furrukhjamal wrote:Question: This is my first DOTYs, so I know the voters get a lot of things to win but do the actual winners get anything except the recognition, like a certificate or something? or are these awards quoted anywhere else outside the UC community?
If not then I guess for next year this should be the goal to make these awards be something recognizable outside of UC too
Great question! So, even though the DOTYs are a UC tradition that have been held for a few years now, this is the first year that we've really made A LOT of new changes, most notably being those aimed to help make voting easier for new and veteran members as well as a strong push to promote outside of our own community to invite other enthusiasts of the hobby to join in and participate. Fortunately, we've had some help from a few of our wonderful designers/producers of the UC fam like montenzi, guru, stockholm17 and others that were able to spread the word using their own social medias to reach a much wider audience during the running of the event, but also from the incomparable GentlemanWake with his gracious shoutouts on his channel to shine the light on our little community here and our DOTYs event before it even began and we couldn't be more thankful to all of those that helped in promotion - Love y'all! <3
Anyways, I've actually thought about presenting actual awards a while back and, while it would be absolutely AWESOME to send out the DOTY Award winners some sort of official, physical award it is, as you could imagine, quite costly and it's not something we have ever done before in the past nor discussed during the planning of this year's event
Another alternative that I considered was sending out award certificates to winners to recognize their win, but, again, this was not something we discussed nor planned and, as seemingly an inexpensive alternative to awards, I had still looked into it about 3 weeks ago and, considering that we're recognizing 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners (in some cases, ties of placement shared between 2 or 3 winners) in each.and.every of the 15 (!!!) total categories, the cost of printing and shipping was/is an expense that I personally cannot bear...
It would be awesome, not just to have people donate towards covering the expenses, but more so if we were able to get Lotrek himself to consider taking on the printing of award certificates for us...
buuuutttt... since this is something that we all failed to address earlier during planning and, now that it's right before announcement of winners, is just something that I don't think is feasible (besides, with Lotrek's time management and luck, we probably wouldn't have award certificates ready to send out to winners of this year's DOTYs until probably next year anyways... along with UC's 2018 deck...
... lmao
) However, this is definitely something that I think we should most certainly keep in mind for planning in next year's event and I think would be really great if we could manage. This year, as I said, I just can't afford to personally take on the costs of printing and shipping myself but, if someone else would be interested in generously donating to cover the expenses, I'd be more than happy to put in the extra time and effort to manage everything else in regards to putting together some sort of spiffy award certificate, finding a place to have them nicely printed at a decent price, collecting addresses from everyone and sending 'em out... but otherwise, the best I can do is offer to create a pdf certificate and email it out to winners so they can print themselves if they so desire...
sorry!
To be honest, I wasn't really expecting the DOTYs to gain so much attention and be recieved so positively from the community outside of our little forum here at UC and there to be so much enthusiasm expressed from our new members in participating! I think I can speak generally on behalf of everyone here when I say that we're all pleasantly surprised to see so many new faces join the UC fam and especially those that are so passionately active and excited to be engaging and contributing to the community - fostering this kind of environment in which we could all come together to help one another and share in on the hobby that we all love is really invigorating, inspiring and motivating to try and make - not only this event - but the community as a whole, the best we can and continue to strive towards more inclusiveness
I hope that with the attention this year's DOTYs gained, we'll be able to manage and plan to continue, to the best of our collective abilities, to grow it bigger and better for next year and every year thereafter to really make this into an event the playing card community as a whole can look forward
But as of now, I'm not sure if the results will be officially published/recognized anywhere else outside of UC (although it would be awesome if they were lol); nonetheless, we can continue to try and promote and make it into an event that everyone will want to be a part of regardless
Also, be sure to stick around even after the DOTYs are over because I'm already planning a post-event update to outline some of the things I feel worked really well, other things that maybe didn't work as well as we had hoped, and some areas that I think we can improve upon as well as open discussion to get feedback from everyone else that participated (or didn't) so, at the very least, we can address these issues now while it's all still fresh in our minds and it'll be a starting point at which we can refer back to when we start planning for next year's DOTYs
BaconWise wrote:TheGentlemanWake wrote:I totally volunteer myself and the Lady Wake to be on stage/camera host for an awards event if we can get everyone to come out. [emoji4][emoji3516]
I would love to see this. The Lady Wake is hilarious and you are okay (just kidding!) so that would be a great comedic and professional/high quality production. From your previous YT videos, I imagine we could expect a song-and-dance number and maybe even a short film based on the theme of the DOTY winner. Oh, man. This needs to happen, TGW. Like now. You could even interview each category winner in your parlor and discuss their craft/inspiration. This is getting out of hand. In any case, just do it. Like now.
Cheers
Yes, please
but maybe this is something we can better plan for in next year's DOTYs?
Just kidding, do what suits you best.
