Heya, this one took me a bit longer than I anticipated to get to, but I figured that it was time to get in my own two cents for the upcoming year:
However, feel free to talk about whatever you'd like here. Elements of the event that you enjoyed or didn't, things you'd like to see in the future or hope don't return! Other than that, I hope you enjoyed the Blitz and that we'll see you all again next year!
All-in-all, I had fun with it. I felt like I got a
bit more done in Review Blitz 5, but this Review Blitz happened at a bit of a tumultuous time in my life, so I can't really complain about how things turned out. I
did think that the scoring was a little biased to "short with lots of chapter" stories again, but that's been a constant of Review Blitzes for a while now, and it might be kinda inseparable from the nature of the event.
- The new heat bonus. Did you like it? Do you think it could be improved, or would you rather we didn't use it again?
I actively attempted to earn it throughout the event, and there were some users where I pulled reviews that I planned forward or else went out on a limb to check out that I probably wouldn't have and then just run out of time to check them out later on. I
did notice that some of the participants were stuck at higher heat bonuses for a while, but it
mostly evened out. The main exceptions that I noticed were a couple of users like
@Inyssa and
@JFought who logged most of their reviews towards the end of the event when a lot of users were going back to pick up repeat bonuses and the like, and wound up ending the event with a max bonus.
A part of me wonders if the heat bonus would've have been more effective at eventually driving the numbers closer to zero towards the end (which is the ideal since it's implying a roughly 1:1 ratio of reviewed chapters given to reviewed chapters received) if it were redeemable once
per week for authors instead of once for the entire event, since it might have helped the late-bloomers a bit more.
- Event timing. Several people on Discord have expressed that they would have preferred a Sunday (UTC) end to the event rather than Saturday. Would you prefer that Blitz run Sunday to Sunday instead of Saturday to Saturday?
I mean, I'll admit, I was one of those guys who liked the "mostly January" timeslots from past Review Blitzes a bit more, but splitting Blitz roughly 50-50 between 2024 and 2025 wasn't
terrible. Though regarding the Blitz question, my preferred interval would actually be a
Saturday to Sunday event kinda like Review Blitz 5 was, where Week 4 that year had an extra day to it. Since Review Blitz being a
29-day event last year helped out a
lot for getting last-minute chapters in under my belt that this year I had to leave on the table for this Blitz.
That said, if all future Review Blitzes will strictly be 28-day affairs, then chalk me down for being on Team Sunday to Sunday.
Beyond that, the only other thing that I'll note is that Review Blitz as fun as it is seems to encourage a very lopsided distribution of reviews on this site through the year where a huge chunk of activity happens in the span of those 28-ish days. Like I get that people have lives and all, so it's not like we can just constantly be review factories, but it does make me wonder if it'd be worth having 2 or 3 7-day long mini-Blitzes as accompanying events during the year to try and spread things out a bit. It'd also give people that dip their toes in the water after January more of an opportunity to get prompt-ish feedback on this site beyond joining games like Catnip or else waiting until the next Review Blitz.
Just some food for thought, but altogether, I had a good time, and thought the mods did a pretty good job with hosting this year's Blitz. Here's to many more in the future.
