this is specifically referencing the PC-98 visual novel collab

i want to preface by saying that i am not making a comment on the quality of this submission, i think its gold was well deserved and the track(s) are really good. but i would be lying if i didn't say that it was a little disheartening when this entry was posted because it felt obvious that it would win the format based on scope alone. a multi-song collaboration is just something no single botbr could ever compete with due to the sheer effort necessary. it also doesn't make sense from a boons/xp perspective to try as a solo botbr - its better to make six tracks for six formats.

does it make sense for "album collabs" to have their own category? or even go into wild chip?

EDIT: my objection has less to do with disappointment in results, and more to do with feeling like i'm voting for a different category of art when i judge an album vs. when i judge a song entry, even a song entry that is very long or has multiple movements. i did not mean to come across as bitter about the result so much as to suggest that maybe mega/album collabs belong in their own format. i framed my initial post poorly and i apologize

you underestimate what a single botbr can do: https://battleofthebits.com/arena/Entry/Opus+VI_+Rain/28168/

but i still agree with you a little.
if a lot of people work together on one single track ("normal length track", whatever that means) then thats cool.
if a single person creates a massive song with several movements, then thats amazing too.

but im also unsure how to feel about one submission which consists of several sub-songs made simultaneously by several people. even if there is a shared theme, i think im leaning towards submitting the different parts one by one.

And also, this was another mega collab in the same fashion and won a bronze:

https://battleofthebits.com/arena/Entry/BotB+Sgen+Staff+Roll/70137/

A big collab won't always guarantee a gold. Depends on many factors.

Yet, I also agree your point makes sense.

its like when people started doing vocals in ohbs, or animation in visualls. pretty soon more people will do largescale collabs and it'll lose its effect . but of course i say this with this knowledge that, it does take a bit more effort to get that many people together, making it take longer for big collabs to lose its novelty too.

It's probably good to talk about. Having joined in three of said types of larger "album" entries, I'll grant that they're really hard to vote on for sure (you might prefer to score one track high and another not so much, and end up just giving the whole entry an average, etc) but I don't think this challenge alone means they need to be in their own category, split up, or stuck in a different format. These also do take a significant amount of effort, they're not somehow easier than writing multiple separate entries and voters may choose to account what they perceive as collected effort on something.

Also I don't mean this in a dismissive or defensive way, but I think doing something strictly because it's something that might score well is the wrong reason to approach a project. I'm happy that the projects I've participated on have all been "hey this would be fun if" type of project rather than a "hey we can artificially jump up our numbers if" type.

edit: I think what I'm saying is the orchestration of a combined effort is itself part of what is being submitted for listener consideration and voting on these types of entries. If all the participants simply submit different entries on their own but don't require any real coordination, it has a slightly different effect. Haberchuck and I have also done a collab of this nature, see Fleeting Embers / Night Shift. I think these are valid and cool too, simply different in nature and objective. Then there are cases like Haikus Vol. 1 where roz and I decided to do something that felt more or less like a combined EP between the two of us, and we couldn't have submitted all the tracks separately even if we'd wanted to in that case.

Also -- I think this is a bigger point -- if you feel disheartened when seeing other entries in regard to competition placement (we've all been there, I think) it may be worth doing some introspection on where that comes from

all for big collabs personally :P

i def don't mean to imply that doing a big album collab is an attempt to game the system, or that it doesn't still take a ton of effort. i just think that on the whole a collab album is hard to judge against a single track made by a single botbr, or even single tracks made as a collab. i think collabs are really cool, and in a way you could always say that a collab has an "advantage" over a botbr because of factors like effort and time. but i guess what i'm getting at is that an album in this style feels like a different thing than a song - i am judging it on different merits than i would a single track, because i can't judge the individual tracks of the album. i dont feel that way about judging a symphony/multi-movment song, which is kinda arbitrary i know

and while i know that making an album collab does not *guarantee* a gold, i think it is fair to say that all things being equal an album is going to perform well in voting against individual tracks.

