Round 3 scores

We had a few late entries this round and since I forgot to set up rules for that scenario beforehand I discussed with judges how to handle it and I've been told standard penalty is one point per day late so that's what I did. I'm sorry there wasn't clear information about this beforehand, I forgot to consider that possibility when making rules. And I also apologize for having a penalty at all when I've been late pretty much every single round. I would not blame you if some of you feel it's not entirely fair, but I felt it was necessary to keep it fair to those that did make sure to keep the deadline.



Thank you all for participating! We've seen a lot of really cool apartment builds and I hope many of you consider uploading them. I'm sorry that my hosting became such a shit show, I did the best I could but when life drowns you in lemons sometimes you gotta focus on just floating

Huge congratulations @Charmful!

Yay, Charmful! You earned it!

And I see I'm in a three-way tie for last place. (Not counting the ones who didn't finish because that would hardly be fair.) That's so much better than I expected! I figured I'd be all alone back there.

It's funny that this is the one that seems put together "in a hurry," since it was the first set of apartments I made for Nova Colonia, and I spent more than a month getting it contest-ready. I think the hurried impression actually comes from taking too long about it, forgetting (and being too burned-out to look) what I'd already done in a different apartment and so on. No complaints whatever about the score, though.

Congrats to the winner(s). Well deserved.
I'm afraid I don't understand the inconsistent scoring at all. Coming from joandsarah77's method which involves taking half a point of for each thing wrong, losing a whole 5 points for forgetting I had a cc plant (from a previous incarnation of the building) seems extreme. Whatever. I'm having a holiday from Sims completely for a while.

Congratulations @Charmful! A very well deserved win!

Congratulations Charmful, you deserved the first place! As for myself, I'm happy I got a near perfect score on my last entry (79.5/80, minus 1 point from being late, pretty darn awesome!). I was really happy with the end result and I'm glad the judges loved it. That score surely deserved the wait! Speaking of which, I hope everything's back on track for you, gummi. The Vortex Tower will hopefully be uploaded soon.

Since we're now at the final feedback stages of the contest, I will try to write my feedback tomorrow. I'm too tired to write what I hope will be a long and constructive post. Until then, congratulations to every contestant, I learned a lot looking at your builds. Thank you gummilutt for hosting and thank you judges for judging.

Oh well done Charmful - very well deserved. Hoorah!

Also, some great builds here - I think everyone did really well.

Thank you everyone, for the participation and challenge, and the encouragement - there were so many great lots to look at in this contest! Thank you judges for your helpful words and time to look through all the entries, and thank you very much Gummi for hosting despite all the curve balls of life being thrown at you. I have been in a number of building contests on MTS and this is the first time I have won, so I'm very glad and grateful and now relieved, haha, because I'm feeling the burn out like I suspect a lot of the rest of you are. I DO plan to upload all my lots and now that the contest is over I do want to share the videos of my lot walk-throughs I have been making since the beginning of the contest, just so you can see every nook that may have been missed because of photo limits

Townhouses
Studio Apartments
Desert Complex
Beach High Rise

Thanks to gummilutt for hosting the contest--I know it couldn't have been easy at times, but we got some amazing builds and inspiration out of it! Thanks to the judges, too; that last round must have been really tough to judge--lots of wow moments everywhere! I honestly don't know if I could pick a favorite; each time I think I have one, I click on another entry and go 'oh, wow, this is amazing!'

Congratulations to Charmful for winning the whole thing; you did some great work!

Congratulations to stitching, too, for winning the last round with a perfect score no less!

And finally, congrats to all the contestants! (We finally made it to the end! Hooray! ) But seriously, I really hope that everyone considers uploading their entries--there are some truly great and amazing builds and I learned a lot from everyone about designing, building, and just general contest tips. So thanks and pat yourself on the back cuz you deserve it!

Yas! I LOVE the walkthroughs! Lol, I do the same thing. I love to get a sense of how it feels to really live there.

