Heyo everyone! It’s that time of year where I, Kondor, get to regale you with probably the longest AWC post you’ll see until next December again. But this is also the post where we take a look back on our year and make some announcements. So if I could ask you to stick with me, I’ll get right into it.

Before I begin, a quick note: we send you all our best wishes. 2020 has been...an interesting year, to say the least. Most would say it probably hasn’t been all that great. We’ve all been affected, but we’ve continued to chug through to provide some fun things for you all to do while we all deal with the situation. Hopefully our challenges and activities have been able to help things be just a bit better for y’all. Continue to stay safe.

Overview: The Good

Now, on to our overview. Last year I was able to give some growth stats based on challenge submissions. This year, I can do the same. At the time of writing this at 11:55pm CST on 2020-12-22, our Review Team has reviewed a total of 23,592 challenge submissions. In 2020 alone, we reviewed 12,446 submissions. That means that more than half of all submissions were submitted in 2020. Y’all submitted 3,487 more challenges in 2020 than you did in 2019. On average there were 1,037 challenge submissions per month. And in 3 months this year y’all actually broke 1,500 submissions - 1,516 in April, 1,529 in July, and 1,642 in October (which was brutal). So y’all are insane and make us work a lot. But those are some impressive numbers, and we couldn’t be happier that our community continues to grow.

Challenge-wise, our Challenge Team puts out 3-4 challenges nearly every month. That’s a lot of creative thinking, planning, and internal testing. This year we were able to cement and expand some familiar challenge libraries, such as our Studio, Franchise, and Legend Collections, and we had some unique events for the year with challenges such as the Valentine’s event and the Boss Battle that occurred in July. We also saw the next raffle with a couple of minor changes, and our community has descended into warring halves with some new Badge Battles. In addition, the team was able to bring some new challenge types, such as the varied Puzzle Challenges, the first joint anime and manga challenge with the Recommendation Challenge, and some interesting new manga challenges like the Space Adventurer's Challenge. We hope that you were able to find enjoyment with the varied assortment, and we advise you look forward to what we’ve got coming next year.

Over the course of the year, our Design Team has had to bring on new team members to keep up with the challenge demand. We added two character and badge artists, as well as a visual effects artist in 2020. Additionally, with a hard push we were finally able to begin delivering the Genre Mastery badges with a unique design and detailed character vectors. On the forum graphics side of things, we’ve also seen some updates to older challenges to bring them up to date with our current standards. Forum graphics have also improved in many subtle ways, with more character being added to them throughout the year, making them more fun and appealing.

For our community, we’ve put time and effort into growing our Community Team this year, which nearly didn’t exist in any capacity at the start of 2020. But serious time and staff resources were spent this year on building the foundation of this team, and now we’re happy with the start it’s gotten. With the Community Team built, we’ve been able to run more events on our Discord and better tie in Discord activities with some of our challenges such as having monthly simuls of anime that will absolutely work for requirements on your Monthly Challenge. We also began to implement Clubs in our Discord server, which have proven to be really effective in creating fun topical groups for people to enjoy. And there’s a such a variety of them to participate in, such as the Cute Boys and Cute Girls Clubs for all your cute needs, a Food Club for the culinary inclined, a Party Games Club for fun games on a frequent basis, the Idol Research Club (run by yours truly and is obviously the place to be), and so many others. It’s our hope that more people will be interested in our Clubs and join us to have some fun, or even reach out to start their own to fill a gap they are passionate about filling - all information for this can be found in our Discord in the #join-clubs channel. We have the solid foundation we wanted for our Community Team and now plan to build on it, so look forward to more on this front.

Overview: The Could Be Better

Now, for all of our efforts to provide the best experience we can, we always end up feeling like there are areas we can improve. I like to spend some time shedding some light on these so that y’all understand we know we can do better sometimes, and that we’re committed to correcting anything that might not be as top notch as we’d like.

