The guest of honor: Are site awards detrimental?

I think it's great for players to feel special. They work hard, pour out their creativity, and seeing it all shine has to be a great feeling. Member of the Month? Character of the Month? Wow!

I've always had mixed feelings about site awards. What are your thoughts?

Do you think they can cause conflict? Are they good for participation?

 

I've had very mixed feelings. To the point where we haven't done Members of the Month since the first year of the game. We've did a Thread of the Month for awhile... Though that's been replaced with an index-page feature in which a handful of threads that people find interesting (anyone can propose, I'm the curator. I try to never say no and just keep it current and interesting.) and those 8 get featured. The only real timer is just someone else proposes something newer that caught my interest, though there's also some sorting based on keeping every group with at least one feature and highlighting priority being given to major plot threads.

 

We do character of the month and quote of the month, and they had been well received. 4 years and still going...

 

I hate creating very obvious main character complexes in the communities I'm apart of, and I think monthly awards/spotlights can put a chip on peoples' shoulders and make new members feel a little daunted and insignificant. If my rp has a celebrity, it should be because the members have all played with them or read their thread, because of their actual appeal and presence rather than because their face is slapped on the index.

 

I love the idea of quote of the month. I've never heard that one before and it's a pretty awesome idea.

 

I have a member spotlight-a-day that runs on a random script on my forum. (The only stipulation is that they have to have an avatar for it to show.) I've made sure to include that the script is random, I have auto-matic rewards for time spent on the site, awards for posts created, posts entirely, and then awards for community spirit, donations, and last but never least--an area for members to award each other.

In the end, you are always going to have someone not happy with something. Someone who thinks something is not fair--as an admin I think you have to weigh what the majority want and enjoy compared to what the few do not. Keeping mostly everyone happy is as good as it might get, because trying to make everyone happy generally means nobody is. And you suffer as the admin trying to keep up with everything and everyone.

 

Those are all really cool ideas, guys! Thank you so much for sharing.

On my site we've pretty much scrapped the regular format. We have a newspaper that works both as a news page, a plotting page, and an occupations page for those who have characters with businesses that need employees. People like to see their character in quotes, but gossip can be really mean sometimes. It's hard to tell where to draw the line. What we implemented was character interviews. We sent out interview questions to all the characters who fit what we want to know about then organize the information. One neighbor of the month is also selected. It is based on what characters have gone out of their way to effect the town as a whole. Volunteer work, organizing a large affair, working as a mover and shaker in the community. The idea is to push a story along with making people shine. The home is to take away the negative stigma of awards and instead offer something a little more communal. People seem to really like it.

In the past i've had a mixed bag with site awards. People get really excited and then really disappointed. In some cases they think there is cheating or favoritism. In several cases only a few members seemed to ever get awards. I'm glad to hear that other sites have had a more positive outcome. I don't think they are a bad idea in the least. I just haven't had much success with them in my experiences.

 

I have a kind of weird system where the awards are collectible (I use a plug in on proboards that gives you items linked to your mini profile). In my case they are collectible plushies of Avatar the Last Airbender characters. Everyone gets three to start with chosen at random. You can earn more by contributing a suggestion that we use, recruiting, or being chosen as an exemplary character profile, etc. I have a board set up where members can trade them. We are still pretty small so i don't have any data to give yet but i'll try to get on here and post results in the future.

 

I've had bad experiences with them so I stopped doing it. Seemed like a lot of people were getting hurt feelings. :/

 

I think really, what you should be aiming for on any RPG, whether through awards or otherwise, is simply to say: "Hey, you're not in a vacuum. We are reading your stuff and we appreciate it." Or "Hey, I noticed you took a load of effort in making this. I noticed that, and you're awesome for it."

I'm pretty lax when it comes to giving out awards. I did a regular thing for a while but it petered out because making it monthly just seemed ... contrived. What I prefer to do is just tell people, individually, whether on the forums or otherwise "oh hey that post you just did is awesome!" or "I just caught up on all your stuff, really liked X and Y". Granted we're not the biggest site out there, and I'd probably reintroduce regular shout-outs if we got big enough. We do have something on our site called 'exceptional bonuses' where you earn bonus experience if you put extra effort into something, and a cool aspect of that is that it encourages people to read each other's work and nominate them for the bonus. Staff can't read everything, so it's good to encourage your members to get involved with it too.

 

I... dont like awards, makes some people feel left out. There are great RPGs out there that go unnoticed.

 

I think awards are nice every once in awhile. It makes people feel noticed in a good way. It makes them feel like they're not ignored. Which is pretty positive to me.

 

I think it does more harm than good. If that member is already active and enjoying themselves then the reward is in the fun. I would rather recognize a new player on to the board so that they feel welcome!

 

On my roleplay sites, I have rarely had difficult members and therefore never really had that problem. Though sometimes you do have those gangs who stick together in their friendship groups and vote for whoever member they like the most, which is annoying. On sites I wasn't admin of, I noticed the awards motivated me to put in more effort to get recognized, which is good in that way. But if you continually get ignored, it does go in the opposite direction fast.

 

I think it depends how you want to use the awards. Member of the Month sort of things are popularity type awards and these can harm a game because people feel left out.

But we have awards that are more based on what people do - for example so many posts gives you a silver, so many more a gold, so many more the platinum award medal. Or if people participate in a site event they get that site event medal. These are awards that all the players can get and sometimes even helps increase activity on a board.

 

I go back and forth on this. The Member of the Month I do actually like. I also really love the way @Elena included a character interview with it for both IC and OOC. Now contests…I don't have time for that.

 

Currently, my board doesn't have 'awards' - thought we have talked about putting them in, but they would be more like 'milestone' markers rather than arbitrary awards (like for participating in plots or events etc where it's all based on in-character action). We do however have a Member/Character otm that alternates each month (so Jan = Member, Feb = Character) with set criteria for qualifying, such as activity, involvement in the community, friendliness, character design and development, etc.

We have a moderator who chooses two people (or characters) for their qualifications and then allows the members to vote and respond with their picks. That way both people can be recognized. The winner doesn't get anything on their profile or the like, but instead gets a small snippet about them in a designated place in the skin, as well as links to their plot/thread trackers so others can approach them for plots and threads.

 

When I had my site the first go-around I had votes and popular picks and all that..I dont know if it helped or hurt. It ultimately was a popularity contest. This go-around I'm not doing it. Really its because I don't want to do the polls and pictures lol. I don't think it really matters, some people like to win but really its about the writing. People could say it helps make people part of the community but if the same people keep winning that isn't to fun or fair. So..I guess it just depends on what you might want for your site.

 

I remember, on a site I once RPed on before I went off and made my own site, they held a kind of annual awards. I think in that particular case it WASN'T detrimental, because it was based on player choice - anyone who got an award was voted so by their peers, rather than the mods. Still, the potential for detriment was there of course...cliques sometimes voted the same people several years in a row, and there were certain years people thought it was a joke. When they decided to not to do it one year - after complaints - there was such an uproar on both sides that they brought it back.

I dunno, I guess it just became an integral part of site politics.

 

I like OTM's. Everyone enjoys voting on it and it is always an honour if you are nominated. What's the harm?