The first round of a tournament will always be in a bit of a time crunch as it naturally has the most stories to read. Especially once we reach the semi-final, 4 flash fiction stories can be read in the blink of an eye. We're talking ~15 minutes to read and rate everything. And we've seen over the course of the last three contests - Rashomon's Legacy, Rube Goldberg, Holiday Ganngbang - that extending the voting and writing window did not lead to more engagement. On the contrary, we put the forum asleep with the incredibly slow pace and for the last 10 days or so of the contests barely anything happened.
@SoftGameHunter winning story
Holly's Jolly Christmas Carol of the last contest was posted on December 7, has made a little over 1,000 views by now and has only 11 replies despite being pinned and avertised much more than any of the stories in the tournament. The last new person to comment on it was me on January 7. The last new comment on that story before mine was on January 1, the day voting began. If I hadn't made the deliberate choice to spread out my reading and commenting on the contest stories, the winner of the Holiday Gangbang contest would not have seen a single comment after the first day of the two week voting period.
If we compare the three recent contests to what we experienced with the first round of the tournament, the results are astonishing. 13 people signed up to participate instead of only 5 or 6 handing in a story after having a month to write it. 12 stories were handed in, one sadly had to be removed because of bestiality content. 13 different people left comments on the stories in only 3 days. Users like
@AdmiralPiet,
@Vile8r,
@Verbal13 were more engaged with the contest than anything we have seen before from them.
@DayDreamNights participated in his first contest AND left feedback for others despite having just posted his first story recently. All of that resulted in the first day with 100 posts on a single day since the launch of the forum.
My point is, this first round of this tournament is by all metrics and anecdotes such a tremendous success compared to the slumber that the forum has been in for at least the last 3 contests, and honestly since the failure of the Used and Abused tournament. Even what you see right now in the aftermath of the first round is great.
@MasterDebater showing relief that he barely made it through,
@Vile8r "raging" because of his elimination,
@Shocker expressing fear of his next opponent? When did we see people talk about a contest like that after it was over? This is good, this is a sign of life, this is what a community is about, the forum being more than a place for authors to dump their stories on and not engage with anything else.
So will the schedule be a little bit tight for the first round of a tournament that has the most stories? Sure, but I think we can handle that for one round of one tournament every six months. I know that I'm not known for spreading optimism. But this is the first thing that actually worked in at least half a year. Let's not nitpick this to death but generate some more momentum. Participation here was great, the best we've seen since Gang Rape Galore.
SoftGameHunter wrote: Mon Jan 19, 2026 2:30 pm
We'd only be handicapping ourselves since we aren't supposed to rate our own stories even anonymously. Of course, if everyone gave at least one point, the effect would wash out, but we'd just be advertising our secret identities by the one story we didn't rate.
That is a small issue but only for the first round. From now on, we have 1 vs 1 matches. So you can freely rate the other matches without hurting yourself.
