FEE3 2020: 10/2 - 10/19/20

Community
246

Personally, I’d kill off FEE3 entirely. :skull: Wait, hear me out.

Viewer fatigue is a big problem. If you read anything about building an online presence or youtube channel, it is highly recommended to:

  • Share regularly
  • Once a day or once a week is optimal
  • Pick your timezones / days to release content

Perhaps we don’t need to strategize to this extent, but I think it’s worth a thought.

Project of the Week (PotW)

Make PotW an all-encompassing entity. A grotesque amalgamation of features - the good projects and the bad. Same time, every week, release a video & feature the project on feuniverse. Put the youtube video at the top of the featured project’s OP.

  • One of our Let’s Players would record a LP for that week.
LP Details
  • (The .UPS patch must be submitted a month or more in advance. Videos ready a couple weeks in advance, generally, and already uploaded, but only made public on the PotW date.)
  • (Say you can’t record some weeks, between us I think we could pull off one LP a week. Someone might occasionally record 3 week’s worth all in a row, or we just alternate when various people are available.)

Users would submit their project for review.

Requirements
  • A project can be featured once per year.
  • All projects pass as long as they have a project thread or sufficient evidence of a hack being ready (eg. pictures)
  • Eventually, there would be a steady flow of projects erasing the need to order them far in advance. But I expect that initially a huge number of people would express interest in being featured this way.
  • I made a suggestion for PotW recently. Basically, a voting system where users can select multiple projects from a long poll that lists out a bunch of projects. This makes for a quick and easy way to vote for each other’s projects.
  • If we ever have too much of an influx of self-nominations to be featured, we could potentially rename PotW to “Featured Project” and do it twice a week until things die down a little bit, assuming Let’s Players are up for that.

Mod Involvement

I want to minimize the amount of work for mods.

Ideas
  • Is it possible to schedule & automate featuring a thread globally?
    • If not, a mod would need to do this each week.
  • We could require users to edit in the youtube video link in their project OP 2 days in advance, otherwise they’d be skipped over that week. The video would be private still, so it would just be an eyesore in the OP for a couple days until it’s made public.
  • Alternatively, if mods want to insert the video into the post each week, that would be fine.
  • ALTERalternatively we do some sort of megathread of PotW and someone like Pandan can edit it to have the youtube video & to link to the current PotW’s thread. Or even a new thread each week could work.

FEE3’s fate?

Now… all of this doesn’t actually need to be mutually exclusive from FEE3. We could do both. :scream: But that’s too much work (and I think this idea would be much less work). But I know FEE3 must hold a special place in many people’s hearts. Therefore, I’d suggest severely scaling it back and adopting my above suggestions. FEE3 could become an annual recap of the year instead. Someone voices over 52 minutes of a random 1 minute clip from each PotW (that goes in order). We also might accept LTC/speedruns or videos under 5 minutes that people make. Event organizers will NOT do this for you. Let’s Plays are strictly for the PotW features. That way, FEE3 still kinda exists but it’s only the work of making one hour-long video. If editing random clips together to speak over feels like too much work, then just someone talking while browsing the forums here looking at each project thread could work.

Conclusion

FEE3 is a really cool event, but we can tackle the issues it’s been facing and improve the site & increase the amount of traffic we get at the same time. Everything said, this would not take place for this year’s FEE3. If anyone is in support of this idea, I’d suggest we aim for December to start it up. There may also be some issues to iron out. This is just my thoughts.

  • Let’s rebuild PotW!
  • No, PotW is a bad idea

0 voters

FEE3’s fate is not related to this poll, as both FEE3 and PotW could exist. This poll is purely for measuring interest in PotW’s revival.

I am terribly sorry for the length of this post.

1 Like
FEE3 2020: The post-mortem thread. Learnings & opportunities as we head into 2021
FEE3 2020: The post-mortem thread. Learnings & opportunities as we head into 2021
247

I think the spectacle of FEE3 is part of what drives viewership to this one event; I just don’t think that one project once a week will draw the same amount of audience. It’s a testament to how poorly at drawing attention Project of the Week is that it goes by months with the same one because everyone forgets about it.

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248

i think everything is fine as is ngl.

249

The problem there is that the pop up only shows up again when it is updated. If globally pinning a thread is forgotten about and not updated for several weeks in a row, then that’s several weeks of no new pop up for anyone to remember PotW’s existence. Almost a catch-22. Additionally, the pop-up doesn’t actually link to the thread and you can’t expand the preview window, so it becomes kind’ve just an annoying pop-up. That said, I think it could hold more value. If mods are able to schedule it to update, that would be ideal.

I know there would be less centralized hype and I see your point there. I think the occasional hype-building community event would be fine, though. Putting all of the hype into one event per year seems to be is to be a really difficult task to handle as the community here grows, but that discussion can happen with the fee3 debriefing discussion later.

250

A good comparison is the olympics. At least in the US, unless it’s that 2 week period every four years, I doubt most people are watching curling (although they should be!)

I think you’re over engineering it, Vesly.

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251

This will be my first time attending the event, this year has been quite exhausting and tough for everyone, hopefully with this event some people will manage to encourage that desire that soon things will get better!

I’m very grateful for the time and effort of both those who sent their projects and the organizers.

I hope everyone has a great time at the event! :grin:

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252

We couldn’t wait until midnight, so we dropped this instead.

Welcome to FEE3, everyone!

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Exciting stuff!

Please be sure to share the videos, and as all youtubers say, like & subscribe for more content :sunglasses:

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254

Arch says in the video that showcases will come out every 3 hours; I assume he misspoke?

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255

Showcases are scheduled for every 6 hours.

256

Yeah, that’s my bad.

257

5 hours ago. These thumbnails are really bland. I should have offered to help make some.

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259

Looking at the current poll results regarding my PotW proposals:

  • 12 in favour, 6 against

I think that’s a significant number that’s against the idea, so perhaps PotW should just be left alone. Generally if something isn’t popular with approx. 25%+ of people, I’d be hesitant to try and move forward with it.

Thanks everyone for voting.

260

project of the week is nice but fee3 is hype cause it’s all one big event annually while potw lasts for a week before going on to the next thing. eventually interest in maintaining it will wane.

261

bland they may be, but I personally think there’s a certain charm to them being the way they are.

262

Unfortunately, there’s a problem with the thumbnails all being so bland and unrepresentative of the project itself. Nobody can look at the thumbnail and know what they might expect from the hack without watching the video. This might be fine if there were only, perhaps, 5 projects? Easy to skim through every one and see what’s what. Problem is, we have almost 70 projects this year, and every thumbnail is going to look relatively the same. Therefore, every project will only be distinct by their name and creator, which is the only information given in the titles.

Last year’s thumbnails were spectacular in that regard.

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Even if the graphics weren’t the best, we still get a nice quick glimpse of every project and a representative aspect of them. Something to catch the eye of people that want to scroll through the projects.

I’d be willing to help churn out some better thumbnails for projects (although I don’t need to for my criticisms to have merit).

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263

thanks for your contribution

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264

Sorry, I had just woken up when I wrote that, but I went into greater detail of why that’s a problem just now.

265

I will say this much, although I was too busy working on other things. I would absolutely like to help as much as I can (probably as a simple contributor) on future events such as this in terms of making things run efficiently. As I was once high staff in a very large Milsim were in which handling this stuff was I guess fairly second nature.