Feedback Survey

Our feedback survey is now live (sorry for the delay!!) and will be accepting responses through August 20th. We really appreciate all of your thoughts and comments on this activity, and hope to continue improving on our current version in the years to come!

For every 10 survey submissions we receive, we will be raffling off a Golden Ticket among participants! In order to be eligible for this raffle, please ensure you fill your username in on the form.

Submitted my survey!

wah I typed a lot this time.

Thanks! Really great event this year :)

Tamako
In a previous feedback survey, we had asked when folks would prefer the Drawntlet to be held. July was pretty high up in the order, and happens to be a good fit for how our event schedule shakes out. We tend to have a lot going on in the fall — between the seasonal shop, fall event, and usually some kind of Halloween activity or something, it felt too busy to keep this activity there.

Additionally, we wanted to kind of pull away from the official Inktober, even though that’s essentially what the Drawntlet began as. I can’t remember the finer details now, but there was some kind of drama surrounding it a couple years ago, iirc, and that was the original catalyst for us trying to make this activity more specific to our community.

In total, we had 54 responses to the feedback survey.

Difficult Prompts

• There were several comments that some of the prompts felt too difficult or abstract this year. We will aim to have simpler/less abstract-themed prompts for next time. The prompt ideas submitted by those who filled out the feedback survey will really help, in that regard!

More Prompts/Prompt Bank Suggestions

• There were some general requests for more alternative prompts or a more general prompt bank spanning the entire month. This should be easy enough to incorporate.
• There was also the suggestion for an overarching prompt bank for each week rather than having a daily prompt and a bank of alternatives. While an interesting idea, we feel as though this might take away from the ‘spirit’ of the activity as an inktober-style challenge, as seeing how different people work with a specific prompt is a big part of that. It also might make things more difficult for people who are more indecisive and who prefer the structure of a daily prompt (which has been a comment in previous years).
• Perhaps we could provide two at-a-glance roadmaps next year? One that includes the daily prompts (the ‘official’ version) and one that simply lists the prompt bank for each week, for those who prefer that flexibility?

Weekly Challenges

• In general, responses indicated that folks liked having the weekly challenges!
• However, there was difficulty with the pairing of the week’s prompts and the weekly challenges (ie, some words were hard to apply to the weekly challenges). This is something we will try to pay closer attention to, going forward.
• There were suggestions for an overall weekly challenge bank instead of a specific/choice of challenge per week. We will give this some discussion/thought!
• Folks indicated they’d like to see the weekly challenges on the prompt overview image. This is doable, for sure!

Submission Process

• The two-step forum permalink -> submission form process was still found by many players to be clunky. This was also a notable comment last year, and is something that we are still trying to find a good solution to. As mentioned previously, we want to keep this a forum-based activity and keep the amount of work glitch needs to do to support it at a minimum.
  • There is always the option of doing away with the submission form and grading everything manually, but this would make marking an even more labor-intensive process for the Coordinators and would be more prone to errors.
  • Perhaps it would be more doable if we had daily threads instead of weekly threads? Picking through the weekly threads by hand is a difficult task when some prompts are posted out of order, but having a thread for each day would still require a bit of extra footwork on the player side to ensure they’re posting in the correct thread.
  • We will give this some discussion, though - hopefully we can figure out some way to streamline the process!
• A number of people also wanted to be able to post their work before the calendar day. This is something we will discuss!

Prize Comments

• Several comments indicated that the highest tier prizes felt too expensive and the mid-tier prizes felt unbalanced. We will certainly look at the prize structure for next year and see where we can make adjustments.
• Players found 41 points to be awkward. Crow also found it really hard to plan around. Creating the prize structure, in general, for this event was fairly difficult, and something that I’m not surprised could use some adjustments. We will try to figure out how we can improve the point distribution for next year!
• There were some comments asking for clarifications as to what’s included in each tier. This should be easy enough to clarify on our end!

July & Overlap with Art Fight

• The overlap with Art Fight caused some stress for participants. This is understandable, but also something that simply wasn’t on our radar at all when planning the Drawntlet. July was chosen based on previous Drawntlet feedback indicating that the summer months were preferred by the majority of participants (July, June, then August - in order of preference), and also based on where we could fit it into our existing event schedule.
• We could consider moving Drawntlet to take place during August, instead - though that would also run up against the back-to-school season for some folks, and may not end up actually being much more convenient, overall. It would also require adjusting our summer event timing, which isn’t really that big of a deal on its own.
• June has too many other things going on, so is off the table as far as a big event like the Drawntlet is concerned.

Other Suggestions

• The suggestion to open submissions to other art media types aside from writing and drawing. Sounds reasonable enough; we’ll make this adjustment for next year. Our main concern with allowing generally any type of artwork is the potential for very low-effort submissions in some types of media, but this is something we could address if it became a problem.
• Folks indicated that they’d like to discuss/comment on Drawntlet submissions, and requested a discord/chatter thread for such. While we always invite event chatter in event announcement threads, we could make a channel in discord for the Drawntlet, too!
• Some players felt as though the weekly spotlight prize was too large. We can make some adjustments to this.
• There was interest in a smaller incremental prize for completing each week as a little something to look forward to throughout the event, since points can’t actually be redeemed until the end of the month. This seems like a good idea to us, and is something we will work on implementing for next year.

As always, we appreciate you taking the time to provide feedback on our events! There are always adjustments that can be made, and we hope that you continue to feel as though we are improving as we go along. I apologize for the feedback results taking so long to get together for this one - there must have been something in the water this past autumn, because a few things just seemed to get away from us. We’ll try to be more timely with these things going forward!

5 winners were chosen via random number generator, are are as follows:
Nephele Featherfoot Lala Pink Chocolate Meesh

Each of you will receive a Golden Ticket, which will be distributed shortly!

Oh thanks!

Additional comments since I got pinged here:

Since I was one of the people who liked the submission page idea but also thought the submission process could be improved upon, I just want to say for the record I still like the current process over trying to find a new thread for every day.
Question: could someone write a script for a browser extension to grab the links as they’re being submitted and help autofill on the submission form or something along those lines?
The onerousness of the c/p thirty-one links thing is mostly trying to keep them straight as you personally do them by hand and making sure you don’t duplicate links. This would basically be just smashing together a very specifically tailored pastebin app (or…like even a list of links since I think we get sent to the permalink everytime we post) + an autofiller.

Also going to say July was a pretty good time to me and none of the listed alternatives seem an improvement.