We Die Like Fen 3 Statistics & Discussion/Brainstorming Post

[fencesit]

Hi, all! We've all had a while to recover and think about the exchange—and also crunch some numbers—and now we're coming to you with statistics about the exchange as well as a call for opinions and thoughts on how it went and how we might use what we've learned in further challenges! "We" here meaning both "the WDLF3 mods" and also, maybe, you! The non-mods!

(Also, someone who doesn't know anything about WDLF might wander past this post, so here's a link to the collection, not that that will really tell you much about what nonsense we got up to.)

Statistics

On the statistics end of things, here's a Google sheet with all the stats scraped from the collection a few days ago — we regret to inform you that we missed a total wordcount ending in "666" by three words, and thus no final certificate will be awarded. But still, we wrote 405,663 words! Go us!

Here's a screenshot of the spreadsheet showing some of our word count totals:

Also, we made more than just fic!

On the audio front, we also made:

• Three fanmixes. Specifically, kimaracretak made them:
  • here (Dare Me - Megan Abbott)
  • here (Critical Role)
  • here (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
• Two podfic. Specifically, flowersforgraves made them:
  • here (The West Wing)
  • here (Original Works)

On the visual front, we made ten works with art!

Still Life with Origami Waterfowl by draconicsockpuppet (Finnish Mythology, Untitled Goose Game (Video Game))

Matt Bragg Stealing A Dufflebag by fencesit (Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF)

Two Animal Crossing Pictures by fencesit (どうぶつの森 | Animal Crossing Series)

snake, rabbit, panther by isaiah_is_the_blob (Original Work)

Her Hand by Resilur (Tortall - Tamora Pierce)

(Soon to be) Half a Red Riding Hood by sheagar (Little Red Riding Hood (Fairy Tale), Rotkäppchen | Little Red Riding Hood (Fairy Tale))

Awkward puppies... by sheagar (Naruto)

The Magnus Sketches... by sheagar (The Magnus Archives (Podcast))

Through the Smoke by wednesday (Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game))

With a cut clean hands by wednesday (Dragon Age: Inquisition)

There's loads more data on the sheet, although it's all from Wednesday (4/29/2020) and is thus a little bit more out of date. If you want to sort or edit the sheet, you'll have to make a copy.

Discussion/Brainstorming

And now the discussion part! We've gotten interest from a good number of people about running this event or one like it (with auctions, you know!) in some form or another in the future and we've even brainstormed a little on Discord, but overall that's a really hard format to have an orderly conversation about all the possibilities, so we're hoping Dreamwidth will help us sort some things out about how you felt the event could be improved.

Here are some discussion questions to get you started:

• What would an improved version of this event look like to you? What parts are most important and what parts could you do without?
• What did you like? What part of this experience are you most interested in seeing recreated?
• Do you have any cool event ideas related to this nonsense that you're kicking around?
• What limits would you have imposed on yourself/the exchange if you had to do it again? Think word count, assignment number, time for auctions, etc.
• Did you have fun???

Anonymous comments are on and you don't have to sign anything you say, but please be constructive. We'll never run this event in this format again and the event is already over, so just telling us it sucked is useless barring the invention of time travel. Similarly, if your only feedback is that you'd never be interested in anything like this ever again because it's not for you and you know it, you're probably wasting our time and yours! In other words, this is a post for improving future versions of this event, not a post for airing of grievances.

Please feel free to answer all or just one of the questions above, and please feel free also to pose your own questions!

Comments

[learnedfoot]

Generally agree with what people have said: this was a ton of fun. Loved the auctions, loved the energy, loved the community.

In terms of things I'd like to see different in a less WDLF-y version, I agree with the above:

- Timeline for auctions
- Set deadline for fics
- Some way to make sure people don't over-commit too much. A lower max bid is one possibility. A limit on number of assignments is another. Or a third would be a max bid *per writer.* Like, you can bid up to 10k (or 15k or 20k or whatever is reasonable given the timeline) all told. If you want to spend that all on one person (maybe also with the same 10k bid cap per recip), fine, but then you don't get more assignments.

