General

AWC: 2022 End of Year Post

AWC · 3y

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Heyo everyone! It’s your favorite long-winded AWC Leader bringing the now somewhat-late AWC End of Year post for 2022. I personally apologize for the delay, as the past month has been absolutely ridiculous for me in terms of being busy and available. With that apology out of the way, I’ll keep this part short so we can get moving on to everything y’all generally would rather hear instead of my expositions.

Challenge Team

Hello, it's Plusho, the leader of the Challenge Team. This year has been another good year for us, we've been able to maintain a regular output of around 4 challenges every month and finally released a few big projects we had been planning for a while. The team has gained a great deal of independence this year, with each member stepping up to take creative control of their challenge plans. I think everyone has been enjoying this kind of autonomy and it's proving successful in the quality and variety of ideas we've seen come to fruition, such as the Hero's War, Light Novel Challenge and Crossword Puzzle. We've also expanded upon a range of multiple challenge series this year, with 4 new Manga City locations, new Puzzles, many more Collections, not to mention the Advanced Manga Challenge back in February. We finally released the Community Workshop Challenge after many many months of planning, polls and pizza puns too, and I personally enjoyed exploring the origins of anime whilst planning the JAFC Collection and Pioneers' Classic as well. In a year that felt so dominated by the planning workload and ongoing chaos of the Hero's War event, I'm very proud of the Challenge Team for managing to create such a variety of high quality challenges throughout the whole year. So, well done team :3

Next year I'm hoping for much of the same to be honest. We're planning a greater variety of manga challenges in 2023 for sure, an effort that's already begun with the Light Novel Challenge. We're also going to be continuing with our plans to get all of our older challenges up-to-date again. You may have noticed that some challenge series such as Classics, Genres and Collections have already had a bit of a clean up this year. However, I'm aware that the submission instructions, rules and challenge codes for many other older challenges are still outdated, but rest assured that we will get to them in due course. Updates aside, I usually put a tease for something to look forward to next year here, and I have been working on something, but it's not a challenge, though I hear Professor AWC-chan has snuck some secret research questions into the End of Year Survey.

Design Team

Kondor again for the Design Team. Over the past few years the Design Team has been playing an ongoing game of catch-up for projects that were started many years back before even I joined the Design Team. It’s been a slow-going process because there’s always been limitations - time, number of other projects, needing to meet quality standards, etc. One of the primary ways to rectify this has been an ongoing attempt to grow the team, and this year was a year of growth for us. Last year around this time we were able to double the size of the team we had at the time, and this year we got even more new recruits wanting to help push the Design Team even further. As a result, we’ve not only been able to easily keep up with the normal workload demands required to get through the usual monthly needs, but we were able to fully complete and get caught up on the End of Year badges that were years behind, and we’re very happy with how they’ve turned out. We also got a couple more Genre Mastery badges out, but there’s still more of those to come. All while maintaining our usual high standards for the design work we put out.

Our goal for this next year is to continue this progress. We’ve already begun training other Design Team members on some of the advanced techniques so we can get more folks working on the high-end rewards. We’ve also got some stuff going in the background that I can’t talk about yet, but I think you’ll all like these things a good bit when it comes time to reveal. I’d be ecstatic if we can get to a point where all the past promises have been made good on, so that’s the endgame for this year. Hopefully when I write to you all in this post next year, I can say that we’re moving on to new big things. Thanks for all of your support until then!

Review Team

I’m anna, the leader of the Review Team. I know how much y’all like stats, so, at the time of writing this (2022-12-29 at 15:15 UTC), the Review Team has reviewed 50,485 submissions in total with 12,933 of those this year. That’s more than in 2020 but slightly less than in 2021. You still kept us busy this year, much of it certainly thanks to your active involvement in the Hero’s War. Besides reviewing, we also continued assisting many of you through our Discord Challenge Support, answering a total of 397 tickets this year. Members of the Review Team have got busier with their own lives in the past few months, me especially, so we’re currently a bit behind on the queue, but it will be our first priority in the new year to get us caught up again! Despite my absence, the team has time and time again shown their great work ethics and how willing they are to dedicate their time to AWC — I’m so proud and thankful for each and every team member! We had a few new recruits join us this year and we might just open up recruitment again next year!

