This is the voting phase for the 2023 User Choice Awards. Look at the thread titles below to select Award categories to vote in, and help your favourite threads be crowned as UCA champions!
User Choice Awards Voting: Best Ongoing Quest
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User Choice Awards Voting: Best Ongoing Quest
User Choice Awards Voting: Best Completed Quest
User Choice Awards Voting: Best Ongoing Fic
User Choice Awards Voting: Best Completed Fic
User Choice Awards Voting: Best Alternate History
User Choice Awards Voting: Best GSRP
User Choice Awards Voting: Best New Work
User Choice Awards Voting: Best Original Work
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Rules and Procedures for Voting
Hello!
Voting for Best Ongoing Quest opens , and will remain open until . For those of you who are looking for more information on the Users' Choice Awards generally, you can find it in this thread!
In short, the Users' Choice Awards are about celebrating the best and most beloved quests, stories, and other creative wonderfulness on SV, as decided by SV users. The Awards take place in two phases. During the Nomination Phase, almost four hundred nominations were made across nine categories. These have been narrowed down to only five* in each category.
Now, in the Voting Phase, you get to vote to see which is crowned as champion!
*(In the event of multiple nominees tying, then the tied nominees will all go through to voting so long as the total number of nominees does not exceed ten. In this case tied or excess nominees will not be counted. We will adjudicate this so that no tied nominees are ever privileged any other tied nominees, and nominees with the lowest number of votes are always discounted first.)
Please try to take the time to read the nominees before voting. Each of them had to fight really hard to get here, and they are worth giving a chance!
At , the poll will be closed, and the thread with the highest number of votes will be the winner!
In the event of a tie, we will have joint winners.
This thread will serve as a discussion thread for the voting.
Please feel free to discuss the threads you are voting for, and why. Whether it's an impassioned argument for why people should vote for your favourite work, or just some great commentary and analysis, we love to see it, and this is the place for it!
Voting for Best Ongoing Quest opens , and will remain open until . For those of you who are looking for more information on the Users' Choice Awards generally, you can find it in this thread!
In short, the Users' Choice Awards are about celebrating the best and most beloved quests, stories, and other creative wonderfulness on SV, as decided by SV users. The Awards take place in two phases. During the Nomination Phase, almost four hundred nominations were made across nine categories. These have been narrowed down to only five* in each category.
Now, in the Voting Phase, you get to vote to see which is crowned as champion!
*(In the event of multiple nominees tying, then the tied nominees will all go through to voting so long as the total number of nominees does not exceed ten. In this case tied or excess nominees will not be counted. We will adjudicate this so that no tied nominees are ever privileged any other tied nominees, and nominees with the lowest number of votes are always discounted first.)
How Voting Works
Voting will be done via the poll you see right at the top of this thread. You can vote for as many or as few of the nominees as you like, and you can also change your vote if you wish, up until the close of voting. It's just that simple!Please try to take the time to read the nominees before voting. Each of them had to fight really hard to get here, and they are worth giving a chance!
At , the poll will be closed, and the thread with the highest number of votes will be the winner!
In the event of a tie, we will have joint winners.
Nominees
And now, without further ado, the 2023 User Choice Awards Nominees for Best Ongoing Quest:Article:
A Stranger in a War-Torn Galaxy: A Supreme Commander/WH40k Quest, by @BOTcommander
NorseQuest (A Norse Xianxia), by @Imperial Fister
The Long March (a TNO-sequel Comintern quest), by @StarMaker764
Equestria: The House of the Sun - A pony cultist experience, by @BirdBodhisattva
To War is Human, To Design? Divine (Battletech Design Plan Quest), by @4WheelSword
This thread will serve as a discussion thread for the voting.
Please feel free to discuss the threads you are voting for, and why. Whether it's an impassioned argument for why people should vote for your favourite work, or just some great commentary and analysis, we love to see it, and this is the place for it!
⭐ Voting is Open ⭐
AG_AG
I love vegetarian food: it goes great with steak
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Did you also vote for it in the poll at the top of the page?
I have some reading to do here since I am only familiar with NorseQuest. Guess I am somehow a bit out of touch with Questing.
NorseQuest itself has some really sick worldbuilding and that it managed to make me care about stuff like seeing the Halla's Hamingja go up or getting a new Muna is an achievement. It's writing is clearly tailored for efficiency and update speed, though, and the mechanics ended up so complex that, if the honor of creating the combat plan was assigned by lot rather than by vote, the protagonist would probably get consistently knocked-out by toddlers.
NorseQuest itself has some really sick worldbuilding and that it managed to make me care about stuff like seeing the Halla's Hamingja go up or getting a new Muna is an achievement. It's writing is clearly tailored for efficiency and update speed, though, and the mechanics ended up so complex that, if the honor of creating the combat plan was assigned by lot rather than by vote, the protagonist would probably get consistently knocked-out by toddlers.
Obviously as a contest-runner I'm officially impartial, and I've voted for everything. Every thread on the roster is fantastic and equally deserves your time and your votes, please give everything a look.
But personally as a NorseQuest player, I will say that probably the most charming aspect of it that you might not expect from a Xianxia quest is the poetry. To elaborate, because praise poems are such a big part of the Norse sagas that NQ draws inspiration from, they're also a factor in the quest. A good praise poem made in your honour can literally boosts the recipient's power level via increasing their orthstirr, the strange sort of qi-equivalent the setting uses*, which rather than being about meridians or life force is based on social reality, reflecting one's status and fame in an honour-based warrior society. This is rather a neat idea in itself, but it also had the rather unintended contest of getting a large number of SV Questers to experiment in writing Norse-style poetry.
