This is the 2023 SV User's Choice Awards, our third instalment, where you get to pick the best quests, stories and other creative works on SV!
The 2023 User's Choice Awards
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2023 User's Choice Awards Winners
The votes have been counted and the winners are now in!
So, 2023 has certainly been another year.
Whether your December was marked by chill mornings and short days, or blistering sun and long balmy afternoons, whether Christmas for you is a religious festival, an excuse to eat Turkey and exchange presents, or just another day, one thing is the same for everyone. What makes this month special, or any month of the year for that matter, is taking the time to be close to those we hold dear, and let them know how much we cherish them. It's in that spirit that we choose this time of the year to hold the User's Choice Awards, and share together that which we hold dear.
Writing fiction on the internet is a profoundly altruistic act when you get down to it, sharing your passion with others without any thought of remuneration. We can't thank every quest master, fanfic author, and other wonderful person who has chosen to create something on SV personally. But the User Choice Awards is sort of our way of saying "thank you" to all of them, collectively, for writing the stories, quests, and other amazing things which make this forum worth the candle. Not to mention all the amazing quest voters, readers, discussion-havers, and other users whose enthusiasm keeps this site's authors going, and many of whom came out to support their favourite works in this years awards.
Speaking of which, if you are reading this and have not taken the chance to check out some of the other winning entries or this year's nominees, there's no better time! This year has been absolutely packed with some amazing stuff, and reading through the backlist of the UCA is a great way to discover some fantastic quests, stories and other works you might not have known about. You can find the nominees for each respective category in the top of the voting threads for each award category.
And now without further ado, the winners of the 2023 Sufficient Velocity User's Choice Awards as chosen by you:
Quest Awards
Best Ongoing Quest | Best Completed Quest |
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User Fiction Awards
Best Ongoing Fic | Best Completed Fic |
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Alternate History Awards
Best Alternate History | Best GSRP |
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Original Awards
Best New Work | Best Original Work |
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Lastly, a big thank you to my fellow Content Promoters, @Havocfett, @Arcus, @ArlequineLunaire, @Walker, who have worked tirelessly behind the scenes to make these Awards a success as well as running the many other fantastic events on offer during Winterfest. Special congratulations to @Havocfett on his recent wedding!
Last of all, thank you to all of the authors, QMs, and users who make these Awards possible. You are all truly wonderful, and we here at the Content Promotion department wish you all a Happy New Year!
This thread will remain open for discussion (as will the Voting threads), until sometime in the next week or so when everything Winterfest-related will be archived. Thank you all, and let's look forward to a new year which will hopefully be brighter than the last one.
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Introducing the 2023 User's Choice Awards
Hello there!
Welcome to our third instalment of the Sufficient Velocity User's Choice Awards! The User's Choice Awards are yearly contest to crown the best works on the forum, where the winners are chosen by you. This event exists to celebrate the creativity and craft of SV's many authors and QMs, worldbuilders and artists, and the passion and enthusiasm of readers, voters, fans and commentators which make it all possible. Every year, Sufficient Velocity helps to make the world ever so slightly more full of stories and joy; the halls of this little corner of the internet resounding with explorations of imaginary worlds, tales of derring-do, and raucous arguments over whether Winnie the Pooh and friends could defeat Batman. Once a year, we like to take stock of all the wonderful things that SVers have been doing with our beautiful community, and come together to celebrate the creativity of SVers, as chosen by SVers.
This year marks the our third User's Choice Awards, and we would like this to be the most successful yet! The Content Promotion have been hard at work trying to make this year's awards even better, listening to user feedback to streamline the way the awards are run, and improve the categories. Last year the ambiguity between the "New" and "Continuing" categories for Quests and User Fiction caused some confusion; so we've removed the "New" category for both quests and fiction and instead introduced an exciting "Best New Work" category. We've also made a variety of other changes, including making discussions during the Nominations phase easier than ever before. Our hope is to make sure this institution of SV keeps getting better year-on-year, so we welcome your ideas on how to improve the Awards, and will be holding a bit of a plenary session at the end to collect feedback.
