We’ve wrapped up another story challenge on the site, and a big congrats to the Top 5 for this round! There were also lots of great stories that, regardless of the popular vote, definitely won my vote. 
Let’s use this thread to share our enthusiasm for the stories we loved in this round… for both the Top 5 and the many other fantastic entries!
Congratulations to everyone who participated! There were so many great stories, within the top 5 and out of that 
Thank you for all the good moments. I already left the comments, so you know who you are 
I had a lot of fun writing for this one! I certainly learned a lot. Hopefully it will translate to better writing in the future haha
Well your story was certainly liked a lot. And it seems people are waiting for you to continue it! Now that the challenge is over, you can always add more chapters.
It was a great competition, and congratulations to the top 5 (and everyone else).
Wasn’t intending to enter this one, but once I had an idea for it I couldn’t resist.
So thank you also to everyone for reading and liking and voting, was a fun round.
Congratulations, everybody! You all made an awesome work! At first I thought this challenge would have little participation, but as the deadline approached, the number of stories increased until it was numerous. 
I was very happy about that, personally, renaming the characters is something that I like a lot, I think it adds an extra layer of dominance and control over the renamed one, or at least it seems that way to me. Many people don’t notice it at first, but it’s like robbing or corrupt the identity of the renamed one in another deep level.When it is combined with humiliation (something that I especially enjoy in MC and TF stories), it becomes something very powerful to me.
I think the first time I saw the true potential and charm on names was on EdIam’s unfinished epic “Re-Educator”, it’s still one of my favourites to date. Another one that I quite like, (although it’s not strictly about changing someone by name) is Angus’ “Superman vs the Vice Lord”, the use of nicknames and names is very enjoyable there, and one of its strengths. If anybody else have more recomendations, please share them, guys!
Best regards everybody! 
Thank you for your kind words!! I should def get back to that story at some point 
This was one of my favorite prompts, and it really inspired some marvels, in my not-very-humble-opinion.
I’ve been wondering, do we have a posting on how the ratings work? I’m not terrifically adept with numbers so it can be hard to tell how things are performing before the announcements are made…
My pleasure! I hope to see that happy day. You probably don’t realize how influential that particular story has been. When I talk to other TF and MC fan writers and readers, your work in general and that story in particular often comes up in the conversation.
We don’t have an official posting about it, though I’ve been wondering for a while if I should make one. I think Martin maybe explained the details here and there on the former discord server, but it was never all gathered all in one place.
I do have it all written down, since I double-check things while the contests are ongoing and also shortly before results are announced. (And I’ve manually double-checked the results after they were announced in previous contests, too, to make sure there weren’t errors. I wanted to make sure I could replicate the math and ensure there weren’t any glitches…)
Pretty much, final scores for all challenge stories are auto-calculated by the site’s challenge-scoring algorithm, which Martin wrote. The scoring algorithm combines a story’s unique Favorites + the story’s top four Rating Categories (aka, categories such as Hotness, or Idea, or Mind Control) and plugs them into a detailed formula, which then crunches it all into a single final score.
In terms of terminology: by ‘unique Favorites’, I mean that if someone reads a multi-chapter story and only Favorites the first chapter… then it will count just as much as if that same reader also Favorited every other chapter too. Meaning: it’s less about how many overall chapters got Favorited, and more about how many individual logged-in readers left a Favorite on the story. (Also, just a note that the algorithm maxes out at 100 Favorites, so it won’t count additional Favorites past 100.)
And, when I say ‘top four Rating Categories’, I mean that the score algorithm considers only the four highest-rated categories (such as Idea, or Hotness, or Mind Control) of a challenge story. A story’s weakest categories won’t be counted against it! And for multi-chapter stories, the top four Rating Categories can come from any chapter — so, if one chapter does really well in Idea, and another chapter does really well in Hotness, the final score will take each individual Rating Category from whatever chapter did that category best.
