Article Grading Update for 22-23: PLEASE READ

[Joe]

Esteemed GMs!

As I mentioned on the boards, I’ve been gathering feedback in the last couple days from GMs across all trees on how we can make our content reward system better – thank you to those who shared thoughts, and to those who have posted their ideas on the boards this season and in the past! To that end, we’re rolling out some changes to the way we incentivize and grade content with the following goals:

• Get more NEW content creators – not just the same 40% of the league writing all the articles and recording all the pods

• Reward truly spectacular content appropriately and discourage shitposting that nobody reads / blatant RP farming via copy/paste articles with no analysis, splitting articles arbitrarily into 2 parts, etc. (as an aside, this is why we don’t just increase content payouts uniformly and use boni instead)

• Incentivize good, creative content without being too restrictive on the definition of creativity

• Avoid widening the wage gap between the RP rich teams and RP poor teams

• Prevent RP inflation and keep RP a scarce and valuable resource

• Get to a Pareto optimal level of happiness (read: Nirvana) across all parties!

Balancing all these goals is tough, but here is the set of 5 significant changes that I think get the job done that will go into effect for the 22-23 season:


1) Boosting the First Article Boni: currently, they’re at 1.5X and 2X for a first article that’s “original” – we’ll get to that in a sec. We are going to be bumping these to 1.75X and 2.25X, respectively.

• NOTE: These are MONSTER boni, on par or GREATER than past content frenzies and they’re available to everyone every season – take advantage of them!

2) Doubling the Quality Content Boni: currently, these range from 50-200RP, and mostly sit in the bottom half of that range. We will now make that range 100-400RP, meaning that killer articles stand to gain basically a full article’s worth of bonus and non-first articles with merit should still be able to clear a solid return; at the same time, no one is going to be able to generate 4000RP a season even if they hit the 5 article cap as non-first articles don't get boni.

3) Redefining “original:” we’ve heard that after 25 seasons, coming up with new article ideas can be tough. So, we’re changing “original” to “fresh” – that means as long as an article hasn’t been published in the last 6 months (checking article dates is easier than trying to count seasons), you can recreate it and earn the new 2.25X multiplier. So definitely feel free to peruse the old boards and bring back favorites - almost 2 years of ideas available!

• NOTE: If you are recreating a past article, please note the date of the original at the top of the article (h/t original author) so we can verify the bonus.

4) Flexibility with Boni: We’ve allowed this provision in the past ad hoc, but formalizing it – if you plan to write multiple articles, don’t worry about the order you post them in – you can decide which one is your “first” article at any time in the season before grades are posted.

• NOTE: If you do not want your first article posted to receive the first article bonus, please tag the graders in that article indicating it as such, otherwise we will assume it’s just by the date. Once a grade is posted, you can’t shift the bonus around (makes for a big pain in the butt).

5) New First Pod Bonus: Everyone’s first pod of the year will now be worth 350RP instead of the standard 250RP.

• NOTE: In order to earn this and make it simple for graders, when you post the pod and list the participants, please indicate all those for whom it is their first pod so we don’t miss anybody.

• NOTE #2: To earn the bonus, the pod’s gotta have real structure / agenda / purpose - remember that pods are also eligible for Quality Content Boni. Everyone should be locked in, actively participating and there should be an end-to-end plan for all pods! We have all made aimless, rambling, shooting-the-shit recordings in the past and we know nobody ends up listening or commenting. Not good!

At the end of the day, the things we reward in content grading remain the same: complexity/effort, insight/applicability, creativity, and funniness, in that order. More content isn’t always better, but more good content and better content is something we can all get behind! We don't have any n00b bonuses because we are all old pros now, but if that ever becomes the case obviously we will need to revisit that so crazy boni don't stack.

As always, open to thoughts and comments!

[Jesse]

Boni Jamz

[Jburns]

Is it pronounced boni or boni?

[Joe]

Is it pronounced boni or boni?

The latter

[heimer]

loving the changes

[ashes]

[Joe]

Reminder: these boni are straight YUGE. Use em or forever hold your pee