Writathon Participants list

On this page in the dashboard: https://www.royalroad.com/author-dashboard/writathon

The top participant is Dauntless: Origins - who doesn't appear in the announcement (could be it was all added right after the announcement for all I know)

Also, I hope wordcount beyond the milestone for the challenge won't be encouraged in challenges after this one, as this competitive leaderboard format is a detriment to the authors' quality of writing and a worsening of the outcome for the readers.

Tales of Demons and Dragons - An Original Xianxia GameLit is also gaining word count from its own unnecesarry censorship of profanities by changing letters in the middle of the words to " * " and the website reads the word as two instead of one. It is just a very apparent example of how the wordcount is a broken metric for a competitive environment.

A wordcount milestone is good for a self-imposed challenge, but it's broken when it becomes a limitless competition between authors. I am sad to see so many wasting away, writing while aiming at a word count way beyond the challenge.

I hope future challenges remove the competitive element and keep it a self-imposed challenge first.

I agree with you. I believe authors should get credit for their achievement (high word count in this case) but that it shouldn't be used as a way to rank their work

The purpose of the challenge is to provide a mutual goal for the community. To motivate, and to give a place to share the fun and frustration of writing, to hopefully developed writing habits, and give more content for readers. 

The challenge is first and foremost personal. Authors win the challenge by competing the 55,555 word count by the deadline, and I hope that everyone one does it in time. 

We added a list because readers wanted to find these stories, and authors asked for it as well.

The idea behind the list order isn't for authors to compete for the top spot, but ordering the list by the word count is the best static option. It would be less motivational if your order on the list is due to how people thought about your story, or how well you marketed it while the contest was ongoing. 

However, I will think about other options for the next challenge. 

As for your statement about Tales of Demons and Dragons 
The word count may include words that maybe manually would not be included (I am not sure about this). But the author wrote 74,652 words since October 31st (and provide proof that he did),  I don't think it is in anyone's benefit to really nitpick on whether or not that should be 100 words less. But we will look into how the words are counted for everyone for the next challenge anyway, and will disqualify anyone that cheats on purpose. 

As for Dauntless: Origins - multiple novels had their word count edited to match the honest word count only and exclude the backlog. This was done for any fiction we were informed about, or discovered. We were proactive in asking the ones on top of the list. I manually edited that novel from the blog post list in the last moment. I just updated the automated counter as well for the automated list. That entire automated list might be removed anyway. 

Thank you for your feedback. From challenge to challenge we always had different changes. Hopefully the next challenge will be even better, taking all the feedback from this challenge into account. 
For more discussions, check out the Writathon forum https://www.royalroad.com/forums/8642 

Pretty confused to be honest.  I nearly doubled the word count and you took that away from me because, what reason?  If you mean excluding the 'backlog', I almost entirely re-wrote and scrapped my first 100 chapters so that shouldn't count.

In any event, it's not the end of the world, I didn't know what the support ticket thing was about since I didn't remember requesting one.  Sorry about that

Nevermind!  I was a bit confused, I'll try my best in the next challenge and I'll ensure that there's no confusion in what I wrote

Regardless of how the event was intended to operate, there are competitive people out there who naturally try to game any system they come across. And we have to guard against that behaviour. 

This is a big list and the people in the top 'ranks' are going to get far, far more exposure. So some see this as an opportunity to use a backlog or write a bunch of junk to get up there, whether you intended it as an admin or not. It's not fair, it's not encouraging to others, and it doesn't foster better stories and authors on this platform. 

Whether or not it's a hassle to list stories differently, I think the best solution would be a randomized list, something that refreshes when you look at it so that new people are at the top each time. 

You make good points about this listing incentivizing competition against one another instead of against ourselves, but also remember that the majority don't view it as such. A few bad eggs will always slip in to any open competition, but most everyone on that listing that I've read has very much deserved the recognition and worked exceedingly hard to meet the deadline with good quality work. I'm sure you didn't mean to make it sound like there were a lot of folks using unfair tactics to get on the board, rather that the organizers in seeking a way to efficiently and easily sort the fictions incidentally did it in a way that makes it far more competitive than they perhaps intended.

Cheers to everyone who did make it, I know I was sick for a week and had to crank out three or four chapters in three or four days so I can only imagine what the rest of you were dealing with. And for my own unsolicited two cents, honestly the format that seems to be the most fair and unbiased would simply be listing them alphabetically, no? My story starts with a W, and even I wouldn't protest this because it preserves the 'pass or no' nature of the personal challenge of reaching the wordcount without heavily incentivizing going over it, you can still list the wordcount alongside the title to show off the achievement, and readers can (as they always have) decide which fictions to view based on the draw of the title as it is meant to draw them in.

Congrats again to everyone, it’s been very fun participating thus far!

maybe ordering the works by alphabetical order, and switching between descending and ascending for April and Novemver could be an alternative ?

idk, just a sugestion 🤷

As much as i agree with your first two points @Timothy Baril, a randomised list would not be all that helpful for reader who work their way through these stories :/

Actually wrote more than that but it got messed around with due to miscommunication 

As pointed out above, this is an example of how some authors are viewing this as a contest, not a personal challenge. And it will encourge others to see it this way. 

That the Admin is using the word 'win' is only making it worse. Language matters. Perhaps we should be saying 'qualify for' or 'overcome' instead. 

It's a writing marathon. In running marathons, at the least, I've found that I'm more motivated by evocative words like 'winning' than the similar 'meeting goals' or  'qualifying'. If viewing a marathon as a contest hinders you, you have sympathies, but for others it may help to feel pushed on by the crowd.

It most definitely is :) 

Thank you so much! Same to you too!

Haha, no, sorry about that boss--it was just a joke I had in mind since I've been writing.

Keep the good work and excuse my stupidity! 

Thanks, all. I read the rules after posting (bad order, I know lol), and I see that I won't make this list, since we're past the first deadline, but I'm 100% eligible for the second deadline! I'll probably start posting tonight after I finalize a couple location names. I appreciate the replies. :)

good luck, if you're already at 30K word, then I'm sure you'll reach the second milestone

I made it! Barely squeaked in over 55K, but I did it. Now I have to keep updating for the few followers I picked up. <3

Thanks for the tip ! Congrats on making it as well !

Thanks, I just sent a support ticket. I hope I did it right this time.

Hey Wing, 

If I did do it wrong and am not able to participate, I will accept that. My mom passed away on Nov. 4 and working on the Writathon has been a gift. Whether I make the list or not is not important, What is important to me is the good that has come to me in the process of writing over the last two weeks. Thanks for all you do!

Take care,

Joyce Matula

Aw man, does that mean I can't participate any more?

Nah you can always start! Just follow the link in the post.

No, you're still counted as a participant and have a chance of winning as soon as you reach 55,555 words before the end of the writhathon. This list only works as a sort of 'midway point' to let people know who some of the active participants are, but not being on it does not necessarily disqualify you.

Awesome, thanks!

Actually, I just realised I was seeing the past writathon winners list and can’t find the mid-writathon participant list. I don’t know if this was already a thing the previous years and can’t see why they would delete this post, but you might want to screenshot it just in case. Sorry for the wrong info.