I think my favorite of yours is your round two. The view from the bedrooms is sooo nice! :lovestruc

I'm afraid you'll have to blame that one on me since the rules state CC use = 0 in requirement. It's not the judges choice it was the directive they were given from me. In No CC contests I believe it's standard to have a big penalty for CC to discourage people from using CC anyway, taking the penalty and making up for it with better scores in the rest thanks to access to things the others don't have. I understand it feels harsh but blame me not the judges

I haven't commented much on the builds outside of host bonuses but I agree there's been some truly spectacular builds and a lot of good builds all around. It's always interesting to see what direction people go with the same instructions. I hope you guys had fun aside from the many delays.

I also want to thank our three judges for all the hard work you guys put in. Judging is not easy and you had more work than usual with it being apartments, so well done for making it all the way through. Same goes for all the contestants, building this many apartments is no small feat and an impressive number of you made it through all four rounds. Should all be proud of yourselves

I was like, what? ...I missed the whole thing. I have those Cyprus trees in my main game too - which is what I've been playing in lately - so I didn't even notice they were CC. Oops!

Congrats EVERYONE on making it all the way through this contest. Building - and decorating - apartments is not easy! It's like doing 6 houses at once I must say, I was quite happy to judge this one, and not have to contest in it Great job all ya'll!

...and especially to Charmful our winner

First of all, thank you @gummilutt for coming up with the idea for the contest and for deciding to host it. I'm sure it was a very difficult job, especially with all the craziness that hit you these last couple of months. @CatherineTCJD, @Goldenbtrfly and @Kukamuukaanmuka, thank you for judging this contest, I'm sure everyone improved as a builder because of your feedback.

My performance
I'm going to start this post by reviewing my own performance. I must say, I'm somewhat surprised to see that Kalamath Townhouses (aka Round 1) was my second-highest score and Cheap City Lofts (aka Round 2) was my worst-scored entry. Personally, I would have thought they would score in this order (from lowest to highest): Round 1 - Round 3 - Round 2 - Round 4. At least, that's how I rank them according to my satisfaction with them. For me, Round 2 allowed me to experiment with apartments like I never had before. I even discovered some kind of base price per square (which I have since forgot, I will have to test again some day), which helped me figuring out the dimensions for my Round 2 entry. That round also "forced" me to test what works and what doesn't off-grid, or at an angle, what improves apartment playability and what causes problems with routing. That's why I like to refer to Round 2 as the Round Of Enlightenment. Without Round 2, I wouldn't've been able to build and decorate the way I did in the next two rounds. Anyway, i guess what I'm trying to say is that I really liked the end result of Cheap City Lofts - even with such a lackluster name - and I was expecting it to score higher. Round 3 was built in the last 10 hours before the deadline (and I messed up with GridAdjuster halfway), so I didn't have time to fine tune it. But like I said in the original post, I stayed away from what I knew would cause playability problems - which I wouldn't know that well if it weren't for the previous round! Finally, Round 4 was by far my favourite, even though I couldn't go with my original Art Déco skyscraper. I am very glad I got a 79.5/80 in judging before the -1 penalty. Which brings me to...

