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Post by Duke Pikachu on May 17, 2019 6:02:24 GMT -5
I don't even understand why it closed. The AC hasn't started, this is just the Pre-Launch Press stuff. Infact, the Pre-Launch Press stuff is supposed to be the warning we should spend the rest of out prize points! EDIT: HTT made a post on the Neoboards that the Prize Shop will re-open sometime today (and they'll make a News post about it) and officially close on the 24th! So we'd have a week to redeem our points. EDIT: Prize Shop is back up! However the Staff Tourney Prize Shop hasn't returned.
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Post by Ian Wolf-Park on May 17, 2019 6:41:00 GMT -5
I don't even understand why it closed. The AC hasn't started, this is just the Pre-Launch Press stuff. Infact, the Pre-Launch Press stuff is supposed to be the warning we should spend the rest of out prize points! EDIT: HTT made a post on the Neoboards that the Prize Shop will re-open sometime today (and they'll make a News post about it) and officially close on the 24th! So we'd have a week to redeem our points. EDIT: Prize Shop is back up! However the Staff Tourney Prize Shop hasn't returned. You can still access the Staff Tourney Prize Shop from the Altador Cup page, via the Staff Tournament link. Just saying.
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Post by Duke Pikachu on May 18, 2019 6:02:10 GMT -5
I don't even understand why it closed. The AC hasn't started, this is just the Pre-Launch Press stuff. Infact, the Pre-Launch Press stuff is supposed to be the warning we should spend the rest of out prize points! EDIT: HTT made a post on the Neoboards that the Prize Shop will re-open sometime today (and they'll make a News post about it) and officially close on the 24th! So we'd have a week to redeem our points. EDIT: Prize Shop is back up! However the Staff Tourney Prize Shop hasn't returned. You can still access the Staff Tourney Prize Shop from the Altador Cup page, via the Staff Tournament link. Just saying. Wasn't when I tried earlier in the day. And glad it did, though I already spent my main plot points, I hadn't spent my staff points. Got mostly Bobbleheads as they seemed the most expensive. Thinking of selling them now along with other AC items I have now, being it seems to be the ideal time to sell AC-related items when the AC is happening.
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Post by Blueysicle on Jun 2, 2019 12:13:54 GMT -5
Worth 137k, according to Jellyneo. Not bad!
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Post by Huntress on Jun 4, 2019 10:33:27 GMT -5
*falls over*
I had the Sauna Day series in works for no less than three years, most of it in development hell. Meaning it's got noticeable art development, inconsistencies and several improvements in technique over its measly eight parts, but I don't care, it's done and submitted.
now watch something go 'splode and get eaten by the wonky NT submission system.
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Post by downrightdude on Jun 4, 2019 17:02:30 GMT -5
GL Huntress!!! Yeah, the NT has been wonky lately. And is it just me, or do comic seem to get accepted more quickly than written stuff?
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Post by Twillie on Jun 4, 2019 17:34:24 GMT -5
Yeah, I’ve noticed in general that comics get faster responses than written pieces, probably because it takes less time to read them. And eyy, good luck Huntress! That development hell and all its side effects are definitely felt, nothing better than finally getting a project like that done. It’s exciting the number of long term NT projects getting submitted recently, it’s been inspiring me to kick into high gear for my own next batch of comics!
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Post by Huntress on Jun 5, 2019 9:36:24 GMT -5
GL Huntress!!! Yeah, the NT has been wonky lately. And is it just me, or do comic seem to get accepted more quickly than written stuff? I strongly suspect that they keep essentially zero buffer these days. In ye olden days of Droplet, the time between a heldover message and an acceptance could be a few weeks to a month, meaning she went through the submissions, sifting them into okays and not-okays, and the okay-pile would then be easy enough to whip into an issue every Friday while steadily working to increase that pile. These days, it's like they put the issue together on the go, sometimes failing to meet the deadline, and of course a person can only read so fast while juggling a bunch of other pies that they have their fingers in these days. It's like you constantly wait until last minute to start doing your school reports, and then discover that half of your intended material is unusable for whatever reasons so you're scrabbling to pad it with whatever else you can find on the spot. (and of course nobody ever learned from all those panicky deadline-overshoots as a student, but personally, once I started doing actual paid work, I whipped myself into shape real fast and developed a system for handling work of varying length and deadlines. Which is, noticeably, the main criticism levied against TNT these days :'D Most of us now know what working for customers should be like.) Twillie , good luck with your comics too! The thing with the NT was always that the more people wrote for it, the more people were drawn to write for it. Gotta keep that upward spiral spinning C:
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Post by Blueysicle on Jun 5, 2019 10:44:37 GMT -5
I strongly suspect that they keep essentially zero buffer these days. In ye olden days of Droplet, the time between a heldover message and an acceptance could be a few weeks to a month, meaning she went through the submissions, sifting them into okays and not-okays, and the okay-pile would then be easy enough to whip into an issue every Friday while steadily working to increase that pile. These days, it's like they put the issue together on the go, sometimes failing to meet the deadline, and of course a person can only read so fast while juggling a bunch of other pies that they have their fingers in these days. It's like you constantly wait until last minute to start doing your school reports, and then discover that half of your intended material is unusable for whatever reasons so you're scrabbling to pad it with whatever else you can find on the spot.
