put another iron in the fire. I know there are lots of different categories within our modelling field such as soft skinned, armoured AFV, cars, and so on. Might I suggest we look at the out the box builds and the aftermarket, scratch builders as two separate entities in the hope of encouraging more participation.

i think its a great idea, gives the readers more input, plus it may attract more memebers

A step further and incorporate some skill level criteria?

Having someone with a few months/years experience competing with someone who builds models professionally is an uphill battle. Mind you it's a great way to improve your skills, but I don't think they should be judged in the same catagory. my2cents

cheers

This month's winner by popular vote was BARV's scracthbuilt Trojan AEV, so it does seem that the site users are able to pick out models that involve particular skill in their creation.

As I see it there are some clear advantages to the prizes being awarded on the basis of a vote:
1) It's a transparent process.
2) There are a lot of talented and experienced modellers on Armorama who are very able to make a good assessment of a model's quality.

There are also disadvantages to deciding by popular vote: the same people can win again and again (but this might not be a bad thing: after all Vinnie intended the competition to reward excellence). The other problem with deciding by vote is that it doesn't allow for dicrimination between amateur and professional builders.

Jim, I'd be interested to know the staff's rationale for making their own award in the competition instead of all the winners being decided by a vote. Also, I assume that the staff will provide a critique of their winner to explain the reasons for their choice (if only to protect themselves from allegations of favouritism and such like)?


Sean

One of the limitations of the current voting process is that winners are awarded strictly on "most votes", but if you look at the total votes cast count for Feb, it comes to 155 votes. Not too many people vote as this is a high point for the historical voting...it typically averages around 120 or so depending on how far back you go.

Consider the vote distribution among the winners for this month. The top vote getter, Barv with 22 votes, won with only 14% of the total vote count. The three top vote getters between them only account for 32% of the vote (22, 15, 12 respectively). It isn't until you get to 7th place in votes that you cross the "majority threshold" where 50% of the total votes are accounted for.

This presents 2 challenges...1) get more people to vote but vote responsibly or 2) change how the winners are awarded. I don't know about addressing #1 but for #2 maybe the voting period could be shortened from the current 2 weeks to 1 week with the 2nd week used to have a "run off" of the top rank of vote getters (maybe that total 50% or more of the first vote or some other cutoff/qualifier)? This would create a 2nd round of voting with more than 3 contenders and would consolidate the votes but could also lead to "voter fatigue" from having to vote 2 times every month.

I would be interested in seeing the field judged by a panel as well as a popular vote, and a summary of the judge's criteria for their selection. There are always several models I would be happy to vote for in each competition, and it would be instructive for me to know how and/or why my choice differs from or co-incides with the popular vote and a judge's panel verdict.

Having just judged a selection of aircraft entries for AeroScale (as part of a panel) I think it's important to note how much the photography plays a part in selecting the best model (from both a judge and a user standpoint). If you have great photographs of a great model it will do well. Average photographs of an great model...eh...

So what these contests really become is who can do the best visual presentation of their model (since it's not like we can actually see the model from every angle/detail).

This is great feedback so far though. Keep it up.

Thanks,
Jim

Yeah you're right Sean, I looked to the past results and I must confess that I was under a wrong impression. In fact, almost everytime the good scratchbuild stuff make the top 3. I was damn wrong.

I agree ... a good photograph .. will go a long way. Previously it was recommended/encouraged that further photographs were shown in a seperate thread. I think this has generally been done .. but maybe should be a demand. No thread .. no award. Maybe even a minimum of images to include several of the normal profiles. The modeller then can choose their best image to represent their entry.
If there will be a panel vote ... maybe an idea would be to include the previous month´s winner(s) on the panel?? Would keep the panel fresh, different points of views and realistically anybody (who won previously) could have a chance to influence the decision.

I have to second Sauceman's suggestion. If you go back over the past 9 months, there were a total of 27 prizes awarded. Of those 27 winners, 4 people won 17 of them. No doubt their entries were exemplary and worthy of their winning. Hell, I voted for several of them myself. But frankly speaking, for a relative newbie like me, going up against the likes of these guys is like my high school baseball team playing the Yankees. We haven't a chance.