Note, also, that this doesn’t actually favor multi-chapter stories over standalone stories. On one hand, you might think that multi-chapter stories have more ‘chances’ to get high Rating Categories with each new chapter they post… But in reality, a Rating Category’s ‘weighted’ score goes up the more users there are who rate it well. So, I’ve seen that multiple-chapter stories often risk getting fewer readers voting on each chapter (both due to longer length, and also the fact that readers don’t always read and rate every chapter). And with fewer readers, you get fewer concentrated ratings, and that can dilute and weaken your Rating Category scores…
In practice, though, I’ve found that any potential advantages and disadvantages between the single-chapter vs. multi-chapter approach appear negligible. Just looking at past challenges, there are examples where standalone stories beat out some really strong multi-chapter contenders, and vice-versa. I’ve been keeping an eye on it, and I haven’t noticed any system-based advantage to either approach.
I hope this helps clarify things! 
And let me know if there are other questions on this, or anything above that could benefit from clarification! (And maybe later I’ll collect all this information into the Challenge Help Desk thread, for future reference…)
Wow. You summarized that way better than I could ever have done it!
Congratulations on the top 5 winners!
This was a fun challenge for me to participate in and I choose to do something a bit out of my norm such as objectification. After reading Philip K’s summary on multi-chapters vs stand alone it makes sense that any multiple chapter thing may not do as well as a stand alone.
Maybe next time I will make it to the top 5!
Congratulations again to Philip K, Colin DV, The Influencer, Cervello, and Swizz!
Hey, hey, thank you Philip K! He cheerleads.
An idle thought, but since the ratings are automated and happen in real-time, would there be value in having a widget tracking the horse race during the contest? It might unfairly weight front-runners (or invite rating-bombers, hmm), but it might also rally support for underdogs and add some drama to the contest, especially since it’s easy for things to get buried. Again, just an idle thought, as indeed all my thoughts are.
Great work, folks
Some great things are being written here; maybe they’ve even given me the bug to get going again too.
Thanks for the plots, fun and faps. 
That wasn’t what I was saying at all! I was saying there isn’t a systemic advantage to doing one over the other. In fact, some people might think there’s an advantage to multi-chapter stories over stand-alones, so I was explaining that there’s no particular advantage to doing either. I’ve kept a close eye on the data, and both types of stories are just as likely to place in the Top 5 or win.
There are always a lot of factors (including some random luck) for whether a story ends up in the Top 5 or not — but whether a story is a stand-alone vs. multi-chapter is not one of those factors. So it’s not something worth stressing about.
I hope that helps clarify my point! Let me know if you have additional questions, I’m happy to have a chance to answer them!
Ah, I’ve considered this, and it 100% would both unfairly weight front-runners and invite rating-bombs. Throughout any given contest, I do regular scans of rating behavior on the site, to track unusual behavior and spot attempts to manipulate ratings — and, to make a long story short, if the metrics are visible like that prior to contest results, I can guarantee it would invite a lot of attempts at abuse. We already have occasional instances of people targeting challenge stories with glowy badges, before the results are even announced, just in an attempt to ‘sink’ their rating and benefit their own story. (They don’t get very far in their attempts, though, since Martin and I catch them. )
This is also one reason that ‘Favorites’ play an aspect in determining the final score for any story. They’re not visible to other users, and you can’t ‘negatively’ Favorite a story you dislike… so they’re much harder to game and manipulate on the outside.
I do think one of the best ways to rally support for challenge stories that you love and wish more people were reading is by leaving comments. A good ‘review’ tends to attract additional readers!
Technical this wouldn’t be a problem. I actually thought about it, but I decided against it. It could lead to a race to up or down-vote stories you want to succeed or you see as competition. It’s already rather bad as it is…
I had so much fun with so many of the stories this contest – seriously guys, these were GREAT. And such a great idea for a contest! I’ve individually rated and commented on the ones that really got to me, but there was so much quality this time around, it’s amost astounding.
Got it now! Lol