I think an obvious thing I could point out this year is that there were multiple times over the course of the year where the “time to review” metric was longer than we’d like. As the one who leads the Review Team, it is of course a goal of ours to get to your submissions as soon as possible. Ideally, we don’t really want to make you wait more than 3 days during our busy periods, 5 days at the most. However, there were some times this year where our team was just completely overrun by the number of submissions that y’all were submitting. To dig into this just a bit, for those that aren’t aware I implement a review cap for reviewers on our team, meaning I put a hard limit as to how many submissions they can review every week. We put this in place so that we can guarantee that our volunteer team doesn’t feel compelled to spend all of their free time on the activity of reviewing. I know that may seem counterintuitive to some - our reviewers signed up for the role, they should be willing to review submissions. I’d like to note that many of our reviewers constantly ask me to raise their caps so they can review more. However, too much reviewing leads to poor review quality and burnout. The cap is present to respect the time of our team members, as they should know they can have their own time to spend as they wish whether that’s spending time with family, hanging out for a relaxing day, or participating in our challenges. This system does lead to a backup of submissions, though, especially during busy periods and it can lead to longer wait times than what we want. We’ve actually made strides to assist with this issue already this year. The challenge code update was a big step forward for improving review time, quality, and efficiency. And while we did receive some kick back when the changes were announced, they’ve helped immensely. As I type, the most recent unclaimed review was only submitted 17 hours ago. With the help from the changes, our team has not only been able to completely destroy the backlog, but also stay handily on top of it for the past few weeks since the changes were implemented. I thank everyone for your cooperation with those changes - I know they were pretty extensive and many had to reformat their challenges, but since then we’ve seen fewer submission failures, faster review times, and happier challengers. So we’ll continue with that momentum into the new year.

Another thing that I can speak to personally is some badges y’all are waiting on. As I also run the Design Team, these fall under my domain. In particular, I’m referring to the 2019 Staff Picks and 2019 End of Year badges. To be completely transparent, these badges were originally the responsibility of a former staff member of ours. After they left, they had agreed to continue working on these, however we recently learned that they would not be doing this going forward. This is completely fair as they aren’t a part of the team, however it did throw a wrench into their development. I just haven’t been able to fit them into the schedule to be completed since I got this update towards the latter part of the year. Current projects and some other stuff I’ll mention in just a bit had taken up all of our Design Team’s time. In addition, I can let you know right now that we will not have the 2020 Staff Picks or 2020 End of Year badges ready at the time of their usual release either - it’d be odd to us to release the 2020 badges before the 2019 ones are released. However, I can also say that these have all been assigned already for development. The Staff Picks badges will be done by our other badge artists and have a tentative goal of being completed by the end of January. The End of Year badges will be handled by me personally, and while I likely cannot have these done by the end of January, I’m going to do my best to have them to you by the end of 2020 Q1. The Boss Battle badges are in there as well - one of our team members has already completed the vector, the badge design is just waiting on me again for reasons I’ll mention here in a bit. Additionally, we haven’t forgotten the remaining Mastery Badges, which are still being worked on. There are three currently in progress, but were put on a temporary hold for reasons (I promise I’ll talk about these shortly).

One last thing we want to do better this next year is interacting with our community. As previously mentioned, we spent the year building up the Community Team’s foundation. Due to the time and resources this took, some of the fun things that we did at the start of 2020 ended up taking a back seat as we went further through the year. This includes things like the monthly themed channel in our Discord to play along with our Monthly Challenge theme, or the frequent quizzes or other events we held every month. We’re looking to revive these this year, as well as expand on many of the foundational things we’ve set up throughout 2020. Your patience and participation is appreciated.

