January MCC feedback poll

[Ryder]

Posted previously in the MCC Discussion thread, but I think it needs more visibility. Please vote and share your thoughts here. The poll will run until Feb 7th.
@void_nothing could you get this pinned please?

https://q653tbmqq.supersurvey.com

[bravelion83]

I would like if nobody mentioned the wording of the questions or their answers here until the end of the poll to avoid influencing the results. Until then, feel free to give generically worded feedback here, or to explain why did you like or not a certain change beyond giving it just a numeric mark.

If for any reason you're unable to take that survey, please pm me and we'll do it that way. At the end of the poll, on February 7th after Ryder posts the results, we will add the answers received via pm, and I will recalulate all the averages myself, I've got no problems with doing that. I will also share how I have personally voted and why for each question at that point.

Thanks everybody for all the feedback you can provide. I'm preparing March right in this moment, and I might bring back the things people liked the most for another test then, so the feedback is invaluable to me in this very moment.

EDIT - I and Ryder have successfully received Caspernicus's answers via pm and they will be added to the results at the end of the poll. Thanks again to Caspernicus for the feedback.
I'm ready to do the same for everybody who might be unable to take the survey. Everybody, if you can't take the survey for any reason, just pm me and we'll do the same for you.

Caspernicus, out of their own will, has also written brief notes in addition to giving the required numeric marks. There is nothing sensitive there, so I will share those right here and right now omitting the questions and the numeric marks they gave to each question. Hopefully that can be the start of a discussion here.

At the beginning of the month I felt 1/2 as default for the Main Challenge was too harsh, but by the end of the month I felt that it was definitely the right call.
I absolutely loved Round 3 pairings depending on the scores from previous rounds, do this every time.
I enjoyed the main challenges well enough.
I absolutely did not enjoy the Subchallenges being relative to other players. The meta subchallenges were incredibly annoying because you knew that only one person was going to get it, thus they were going to have a leg up. In the future, this could cause problems because contestants wouldn't submit anything until the last minute, leading to more hastily put-together cards and a relative decrease in card quality.
The color assignment in Round 3 was fine, I wouldn't say I despised it. I don't think we should do it again, but it was fun as a one-time thing. People should be able to use the whole color pie when creating their cards.
The timing was the best part of this month! It actually felt like the contest was moving along, instead of stalling well into the next month.

EDIT - I've just made a local spreadsheet (local Excel file on my pc, not on the internet) taking all the current votes from the survey, adding Caspernicus's marks and automatically recalculating total and average for each question. I'll keep it updated and I'll post the data once the poll is over.

[Ryder]

Thank you to all who participated in the poll, here are the results:

Q1: Was a 1/2 default score in the Main Challenge an improvement?
1: 3 votes
2: 3 votes
3: 2 votes
4: 4 votes
5: 2 votes

Almost a perfect neutral result. The idea was to reward more creative approaches to the main challenge. Perhaps because of the narrow main challenges this month, I rarely gave more than 1/2 here. Could be just once or twice. Instead I found myself assigning 0.5/2 several times. This change hurt the overall scores quite a bit, so I can understand the resentments. I'd say 2/2 as default may be good enough if we start considering the spirit of the challenge on a regular basis.

Q2: Were the new Versus Round pairings (Top vs Bottom) an improvement?
1: 1 vote
2: 1 vote
3: 5 votes
4: 2 votes
5: 5 votes

This came out as one of the successful experiments. It gave meaning to the first two rounds, where it's relatively easy to advance (place in the top 80% or 75% of your brackets). I hope for it to become the new standard.

Q3: Did you enjoy the relatively hard and narrow Main Challenges this month?
1: 3 votes
2: 1 vote
3: 2 votes
4: 6 votes
5: 2 votes

Another positive outcome. I was skeptical as many times the scores weren't too great and it must have felt bad for the players (it did feel bad for me as a judge), but at the end of the day it helped us all grow. And I believe participating in the MCC is one of the best ways to grow as a card designer. The host can never satisfy everyone, but diversity is great in this case. Host a month yourselves!

Q4: Did you enjoy the "relative to other players" or "meta" Subchallenges?
1: 10 votes
2: 2 votes
3: 1 vote
4: 0 votes
5: 1 vote (it wasn't me!)

A complete failure, and I agree with this. I had wanted to add a new layer to the contest, but it soon became obvious it's wasn't going to work. We'd need blind submissions for it to have any real potential (which could be an idea for a new contest type). Here it rewarded late submissions and it got one player DQ'd. You could say I had laid a trap and many fell for it. It wasn't fun though.

Q5: Did you enjoy color assignments in the Versus Round?
1: 1 vote
2: 5 votes
3: 4 votes
4: 3 votes
5: 1 vote

Mixed bag with only few strong opinions here. Some of you said it was ok as a one-time thing, but wouldn't do that again. It's alright. The door has been opened though, if a future host would be willing to pull off a similar thing. Most of the time, the differentiation between later submissions comes from dependencies on previous cards. This offers a way to break that pattern.

Q6: Was the time format of this month's contest (4d Design, 3d Judging, split weekend) comfortable?
1: 0 votes
2: 2 vote
3: 1 votes
4: 2 votes
5: 9 votes

We made it! January MCC actually ended in January. The split weekend is what I consider the true winning formula
Most of us have busy working days, and having a Saturday or a Sunday (especially as a judge!) was a saving grace.