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There's loads more data on the sheet, although it's all from Wednesday (4/29/2020) and is thus a little bit more out of date.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

[phyrry]

My big request for improving the format next time would be providing everyone with a set date in advance for when automatic defaults happen. (So, tell people in advance "You get until next Saturday at noon MDT.") I get that to some degree it's done whenever it's done, but I also think that having a set deadline is really important for exchanges. Given the 10k max bid, a week and a half time limit seems like it was reasonable for most participants.

I also got confused about the purpose of the Flamingos collection early on, but I've been chalking that up as a me problem.


Beyond that, loved the pinch hit auctions, and I feel 10k was a great max length: intimidating but reachable. I had a ton of fun and would gladly die like fen again.

[everysecondtuesday]

As a WDLF event, I had a great time! But I think there are a few things I'd hope would be different (and some I'd hope would stay the same) if it were a general event.

The biggest thing for me is that I think it would be good to have a set default date announced from the start to give people a better idea of what their limits are and so people can, I'd hope, default sooner if they need to and give pinch hitters longer. I also think it would be good in a non-WDLF event with auctions to have the exact auction dates and times set up ahead of time, so people can schedule their time online accordingly.

I liked the max bid thing (though I wouldn't mind one way or another if it were higher) and I liked that people could go in on group bids. I also loved that we could split our word counts over multiple stories, which enabled me to bid higher than I otherwise would have been comfortable doing, but if that changed, I would just change my own personal max bid, so this wouldn't affect whether I'd participate, just how.

I appreciated that finished auctions were (after the first set) set to be public in a different category so that active auctions were most easily seen, but we could still check things like a) what exactly we bid on, b) how much we bid, and c) non-sign-up info disclosed from the person we were bidding on during the course of the auction, like additional fandoms, ships, etc.

Thank you so much to the mods for all your hard work!

[ashling]

It'd be nice to formalize the cleo-type auction, in which somebody who has contributed a whole bunch but received nothing gets a shot at some treats.

Possibly also this happens in the situation somebody has contributed x amount of words of treats but received less than x number of words of treats?

I particularly liked the amount of energy generated by communal insanity. Next time I really wouldn't sign up for half so much, I think that was a mistake on my part, because I inevitably always write twice as much as the minimum wordcount.

And also next time, I'm think perhaps there should only one set of signups, because having more than one auction for one person made finding things a bit confusing/chaotic.

It would be useful to have tags that opt-in to art, podfic, and/or fanmixes. Otherwise, it's just people going, "do you want fanart? podfic? fanmixes?" every auction, which isn't terrible, just inefficient.

Being able to split the bid between multiple stories was not something that I did, but it was something that made me feel better, so I'd like to keep it. Being able to split the bid between multiple writers was also good.

The drawerfic thing that somebody suggested seemed really cool at the time, but my brain is a sieve so I don't remember much about it.

[shadaras]

I did not participate in this particular madness because it was very overwhelming from the outside; I know that's part and parcel of the WDLF experience, and there's not much you can do about that, but I still wanna say something about the auction stuff, because it seemed super cool!

I would love to understand the auction things better. Something that would've helped me feel comfortable participating would've been to have a place I could read the auction rules in a stable place (meaning, a DW post or similar instead of the rolling chaos of discord) and being able to set my expectations for an event run that way.

I'm definitely interested in other events being run auction-style, because it seems like a lot of fun, and I look forward to seeing what discussion those of you who actually played the WDLF3 game have!

[lailah_tov]

This was a giant bucket of fun and I loved every minute of it. Thank you for making it happen!

Best parts for me:

- The real-time excitement of the auctions. People cheering one another one, shilling for their friends, teaming up to bid, even getting outbid at the last minute, all fantastic. I liked this experience better than the fire sale format where a lot of little bids come in to collectively hit a target.

- WRITING SO MUCH HOLY SHIT. I can't believe I wrote so much. And it was all things I committed to writing... even my one treat crime was intended to be a bid, someone else just bid first. As completely insane as it was to commit to so much, I never felt like I bit off more than I could chew, and clearly I really thrive on that kind of accountability, which is cool to know about myself.

- The auction format put each person's sign-up in front of me in turn, so I could take some time to consider each one and whether I'd want to write for it. I never remember to look through sign-ups for treating opportunities, and having them come to us this way was really cool. Even without auctions, I'd love any exchange that took the time to say "Here is this person's sign-up, look how awesome their prompts are, don't you want to treat them?" for each participant. And I so appreciated that in WDLF positive things were said about every sign-up, whether it was long or short or detailed or "write what you want" or whatever.

