This is the 2024 SV User's Choice Awards, our fourth instalment, where you get to pick the best quests, stories and other creative works on SV!
The User's Choice Awards 2024
- Thread starter Skippy
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Introducing the 2024 User's Choice Awards
New
Hello there!
Welcome to the fourth instalment of Sufficient Velocity's User's Choice Awards. This User's Choice Awards are SV's epic annual contest to find the very best works on the forum, where the winners are chosen by you. We hold this event to celebrate the countless hours of work put into this forum by amazing quest runners, authors, artists, worldbuilders, essayists, and the passion of legions of voters, readers, and commentators who make it all worthwhile. This forum fundamentally is just a vessel, a kind of conduit; the vital substance flowing within which makes it alive and precious is all of you, the users. That's why this event is focussed on the users - both the creators on SV and the fans who support them.
Every year we run the UCA we learn some things about how to make it better, almost always through making mistakes. This year has seen a couple of changes which I'll run though briefly. First, because we love discussions and want to encourage more of them, have further liberalised the rules governing discussion in the nominations threads. It is now fully kosher to put an argument shilling for your picks in the same post as your nominations, so long as it's properly formatted with a gap between them. A defunct bit of wording in the nominations rules has been reworded. And lastly, we have expanded the Best Alternate History awards to also include other writings that don't really fall under the umbrella of stories, quests or roleplay - like essays, let's play, reviews, commentaries, and other substantive nonfiction writing on the forum. We've taken this decision because Alternate History for years has been a bit inactive, and it's our hope this brings in more nominations and interest to the category.
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 Sunday the 1st of December to midnight on Sunday the 15th 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 Monday the 16th of December to the midnight of Tuesday the 31st of December. The winners will then be announced on New Year's Day, Wednesday 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 & Nonfiction 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 & Nonfiction, or 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!
Duke William of
I really need to finish my quests. :V
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Say, are we able to enlist people participating in the quests/works we nominated to vote as well or is that a no-no?
Absolutely fine and indeed, encouraged. We want as many people as possible to get involved in the UCA and rep for the their favourite works, and if your voters are willing to ride into the nominations and voting phases when the proverbial beacons are lit, then more power to you both. Fundamentally it is a popularity contest.
I will add a question to the FAQ about this tomorrow actually, I knew there was one I was forgetting...
E.I.G.
Robo-Bird
- Pronouns
- It/They
So, how does this work for stories where you know you will be continuing, but it has not been actively updating since earlier in the year?
I have an original fiction work that I started at the beginning of this year, but it has been put aside until I finish a fanfic I've nearly got done. My hope was to get the fanfic done before this event, so I could at least honestly say I was working on the original fiction again in order to post in the thread about this event, but it is looking like I won't be back to writing the original story until next year at my current rate.
Is it alright for me to post a "hey, readers, remember that this exists? a voting event is going on" message in the thread even though I only have a tiny bit that I can say is happening with the story?
Ariamaki
Judge of Scales
- Location
- Land of Breath and Balance
- Pronouns
- He/They
Just dropping in to point out, if anybody wants to fix it, that all of the 2022 awards are broken images right now. 2021 is fine, 2023 is fine, this year is fine. Just saw the broken year in the backlog while checking to make sure I didn't hypothetically nominate a past winner. 
- Location
- USA
What does a thread being updated mean, exactly? If, for example, a fanfic thread hasn't gotten a new chapter for over a year but a bunch of users make omakes and fanart and the author threadmarks them as "Media" or "Apocrypha", does that count?
Ariamaki
Judge of Scales
- Location
- Land of Breath and Balance
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- He/They
Speaking of which, another issue: Only 3 of the nomination threads actually have the User's Choice Awards tag , Winterfest tag, etc. It's currently much harder than it has to be to find all of the right spots, especially since SOME of the others show as Similar Threads but that can only display 5 things at once.
Yeah, go for it.
SV does not have a thread necromancy rule anyway, so any rando could potentially post that in the thread and it would be fine. But as you're the author, it's doubly fine.
The annoying thing is we have a template from which we copy a post into new eight threads to make the nominations threads, but tags from the template thread don't carry over to the new threads. Normally I or other Content Promotion staff try to remember to add the tags in the process of filling in each of the templates, but apparently this year I forgot... I will go through and fix that this evening whilst I fix the image hosting, thanks for the heads up.