Click Here for Survey

We like to ask that y’all participate in a survey every year. It’s pretty short, and just asks for your feedback on the different aspects of the AWC. If you could take 5 minutes to open the survey and provide some answers for us, we really do take the feedback into consideration every year. It helps guide us to things that maybe we weren’t aware of before, or shows us what our community finds to be important versus what we might have our focus set on. And if I could personally ask you to spend some time on the optional short answer questions, that would be very much appreciated. These are optional and tend to be skipped over, but they’re also where we can get some specific notes and feedback that simply putting in a number or a yes/no answer can’t give us. We read everything put in these surveys, and we share them with the team. So let us know your thoughts on the AWC over the course of 2020, it’ll help us out a lot.

Alright, on to the changes. Last year we had some changes that directly affected things that you would need to do or interact with. This year, we’ve got some changes that you don’t really need to do anything about yourselves. However, we hope that these changes will be welcome and well-received.

End of Year Badge Reward Structure

So, most of you at this point are aware of these End of Year badges that we’re a bit behind on getting to you. While discussing the delay on these, we also took a look at how we awarded these and decided that it’s way too damn complicated. For those unaware, the reward structure is present on our Master Post, but for the sake of making things easy I’ll just copy it here.

Old Structure:

Participation: Complete 6 Monthly Challenges on any difficulty
Easy: Complete all Monthly Challenges on any difficulty
Hard: Complete all Monthly Challenges with at least 6 of those being on Hard Mode
Complete: Complete all Monthly Challenges on Hard Mode

Good ideas of the past, don’t always translate to being good ideas in the present, and we believe that the above reward structure is an idea that falls into this category. It’s a bit overly-complicated for what we would like to do. So going into 2021, we’re changing the reward structure to the following.

New Structure:

Participation: Complete at least 1 Monthly Challenge
Easy: Complete all Monthly Challenges on Easy Mode
Hard: Complete all Monthly Challenges on Hard Mode

With this, we want to accomplish a few things. With the removal of one level, it makes it a bit easier to keep track of for the challengers, the Review Team, and the Design Team. Additionally, we’ve made these rewards more inclusive, expanding Participation to include folks who have only had the chance to participate in one Monthly Challenge due to circumstances such as finding the AWC towards the end of the year. Another benefit is that this easily follows out Monthly Badge structure, which utilizes 2 of the 3 medal colors in the medal system. With this, we can better tie the End of Year badges in with the Monthly Challenge system, which it is dependent on. In the end, this doesn’t really change much in terms of what people are receiving in rewards, either - most people were on track to receive Participation, Easy, or Complete, so we’ve removed the unused tier. Additionally, for ease of distribution and to include as many people as possible, we will retroactively apply this change to the 2019 and 2020 End of Year badges when we finish them.

One additional note to make - we no longer have anyone on staff that is familiar enough with animation to reproduce the detailed character animation from the 2018 End of Year badge. Unfortunately, at least for now, that badge will be pretty unique. We may do this again, but currently we don’t have talent in this area, and while we could dedicate time to learning, this would take a lot of time and essentially take that member of the Design Team off any other projects for quite a while. This is something we just cannot afford at this time. We will try to make up for this different with some possible extra effects animations and character vector quality.

Badge Design Overhaul

Now the big announcement. Band-Aid off: We’re changing our badge design. AWC badges are some of the most classic badges on the site, being the first of their kind on AniList when we introduced them in July of 2018. However, since then we have not done much to expand or elevate them. Other than some small animation effects and slight changes in vector styles, our badges are pretty much the same as they were back in 2018. Since then, others on the site have played with our base design to expand upon it. In some cases, I’ll admit that I personally find other badge designs on the site to be more interesting than ours. Additionally, our design options are constrained by the design itself, leaving little room for new design concepts and principles to be applied while we want to still maintain visual consistency with our own style.

With all of that being said, I’ll reiterate that we’re changing our badge design. The work on this design is part of the reason we’re behind on some of the badges mentioned earlier in this post. Various designs and iterations were gone through over the past few months before we landed on what we’ve got now, and then spent some time tweaking and perfecting. While I won’t show this off right now, the first badge we release with the new design will be coming with the January 2021 Monthly Challenge. Be aware, this design is different. While it maintains some similar visual aspects, we’ve dumped some of the more visually unappealing and restricting components. We think this is much more slick and clean, and gives the badges a more modern look. It will also let us expand and try new design ideas that we were unable to play with beforehand.