Obviously that is a lot to keep track of for mods, but -- worth considering!

[lailah_tov]

I'm torn on max bids per writer/max commitment per writer, because one person's "reasonable" is another's "ha ha are you kidding." Some people could very comfortably commit to 10k+ and that's totally out of reach for others. Some people are inclined to bid really conservatively and some bid really extravagantly. And if you'd asked me in advance whether I could write 17k in ten days I would have laughed in your face (I still can't believe I did that! I definitely could not do it consistently!), so even asking people to set "budgets" in advance might not work. And so much depends on the requests, like if it's very Star Wars/MCU heavy I'm not going to have much to bid on but if lots of people are requesting original work then I'll bid all over the place... writers are just so variable and I don't think there's a way to do a writer-focused system of limits. I think lower max bids have a better chance of keeping people from burning out while making space for the super productive to be super productive, and some kind of pinch hit system will allow people who overcommitted/had an emergency/whatever to offload their commitment as needed.

[learnedfoot]

Yeah, I think it's definitely variable! But I think that is kind of true either way? Like, if you aren't comfortable committing to 10k (or whatever the max is), you might get snipped in either system. The upside of having a writer cap is that, based on this experience, a lot of people seriously over-committed, which could have been somewhat mitigated by a writer cap -- and won't be mitigated if people can still bid the max on as many different assignments as they want. But you're right that a lower per-assignment bid could be more effective at achieving the same goal!

(If there were a writer cap, I would think it should only be for the first round. Then people who have finished their commitment could take on PHs and such.)

[lailah_tov]

Yeah, the barrier to overcommitment needs to be higher in some way.

Also now I'm thinking about accessibility and needing to type fast on Discord in order to win an auction, and limiting the number of auctions a person can win might also be useful there.

[everysecondtuesday]

Hm, I'm of two minds on limits to make sure people don't overcommit. On the one hand, you've got people who committed to a lot and were able to balance it pretty well (with perhaps some issues with the lack of a concrete deadline for some people). On the other, several people did comment toward the end that they'd overcommitted, and it would be good to have safeguards to prevent bidding 10k in the heat and excitement of the moment when you're only capable of a quarter of that, both for the sake of the people who will wind up pinch hitting and to be more fair to the other people bidding whose 5k they actually would have been able to manage. (These numbers pulled from the air for the sake of rhetoric. If it matches an actual example, I don't remember it.)

I think that if limits were implemented, it might be more useful to have sort of rolling limits? Like you can only claim X words to start (or maybe have full ownership of 2 assignments? Not sure how we'd handle people who only promise 100 words as part of a group bid if we're limiting assignments, though), which are freed up as you post assignments. A lot of the pinch hitters ended up being people who took on a lot overall, but finished sooner and had extra time on their hands, for example. For keeping track, maybe use roles (3k winner, 4k winner, etc. to mirror the x time winner role)? Though that requires mods to be paying attention and a lot of extra active mod work, which doesn't seem ideal, either.

Looking at the Author's Doom spreadsheet and who was done a week out from the start, it seems like lower commitments doesn't necessarily correlate with being finished sooner, so I'm not even sure whether hard limits will actually help with this or not. Though it's also kind of hard to tell when people actually finished if they picked up pinch hits right away (see, my line is not blue starting from the 19th, even though that's when I finished my first set of assignments).

Anyway, this is a rambling way of saying I'm not sure if it'll fix the problem, but it might be worth trying?

[learnedfoot]

Oh yeah, I definitely like the idea of making it rolling (I mentioned something similar elsewhere).

I feel like this would also help with fairness/even spread if it was rolling -- everyone could get a chance in first rounds rather than have someone who can commit 30k or whatever snap a bunch of stuff up. But then people who had stuff finished could pick up more if they are so inclined?

A pure cap to number of assignments at a time would also work.

Any option here is definitely more work for the mods, though!