Sure, like I said, voting on these is a bit different. However, it's worth looking at the compo as a whole rather than the format - all things considered, there were 23 entries in WC that placed higher than this one, 19 of which were solo efforts representing something like 16 or 17 different formats. Pretty cool stuff all around if you ask me, and by no means guaranteeing top compo placement.

you do have to decide as a voter how you want to interact with a multi-song entry - as kilowatt suggested, averaging out how you felt about everything is an easy option; some songs tick score up and some songs bump score down. everybody's scoring rubrics are different from one another already, especially for majors, so i don't really see that as a problem. it's up to you, basically 😅 it's tricky to vote on an entry like that, so you just have to choose whatever path makes the most sense to you.

i personally don't think there's really much to be done about this either.. to change the rules in some way here would be stifling in creativity imo. people submit multi-song entries often even solo - 02FD for example has done several, Dunehawk too. non-solo, the big collab projects are tremendous undertakings for their hosts and result in something really special. the end result in all cases is a large, effortful, collected piece of art, and in the case of collabs, also one that brought people together for its creation. how is that not the most beautiful thing about this? the numbers are among the least important things on the site in comparison - who cares how they do or don't score? that art was made, that creativity was explored to hearts' content, is so much more important to me than "hmm not sure how to vote on this". (not to say voting isn't important btw, it's what makes the system work at all! and perhaps most importantly it means you are engaging with the works of others.)

in the parlance of our times: "let them cook"

this year there was a correlation between really long entries and my not being able to finish voting on the whole compo
you have to consider as an entrant whether it is worth someones attention for the full length, especially for the time poor
more often than not my voter score can reflect whether something has outstayed it welcome

then again, there were also over 100 entries that got a less than 20 so theres some welcome being outstayed in the quality direction too

big album collabs and longer entries definitely have a place. it IS beautiful to make art, and art is better for it when we make it together. that's why this place is so cool.

i only mean that within the limitations we are already setting for ourselves through formats, voting, competition, even file size it feels... out of place, i suppose, to post a large number of entries as a single aggregate work when those entries are capable of standing on their own (which is maybe the difference between this vs. a symphony/long piece).

you might be right that there's nothing that could be done about this that wouldn't limit creativity in some way. though i would honestly be excited by a format or compo that specifically catered to mega-collabs and/or album style entries.

i didn't mean to come across like i was a sore loser, my placement in the competition matters comparatively little to me. what i like about BOTB is that it helps motivate me to finish songs at all, and regardless of where i finish my goal is always to just be proud of my own art.

"Mega-comp" format could be a cool concept. As the arranger for two such projects, I'd certainly be behind it.

Beyond that, I offer two simple points:

*People have license to vote it down if it doesn't match their overall expectations or collectively the sum of its parts doesn't match a couple high points throughout the track. That they don't choose to act upon this license is their choice ultimately, but it was outlined in the description based of previous feedback by kleeder on past mega-comps.

*I aimed to make it clear it the thread introducing the piece: the submission was meant as a challenge for me and an open invitation to all BotBrs to participate. I got to collaborate with fortuna, katsye, lumby, and alexa for the first time, which likely would not have happened without my trying it.

Honestly, I just got bored doing solo work. Big projects feel more grand and BotB's archivist policies make the outcome even more appealing because something like this can stick around on the site for a long time.

I think it's quite valid to discuss how projects like this fit on BotB in the future, but I think the sentiment that it's some kind of misfortune or letdown it won when it was a large-scale community undertaking in which multiple permutations of users worked together for the first time is antithetical to the site's broad philosophy. Definitely would consider for future projects, though, a more singular theme so that there could be more direct interaction.

As I try to hash this out, what happens if we had submitted separately? I'd have given Dippy gold, maybe Tobi silver, Dami bronze, and then a bunch of us using the same project eat up all the tin cans, so I'm not sure it's a way better outcome, either.

Yeah, I agree that doing solo work for majors can get a bit boring after a while.

I think this is valuable to discuss. I personally have conflicting and unsettled feelings on the collabs.

*Generally, I love the supergroup formed projects; I think botb is an amazing community brimming with talent and I love seeing what people do when they work together. I am a chronic introvert and don't usually get that involved in things like that, but even I did a little collabo myself recently--Shout outs to Ray Steiner!

*That being said, I also feel some friction when you put a lot of effort into a solo project that is measured against a mammoth group project. The argument that "you can also spend X amount of time to make a sprawling project" isn't precisely wrong, but it is impractical or even a bit disingenuous.

Using Winter Chip XX as a recent example, I submitted a little looping animation for the pixel art category. I am proud of it, I am happy with it, it makes me laugh, and I was extremely pleased to see where it placed. However, I not in the same league as the number 1 Winter Chip Fighter XX. Let me be clear, it is an amazing incredible work of art, that took 7 weeks to make--it deserved that prize. But I do symapthize with the sort of deflating feeling you might experience when you hold the two entries up against one another.