Writing a poem in the quest can get you Reward Dice, similar to reward mechanics for Omakes as in other quests. It's been lovely watching other players' creativity bloom as the quest has gone on, with many becoming quite accomplished poets by now. Personally, I've even made my own forays into dróttkvætt, the notoriously challenging "court metre" used by skalds whose structure makes it quite a pickle to render into modern English. This led me to discover the work of Ian Crockatt, the only living poet to translate and compose dróttkvætt in modern English, whose work I honestly cannot eulogise enough after buying his books.
So I don't know if @Imperial Fister intended it or not, but I have to say that "SV Questers get really into composing Skaldic poetry" was not on my bingo card for 2023.
*(There is another, secret qi-equivalent based on the mead of poetry, which the main character discovers some of the way in. It's a complicated quest.)
But personally as a NorseQuest player, I will say that probably the most charming aspect of it that you might not expect from a Xianxia quest is the poetry. To elaborate, because praise poems are such a big part of the Norse sagas that NQ draws inspiration from, they're also a factor in the quest. A good praise poem made in your honour can literally boosts the recipient's power level via increasing their orthstirr, the strange sort of qi-equivalent the setting uses*, which rather than being about meridians or life force is based on social reality, reflecting one's status and fame in an honour-based warrior society. This is rather a neat idea in itself, but it also had the rather unintended contest of getting a large number of SV Questers to experiment in writing Norse-style poetry.
Writing a poem in the quest can get you Reward Dice, similar to reward mechanics for Omakes as in other quests. It's been lovely watching other players' creativity bloom as the quest has gone on, with many becoming quite accomplished poets by now. Personally, I've even made my own forays into dróttkvætt, the notoriously challenging "court metre" used by skalds whose structure makes it quite a pickle to render into modern English. This led me to discover the work of Ian Crockatt, the only living poet to translate and compose dróttkvætt in modern English, whose work I honestly cannot eulogise enough after buying his books.
So I don't know if @Imperial Fister intended it or not, but I have to say that "SV Questers get really into composing Skaldic poetry" was not on my bingo card for 2023.
*(There is another, secret qi-equivalent based on the mead of poetry, which the main character discovers some of the way in. It's a complicated quest.)
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[X]Equestria: The House of the Sun - A pony cultist experience, by @BirdBodhisattva
I.F. Ister
Fortifying The Thread
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- He/They
As the writer of NQ, I agree 100%. It's why I'm intending for NQ2 and subsequent quests to have some breathing space in terms of update rate and also much lighter on mechanics, though that's only when compared to as it is now.
I do have to give a very big thank you to @DeadmanwalkingXI for the hard carry when it comes to planning
I'll take it!
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Checked out the rest of the candidates:
-'To War...'-design quest. Didn't grab me at all. Feels more like a dedicated Nerd Fight Enabler™ than something trying to tell a story. Doesn't help that it's anchored in a setting I have no connection to.
-The Long March. Grabbed me slightly more than the above, but I still bounced off. Intro was super dry and I started off a bit sceptic because its genre is something I already failed at enjoying in the past.
-'Stranger in a...'. This one is fun. Some compelling mysteries and characters. The protagonist has a super boring powerset, though, and I don't really vibe with WH40k, especially if its this vanilla (compared to what, for example, Suffer Not has been doing). Still, already read a novel's worth of words yesterday to form this impression and might return to it someday.
-'Equestria...'. It's unfair, but a CK2-ish crossover between Ponies and a game I haven't played would have needed a total banger of a start to win me over. This didn't have that. The parts I read seemed perfectly ok, though.
So NorseQuest definitely stays my choice with its awesome worldbuilding.
-'To War...'-design quest. Didn't grab me at all. Feels more like a dedicated Nerd Fight Enabler™ than something trying to tell a story. Doesn't help that it's anchored in a setting I have no connection to.
-The Long March. Grabbed me slightly more than the above, but I still bounced off. Intro was super dry and I started off a bit sceptic because its genre is something I already failed at enjoying in the past.
-'Stranger in a...'. This one is fun. Some compelling mysteries and characters. The protagonist has a super boring powerset, though, and I don't really vibe with WH40k, especially if its this vanilla (compared to what, for example, Suffer Not has been doing). Still, already read a novel's worth of words yesterday to form this impression and might return to it someday.
-'Equestria...'. It's unfair, but a CK2-ish crossover between Ponies and a game I haven't played would have needed a total banger of a start to win me over. This didn't have that. The parts I read seemed perfectly ok, though.
So NorseQuest definitely stays my choice with its awesome worldbuilding.
Sole_Survivor 77
Better dead than Red
4WheelSword
The original N-body Problem
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You are absolutely correct, that's exactly what it is
Honestly, it's a fucking honour to get nominated at all, I hadn't expected the quest to be nearly as popular as it is. I guess daily updates and regular updates from mid-march will do that
Thanks for your participation and obvious enthusiasm for your votes, but just a reminder that votes need to go in the poll right at the top of the thread. Thanks, and Merry Christmas!
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- Under your couch
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- He/Him
Non standard voting? What is this blasphemy.
16 characters
Sick and tired of being Sick and Tired
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It feels super weird to me realizing I have never read any of these quests that got this years. Therefore I feel it would be unfair of me to vote on any of them.