Suggestions for Change

[Chippiewill]

My quote was "one of the smallest". Please tell me how that is wrong, there are some smaller, but there are some bigger to.

Because Competitions is about average.

My question, which nobody to my knowledge has answered.. What would cutting down on the number if comps staff benefit?

Nvr posted why ages back.

Its unnecessary little changes like this which annoy people, instead of trying to fix departments which are doing well, why not address some more serious matters.

Examples and ways to solve them would be helpful?

[Yupt]

Nvr said that the departments should not be merged, agreed.

He also said that there should be a competition per week, 10 times Less what we currently provide... Not agreed.

If we were to only do one competition per week then fair is fair, there should be less staff if that was the case. But it's not, we currently do 40 comps per month, which averages to 5 comps per staff member per month, we put a lot of thought into each competition behind the scenes, whether you may think so or not, agreed comps don't do as much as say hxhd staff, I never said we did, but that doesn't mean we should change it dramatically.

Edit; if you want to see the bigger issues, go back to garions first post.

[nvrspk4]

We do 40 competitions a month and there are still some people saying there should be more. You're suggesting dividing that by ten. Personally, I think you're trying to fix something that isn't broken. The department's currently on a high.

First of all, my apologies, I didn't realize you do 40 competitions a month, should have looked into that first. Second of all, I don't think you should do 40 competitions a month. Looking down the first few pages, I see a maximum of 26 entries, and those are outliers. There was Saurav's Birthday Bash which went well, but other than that, there were very few competitions.

I'm not sure why you would choose to give out 40 sets of prizes when you're getting 10 entries per competition. Perhaps downsizing to 10 (to 10, not dividing by 10, that'd be 4) comps per month would be a positive idea. A four times bigger prize might encourage more participants, and would also allow you to focus more on promoting those four.

I think four competitions with 50 entries beats 50 competitions with 10 entries. You might say that the latter has a over double the total entries. Yes, it does, but think about the utility. That's probably 10 members satisfied, who were probably already members. If you're getting 50 people involved in every competition, it's a much more useful department than the other situation.

Now the decrease in competition entries might not be your fault, but I think downsizing and focusing on a smaller number of competitions may be beneficial. To adapt the quote of the competitions guru, "quality, not quantity."

http://www.habboxforum.com/forumdisp...=27&order=desc
and
http://www.habboxforum.com/forumdisp...=31&order=desc

should be what we're aiming for in terms of entries.

Nvr said that the departments should not be merged, agreed.

He also said that there should be a competition per week, 10 times Less what we currently provide... Not agreed.

If we were to only do one competition per week then fair is fair, there should be less staff if that was the case. But it's not, we currently do 40 comps per month, which averages to 5 comps per staff member per month, we put a lot of thought into each competition behind the scenes, whether you may think so or not, agreed comps don't do as much as say hxhd staff, I never said we did, but that doesn't mean we should change it dramatically.

Edit; if you want to see the bigger issues, go back to garions first post.

I understand that you do 40 a week and you're thinking of downsizing as a bad thing. However, my point is that if the 40 comps per month aren't well-entered, then there's no point doing 40 comps a month. Obviously there's something seriously wrong and the easiest way to fix that is to downsize, focus, and rebuild from there.

I understand that you're all putting in a lot of effort, and that 40 competitions a month is a lot. However, I disagree that the fact that the Competitions Department is putting out 40 competitions a month means that they're being effective and the department is in top shape. That said, I will say once again, it's impressive that each staff member is putting out 5 comps a month, it's just not tackling the actual problem that the Comps Department is facing.

I have to second this. Having worked in the Competitions Department, it's much better to work with fewer staff. Four in total is all that's really required. I was fortunate that I had a good assistant manager who once I had taught, I could delegate work to him/her, could trust them to update the site for me, and eventually deliver prizes. Competitions should also roll on, once one has ended another should already be in place. So I don't quite understand why there is a month end. It's not a business, it's a department that should encourage new members to enter competitions regularly, and hopefully help retain their membership on the forum. Whilst they are waiting for winners to be announced, and checking out the new competitions appearing, they have the opportunity to trawl through all the new threads and posts made on the forum. Gets them interested in what else is on offer with Habbox.

Good competitions are important, it's what keeps members coming back, particularly new younger ones, as those members tell their friends. Quality is very important, and also a range of competitions that the younger members don't find to difficult to enter

I've not studied the Competition Forum in depth, but does the final post in a competition thread announce the winner, as well as being announced elsewhere? If it doesn't it should do.

Agreed with all of that.

