Quote Originally Posted by Kc View Post
As far as I know I think I was the only one who voted on our team. I felt one vote per production was fitting. In fact I didn't even nominate us for anything. I let whoever thought we deserved something do that. I still voted for us in the categories I think we excel in, which is biased considering I am the lead of this project but honest because I did listen to the other nominees.

Perhaps posting the result here just opened it up for criticism because everyone here, is here because they love our show. At the same time they're also big audio-drama fans, so reactions shouldn't be just passed off either. These reactions of the fans aren't specifically shared by the WA production team, but I agree there could be improvements for next time.

1. We have a crew of about 8 and about 88 actors... Vote stacking is easy, but also almost impossible NOT to. If any other audio drama production is voting, they WILL vote for themselves. Perhaps limiting votes per production would circumvent that. It's the only way to truly balance it out. OR, just not count the votes that are self-categories. If you open it up to public voting, then it becomes a spam contest.

2. Let the production nominated choose 15 to 30 second samples that best fit the entry being judged for that category. It's near impossible to know who an actor is in a production sometimes, so to have a segment with their best performance makes sense. Our production is currently about 43 hours long. Can anyone easily find segments? No. That goes for every other category as well. Nominated for music, have a segment that shows your best use of music. Sure, this would require some work from the productions, but is very essential. If they don't provide the segments for the nominees, then they don't qualify. How else would people properly vote for who deserves it? Comparing this competition to SAG awards isn't fair because you have faces to match, and those entries are only 2 hours long.

The goal of having this competition should be to expose people to the best of the best, and would be a great way to share listeners.
Thanks for the feedback KC! You have no idea how valuable it is!

While it thankfully didn't happen this past year, Gwen and the rest of the AVA team have already been discussing what to do if vote stacking does happen. While it's definitely a potential problem we need to be on top of, we don't feel like the possibility of it happening should be a deterrent for prospective voters. We should hopefully have a final policy verdict on it by this summer.

As far as public voting goes, the very reasons you noted (spam and vote stacking) are part of the reason we weren't allowing fans to vote. Though due to the overwhelming fan response, we're looking into some sort of "fans choice" award that we might be able to incorporate into the show next year, should it prove to be little extra work for the crew.

Finally, the suggestion of samples is a good one. But we purposely decided against it due to the fact that this is how the Parsecs handle things, and prior feedback we received indicated that productions hate having to put in the extra time in to produce said clips.

That said, we do have an alternative method of exposure in the works, which you'll hopefully be seeing some of later this year.