The Thirst Games 2 -- NEW Vote Results!

[Executionus]

***Spoilers for the final part***




Well it took almost 4 entire months, and a massive 121,724 words, but the second Thirst Games has finally completed! As part of that, we now get the voting for Favorite Elimination and Favorite Entrant. I am going to run this poll until the end of May just to give everybody possible the chance to vote for their choices. I'll bump this thread for the results on June 1st.

***UPDATE: Use these links instead of the previous one:
Favorite Elimination?
Favorite Entrant?

I am extremely curious as to which entrants and eliminations will wind up being the big favorites, and this information may aid me and others in future writing efforts. It's always good to understand your audience. The people who submitted the winning characters should consider themselves proud as well for their part in the action.

On that note, congrats to Skillbox for winning the contest with the Author character! I greatly enjoyed writing for her, with her unique trait of excessively plotting and planning traps using her environment and her questwriting app. Ironically, I don't think her ability to write quests influenced the others worth a damn, but it was a fun mechanic none-the-less. She completed two of her own quests for useful items, so that was beneficial. The secret to her victories all match came from the fact that she alone would think several steps ahead. Multiple times I would write an entire paragraph full of the multiple layers to whatever trap/ambush situation Author was establishing. She was very unlike the other girls in that she had zero faith in her physical ability, something shared only with Heiress. Most of the other girls were more reactionary, with Waitress being the only person Author fought that used her head much at all.

Skillbox designed her as a meticulous dungeon master with years of experience luring players into traps, and she could now use that experience to take out enemies in the contest. That being said, I found it amusing how often her trap setups failed (twice over with FI for example). When things went wrong, she always had a backup plan. There was always layers to Author's plots, never ever did she rely entirely on just one thing alone. Author's consistent use of sleep attacks wound up being her main saving grace in battle, since almost always Author would find herself getting beat up until the sleep trick was successful. All-in-all a great character and worthy champion!




********
Now with the conclusion of this contest I have an unfortunate announcement to make: I don't think I'm making any more Thirst Games stories in the future. These events drain my energy tremendously, and they take 1/3 of an entire year to complete. Countless hours go into it, and the final size of this story is larger than most novels. No joke, this story ended up over 20% of the size of War and Peace, the novel world-famous for being too goddamn long. I thought reducing the entrant count to 20 would help, but honestly this contest has felt more tiring than the first one did. I got to the point where I legitimately fell asleep while typing 3 separate times.

I might do another Thirst Games some day, but to be honest I probably won't. It just consumes far too much of my life and wears me out from constant work. I'm actually going to take a significant break from writing as a whole once I complete my two summer contest obligations.

So anyway, I hope everyone enjoyed this story and this overall saga! Be sure to vote in the poll. I'll announce the winners on June 1st.

[Nikolai]

Wow







Honestly just wow.



Bravo man, this was an incredible games, I loved what you did with the setting and the various characters as well as the overall gameplay, where you took Waitress was incredible, I loved the various scenes she had and I really felt like you nailed what I was going for, while making it your own, and her defeat and comeuppance was far greater than her earning the championship, reminiscent of the last "bully" to receive her karma in the previous series while being more unique as well, tbh it was amazing, and if this is a farewell to the Thirst Games then atleast it went out with a Bang, I'd love to see someone take the helm on something similar to this in the Games absence, maybe even in the universe, but to be honest no one would do it as good as you do and it deserves to be shelved until years from now(hopefully sooner) you pull it off the ol shelf and get back into it, but if you never do i can respect that, I can also respect you taking a well needed break, don't feel to bad about how long its taken to put out, I've yet to complete the likely last part of detention, and it's a couple months from being a year in the works, and much shorter, but I've had alot going on, as I've mentioned, writing should never feel like a chore, I hope you find your muse and don't leave us too long, rep out some good short stories to break up the monotony, take care, bravo on the conclusion, I'll be doing my voting tonight, thanks all your hard work on the series and for nailing waitresses character and even her downfall, looking back I did send a generous amount, but you took that and ran with it and I was on board the whole way, thanks again.

Hope your well, take care buddy.

[Executionus]

OK, so I'm quite pissed off at SurveyMonkey. Apparently this buttchugger of a website is completely useless in the free version. It will not allow anyone to see any of the poll results past the first 10 voters without me paying it $25 per month. And understand that it will be a cold, frigid, absolute zero of an arctic winter's weather in Satan's sweaty asscrack before I pay any actual money towards a freemium scam site. And you can quote me on that.

I'm going to have to find a better source for this, or just abandon the idea entirely.

[TheBlushingPrincess]

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[Humilatron]

Use http://strawpoll.com

[*Lady Lucia*]

It’s almost comical how criminal it is at this point. I used Survey Monkey for a few of my contests, and have witnessed them going from free unlimited votes all the way down to forty when I had to bail in the middle of a contest vote in order to get everyone counted. Some of you may remember!

Now the number is down to TEN? Oof. It’s like they want us to migrate elsewhere. Limiting the fancy options that used to be free is a good way to sucker some people into paying, but limiting votes is just dumb. That’s the whole point of a survey.