So I'm very much looking forward to seeing your nominations, and which fantastic works by SVers will battle against all comers and emerge victorious in this year's Battle Royale!
The Awards will be run in a similar way to how we run our Council elections, with a two week period for nominations, running from now on Friday the 1st of December to midnight on Saturday the 16th of December. The top five nominations for each category will then go forward for the voting round. This will be a two week period for voting, running from midnight on Sunday the 17th of December to the midnight of Sunday the 31st of December. The winners will then be announced on New Year's Day, Monday the 1st of January, as we ring in the New Year!
Currently, the categories for the eight awards we are planning to offer are as follows:
Quest Awards
Best Ongoing Quest | Best Completed Quest |
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User Fiction Awards
Best Ongoing Fic | Best Completed Fic |
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Alternate History Awards
Best Alternate History | Best GSRP |
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Original Awards
| Best New Work | Best Original Work |
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If you have any further questions, then you may find this helpful:
Users' Choice Awards FAQ
- Why are you doing this? Is this part of your nefarious plan for world domination?
- So what do we get if we win?
- Okay, but how do I know whether a quest or story counts as Ongoing or Completed?
- What about Alternate History and Grand Strategy Roleplay?
- What about the New & Original Work categories?
- How do nominations work?
- How will voting work?
- Can I nominate my own quest or story?
- Can a thread be nominated for multiple categories/win multiple awards?
- What about threads that were nominated or won in a previous year's Awards?
- What happens if there's a tie?
This thread will remain open as a general discussion thread for the Awards, nominations and voting, as well as for any questions regarding the Awards not answered in the FAQ. Also feel free to make your own threads in the Winterfest subforum to discuss the Awards or our other exciting seasonal events if you wish to!
I am currently seeing the 'Best Original Work' badge in the GSRP spot.
Within the threads the How to nominate instructions also seem contradictory with the Where to discuss part below them.
Also, thanks for another year of setting this up. So far it's always managed to point me towards cool new stuff!
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Thanks for catching the slip-up with the medals! This must have happened as I was making the new version of the thread to post. Should be fixed now.
On the instructions for nominations, the "How to Nominate" part is talking only about the formatting of each nomination entry. The "Where to Discuss" is talking about the nominations post and posting as a whole. I've editted this to be a bit clearer, since I see the ambiguity you're talking about. Thanks for the feedback!
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- Outside the Box
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I'm disappointed there is no Short Stories (or similar) category this year. Last year we had a number of excellent one-shot stories that were overshadowed by their more long-running counterparts. Not to mention we have a plethora of Omake works on SV, none of which have any presence in the Awards at all.
Short fiction is a bit of a tricky one for a UCA category - there's a lot of great short fiction on SV, but for a good UCA category, you want things with fandoms big enough to nominate and vote, and that's harder for a standalone work. Last year and this Summerfest we ran short story events, and we are very likely to do so in future as they're always popular.
You could in principle enter a short story or novella into the New Year, New Chapter Contest. The event is more oriented around serialised works in terms of its design assumptions, but nothing in the rules stops a short story from entering or qualifying from awards as long as it is posted as its own thread on the forum.
You could in principle enter a short story or novella into the New Year, New Chapter Contest. The event is more oriented around serialised works in terms of its design assumptions, but nothing in the rules stops a short story from entering or qualifying from awards as long as it is posted as its own thread on the forum.
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- Outside the Box
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- She/Her
I don't think you can really say for sure if there's enough or not until you try it. I know some categories of the UCA don't get much participation but are appreciated anyways.
Winged_One
Head Engineer of ATHENA
- Location
- Low Earth Orbit
Is there a reason why it's "Best New Work" and "Best Original Work" but "Best Ongoing Fic" and "Best Completed Fic"? The inconsistency in terminology mildly bothers me.