Well I am not going to get involved with the voting / judging issues---thats not my scene ...all I will say is ....you carry on as you wish ..but as there seems to be a lot of comments ????...Will you resolve it ???
Please don't re-invent the wheel !
Dont get upset if you are a "NEWBIE"--we all started at the bottom
Will "pass" on the next few months competitions and park up on ModelGeek / Scratchbuilders----will still vote though :-)
aye
BARV
(GOSMG)

I have not really gone back that far but if 17 prizes have been won by 4 people I would suggest that spells out the problem right there, I believe that part of the reason for this competition is to encourage participation and improvement of a modellers skills and to showcase them. However with the above statistic if accurate (I haven’t checked) the result will most likely be dejection and apathy for a large number of model makers on the first part while trying hard to meet the standards of second criteria.

For myself I know one part of any entry that catches my eye is the figures which is a skill all in itself, if an average model has excellent figures it will attract votes for that part alone which is not really the purpose of the competition. Please do not take this as me saying the model that won should not have as I have never seen a model win that was not deserving of that win, it’s just that it discourages entries from the novices and less advanced members of this site.

If I am totally honest I don’t think there is a perfect solution to this problem, unless we are able to break down the entries into groups such as skill level and type of entry. When all is said and done I do think that up to this time the competition has been run very well with the criteria currently in place.

Regarding the way this is currently administered I do have one suggestion, when a well made model get zero votes. I feel that any entry that gets say 5 votes or less no number of votes be listed because I would feel gutted at an entry by myself receiving no votes despite my best efforts.

Breaking the entries into skill categories solve the problem of having "experts" in direct competition with "noobies". But IMO it creates other kind of prob. Like who will choose which models goes into which category. Staff members? The modelers themselves? And then, some will wonder if the model that win in the beginners category should have been in the experienced category....

But all in all I agree that some changes should be made, because if Mauserman is right, 17 prizes out of 27 won by 4 persons, well it does'nt encourage a larger participation.

Good reflections in sight for staff members.

Well then perhaps the answer is scratch builders, aftermarket, OOB, and clean build. By clean build I mean OOB and painted without weathering, this category would appeal to the new comers to the hobby. But I don’t believe it matters what steps are taken as some one will always find something to complain about no matter how hard the powers that be try to diversify and reward people of all levels. On this last part I really hope I am wrong as I have found the people here to be a wealth of information and free with that information.

One suggestion is to have a permanent link on the homepage to the Model of the Month contest. This may get more participation. Honestly, with the "reminder" to vote being in the forum I sometimes miss it during the month when the topic drops out of the top 5 most recent posts.

Regarding the adminstration of the contest itself, if it is going to continue to be a monthly contest, I would target whatever makes it simple and easy to administrate. Maybe once a quarter there could be a competition among the top five winners or some other contest format that starts to break entrants down into skills.

Just my two pennies.

Marty

Maybe now is a good time to revisit the goal of the MoM and see what we want to accomplish with it. There needs to be a different structure if you want it to just simply be an attraction, vs. it being a way to encourage people to build more models on a monthly basis, vs. making it a true competiton divided into sub-catagories to encourage fairness.

Once the goal is chosen, things should be easier to figure out. I agree that 4 people winning 17 prizes is a bit high, but then again they are also building and entering the models.

A way around the problem with only a few ppl winning is to make them ineligable for the next months contest. this may have the unfortunate side effect of reducing the number of entries, but it should help spread the prizes around and may even encourage ppl to enter who are put off by the "elite".

Regards from the Swamp

Eth

Here's what I think is a good idea

Make the prizes random on the number of vote a participant received.

- For each entry you make you get one ticket
- Each vote give a ticket
- You then make 3 random drawing.

That would give everyone who entered a model a chance to win. And it would give more chances to those who entered multiple models and those who collect a lots of vote.

Hope my poor english is conveying my idea correctly.

i think having a popular vote by members is a good idea. i also like the idea of seperate catagories. one way would be using rank as a way to seperate the novice from the pros. im not saying the process is flawed but maybe fine tuning the process may encourage more entries. thanks