(At least this year we do not have {INSERT NAME OF THREAD} left sitting in any of the Nominations threads lol)
- Pronouns
- Reader
- Location
- Outside the Box
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- She/Her
Please elaborate on why the New Work category is a single category covering both fics and quests. Especially given that all five nominees last year were fics, and this year is heading towards all five nominees being quests.
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Do we just post here to nominate or do we PM?
Duke William of
I really need to finish my quests. :V
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- He/Him
There are separate treads in this subordinates where you can votes for specific categories.
Apologies for the late reply! Essentially part of why we stopped having "New Quest" and "New Fic" as individual categories is because there was a sort of unresolvable* overlap between "New" and "Ongoing" for both the "Quest" and "Fic" super-categories. This both depressed turnout (in my view, although reading the numbers for is a bit like reading tea leaves), but also meant in practice there was just less distinctiveness between the categories. We had a two hour meeting about it in 2023 where we went through the 2022 UCA After-Action Report, so this wasn't a decision taken lightly.
More generally, the New Works category has been really successful IMO, and I don't think it swinging one way or another between Quests/Fics in a particular year is at all problematic so long as it isn't consistently swinging to one or another? But also there's only a sample size of two here, and this year's noms have not even finished, so let's see. If we get to like 2025 or 2026 and New Work has become essentially a third Quest category, then that would be worth thinking about, but I don't think we're there yet.
*(As in, you could in principle draft rules to prevent an overlap, but the effects of such rules would themselves cause issues we felt might outweigh the benefits.)
The nominations threads are in the Winterfest Subforum, basically it's all the threads below the stickied ones at the top. Info for how to format your nominations is in the thread. Essentially it's like a Quest vote and you copy-paste the full title of the threads you're nominating.
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- Pronouns
- Reader
Their is the counter argument that you switched to new works award based on a sample size of a single year to indicate that the original switch to new works was itself hasty, but overall it certainly makes sense to see through the awards of this year before considering it further.
Duke William of
I really need to finish my quests. :V
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- He/Him
How will the second round voting for UCA's work? Is it a poll, or is it similar to how we voted for the first round?
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- He
See the akkordeon in the threadmark:
Duke William of
I really need to finish my quests. :V
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- He/Him
Thank you.
- Pronouns
- Reader
So looking at the nominees for new work I can't help but feel that there does seem to be a case where a few particularly good fics or good quests can inspire further new creations of sufficient quality to dominate a singular "New Works" category, and that this has happened two years in a row does seem to indicate that the intended effect in combining them does not seem to have born fruit.
Frankly a single year(2022) of new quest and new fic awards before switching does seem to have been somewhat hasty, so splitting new works back into those awards for another try seems like the simplest solution in my opinion, though I naturally bow to the wisdom of event planners in how they deal with this in next years winter fest.
Frankly a single year(2022) of new quest and new fic awards before switching does seem to have been somewhat hasty, so splitting new works back into those awards for another try seems like the simplest solution in my opinion, though I naturally bow to the wisdom of event planners in how they deal with this in next years winter fest.
Winged_One
Head Engineer of ATHENA
- Location
- Low Earth Orbit
Out of curiosity, is there a reason why voting results are private this time around until the polls close?
That's not the case with all of the polls; I think the wrong box must've gotten ticked on a few of them as the polls were beimg created.
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- Reader
I checked and it seems all of them are hidden at this point, and I know the new works wasn't hidden earlier in the day when I cast my own vote. Plausibly there may be some manner of miscommunication about which ones are and arn't supposed to be hidden, with someone mis-correcting them as a result, which is always a risk when dealing with uneven implementation.
I was suprised to see the A Little Vice nominations actually end up counted. Do the No Previous Winners rules not apply across categories?
My intuition was that they would, since previous winners, independently of the particular context, already got their moment in the spotlight.
My intuition was that they would, since previous winners, independently of the particular context, already got their moment in the spotlight.
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- in the trash
For now, the ruling is they only apply to the specific award.
There's nothing like that. There's no reason to only make some of the polls hidden.
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- Reader
That contradicts Skippy's earlier assertion about them not all being hidden and the fact that I was able to view the new works category's percentages at the time of my vote, all of which hints at some degree of mixup in the events organization.