DoobleDeeDooble
Please read me again sometime.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
As I understand it, "Work" includes Quests, Fics, and other forms of fiction. "Fic" is short for User Fiction, and means, like, not a Quest, basically.
- Location
- Oregon, USA
I don't think this change actually solves the confusion. Rather, I think it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why people were confused in the first place.
The problem was that stuff that was 'new' also fell under 'ongoing'. That is still an issue. Rather, merging quests and stories into 'best new work' only cuts down on the number of things being recognized.
As I said last year, the change that needs to happen to prevent issues like one new work's hype stopping older works from receiving recognition is simple: just add a rule to the ongoing category that they must have started before Jan. first. In other words, they must not be new. That clearly differentiates new and ongoing and resolves confusion.
Right now, something could potentially win the Best Original Work, Best New Work, and Best Ongoing Quest awards simultaneously. This is silly, when the whole point of having multiple categories is to recognize a variety of works rather than just one or two. This isn't as much of an issue with Original Works, as they're harder to attract attention to, and thus having a separate category makes sense, but as for New overlapping with Continuing, just as last year, this remains an issue.
Some things are great. But do we really need to let them win twice? At that point, the prize is redundant, and it's simply taking up a slot from something else.
The problem was that stuff that was 'new' also fell under 'ongoing'. That is still an issue. Rather, merging quests and stories into 'best new work' only cuts down on the number of things being recognized.
As I said last year, the change that needs to happen to prevent issues like one new work's hype stopping older works from receiving recognition is simple: just add a rule to the ongoing category that they must have started before Jan. first. In other words, they must not be new. That clearly differentiates new and ongoing and resolves confusion.
Right now, something could potentially win the Best Original Work, Best New Work, and Best Ongoing Quest awards simultaneously. This is silly, when the whole point of having multiple categories is to recognize a variety of works rather than just one or two. This isn't as much of an issue with Original Works, as they're harder to attract attention to, and thus having a separate category makes sense, but as for New overlapping with Continuing, just as last year, this remains an issue.
Some things are great. But do we really need to let them win twice? At that point, the prize is redundant, and it's simply taking up a slot from something else.
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DoobleDeeDooble
Please read me again sometime.
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I would point out something could win both "New" and "Completed", also, not just both "New" and "Ongoing".
While I agree with the spirit that something winning multiple categories is a bit of a missed opportunity, I don't at all see how that was the confusion in this instance.
(And I am also unsure if something being forced into running in just one category rather than multiple would lead to a loss where another category could have been won, and maybe the energy won't be there for a win next year. That is a potential offsetting factor of missed opportunity. Not clear to me at all which is better.)
While I agree with the spirit that something winning multiple categories is a bit of a missed opportunity, I don't at all see how that was the confusion in this instance.
(And I am also unsure if something being forced into running in just one category rather than multiple would lead to a loss where another category could have been won, and maybe the energy won't be there for a win next year. That is a potential offsetting factor of missed opportunity. Not clear to me at all which is better.)
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- Location
- Oregon, USA
It was the confusion last time. It wasn't explicit whether something could win multiple categories, so people got confused when it came to whether something could be nominated for both. And then something did win both, which, while it probably deserved it, was like you said a missed opportunity.
The fix to this was to make it more explicit that something could win multiple categories and merge new quests and new fics, apparently.
EDIT: misunderstood what you are saying.
Actually, something technically can't win new and completed, since New requires the author to intend to continue it.
So there's some confusion you had right there that could be fixed by making the categories all mutually exclusive with perhaps the exception of original work.
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DoobleDeeDooble
Please read me again sometime.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Oh whoopsies.
- Location
- Oregon, USA
It's not your fault. It's merely proof that the current rules are inconsistent and confusing. You can win multiple categories, except if those categories are new and completed. You can win either of those categories with ongoing, though.
EDIT: no, wait, I'm wrong too. You can't win new with any category other than original.