Scores
Ah, scores. I don't want to hate on any judge or in any way, shape or form disrespect them, or any other contestant when I use one of their entries as examples, but I must say I feel like scores were a bit biased or had double standards. Like HugeLunatic said some time ago, judges seem to favour specific styles over others. Yes, I fully understand that we're all different and I can't expect everyone to like the same styles as I do or play the way I do, but I feel like judges should try to be more neutral on this aspect, especially given that this could make or break the contest. Things that specifically come to mind when I say this:
- My Round 2 entry (sorry to bring that up again), specifically regarding the Creativity and Deco scores. I scored 13.5/15 in Creativity for no apparent reason (at least, nothing I can understand by reading the judges' comments). Charmful, please forgive me (congrats on the win, 100% deserved!), but I will use your lot as comparison. Why did my apartments get 13.5 in Creativity while Charmful's got a full 15 points? I honestly can't understand why the difference. Two similarly styled lots, with similar floorplans even. I'm sure the judges had their reasons, but I would at least like to know them. As for Deco, again, I don't understand why I got 13. Judge 2 even said "Your lot certainly does nail the industrial vibe", so why did I get 2 points less? If it was because of the cramping of things, wouldn't that be a double penalty, as I was already being docked, rightfully, in playability? My final point with this goes with what Lunie said. The whole idea with this lot was tiny, cramped units, like university students have (in fact, this lot drew inspiration from my sister's own apartment during her university years), but then I get a comment from Judge 1 saying they would prefer if I only made one or two units like that, which completely defeats the purpose of the lot. I understand your style would favour more open spaces (like Charmful's apartments), but each and every unit in this lot is definitely playable despite pretty much using every single tile in one way or the other.
- Peni's lots, namely the last round entry. 3.5 from Judge 3 in Deco because, from what I understood, "our color/style may never match up". That hardly seems fair. And if Peni's "pops of color and quirky decorating are signature", why did she only get 4 in Creativity? In fact, even Judges 1 & 2 gave her more points in Creativity, despite not really commenting on the out-of-the-box style of Peni's builds (Judge 1 even said this was done in a hurry, yet gave her 0.5 points more than Judge 3). I admit I'm not exactly a fan of her eclectic style, but I wouldn't dock her 30% of one of her categories based solely on that.
- Judge 3's comments about bathrooms. I'm referring specifically to the comments on my Round 1 entry, but I know those comments "plagued" other builds of that round, and possibly later rounds as well. What exactly constitutes a "large" bathroom? While I do agree that no bathroom should be able to accomodate a party, I don't think @yavannatw 's bathrooms were really that large. 3x3 and 4x2 are normal sizes for bathrooms, IMO, which are exactly the sizes I used in my build for that round as well. The minimal size for a full bath is 2x2 using the communal shower, 3x2 using a normal shower, so I can't really see why 3x3 and 4x2 are considered "large". And I also got another comment saying that it was weird having showers in the downstairs bathroom, even though there were no bedrooms in that floor. It may be a cultural thing, but for me, a Portuguese guy, that comment doesn't really make sense. My house has 2 above ground levels and a basement and every bedroom is on the upper floor, yet all 3 levels have a full bath (in fact, the most used shower is the one on the ground floor). Pretty much every house I've been to has showers in almost every bathroom, even if there are no bedrooms nearby. That's why, for me, having showers downstairs is a totally normal thing to do. In fact, I do that in every single house I build. I don't know how it is outside of Portugal, or Europe, though.

Also, I noticed some small details in judging which I think are wrong, and again, could make or break the contest, namely Magnolia's Round 4 entry. Don't get me wrong, I loved Magnolia's lot. I will download it if is uploaded. And I too have Perfect Plants in my game. But this was supposed to be a near-CC free lot, and CC includes mods. However, having Perfect Plants doesn't change the fact that the lot REQUIRES a mod to work properly. So why does the lot get comments from the judges saying "there’s no playability hit that I can see, because I have that modded out of my game"? And only a 1.5 point deduction in playability for it (Requirement scores were 5/5, though I guess those points go directly to whether or not the lot has CC)? I would argue that is NOT a CC-free build, so I would expect a harsher penalty either in playability or in requirement. (Great job anyway, Magnolia, lovely lot! I'm just trying to give a neutral perspective.).

I say it again. I don't want to diss the judges at all, I'm just trying to provide some helpful insight - like you've done for us during these months!

The Host
Gummi, I know everything happened to you during the course of the contest, so you weren't able to really keep up. That's ok, real life comes first, just like it came for me during Round 2 and my stay at the hospital. What I would like say, though, is that you could have provided the judges with some more objective guidelines - for example, to avoid that whole Perfect Plants situation I mentioned earlier, and with the whole late entries situation (which you even acknowledged). That would avoid certain inconsistencies in scoring between judges.
Also, I think it would be best if you had kept Judge 1, 2 and 3 in the same order throughout the contest. It makes feedback like what I wrote in the Scores section somewhat confusing if Judge 1 in one round is now Judge 3, for example.