[Humilatron]

It gives me flashbacks to Writing.com who has gone out of their way to make their free site unusable. It used to be all you needed was to make an account, but now they’ve limited that too to the point you literally can’t read a single interactive story past 4 branches. At best you maybe get an introduction lol. That’s why I was reluctant to use CHYOA when I heard about it cuz I was traumatized by Writing.com and their shady business practices.

If we’re talking non-erotic content. I also tried branching to other sites and there was an instance where I reported a user because they were clearly trolling/just being a dick and I was literally called out by a moderator on the same post that it happened in. Like wtf is that. I was under the impression that the reporting system would be anonymous because I have never ever seen an instance where moderators literally blast the people publicly for using a feature.

You can literally see it here btw: https://forums.abdlstoryforum.info/t/sc ... nor/9829/3 I can’t make this shit up. In the moment I was pissed but also in a really awkward position. Like sometimes the CHYOA moderators can be a bit confrontational but at least they keep it in private messages where we can go through the problems. I don’t know what planet this moderator team is on. It’s not like I was spamming the flag system, all I did was hit it once and within a minute of doing so, I got ass blasted. Smh. And whenever people ask me why I only publish on certain forums. THIS is why. Because I can’t trust random ass communities even if it has a specific niche.

Anyways that’s my TED talk of the day. Anyways freemium sucks ass and it’s a shitty business practice that will only make people distrust you or take advantage of those naive enough to fall for it. It’s so bad especially within the adult community.

[Executionus]

Favorite Elimination?
Favorite Entrant?

New links! Hopefully this site works without issue. It at least gets bonus points for being MUCH quicker to use by a mile, without all of the lag and wasteful crap. I'll still end the voting at the end of the month, posting results on June 1st.

There were 19 people who voted on the first poll, so everybody has to vote again on the new site. Looking forward to the results!

It’s almost comical how criminal it is at this point. I used Survey Monkey for a few of my contests, and have witnessed them going from free unlimited votes all the way down to forty when I had to bail in the middle of a contest vote in order to get everyone counted. Some of you may remember!

Now the number is down to TEN? Oof. It’s like they want us to migrate elsewhere. Limiting the fancy options that used to be free is a good way to sucker some people into paying, but limiting votes is just dumb. That’s the whole point of a survey.

This situation is playing out with every company these days. Netflix has been all over the news for this lately. The problem is what's called "Late-Stage Capitalism", which put in simplified terms works as follows: A company that isn't actively growing by over 8% per quarter is treated as a failure no matter how big it is, because modern companies exist solely to produce profit for stock investors (not profit for the company itself). Because infinite growth is impossible, companies begin to self-destruct out of desperation once they hit a ceiling and their growth slows too much. Since 2021 was a record growth year, most companies are pissing themselves in 2022 trying to meet last year's rates, which is why we're seeing literally everybody raising prices across the board and trying to strong-arm their customers into paying more at all costs.

It's monumentally stupid and will result in an eventual crash that will make 1929, 2008, and 2020 look like an average Tuesday. So, we have that to look forward to I guess.

I also tried branching to other sites and there was an instance where I reported a user because they were clearly trolling/just being a dick and I was literally called out by a moderator on the same post that it happened in. Like wtf is that. I was under the impression that the reporting system would be anonymous because I have never ever seen an instance where moderators literally blast the people publicly for using a feature.

Wooooo, yeah I understand that nightmare perfectly. In the early 2000s I was a member of multiple php boards like this one. I even moderated on two of them. Most other forum moderators were unfathomable asshats obsessed with their perceived self-importance, waging war against any members who offended them or hurt their widdle feelings. There was this one site that started a massive war against me when it came out that I wasn't Christian and opposed Christo-fascism. This took place during the Bush era when all non-Christians in America were openly discriminated against, sometimes involving violence (a mosque in my state was frequently molotoved). The entire attempt at shaming me was very public and quickly degenerated into preschool-level basic mockery of random subjects (like saying I couldn't get a girlfriend, or yo mama disses). Me being me, I mocked all of them back, right up until I offended the head honcho too badly and he banned me.

I had several poor interactions on other forums, which is why I eventually stopped using any. My main forum (where I had well over 10,000 posts) eventually self-destructed for the stupidest reasons possible. No seriously, I couldn't even make this up because my integrity as a writer prevents me from conceptualizing an idea this paste-eatingly moronic: A massive gang of Tool fans who worshipped Maynard as a literal god started a gang war with everyone else, resulting in most of the members fleeing. Then the self-proclaimed "Porn King" hacked the site in retaliation after tricking the admin, deleting the entire database. Yep, that was a thing that happened.


Aaaaaanyway, new polls are live! Let's all vote.

[Executionus]

So I'm bumping this and changing the thread name to reflect that the voting has to be done all over again with the new site. The original Surveymonkey poll had 19 responses in around 24 hours, yet I've only had 5 votes so far in the new poll. Anybody that voted in the first one has to vote again to be counted.

Favorite Elimination?
Favorite Entrant?

[Executionus]

So as an update on the voting, one girl is dominating the Favorite Entrant category. Meanwhile we have a tie for first place in the Favorite Elimination poll. I'm hoping to get more votes in order to not have this end on a tie, since that would suck.

There have only been about 25 votes so far, which really isn't that many people. I imagine lots of people have yet to vote on this and may have missed it.