How winning entries were chosen

MakerWorld
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Hi Bambu Team,

I hope you can address my inquiry regarding topic in hopes that more people can increase their success in winning contests in MW.

First of all, I want to establish that I have nothing against the winning entries. They all have merits and deserve to win.

I also would like to establish that I participated in the Christmas decor contest and didn’t win any prize. My entry is the Minecraft-inspired Christmas House: Minecraft-inspired Christmas House by chiz_m - MakerWorld

I will be speaking most of my discussion points based on my entry but would compare it against the winning entries.

Tips for Creating a Winning Model

  1. Be creative and original! The judges will be looking for models that are unique and eye-catching.

I came up with my idea of creating a Christmas house display expanding on my Minecraft building blocks model. Not only this allows people to come up with their own unique set of Christmas house/village display given my sample as basis and also to show the expandability of my Minecraft-inspired building blocks system. While it may be similar to Lego, I believe my entry/idea is unique in a sense there’s no other entry that allows one to create a custom Christmas scene display.

Two (2) train models were chosen to win. How are these two similar concepts/idea considered unique and won based on this criteria?

  1. Make sure your model is well-designed and easy to print.

I want to clarify what well designed and easy to print mean in judging winning entries. While my entry, is both well-designed and easy to print, it requires a lot of parts to be printed, i.e., individual blocks and parts and then assembled. I provided a detailed step-by-step guide for easy assembly.

Does this mean easy to print means least amount of parts to print and that huge projects like mine will not pass this criteria?

  1. Create something popular. Consider what other people would find useful or interesting.

I have seen this concern posted by others and I have been constantly appealing to the MW team to not have contest entries being featured while the contest is running. It simply doesn’t make a level playing field for all participants.

I was told by MW Team that number of downloads is not a factor to win but clearly, the first prize winner was a featured model and has the second highest number of downloads. I joined one week before the closing of the contest because I had to print a lot of parts for my entry. Obviously, the others have a head start plus some of them were featured in the front page. My entry reached almost 500 downloads at the end of the review period but apparently that is not enough.

While the MW team says number of downloads doesn’t affect winning, it clearly shows it influences decisions in choosing winning entries. I sincerely hope that once and for all, contest entries will not be featured anymore and provide everyone a level playing field.

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2nd place has half the number of downloads as 3rd place. Half the participation winners have less than 1K downloads. 2 have more than 2nd place. I don’t think downloads factors in as much as you think it does.

I do agree that featuring an entry during the contest seems unfair though.

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Yeah while I’m not saying it’s confirmed that number of downloads has influence in the decision but it’s hard to ignore some of the entries with high number of downloads were featured throughout the contest period. In fact some of them are still featured at the moment.

That’s why to me, to remove any sort of doubt that downloads do not influence decision, the algorithm on choosing which models to feature should ensure that they are not currently part of any contest until said contest is complete.

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I 100% agree that models should not be featured if participating in an active competition.

Just as a thought exercise, ordered by importance / weight, here are what metrics I believe should be considered:

  • Makes: because they show that your model was good enough to motivate someone to take their time and money to print it.
  • Downloads: because they show that someone is interested enough to put your file on their computer.
  • Collections: they show intent to possibly print later.
  • Likes: I think are the least important because they’re highly subjective while showing no intention of printing the model.

Other factors of course may be considered in final decision making process.

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This design is very good, I think it can at least earn a gift card of 40 dollars :face_with_peeking_eye:

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Thanks!

Yeah, I feel like the judges didn’t like elaborate designs and it didn’t earn at least a participation award.

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I agree that featuring a model from a competition seems a little unfair. I always look at top models in contests, and then take a look at featured models. Selfishly, I’d rather they feature stuff I’m not going to find when looking through contest entries so that I have a better chance of finding something fun to print. :slight_smile:

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Thanks for your suggestions. We appreciate all the support and interest for MakerWorld’s contests. We would like to start off by saying that it is almost an impossible task to choose 23 winners from nearly 2000 participating uploads for our Christmas Decoration Design Contest. There were simply too many outstanding designs and too few winners. With that being said, we take our users’ voices very seriously, and are here to clarify some of your questions:

-Being in the featured model will certainly boost a model’s download numbers. However, the number of downloads is only one of the criteria considered by our judges when choosing contest winners.