Format
I really enjoyed the quasi CC-free format of the contest. Even though I cried inside everytime I had to use a Maxis rug or curtain, it was a nice break from CC-heavy contests like Wanderlust and Strangetown Makeover. As hideous as some items are, building CC-free really makes you look for new and innovative ways to use what you have. And now I discovered some techniques which I can use when I build regularly, like using the H&M curtain as a room divider. I now understand how @Zarathustra feels everytime he tries to build something never attempted before using only Maxis items.
That being said, thank god for CC.

Final thoughts
Great idea. Amazing entries. Debatable scorings. Lots of fun. That's how I would summarise this contest. I will now take a break from contests, it's been 3 in a row, non-stop since what, January this year? I'm tired. I'll just enjoy playing and building in The Sims as I usually did, or just take a break altogether. Yu-Gi-Oh has sucked me back in this week, it's been nice reliving all those childhood memories watching Yugi pull that exact card he needed, that one card so situational that it could never be used anywhere else, and go for the win.

Man, this was a long post and it took me ages to write this. What's worse is that I'm 100% positive I will have missed something I wanted to address. Oh well. If I remember anything else, I'll make an addendum or something like that.
EDIT: Yup, it's been 5 minutes since I posted this and I already remembered something. I added it to the host section.

See, here's the thing about judging: articulating the difference between two apparently similar entries is so hard, that even people who do it professionally have a hard time with it. Most of the professional rejections I've ever gotten have boiled down to "You write well but this is not right for us." Even though I know that, in some ways, it's a lot better than something else that was right for them. It's a rare editor who can put her finger on a place in the manuscript and say: "Here. This isn't right yet." And as for saying definitively what isn't right and how it could be fixed so that it was right - editors who do that, suck, because they're intruding on the province of the author. The editor gets final say on what's right for their imprint; the author has final say on what's right for the work. Do you see the difference?

The way I interpret my scores - and the reason I don't expect ever to win a contest unless everyone else drops out - is that the judges could detect that I wasn't building for the contest, but for my game. It's not that I didn't try; but that when push came to shove, I always forgot the contest in the process of building and decorating and kept doing things because they were fun, or right for Nova Colonia, or hit my funny bone. I know nobody but me likes the belted exteriors. I know that demand for spotlight in bedrooms and two TVs in one room will be small. But in the end, I always went with what I wanted to do. I didn't show off any particular expertise with building styles or cheats or decorating, I didn't create any startling innovations, I didn't look at the criteria from an unexpected angle and produce a surprising lot that nevertheless fit perfectly. I didn't do the things that win contests.

And the judges didn't quite know how to express their recognition of that, so they went with "in a hurry" or whatever because they had to say something, and they couldn't say: "Well, it just isn't right enough."

I'm not sure, but I'm assuming that inaccessible plants were largely overlooked throughout the rounds because a lot of the problem is kind of a weird bug/quirk of the game, and so most people have long ago fixed it with mods. So either they've forgotten what's accessible and what's not, or they just missed them or didn't consider it a concern. For instance all plants with exception of the low flowerbed flowers are inaccessible when behind one of the short edging fences. Which doesn't make any logical sense. And also sims need clear access to stand in front of the plants to trim them, they can't reach bushes in a back corner or when blocked by stuff in the way. Which does make some sense, but it doesn't really allow for normal looking gardens with plants closer together or in front of each other. You know like we have in reality.

So for example, your last entry also has some inaccessible bushes and actually it would require the same mod to trim them. And no judgement! It's easy to miss/forget! But yeah, I think I may have only got points off because I knew they needed the mod and so I mentioned it. Or maybe it was just the sheer volume of plants in mine, lol. I definitely went a little bananas with the foliage..