- In general everyone was just really nice and it felt good to be doing a thing with such nice people. The social parts were so great! I know not every exchange will have its own entire Discord server but it was incredible to just be able to spraaaawl out and heck the place up and not be confined to one channel on EAD. So handy to have individual channels for group bids and team efforts like epochenonsense and all that.

- Non-anonymity! I loooooved not being anon, being able to ask my recipients what they wanted, all of that. I know some people care a lot about anon periods but it was amazing not to have one. I also think the mix of open auctions and anon initial assignments was nice for people who prefer one or the other.

- This is a small thing maybe, but for all that there was talk of ShAmE for defaulters, I loved that like half the people initially defaulted, and then we ALL got defaulted on our second assignments, because the thought of needing to default on an exchange fills me with dread and I felt so much better seeing defaulting be normalized that way. Even though I didn't default, I knew I'd be in good company if I did.

Things that could be improved, but would make it less WDLFily chaotic:

- It would be great to have a real timeline, with auctions scheduled in advance.

- Being auctioned off turned out to be way more fun (at least for some of us) than being kept by your original writer, so I think every sign-up should have been auctioned, not just pinch hits. We didn't know ahead of time how awesome the auctions were going to be, but once we knew, I think there was an argument to be made that everyone should have gotten auctioned for their original sign-up, not just for Flamingos.

- We all make a lot of jokes about cliques and popularity contests but there did end up being a really wide range of how much fic/how many fics people received. Obviously that can happen in any exchange, you never know who's going to write 25k for a 300-word minimum, but with the auctions it was a little more in people's faces and I think that wasn't always entirely comfortable. 10k is a lot. If the snipe point had been 5k I think that would have been less... dramatic.

All these come down to ways of making participants more comfortable, I guess, and for a chaotic exchange like WDLF we're obvs signing on for a degree of discomfort as a trade-off for more amazing whimsical random-ass fun, so I won't be surprised if your reponse to any and all is "That sounds like a you problem" or at least "That sounds like useful info for an exchange that isn't WDLF."

Suggestion for a future event:

- Have no assignments. Hold a fire sale for each sign-up, requesting pledges of 200–500 words up to a total of 1k. Then auction one additional treat per sign-up, with bids up to 5k and no group bidding. Of course writers can write more than they bid/buy and anyone can commit treat crimes. I think this would be a decent balance of guaranteed quantity (you get at least two fics and at least 1000 words of fic), relatively even distribution of gifts (or no less even than in a standard exchange), and auction uncertainty/excitement.

I've had this tab open for two hours so I'm going to give up and submit the comment before I think of even more things to say! Thank you again!

[snickfic]

Things I enjoyed:
- The auctions! Bidding, being bid on, rubbernecking, all those aspects were really fun.
- The general community atmosphere. :)))
- The mods, who worked miracles. Y'all were amazing.

Suggestions for future rounds (especially if the rounds are intended to be less wdlf-y):
- Have a firm deadline from the beginning. I know we were inventing the exchange as we went along this last time, but I think it actually made it harder for me to be productive, not knowing how much time I had.

- I think lowering the max bid might be a good idea. People can still go over the max bid, obviously, but I feel like it might help everyone rein their aspirations in a bit and also reduce the sense that some people are guaranteed to get way more fic/gifts than other people. I think 5-6k might be a good max bid? Or maybe let the max bid be larger IF the bid involves more than one creator? Although then you're still going to have some people receiving way bigger bids than others. Or maybe let the first round of auctions have a higher max bid, and then if everyone gets auctioned off twice, the second round has a much lower max bid? I got the feeling that everyone was feeling a little exhausted by the end of the last round of auctions.

- This is more a frustration than a useful suggestion, but it took me several days to win an auction, just because I didn't feel able to go nearly as high as a lot of people did (even when I teamed up with someone!). That was due to a combo of RL and other fannish things going on in my life, and in a different week I'd have been willing to bid higher, but I feel like maybe some kind of limit on number of assignments per person, at least until everyone has an assignment, might be a good idea? Of course that gives the mods even more to keep track of, and what if the only person willing to bid on a given assignment is someone who's already maxed out? IDK.

[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!