pouët.net

Smash: easy to say when 80% of the democrew walked over to FLT and left razor to burn with the crackdivision steering the demodivision for half a decade. Then stuff like that happens But we are working on it, ain't we? ;-)
And I said it a million times but: razor has never ever been refounded so stop saying that. (except the amiga division at one time)

yeah I agree with superplek. you'll never get "what the demoscene judges as best" from a public vote. on the other hand this is probably the best insight into how "outsiders" see the demoscene that we will get.

A fixed jury of 2000 demosceners, perhaps? :)

revival, i see it so that the jury categories already are for what's "best". (in the jury's opinion at least)
i never agreed with the public choice being the "best" demo released during the previous year and find it ridiculous that someone would even think so.
it IS a popularity contest, the matter is just how to define who are good enough to be allowed to take part in the voting or not.

the real "best" demo from any given year is the one people go back to after 10 or 20 or more years.

and, how is a gamer that goes to assembly different from a gamer who didn't go, regarding to voting at scene awards? how do you define whether someone has seen enough scene content to be given the right to vote? someone can visit asm and just stay at the gamer area without ever seeing any reference to compos at all.

first scene productions i ever saw were crack intros on commodore c64 and i know it's the same case for many sceners that the first prods they saw were cracks. why would it be such a bad thing today if someone would get interested about other scene stuff after seeing some crack intros?

says more about Razor1911 than the rest of the scene if they need to resort to votewhoring to get a silly trophy.. but hey.. ;)

*) cos that IS what they did, last time.

"votewhoring" come on

cry much every night?

plek: you should see the operation hes got planned to get variform 2 to win next year

smash: :))

also maali tells me a bit about the strategies used by rzr. this surely allows for a bit of nuance on the matter -- but in the end it's just a public vote thing and lets all focus on the jury stuff (if you care at all, which i dont, because all these awards do is remind me that i've been inactive for years and years :)).

smash: jups.. aka OPERATION FASTLINK2

smash, variform 2 already won so big that any award show is irrelevant.

dubmood: before splitting we did at least produce the demo that stood as razor's best for about 10 years, so dont hate us too much ;)

plek: indeed. the jury awards are there to tell me what a group of people with a clue objectively thought was the best thing that year having considered it in some detail.
the publics choice award says whats most popular among a large group of highly subjective people. its not that its not worth something knowing that and in a strange way its one you really want to win for that reason, but you cant start using words like "best".

my hope was that razor winning last year would motivate all the people who got really annoyed by it to vote, and to convince all their scene friends to vote too - meaning that the number of votes was significantly large that it would be much harder for anyone to influence (without the level of effort i doubt anyone would put in). if that doesnt happen and you dont like the results again, well..

There's always other ways to do Public Choice-tallying, apart from an internet vote, but this year it was decided that a rephrased set of voting guidelines was the only change needed. For next year -- who knows.

What exactly did we do that count as whotehoring last year except two posts on our facebook page and one on twitter with about 1 month in between asking our fans to support us? Maybe maali knows more than I do!

smash: comon, mindstammer wasn't that good. ;-) and when a whole group of people joins first 1 big cracking group name, then just a few months later split to join another 1 big cracking group name, no matter how good their prods are, they should maybe consider not bashing other people for joining simular (or same) groups. On the same grounds, FLT is just as refounded as you consider razor to be and two is more than one. I somewhat miss the old trolling days but lets face it, today razor is 4 active members, 2 who are in the group for more than 15 (and even 20) years, and then rez and me. 2002 was a great year for flaming us, but time passes.

no kidding... my attempt at modern flaming has turned into an actual discussion. o tempora, o mores!

btw, dub, on the subject of founding or refounding groups... what was triad pc then? ;)

Reed: Triad-pc was when I was briefly kicked out of razor by TRC because of dissagrements over a certain incident on the 11th of september 2001, TRC not appreciating my likeness of US foreign policits just boomeranged on themselves. And a few weeks later I was contacted by a guy, forgot his handle, who said he was in TRiAD and they were doing a pc-div, since I was groupeless I joined. Then taper / triad mailed me and said that they didnt give permission to anyone and the leader of the triad-pc was a fake so I jumped ship. taper was really understanding of the situation too.

A few weeks later TRC went underground because of the operation buccaneer busts and I blatantly exploited the situation by rejoining rzr since he was no longer calling the shots. =) But reed, you know all that...

dubmood: frankly the whole thing is so long ago im surprised you can remember the details, cos i sure cant.. :)
while the baiting and trolling is amusing now and again, we should probably just be happy we're still around at all. :)

dub: actually i never knew the details, but thanks for sharing :)

Isnt it controversal to be part of razor/fairlight and work professionally with games?

To all the questions about who should be "allowed" to vote, the answer is simply: anyone who has an opinion on the matter. We would like nothing better than the whole world giving us their honest opinion about their favorite demoscene production - problem is, they don't have one.

Running a poll which requires an informed opinion to answer is usually not a problem, as most people will only vote if they care one way or the other. The problem arises when someone treats it as a competition and tells their clueless friends about it (clueless = did not follow the demoscene during the previous year).

We tried to clarify this by adding the voting guidelines. Our choice of words was perhaps unfortunate, giving the impression that this is a competition where you can get disqualified if you don't follow the rules. If you look closer, you will see that the word "disqualified" is not used anywhere. It is not a competition, and you cannot get disqualified.

I think it depends on the studio. Mediocre studios tends to cry a lot about cracking and piracy (hi ubisoft!), then you have awesome studios like DICE and Blizzard were many of the seniors, and even founders, are from cracking groups. Many of our ex-members work in the game-industry, they tell me that you should just choose the good studio and don't hide who you are/were, in the end an old warez-grouptag gives you more respect than problems. Shows them that you were there in the old days and knows your shit I guess...

Smash actually said it really well. To paraphrase: being nominated in Public Choice tells you that several people liked your demo very much, which is a nice feeling. Except if someone manipulated the votes in your favor - then it tells you nothing.

Oh, and all this talk about clueless outsiders of course only applies to voting round 1. For round 2, the scenario is: take a look at these 10 demos and pick your favorite. This makes perfect sense as an outreach scheme, and this was exactly why the voting was split into two rounds in the first place.