I only joined halfway through, but I'll jump in with a few thoughts.
Themes:
・I thought they were all great (including the ones I wasn't around for)
・Reducing the amount of bonus for theme adherence sounds reasonable
Prize system:
If you plot the number of points each person earned on a graph (from lowest rank to highest), it becomes really easy to see that the progression isn't linear but follows a curve and starts to sharply rise as you move to the right, towards the highest scorers. (TBH this is evident even without a graph; the graph just makes it easier to see.)
Scatter plot for points
(Thanks for the stats, Kintsugi!)
So, keeping in mind the idea of not overburdening volunteers, I thought maybe it would make logical sense that the prize tiers could also follow a curve instead of a line? For example:
5, 10, 20, 35, 50, 70, 100, etc.?
It doesn't have to be exactly that, obviously; it could follow a more mathematical curve (though that would produce numbers that don't divide evenly by 5). Either way, that would produce sort of a video-game-like progression where getting to each next tier requires a few more points than the one before it, and would somewhat reduce the concentration of prizes going to a few (incredibly awesome) high performers. (With my example, they would be getting something like 7-8 times the amount of prizes that people that reach the first tier get, as opposed to 15x the amount).
I do like the idea of keeping the threshold low for the first prize, to make the event accessible to as many people as possible. But since the number of reviewers who reach each prize tier gets fewer as you go up, probably keeping prizes that require less time commitment (like the 10 points = companion pokemon this time around) towards the bottom would also be helpful.
Point system:
I found it really interesting to look at word count versus points, so I put that on a scatter plot, too (
same link, different tab). I'm not sure how helpful the scatter plot is for this, though. Just glancing at it, there's some scatter, but there's still an overall progression of higher word count correlating with more points. But if you look at some specific numbers of points with a lot of difference either horizontally or vertically, in a lot of cases there's an enormous lack of correlation between word count and points. For example:
19436 words = 20 points
22506 words = 92 points
16207 words = 71 points
31705 words = 73 points
Some thoughts on this:
・This encourages people to read a lot of (hopefully short) chapters from multi-chapter works. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; it's probably a good thing for longfic writers, because you probably don't want everyone leaving huge reviews of the first chapter (only) of your fic if it's on the 40th chapter because that feedback doesn't help with what you've been working on recently.
・As others have mentioned, it also somewhat discourages reviewing longer fics/chapters--not that a longer fic always corresponds to a longer review, but probably overall there's some general correlation between chapter/story length and review length?
・Overall, I feel it would be nice if there were a bit more reward for writing in-depth reviews.
・However, I wouldn't want the point system to err so far on the other side that it excessively incentivizes padding, pointless rambling, etc.
・Reducing the amount of points for theme bonus compared to for the review itself might help even things out some?
I am not that much of a numbers person, so I don't have any really concrete suggestions for what the formula should be (I'll leave that to the more mathematically-minded), but those are my thoughts.
On the word count minimum:
・Personally, I feel 250 words is a reasonable minimum most of the time (except for some short works), but...
・Maybe there could be something like 125 words = 1/2 point in the case of people who want to review short works, or otherwise struggle to reach the 250 mark. That way, they could write a few shorter reviews (not necessarily on the same story) and combine them to get points?
・Not limited to Review Blitz, maybe it would be nice to have a thread somewhere with a master list of topics that people can include in reviews, with a few questions to think about for each topic (plot, setting/worldbuilding, characterization, pacing, etc.) that people can refer to when reviewing, if they need help thinking of things to say? Especially as TR grows, it's possible that not everyone who joins will necessarily be an expert reviewer right out the gate. This kind of thing is especially helpful for people who are new to reviewing and want to work on their review skills, but I think even for more experienced reviewers it might be helpful from time to time for sparking some ideas for feedback.
In the end, though, although I can say "it might be nice if we did x or y," even if the point system stays completely the same next year, I would not have any complaints. I wasn't particularly aiming for the top; if I had been, I could have changed my review style. But while still giving reviews that are (on average) on the long side, I was able to read some interesting stories, get some reviews from fellow blitzers, and also collect some awesome prizes from volunteers who are creating prizes for people simply out of the goodness of their hearts--and I think that's fantastic! So, thanks again to all of the organizers and volunteers for the work you put in to make this happen!