This year we continued focusing on increasing our consistency from reviewer to reviewer, though in general, we kept on doing what we did last year since it seemed to be working well. However, we did have some changes. In the team leadership, we made sure to streamline our training process after each new batch of recruits to make the process as recruit-friendly and efficient as possible! During the past months, I have also been rewriting the FAQ thread, which should now also be live. In the new year, we hope to keep more on top of having such information up-to-date.

Community Team

Stealth here, I’m the manager of the Community Team which is actually split in 3 different groups that manage our Discord server Events, server Activities (Clubs & Simuls) and Moderation respectively. This year we ended up with an almost entirely new staff lineup for the Events and Activities teams. For example, this is the first time you will be hearing from me in this post as I just took over management of the team this year. Moving into the new year, the new team members have gotten settled in and we are back on top, hosting fun events, managing our server clubs and generally making the Discord community a welcoming, enjoyable and inclusive place to be. I'm very proud of the effort the team has already put in this year, and am looking forward to the fun things we will be doing with you guys in the year to come.

We are up to 18 different clubs in the server, which cater to the wide range of interests and hobbies of our members. New clubs this year include the Cool Robot Club, the Tech Club, and the Henshin Club; all of which have been hosting events, games and simuls for their members and the whole community. We’ve continued to host popular community events like the Secret Santa and Trick or Treat anime/manga exchanges, our official AWC Anime Music Quiz Tournaments, and even Karaoke. We also managed to finally complete the challenge workshop which was in progress since mid-2020! Now that we finally have the events channel back you can all look forward to more themed events in that channel, as well as some surprises in the new year. There is a lot to look forward to! As always, your patience and participation is appreciated.

Development Team

Hello, this is Zach, the leader of the Development Team. This year saw a couple updates to the AWC website early in the year including the challenge code editor tool. Additionally special badges that aren’t tied to specific challenges were added to the challenger profiles such as end of year badges and special badge versions like with the AWC Boss Battle challenge. The Dev Team always has to divide their efforts between features and tools for challengers and the AWC staff, so we’re hoping to tackle some more challenger-focused projects in the coming year. I hope what has been added so far has been helpful and thank you for your patience as we continue to improve the website.

List Team

Dry here, one of the latest additions to the leadership team. I’m currently handling part of the Challenge Team workload as well as the List Team. This year marked the kickoff of the Community Lists thread, making the submission procedure for our lists more streamlined and accessible from everyone. The thread was a great success from the very beginning, we received so many submissions that we had to add new recruits to our team already. For the future we will be looking to continue the same pace in verifying submissions, as well as potentially releasing new, fun, lists that will cover interesting tropes.

Like all other years, we would like to present an End of Year Poll seeking your thoughts on AWC for the past year. We value all of your feedback very much, and we do take all of it into consideration. We may not always agree or make changes based on some of the feedback we get due to some internal plans or limitations that you may not be aware of, but your feedback genuinely helps shape our plans and decisions going forward - we discuss it frequently throughout the year when discussing new challenges and other plans. So if you would please be gracious enough to take a few minutes to fill out this year’s poll, we would be very grateful.

Click to take the poll

That brings this year’s End of Year post to a close. This should be the shortest End of Year post so far, largely due to the fact that we don’t have any sweeping changes to make and announce, or out-of-left-field plans that we want feedback on before we kick them off. We added a couple of internal teams this year - the List Team and an Update Team - to help facilitate some smoother processes that we think will be helpful going forward in a more low-key manner. We’ve also made a recent update to the FAQ Thread, which was quite a bit out of date, so please feel free to reference this when you have a question regarding our challenges.

As I noted previously…somewhere…the End of Year badge will be coming in the first month-and-a-half or so of the new year. Since we use characters from the year for that badge, we like to allow the last season of the year to end, as well as let the Seasonal Challenge character and Classic character be chosen. So progress on that will be starting soon, and you should have it with much more speed than you’re used to for this particular series. Which isn’t hard, as we won’t be taking three years to do it again.

This year we aim to continue providing fun activities and challenges for you all to spend some of your free time with. And from all of us to you, our staff thanks you for your continued support. Here’s to a good 2023!