EDIT 2: I mean complete. You can't win complete with any category other than original.
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- Location
- in the trash
Basically we didn't add a cutoff date for Ongoing works because it was judged that it would have made things a little too convoluted if works less than 6-12 months old were barred from Ongoing.
In retrospect it might have been better to do so, but there's not much point rehashing the internal discussions we had on the matter last year.
The Best New and Best Original Works are to my understanding meant to be free-for-all categories, though we could probably make that more explicit.
There were a couple of other issues; it was felt that the number of categories last year ended up bloating things a bit too much, which is why we condensed them into one award.
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- Location
- Oregon, USA
Couldn't you rename it to Continuing?
It's probably a bit close to author bullying, but I think a category explicitly for old unfinished stuff would be fun. I want something that is like Cooler Broly Quest vs some old Worm stuff that I don't remember reading. This forum is old enough already for some self-indulgent nostalgia after all.
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(and then get banned off the site)
More seriously, I think we're a bit wary of increasing the number of categories beyond what we have at the moment, so we would probably have to bump off one of the existing ones to consider it.
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- in the trash
I'm not sure a name change really solves the issue, we wanted to avoid people nominating stuff to Ongoing only to find out that it doesn't qualify because of the cutoff criteria, and we wanted the criteria for each category to be easy to understand. Regardless, it was judged that there were probably too many categories.
Even we really wanted to maintain category exclusivity it's also entirely possible to have a work that started in July of this year, ran for 3 months and then ended, which under a common sense interpretation would qualify it for both "New" and "Completed", for example.
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Thank you for the feedback and critique @Young Pyromancer and @DoobleDeeDooble - it really does help us make these Awards better, and it is very useful to identify gaps and places where we need to raise our game.
In terms of the categories, Completed should not be able to be won concurrently with Ongoing for the simple reason that it's for completed works. This is clear in the Eligibility for Nomination section of the nomination threads, but not so much in the FAQ above, so I'll have to go and edit that. There is a bit of grey area with New and Completed if a work is started and completes within the same year, which honestly seemed unlikely to me and is technically disallowed in the rules as things stand, but we may need to think about going forward.
The question of winning multiple award categories in general is a tricky one, and I think there are good arguments on both sides. On the one hand, it's true that we would like to celebrate as much stuff as possible. On the other hands, the UCA is also about finding the most popular works on the site, and if something does have enough of a devoted following to win multiple awards, it feels kind of appropriate to let it have its time in the sun - movies are allowed to win multiple Academy Awards.
What it ultimately hinges on it for me is that we can't know in advance whether works will end up coming to the top of multiple categories. So if we want to ban works from winning multiple categories, it puts us in the position of having to essentially negate people's votes when the results come in and something wins multiple awards, which is a nightmare to adjudicate (if something wins Completed Quest and Original, which one is it disqualified from?) and this understandably would really upset voters.
There are certain ways we can stop this from happening in the first place through setting up categories such that they are not overlapping, but there are some where this does not really work - Original being the chief one. One thing which admittedly blindsided us a bit was the idea that Original works would have the numbers to compete in the general quest/UF categories - the assumption was that original would be a smaller category due to fandoms being bigger. But then theFire Nation Xianxia genre attacked. 😅
Still, on the whole, I think it's worked out for the most part.
We could, and I think this got brought up at a meeting - we do a sort of review on a voice call in January - but the basic issue is that it's still a bit counterintuitive. One issue you tend to discover really quickly running stuff like this is that a lot of users don't necessarily read the contest rules on a line-by-line basis. (Unlike really helpful users like yourself, who we love, because you help us find ways to make them better.) So you want to reduce "friction" for lack of a better word, as much as humanly possible, and have titles which are descriptive of their categories.
So what we'd end up with, I think, is a lot of works that were actually started within the same year getting nominated, and then users (understandably) getting really annoyed that their nominations were disqualified, and that's something I want to avoid. The real solution if overlaps with New cause too many headaches, honestly, is just to delete the "New" category entirely, but this is something we wanted to avoid because it's nice to signal-boost new stuff on the site. This year's compromise is sort of a halfway house.