-We choose our featured models based on the quality, complexity and timliness of the designs, whether the model is participating in an ongoing contest is not considered. However, some of our contest themes are closely related to recent or upcoming events, so it is inevitable at times that some of our featured models will also be contending in an ongoing contest.

-Looking at the results for this contest, the number of downloads was not the deciding factor for the judges when choosing the winners. Our 1st prize winner did not have the most downloads, and our 2nd prize winner had less than 50 downloads when the judges selected it as 2nd place.

-We certainly welcome more elaborated models participating in our contests. This is certainly one of the important criteria judges look at, as we see most of our winning models are rather sophisticated and requires an abundance of parts to print, with printing time exceeding 10+hours.

We thank you for your continued support and hope to see you in our future contests. There will be plenty of chances ahead for great makers to compete and shine.

The MakerWorld Team

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Contest winner picks are confusing
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The last item on the Terms and Conditions:
“7. The judges’ decisions are final and at their discretion.”

We agreed to this before submitting an entry, so let’s leave it at that. From my own experience, after gaining some very valuable insights by participating in the contests ( I wish I realized this earlier), winning is no longer the top reason to enter a contest. A win will be a bonus.

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Thank you for the response.

Regarding the download count… It may be true but as I’ve said it would be difficult to ignore when entries continue to get featured.

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I know about this and I signed up for it before I posted my entry.

I’m not asking to reverse the decisions.

The purpose of this post is to clarify what are considered winning entries, i.e., elaborate vs simple to qualify for the “easy to print” criteria. What uniqueness mean in hopes to increase the chances of winning next time, and lastly to express my thoughts on entries continue to get featured.

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Is it possible to have only one design competing in a contest? It’s so annoying to see the same design from a single maker in a lot of minor variations. It feels like spamming the contest. If a maker wants to participate a new design, the previous one needs to be unlisted.

Maybe it’s only me that feels like this, but i strongly do :confused:

I’ll back the original poster with his remark about featuring designs while in contest, feels unfair.

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In my opinion when you have multiple different ideas you should be able to take part with all of them.

You are right if it’s the same thing with just little modifications, but I think it’s hard to enforce and totally subjective to decide when it is something new or the same.
There are even designs in the contest which have nothing to do with the topic. When they are moderating it I think they should start removing designs which are missing the topic.
Best example is the “make my sign” contest. More than 80% of the entrys are off topic.

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There is a clear case of spamming in the kitchen design contest, and there have been tag-along entries that have nothing to do with the themes of the contests trying to capitalize on the higher viewership generated by contests to get downloads.

For the spamming problem, settng a limit, such as a max of 5 entires can solve it.

For the tag-along problem, MakerWorld will need to enforce this rule: " 6. Submitting entries that do not meet the contest theme will result in disqualification, and repeated offenses may disqualify you from future contests." . Perhaps MW can have an employee browse the entries once a day, and hide entries that are considered out of theme and give the uploader 48 hours to appeal. Or have a report function under each entry for users to report potential tag-alongs.

Added: Perhaps MW can modify the above rule to add some text to the effect of “uploading out-of-theme entries will disqualify creator’s valid entries from consideration of any awards”. IIRC, there have been at least one case where a designer uploaded some valid models and then also uploaded some out-of-theme models.

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Looks like you got a feature out of this post, not bad.

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Is that how you get featured? I often wondered. :thinking:

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Well, that was not the intention. Would have been great if it was during the contest period that it got featured.

I could be wrong but I always thought that getting featured depends on the roll of the dice – not some BL employee sifting through posted models and feature them. That’s why I’m appealing to BL to modify the algorithm so that contest entries don’t get feature only after the contest winners are decided.

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I agree that users should have a way to report models that don’t conform to the contest theme/rules.

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I’m always a little disappointed when people do this too - or if an entry is just a previous model from other contests that’s just been changed to fit the theme. But, I figure it dilutes their chance of being seen - their likes/downloads/etc are spread out over all of the profiles on each slightly changed model, so they likely aren’t getting noticed as much as if they’d just modified their original entry. That’s my theory at least.

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I agree, spamming gives them slim to no chance at winning anything so I would say just ignore them and focus on the quality ones

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