I think the frequent breaks lately have a lot to do with what you said, but another thing that I suspect might be contributing to it is that... there simply aren't that many submissions for the NT anymore. I have no way of knowing how many submissions there are to the Neopian Times that we never see or how frequently people submit, but if I had to take a guess, I'd say that there are times when there simply aren't enough entries to justify a new issue.
And the reason why I suspect this is because I've noticed that Short Stories and Series in particular have taken a hit in recent times. Articles and Comics still seem to get a decent amount, but the last time there were more than three Short Stories in one issue was ten issues ago. (For the Sidekicks and Partners collab, no less) To say nothing about Series, which I've seen go with zero new ones a number of times recently. Compared to how it used to be, when you could expect anywhere from eight to ten Short Stories and two to three new Series a week, it's kind of worrying to see.
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Post by Herdy on Jun 5, 2019 12:26:12 GMT -5
Actually, you can tell how many submissions the NT has. Each entry (and each part of a continued series) has an ID in the url. This ID is assigned at the point of submission rather than the point of publication (so in the old days, things that had been held over for ages would have a lower ID than entries that had only just been submitted). Given that, like Huntress says, there's essentially little to no buffer of long term held over entries, you could go through recent issues to see how many submissions there have been relative to entries. If you're a regular NT participant, you could even tell exactly how many submissions there have been in a given time window by recording your submission times on two entries and seeing how many IDs fall between them when they are both published.
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Post by downrightdude on Jun 5, 2019 16:44:14 GMT -5
I feel like my NT mojo-jojo is plummeting to an all time low; year I've always been an procrastinator, but it's been a long while since I've written up another short story, and I haven't worked on my newest series since March!
Doesn't help that the one story I keep submitting to the NT keeps getting rejected for a REALLY long response time.
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Post by June Scarlet on Jun 5, 2019 18:51:53 GMT -5
And the reason why I suspect this is because I've noticed that Short Stories and Series in particular have taken a hit in recent times. Articles and Comics still seem to get a decent amount, but the last time there were more than three Short Stories in one issue was ten issues ago. (For the Sidekicks and Partners collab, no less) To say nothing about Series, which I've seen go with zero new ones a number of times recently. Compared to how it used to be, when you could expect anywhere from eight to ten Short Stories and two to three new Series a week, it's kind of worrying to see. Okay, but the weird thing is that it took like three months to get my short story published, all while they were only publishing an average of 2-3 stories a week, which makes me think there's a huge backlog there.
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Post by Huntress on Jun 6, 2019 4:42:42 GMT -5
Actually, you can tell how many submissions the NT has. Each entry (and each part of a continued series) has an ID in the url. This ID is assigned at the point of submission rather than the point of publication (so in the old days, things that had been held over for ages would have a lower ID than entries that had only just been submitted). Given that, like Huntress says, there's essentially little to no buffer of long term held over entries, you could go through recent issues to see how many submissions there have been relative to entries. If you're a regular NT participant, you could even tell exactly how many submissions there have been in a given time window by recording your submission times on two entries and seeing how many IDs fall between them when they are both published. Ooh, that is a fascinating bit of information. My NT streaks have been coming in short erratic bursts recently, but I did go through a submission spike recently and went back to crunch some numbers. My four most recently published comics are: Local Colour - issue 838 - 577322 Delegation - issue 842 - 577730 (+408, +5 issues) Heavyweight - issue 852 - 578453 (+732, +10 issues) Repurposing - issue 858 - 578873 (+420, +6 issues) 732 / 10 issues = ~73 entries per issue, 408 / 5 = 81, 420 / 6 = 70. Broadly speaking it checks out between 70-80 submissions per week - I don't have a way of knowing when I submitted each one, but I do know that I only submit a comic after a previous one has been accepted, so that they wouldn't somehow land in the same issue. It's a far cry from ye olden days when Droplet got around 1000 comics, 300-400 short stories and articles a week (that's intel directly from her mouth as of 2007, I asked her for a collab article I wrote) but it's still enough to fill up every issue every week, with around 50% weeded out or put to buffer. Not to mention all those skipped issues that presumably allow submission backlog to build up >> In short, the dwindling supply and Sturgeon's law most probably apply, but if they were operating right on the brink of weeding out everything that's "and then jeran and karnik made out n the badguys exploded the end!" it should, if anything, mean that submissions would get accepted almost instantly. If they're not, but there's still a steady supply of entries that exceeds the number of published entries every issue, then soooomeone is being a bottleneck at the other end. Ahem.
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Post by Zoey on Jun 6, 2019 7:58:44 GMT -5
The Neo team seems to be short-staffed and I'm guessing they're putting their efforts into whatever has the most demand. The editorial is the most crucial part of the NT nowadays, and people will complain on the boards if it isn't updated. Comics are the most-browsed section otherwise, and reviewing those takes like a minute or less each, so they'll get shuttled along pretty quickly. All other categories get left behind, and as long as there isn't an uproar about it, I don't see them resolving that bottleneck, unfortunately. Love that number crunching, though! 70-80 submissions is not that many, but still more than I expected, to be honest.
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Post by Breakingchains on Jun 6, 2019 13:37:57 GMT -5
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