One more note on this that will affect some of you. We’re going to try moving away from the GIF format for various reasons. Instead, while we continue to use PNG for our static non-animated badges, we’re going to move to using the APNG format for our animated badges. APNG has a few benefits for us. First, it helps us maintain the vector format on our anime badges that we’ve tended to lose on any animated badge up to this point. We’re aware of the aliasing that you’ll see along many curved and slanted edges on our current GIF badges - with the APNG format, this won’t be the case any longer. Additionally, we’ll get similar file sizes, and with APNG becoming a bit more popular with time, we’re future-proofing our designs a bit. There are two downsides to the APNG format: 1) The APNG output loses a bit of sharpness on the badge at full size. However, most people shrink the badges for display, so as you shrink these to show them off, this will become much less noticeable. We’ll continue to look into this to try reducing this effect as much as possible. 2) For those of you that use Carrd, the APNG animation will not display on Carrd as it has not implemented support for this file type yet. Instead, when using the APNG file Carrd will display only the static image. While we understand that this may be inconvenient for some, moving away from the GIF format is actually instrumental in some of the decisions with the new badge design, which would not work with the old GIF format. Hopefully Carrd will move to providing support for the format, but in the meantime we think that the benefits from moving to APNG are going to outweigh the drawbacks we were experiencing with GIF. For some things that we want to do, the GIF files would have been too large anyway - the Mastery Badges, for example, needed to be manually shrunk if the GIF versions were to be displayed on Carrd, which frankly just made the badges ugly. So I don’t recommend doing that in the first place.

We will not retroactively apply the new design to older badges that have already been released. The simple fact is that many of our early badges were made by former staff members that are no longer involved with the AWC, and either we can’t get the files or they had deleted those files by the time we reached out. It’s been a few years now, so this isn’t unexpected. That would also be a generous amount of time in terms of effort that we can use to move forward instead of going backwards. However, we will update the Mastery Badges that were already released to use the new design. If time allows, we may periodically update some previous badge sets that I personally have the files for, though this is not a priority - sets such as seasonals, classics, and some others.

Recruitment

As we continue to grow and our plans get more ambitious, we of course need new staff members to bolster our ranks. Shortly after the new year we’ll be looking for new folks to help us out in the areas of community interaction and moderation with our Community Team, tool development for both staff and challengers with our Development Team (especially in the realm of front-end development), and forum graphics design with our Design Team which comes with the chance to eventually work on character vectors and badge design a bit later on. Actual specifics on these openings will be detailed soon after the new year, and we’ll announce them both in the Discord and on our Recruitment Thread.

Post Updates

Here at the AWC we have many posts on the AL forums. And many of these posts are old and at this point have outdated information after changes that have been made over the past year or so. We’ve had some bumps in personal schedules for the past half year that have ended up pushing these back, but we plan to get these updated as soon as we can. This will include many of our challenge posts, our FAQ Thread, the Submission Thread, and our Master Post.

Overdue Badges

As noted earlier in the post, we’ve got some badges that you should have, but don’t. These badges are the 2019 and 2020 Staff Picks badges, the 2019 and 2020 End of Year badges, and the Boss Battle badge from earlier this year. The circumstances surrounding these have already been discussed. The assignments for these badges have also been settled, and while there may be some variation, we hope to get most, if not all of them to you by the end of the first 2021 quarter.

That’s it. The inevitable end of my AWC 2020 thesis page. Thanks for proofreading.

In all seriousness, I and the team appreciate the time you spent reading this post. It’s not often that we get the chance to address all of you with what we’re thinking, and this post is one of the chances we get to really dive into what’s going on in the AWC behind the scenes. We hope y’all had a good 2020 despite the circumstances, and here’s to a better 2021! Happy holidays everyone.