In terms of the categories, Completed should not be able to be won concurrently with Ongoing for the simple reason that it's for completed works. This is clear in the Eligibility for Nomination section of the nomination threads, but not so much in the FAQ above, so I'll have to go and edit that. There is a bit of grey area with New and Completed if a work is started and completes within the same year, which honestly seemed unlikely to me and is technically disallowed in the rules as things stand, but we may need to think about going forward.
The question of winning multiple award categories in general is a tricky one, and I think there are good arguments on both sides. On the one hand, it's true that we would like to celebrate as much stuff as possible. On the other hands, the UCA is also about finding the most popular works on the site, and if something does have enough of a devoted following to win multiple awards, it feels kind of appropriate to let it have its time in the sun - movies are allowed to win multiple Academy Awards.
What it ultimately hinges on it for me is that we can't know in advance whether works will end up coming to the top of multiple categories. So if we want to ban works from winning multiple categories, it puts us in the position of having to essentially negate people's votes when the results come in and something wins multiple awards, which is a nightmare to adjudicate (if something wins Completed Quest and Original, which one is it disqualified from?) and this understandably would really upset voters.
There are certain ways we can stop this from happening in the first place through setting up categories such that they are not overlapping, but there are some where this does not really work - Original being the chief one. One thing which admittedly blindsided us a bit was the idea that Original works would have the numbers to compete in the general quest/UF categories - the assumption was that original would be a smaller category due to fandoms being bigger. But then the
Still, on the whole, I think it's worked out for the most part.
We could, and I think this got brought up at a meeting - we do a sort of review on a voice call in January - but the basic issue is that it's still a bit counterintuitive. One issue you tend to discover really quickly running stuff like this is that a lot of users don't necessarily read the contest rules on a line-by-line basis. (Unlike really helpful users like yourself, who we love, because you help us find ways to make them better.) So you want to reduce "friction" for lack of a better word, as much as humanly possible, and have titles which are descriptive of their categories.
So what we'd end up with, I think, is a lot of works that were actually started within the same year getting nominated, and then users (understandably) getting really annoyed that their nominations were disqualified, and that's something I want to avoid. The real solution if overlaps with New cause too many headaches, honestly, is just to delete the "New" category entirely, but this is something we wanted to avoid because it's nice to signal-boost new stuff on the site. This year's compromise is sort of a halfway house.
Completely valid. Panopticon would definitely be one of my hypothetical nominations too.Unfortunately this will never happen because if we added that as a category I would immediately abuse my powers to edit everyone's posts like so:
(and then get banned off the site)
Totally different subject: This here just links to 21 at the moment.
Thank you! Will fix this presently.
- Location
- New Zealand
It does not match Any of the catagories, but I would like to nominate Which reaction is best reaction as best, most SV thread.
Also, does Straight from an undisclosed location count as user... fiction? A Quest? I don't know, but it is great.
Also, does Straight from an undisclosed location count as user... fiction? A Quest? I don't know, but it is great.
xbox432
Lover of Editing
One suggestion I'd like to make for next year is to put a limit on what stories can be submitted for the "Completed" categories. It seems a little unfair that stories from years past can be submitted when all the other categories are centered around the best of the current year. So like all the others, perhaps the "Completed" categories can be just for those which have completed in the year of the competition?
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- in the trash
That effectively means any stories that don't win within the year are barred from all future UCAs permanently, in addition to already being at a disadvantage because they're not as recent. I'm not really sure how that's supposed to be more fair.
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Erien
God's Weakest Soldier
- Location
- Georgia
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Golden oldies perhaps? I get the sentiment, but it does kinda seem kinda odd that everything else is regulated to 2023. I didn't want to go bumping any of my older threads as it seemed rather against the spirit. Until now I thought it was just restricted to the current year.
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