*I don't think I have a conclusion here. I don't really know if these things should be in separate categories, but they often feel like they are. But also, as a fan of botb, I want to see things like Winter Chip Fighter and listen to things like the visual novel collab in as many battles as possible. sexy_shruggy_emoji.gif

pretty much agree with da diad on this one. I admit I sometimes experience some butthurt over the big earthsmasher collabs. Like, "pack it in boys, we clearly have a winner." But there are many neglected formats to run away to as well, in the big ones. And working on your own has advantages. Let your entry be the Minecraft to their Black Ops. Except don't do the part where you quit in disgust, sell out, lose your family, watch your creation become a cultural scourge and a shadow of its former self, and then also become a cultural scourge and shadow of your former self. Well u know what I mean

I think this argument against big collabs is kind of like being in a swimming pool, fighting the water because it's crowding you.

If we were to put a cap on the number of collaborators then it would be worked around. If we removed the collab feature entirely then the same would continue to happen. People will find a way around it.

My closest parallel I can come up with is the embedded image firki feature being abused to link images outside BotB. I spent the time to try and block that because I didn't want to wind up with a bunch of dead image links on this site. Years went by and an exploit was eventually found and now we have dead image links on the site. So do I fix the feature to remove the exploit? How long until the next exploit is found?

This request puts the burden and responsibility on the admin team which would have to quantify when things are arbitrarily out of bounds.

Part of being a member of a community is accepting some folks in the community may do things not to our liking.

I don't want to poopoo this discussion. I think it is absolutely valid. But sometimes a subset of the community is going to collaborate in a communal way to produce a great work and present it to the larger community. I would rather this community praise a great work than shun it because it's unfair, but also individuals have the right to vote as they see fit for any reason. It will all come out in the wash.

Winning is not the goal of this community.
Community and personal growth is the goal of this community.

i was gonna contribute to this but the diad and puke said most of what i would've said anyway lol

i guess i'll add this as well: quite a few botbrs kinda focus too much on the end result of an entry, and i'm guilty of this as well. i won't go into specifics but i did see at least one botbr see how they did this time around, go "i'm too bad at music for this community" and then leave. i think this community should logically be and, for the most part, is about the journey and not the destination, and i think the collab function speaks to that. the fact that there is a collab function with the ability to do as many collaborators as possible is a double edged sword: sure, it's open to abuse and you can go in trying to make the biggest fuck you collab out there and prove you're the most popularest poppu to larp, but most people who do collabs (e.g, me and chuck) don't go in with that goal in mind

that said, i can see how people can see gigantic collabs like the vn one and wcfxx as unfair; ESPECIALLY wcfxx which wasn't an open sign-up collab like chuck's was. i, too, would probably be miffed that my entry was outdone because i didn't happen to be invited to a group of people that ended up making the winning entry. at the same time, though, i would probably understand the amount of coordination, effort and time management needed to make something in that amount of time, especially since i've now done one. it's somewhat of a "you have to be there" kind of thing, i suppose? i don't expect them to become common here, at least not on the level of my collab and chuck's.

it also doesn't mean that solo entries don't have their place here. wcxx has a crapton of amazing art and music still, and people who don't look past that and instead just go for wcfxx are missing out. you should do yourself a service to listen to necari's heartbeat city or sweatynoodle's plan -Ω- or alisongrace's stage 1a ~ the endless snow! those are honestly some of the entries i thought would top winter chip this year, even if for a moment

again, botb is not about the destination; it's about the journey. i don't think collabs like mine will come again for a long time; chuck will probably do another one for summer chip tho lol

i am not advocating for banning megacollabs. i don't know how many times i can say that haha.

i feel like im being talked past a lot here in order to point to the sanctity of art or being overly focused on competition, which was never my point.

in any case i respect whatever the mods do, at the end of the day it's no big deal. i think a "megacollab format" would multiply all of the artistic and community benefits that everyone in this conversation clearly values. it would certainly help someone like me who has virtually no friends here make new ones.

but maybe that's just me.