[Chippiewill]

I'm not sure why you would choose to give out 40 sets of prizes when you're getting 10 entries per competition. Perhaps downsizing to 10 (to 10, not dividing by 10, that'd be 4) comps per month would be a positive idea. A four times bigger prize might encourage more participants, and would also allow you to focus more on promoting those four.

I think you confused yourself there..

Obviously there's something seriously wrong

Actually I think the point is they're doing better than they were?

[Yupt]

Have to agree with chippie there, comps deffinatly do not lack a sense of promoting the department.

Can I also ask what the links provided lead to? My phone doesn't seem to want to open them.

[Martin]

The thing is, you can't really win with feedback. A while ago members were asking for more competitions. Competitions that were easy to enter, had variety and different types of competition etc.

I personally don't think the department is "facing a problem", and it's currently getting better and better. Over the past few months entries have been slowly increasing in general. We are told to aim for at least 10 entries per competition and I don't think this is bad really. When you look at the amount of forum members, and the amount of competitions that are usually on offer, having 10 entries+ isn't bad at all. A significant number of these are new members joining up, and I really do think that a good variety of competitions ensures that people will be more likely to find something that they are more interested in entering.

Michael and Alex do tons of advertising, and so much you could probably classify them as robots. They do a brilliant job of promoting the comps forum, and it's really payed off.

Hitting over 500 entries in total in a month is brilliant, and it's really the overall month you could look at, and realise that this is a great number of entries in total, which will be made up of newer and older members alike.


More variety and different types of comps will attract more people. There are other ways to get more entries on individual comps, however a lot of the time it also boils down to forum activity, how busy the forum is, and the style and easabilty of the competitions on offer.

I really don't think cutting back on the number of competitions would achieve much overall per month, perhaps just saving a few prizes here and there. The prizes themselves are often things like VIP, reputation and furniture, and I think they've achieved a good level of prizes now and this is certainly another factor in luring people in.

With amount of entries on the increase, a lot of new faces joining the forum as a result of comps, and a department full of dedicated people who enjoy their roles, I don't think there's much to be fixed personally, and the balance at the moment is good. I'm not just saying that as a Comps staff member, I'm saying it as a forum member who would happily enter the current competitions, find them to be nice and varied, and can see the huge amount of work Michael puts into his department. There were fewer competitions in the past, and this didn't really make things all that better.

My views on a merge of competitions and events are above, and I definitely don't think this should happen. I think people underestimate the success of the comps department at times, and I think with this number of competitions on offer it allows there to be a far better choice of them available. If there was "something wrong" surely it would have been identified months and months ago, since the department is currently doing fine in my eyes.

[Josh]

on the merging issue, how would applications work? you need client-based workers (events) but not comps. are you just going to open apps for the events section? if so, it'd be the same as having two departments.

[Grig]

Ah but Sammeth did a review on comps to make them more effective. However, I do agree comps need to be really creative and have huge prizesas before. Their layout is good now, but maybe nvr is right. I was with JoeyK. in comps and it worked well with less staff and less regular comps .

[Alex3213]

This is going to be very small as although I am on my iPod and on holiday, I personally think it's rude of me not to reply (thus I will only reply to comps).

I'm actually going to start which hasn't been said by anyone yet- thank you. Everyone knows that wirhout feedback you can't supply a better dept. so the department really appreciates it.

However, I do not like the merge idea. Josh has made my main concern being applicants, I resigned from events cos I didjt wanna do them. Why put applications open if some wanna do on client, some do not? I know I would not apply for a department like that. Also if they merged, youd have a lot more staff, do you need them?

In December, the dept. made a lot of chsnges due to feedback. I wont specify them as its hard typing but one was more comps. We used to have 11 comps/month and a lot were not impressed. Another was cutting down from a fortnight to five days. Again, something which was asked for. Otherwise, you have 14 days to wait for the comp to end, is it worth it? Im not sure five days will be healthy to get 50 people to enter either.

Im reluctantly leaving it at that and I shall return once im home. Sorry for poor SPAG (and i have read your points, dw nvr, ill reply soon)

[Inseriousity.]

I am well aware that MissAlice was a brilliant competitions manager but I'm afraid to say that the whole dynamic of Habbox has changed considerably and I doubt that the suggestions made would prove a success in the long term. I started recording number of entries from October onwards and with the system of my predecessor, I continued with that up until December when a massive feedback thread made me change everything. As you can see from the graph above, these changes have been a success and we're constantly reaching 500 entries now.

So to quote another popular phrase 'Why fix something that isn't broken?' I don't think any department manager would be foolish enough to say 'my department's perfect' but I don't think a department manager would change a formula that seems to be working either.