And I just want to be clear to the judges that I'm not complaining or anything. I'm super super happy with my scores, and ultimately I just wanted to build some cool new apartments for my neighborhood. But I did want to mention that quite a few entries got a pass for it and that it wasn't just me, or like the judges playing favorites or being unfair or anything like that. It was just generally a non-issue throughout the contest.

congratulations Charmful!!!
your round 1 townhouses got me shookt from the very beginning anyways lmao

ahh...mmm I learned a lot in this contest and it was fun knowing what makes an apartment work better! Ive lived in fancy apartments to public housing for a good chunk in my life so it feels really personal.

i lived above a convenience store beside a mosque, and then years later we moved to a fancy condominium outside the city with so many trees, birds, and monkeys outside my window! There was an ultra modern one in the city too where I just take a 5 min walk to work. Then, we moved to public housing with a wet market. Our unit always smelled like bread cos of the bakery directly below us. Finally we moved to a modern townhouse (r1) in the mountains. The view from the living room was just trees and the silloutte of the mountain range beyond.

So i guess thats why i keep putting so many big windows hahahha it was really fun to recall all those memories cos of this contest! Thanks gummi for the experience :3 im just a bit sad that i wasnt able to finish qA q but i really had fun and it was nice to see what everyone else comes up with

for the judging ....tbh i didnt really care as much cos i already won before..... /sweats nervously ummm im sorry qAq the points are weird but I live for the comments!!! so if the judge said something nice im ok

Congrats, Charmful on your win!!!

Yes, I know I had 2 hedges which are unreachable without mods. While I was building my lot, I thought whether to remove them or not, but I decided to take the risk and leave them as I didn't like how it looked without them. Either way, I don't think that would warrant a large deduction because 2 hedges are just a mild annoyance, nothing major to the playability of the lot. But now that you put it this way, I guess it makes sense to not deduct for landscaping. In that case, I feel that in future CC-free contests what is/isn't deductable should be mentioned early on.

Congratulations Charmful - I really liked all of your builds, but I think my favorite was your desert complex.

Gummilutt and judges, thank you very much for taking the time to make this contest work. I liked the different requirements for the rounds, and the challenge of not using most cc was nice (but thank you for allowing stairs, doors, and windows). The feedback from the judges was thoughtful and helpful for seeing spots I could make improvements.

Finally, I really loved seeing what everyone else created. There were so many different approaches to decorating the many apartment units that I think I'll keep coming back to this thread for inspiration. Aside from many great floor plans, I loved seeing the use of brick or stone in several people's interiors. Throughout the contest, I kept seeing combinations of textures people were using and thinking "I need to try that in my next 'hood!"

Congratulations Charmful, from me too

To everyone as judge I want to say something. I NEVER had a "favourite" , I NATURALLY had a style to judge. How in earth can I know how all the contestantants like to play their game???
And I find it unfair to blaime that judges have their favourites and favourite style to play the game.

HOW we can judge if not from our own play style?? Other option is to get max scores to all.

Loved the contest and so much great apartments!!!! <3<3<3

EDIT: and to whoever is who dissagreed, I am sorry, I still do not change anything, I judged based what I liked. Nothing more.

First of all, congrats, Charmful!

Secondly, I've come to accept that there is sometimes a huge difference between what judges may like and what downloaders may like. Going by judge scores only when looking at your work is misleading. I've seen lower-ranked entries uploaded and get hundreds and hundreds of downloads, while higher-ranked entries not get as many. Go figure. All the entries here were great, and I have no doubt that most if not all of them would be well-enjoyed by many downloaders. Judging is really subjective, and yes, it's very much like that in real life. If people are judging strawberry jam, one judge may think an entry does not have enough sweetness while another judge thinks the sweetness is just about right.

Thirdly, I agree with Peni Griffith. I have also accepted that there is a snowball's chance I could win a contest. Not trying to garner compliments at all, but I also design entries that I want for MY game ... to a fault. If the entry wants me to design a movie theater, I already have two I made that I use constantly in my game, and would admittedly hit a roadblock terribly quickly.

In my mind, any building I make plays a role in that hood, much like an actor plays a role, and it can be a challenge to go against type. I applaud any of you who went against your personal type of building. Actually, I applaud anyone who enters a contest in the first place. I found it was not as easy as I thought!

I apologize my last comments, not deleting it anyhow.
once in a while you say things before thinking that happened to me there, sort of, as I do stand what I said.
I simply have to learn to SHUT UP!

@gazania , so lovely post! <3

Closing