I want to second gotoandplay's post here. Maybe I'm just a minimalist or something but unless all of the songs are amazing you're gonna be committing your big collab entry to be the average between the worst and the best*. If you wanted to take a very inhuman and objective stance you could say that they should just drop the worst ones to get a better score, just like you might remove the worst cards from your deck in order to, on average, draw cards with more utility in a deckbuilding game. I'm also very prone to too long-ness which is probably one of the reasons I don't do voting on majors anymore. That and voter INF, for to which I won't talk about my opinions on that because nobody cares.

At the end people are going to vote however they want, for example, voting "competitively" is going to land you with a skull aura but it's not against the rules - and if the people decide that they are going to incentivize collaborations by voting higher than that's far from the worst problem. That's actually a good thing really. Guess we'll all have to talk to each other now.

* although some voters probably vote closer to a max() function where they just vote on how good their favorite part is

@NecAri to relocate such entries to their own format *is* to ban them in a sense though - it's saying, hey, not here buddy, you gotta go over there if you wanna do this. and i could see that going one of two ways - either it's just a buzzkill, or it makes more people want to give it a try for the sake of giving it a try when it shows up in a major. tbh though, since most of the multi-song entries (solo and collab) are intended for a specific format, i think some magic could be lost. why even make a big sgen collab if you can't submit it to sgen?

considering that the other formats are restrictive in terms of content type, it'd be a little odd to have something on the shelf that is "allgear but only X number of collaborators allowed". where does the line get drawn there? if you say X is 5 people, will someone get irritated at a 4 person collab in the normal categories? can you skirt the rule with an account that two people use? what about the aforementioned solo entries that contain several songs in one, which this hypothetical format doesn't really address? an "allgear but it must contain multiple songs" format carries its own ambiguity and need for arbitrary line-drawing too. it's messy, like puke is saying about "exploiting" the collab mechanic.

hahaha I'm imagining all the completionists having to create an entire album for the new "album" format lol so owned

An album format would be interesting. But also consider if it's hardware playable. I'm picking up SNES assembly, and I'm planning on solo or duo composing a ROM album for the next SNES major. If the format was just "album", I could forget all that and instead just crossfade some mp3s.

Edit: point being, don't make an album format please and thank you

simple solutuon to megacollabs (in the words of spring yard zone):

c o p e

most ppl have already said why making collabs their own format would be dumb. plus, if we make a single "collab" format, how the fuck do you rank different collab formats??? like if a sgen and a visual (which may be a still image mind you) were in the same format, that would literally be unvotable bro.
and if we made a collab format for every format...
do i even need to explain why doubling the fucking format count would be stupid?

like i am one of those people who may get mildly annoyed when a "gg entry" gets entered in a format i was planning to sub to (or if one got submitted into a format i alreadt entered), but there is no "solution" to "fixing" this. people enjoy doing the thing.
simply just accept that you'll won't get 1st or whatever place (if you are one of those people) and move on with life

(oh and for the argument that you CAN beat a megacollab, that is techincally true, but its not as easy as some of yall be wording it. you'd have to do some crazy shit to get that, and while basically everyone (minus me) on this site are effectively chefs in the masterpieces they can cook, its still a pretty large challenge to deal with.
plus the existence of a megacollab in any fornat means it'd likely just get high points for simply having like 5+ people on it, with each having a decent song part to it.)

so uh
enjoy copium ig


:p

if i was a control freak and didn't collaborate on what the community wants for this site then multi-track entries and entries over 4 minutes and 20 seconds wold be illegal

bet, hey, we do us, boo

NecAri, there's no need for a "megacollab format" to exist for you to make friends here. Maybe get more active and ask someone you get along with if they want to collab with you.

Also, it's worth emphasizing that the PC-98 visual novel collab had a public invitation. All you needed to do was show up asap to claim a spot. So, it wasn't even a secret project hid away from everyone else that required you to be part of a tight-knit group of friends.

Keep an eye out in the forums if you're interested in joining a future one.

If I'm being honest, I don't feel like I have much to add (as dami and puke both touched on pretty much exactly what i'd have to say), but I'll toss this one in the ring:

While "big allgear" would be strange for a format, I think it'd be cool to see some majors or something expressely designed for larger collaborations-- Not hard required, to be clear, just encouraged.

i totally agree, i'd love to see more events that are specifically geared towards this - Battle of the Bands (of BotB) was a blast, although it struggled with forward momentum given our room full of introverts :p

it'll be a while until the next Future Battles, but i was thinking of proposing something along the lines of a "make an EP" monthly major... largely inspired by the kilowatt/roz haiku collab

“Road to Golden Albumgear #37”