Superstar 2014: Top 16 Revealed!

Congrats, Top 16!

Congratulations to everyone who made it! Glad to see that all eight I voted for still in! :D

Woo! I'm so excited to be here, and so happy for everyone else who made it!

I'm happier than [insert Geico commercial here], and I cannot begin to thank the voters enough to have advanced me. I am humbled, and I hope my encounter reflects well on the confidence the voters have in getting me to here!

Congratulations! I'm excited to see more!

Congrats!

Congratulations Top 16!

Competitors, feel free to respond to comments about your monsters. :)

Competitors, feel free to respond to comments about your monsters. :)

I think you'll find that most of us did already!

Thanks, everyone! :) And congrats to the other 15 people who made it! I hope round 3 will be as good as this one!

Congratulations to all! Best of luck in the next round.

Congratulations everyone!

Congrats Top 16! It's only getting tougher from here so bring your A++ game!

Congratulations!

Congratulations, top 16. I look forward to reading and reviewing your encounters.

16 will enter Round 3.

Only 4 will leave.

So, seriously...bring your awesome, folks. And congratulations.

What Neil said. This round's going to be a bloodbath. And, for a change, not for the PCs (OK, well, maybe them too).

Congratulations Top 16. This round is key. Encounters are the building blocks of every adventure. Its the encounters where we spend hours of real time to determine minutes of game time! Make your locations dynamic. Utilize the terrain, traps, events, and secondary monsters/NPCs to make the Round 2 monster you chose shine!

--For those about to Vrock... we salute you!

Many thanks, everyone! I'm thrilled to have gotten this far in the competition, and I will do my best not to let you down! :-)

And thanks a bunch to our three judges!

Congratulations, everyone!

Is it confirmed that round 4 will only have four moving on? I had assumed it would be 8, since we are doing one less round this year.

Yep. "Voting ends on February 17 and the Top 4 by votes will move on to Round 4: the module pitch!"

Only four move on to the module pitch round, so that makes this year's encounter round relatively brutal (percentage-wise).

Congrats to the Top 16!

Congrats to the top 16

Yes, always 4 in the last round.

Is that quartimated?

I used to agree with everyone who said that you could only use "decimated" to refer to the elimination of precisely 10% of a group. But after just now attempting to invent a similar word for a different percentage, I have completely changed my mind.

Seriously, about your maps...

Ohhh, my Top 4 are still in the running! :D

Congratulations everyone!

Congrats, everyone!

Congratulations to everyone who made it into the Top 16! I was happy to see some of my favorites make it, so it will be a lot of fun to see how the rest of this plays out.

I do want to make a point to say this: this is most definitely a competition and only the best will take home first place, but simply getting this far (heck, to the top 32 even) was a herculean feat of its own. Don't be distressed or let down if you get cut from the top 32, 16 or don't get first place - everyone here deserves to be here for one reason or another. Even after the confetti flies and the champion stands crowned, continue to be awesome at creating exciting new Pathfinder items, monsters, and adventures. Who knows where your creative prowess may take you in life?

Congrats to the top 16!

Extra congrats to local (to me) GM Emmanuel Greene!

Seriously, about your maps...

FYI, we updated that boards post into a Paizo blog post, which allowed us to include my example maps in the thread, instead of having to link to photobucket. Competitors, you should read it!

Edit: Updated my post for clarification.

A rousing huzzah to one and all!

Avatar-1 wrote:

Seriously, about your maps...

FYI, we updated that boards post into a Paizo blog post, which allowed us to include inline maps. Competitors, you should read it!

Let's assume that some of us are not uber programmers and such. Are you saying something about how we post our maps for the round? Do we not still email them in?

No, he's just saying they made the advice post into a blog item, which has the example maps embedded in it (so you don't have to click on links to see them).

The contestants will still email our maps in.

No, he's just saying they made the advice post into a blog item, which has the example maps embedded in it (so you don't have to click on links to see them).

The contestants will still email our maps in.

See, this is why I needed it in 1 syllable words!

Congrats to the top 16!

Extra congrats to local (to me) GM Emmanuel Greene!

Thanks, Mark!

Now I better get cracking on that encounter :-)

Congrats and good luck!

Thanks, everyone!!! I just noticed for some reason my city and state are not showing up next to my name. Hmmm not sure why.

Congrats! (PDX representing!)

It seems odd to me at least that people who made it happen to also be really huge voters. You would think that they would be exempt from voting or their votes would be removed from the contest prior to a result phase.

It seems odd to me at least that people who made it happen to also be really huge voters. You would think that they would be exempt from voting or their votes would be removed from the contest prior to a result phase.

The number of votes any single person cast in the 1st round did not have a large impact on the overall results. There were several hundred thousand votes cast afterall.

For the 2nd round no single person could vote for more than 8 people. So everyone who voted had the same maximum vote count. Additionally I was able to vote for 7 other people other than myself in round 2. I couldn't cast all 8 votes for myself!

I totally get your initial reaction to the voting system. As a Marathon Voter myself that means I voted over 1,000 times in the 1st round of this contest. That looks like a LOT of voting. However, I only saw my item 5 times in the course of those 1,000 votes. So the impact I had on my individual item making the top 32 was extremely small, approximately 1% of the total votes cast for my item. I don't know how many votes were cast for the 2nd round but again I could only vote for my own item once.

It seems odd to me at least that people who made it happen to also be really huge voters. You would think that they would be exempt from voting or their votes would be removed from the contest prior to a result phase.

In addition to what James Casey said, the final decisions in Round One were made by judges. That means that while the top 100 or so were generated by public votes, the finalists were chosen by the judges.

In Round Two, nobody can vote for themselves more than once.

Thanks for clearing that up. It just looked odd that after checking through all the previous 2 round names that most of those who did not make it in had no voting titles or the lowest one if they had one. I have never been a fan of public voting systems though due to possible loopholes or how many people tend to be influenced by judge opinions especially if shared prior to the actual voting phase being completed.

It seems odd to me at least that people who made it happen to also be really huge voters. You would think that they would be exempt from voting or their votes would be removed from the contest prior to a result phase.

Actually, it makes a lot of sense to me. The people who voted a lot are the same people who are really into the game and spend a lot of time doing things like looking at other people's magic item submissions. At least in my opinion, the effect is correlation, not causation.

I voted for probably 200 items this year, and in that time, I managed to see my own item only once. Did I vote for it? Yes. Did that one vote significantly impact the outcome of the contest? Not likely.

Deeply humbled and honored to have advanced. Many thanks to all my supporters and voters, and congratulations to all the other contestants, including those who didn't make it this time around. This was a fantastic crop of monsters across the board, and everyone should be proud of the work they put forward!

Congrats to the top 16. Way to go folks! Good luck on your next round!

Is that quartimated?

I used to agree with everyone who said that you could only use "decimated" to refer to the elimination of precisely 10% of a group. But after just now attempting to invent a similar word for a different percentage, I have completely changed my mind.

You can simply use "quartered" for that. I too like using "decimated" for its specific purpose, as well as "defenestration".

You can simply use "quartered" for that. I too like using "decimated" for its specific purpose, as well as "defenestration".

I truly hope that none of us are defenestrated as a result of this contest. I don't recall that being in the fine print. :)