How do you all feel about Awards to members or your RPG?

Like Outstanding member, or Member of the Month, or Member of the week? Best Dawn Summers. or Best Villian, Best plot line, Best origional Character..

Awards to be givin out at various times some monthy some by yearly some seasonally...

And how do you go about making the awards and deciding? Do you think it promots activity? or do you believ that it may single out certin players for greatness and leave others in the dark?

I would really appriciate your opinion on this people. Its a dcision i have ben thinking about for a while now

it depends on how you do it. for me, i do member of the month and character of the month on most of my boards with another one thrown in there from time to time just to change things up.

for me, the CotM is done by the members where they nominate and vote on their favorite character. to prevent things from getting unfair, though, this character will not be allowed to be voted on again until others have had a chance. it's only fair and it promotes activity and creativity.

the MotM is done by the administration. we pick a member who has best helped the board in some way or another. this one might not be as fair since it is picking out certain people but i would like to think that it's not being a negative influence and that it's mostly encouraging other members to do great things to help the board they're on.

i've never done the seasonal or yearly but that's because i've got so many members who just come and go, they're all rarely aroudn when it comes to those sorts of things.

Thank you nadja!

Now i have another question for you If the MotM is picked by the administration should they be "immune" from such an award?

and if so then should they be "immune" from the CotM award also? Or does that not matter since people are nominated by the RPers of the forum?

Interesting, we do it the opposite way. We have the staff nominate the CotM and the members vote on them. And for our member awards (we call them Most Valuable Player), which occur quarterly, we accept nominations from the members who then vote on them.

Since we feel that the staff are already approving character applications and setting the standards for RP that way, it shouldn't be too unfair to have them determine the CotM nominees.

And for the member awards, staff are ineligible, because we plan to have staff awards later on. For CotM, staff are eligible, because they have characters just like the rest of the membership. In fact, our first CotM was a staff member who played one of our central canons.

I like that idea of having staff awards.

So the CotM can be any character staff or not then there will be MVP or MotM as well as -nod nod-

We do it this way too. Members nominate and everyone get to vote for the character of the month. Although now I keep a list, and characters who won once can't be nominated again. Only one vote pr member, naturally (I know who's who)... :) the award right now is a special member title, before I gave small banners saying they won it, but the member title is more fun I think...

We don't have MotM awards, and honestly I don't know where I should put the 'winner' anyway. There's not space in our header box I think :lol:

See now that im thinking about it and taking into concideration the space and what not i supose i could make a new box and put it above or below the little menue thing i got set up.

I was also thinking of making a banner for the player to put in their signature or a special skin for them IE the characterof the month Skin. or maybe a banner for the top of the forum... (not the SL banner just an extra one)

Also thinking i could use some coding to get the extra member title box in the mini profiles. that way i could put them as character of the month for (insert month here)

yeah, i've got a whole other section for the awards. i figured it just keeps things more organized and creating another cell isn't hard at all. there are so many awards out there so it just kind of makes sense. of course, couple of the moment is the most ridiculous, to me.

lol yeah, we don't put the staff in as MotM.

i've seen it where sites award little graphics to the winner to place in their signatures [like a 200x100 icon] and i think it's brilliant but i'm too lazy to do that, lol. maybe on my newest board...

when i put the announcement that so and so has won CotM, i just place a link to their bio and their plot under their pic and a quick little blurb about why we love them.

Currently at AG we have Featured Members and Featured Quotes...only two because it's one of my pet peeves to see a gazillion 'TBA!' tags in the sidebar, and it gives the admin less updating work every 1-2 months.

For Featured Member, members submit other members (or, when the bums are too lazy to pick someone new after several weeks, one of the co-admin will submit someone to the other co-admin. I suppose they have trouble picking one person to submit because they're all so awesome. :p). They're submitted for things like original characters, good/funny/improvement in posts, high activity, a friendly and welcoming attitude, etc.. We don't have a timeline or cycle like '____of the month' for it because we wouldn't follow it...at all. Everyone who's submitted will be featured, there's no voting process. I'm thinking of changing to Featured Character at this point because the members may be more responsive...but we'll see.

We have Featured Quotes as well, which the admin pull from all the threads on the site. It's my favorite feature because it really shows what the site is made of. Characters who steal flying carpets, punch Victoria Beckham in the face for a scarf, and eat British babies for supper! x.x

I think it is very important to let players know when they're doing something right. They're not necessarily writing for themselves, after all. I'm all for awards so long as they're utilised and not just sitting there gathering dust. Because of this I don't think character of the month or week or moment are much use to anyone if the staff are being sporadic about it. You need a dedicated member and staff base to pull that kind of thing off on a regular basis.

I have a few ways in which I show appreciation, and how members can show appreciation for one another.

- Awards of Awesomesaucery: A sticky thread in our announcements forum where members can come as often or as little as they like with something they thought another player did really well with. Maybe the mod did a good job of quickly going through an application, maybe someone is able to sustain multiple threads. Maybe a player has reached a milestone with their character or did something that really stuck out. I think this is a great way to get people reading one another's posts and connecting themselves with the rest of the players. It also shows we care about one another's efforts.

- Annual RPG Awards: I am not someone who could keep up a monthly or 'moment' voting process. Annual awards was a big enough pain. We collected ideas for categories, held nominations then a poll, and we've just started putting up the first set of awards. We did this through a rotation banner which you can view on the board at the moment. Each refresh gives you a new award.

- Character Quotes: A funny sentence, or something that moved us. Provided it isn't an entire post (that would be awarded in Awesomesaucery) members submit quotes, along with the name of the character who said it and I put it into our quotation rotation that appears beneath our Welcome Box.

- Muse Madness: This helps promote OOC community and again, acknowledges other players for their creativity. It's when you sit around in IM and start posting for your characters instead of yourselves, or, characters interacting with the players. It isn't roleplaying as such, it's more character speaking for themselves.

I don't buy into the whole, 'oh it's just a popularity contest,' thing. It has always strengthened my OOC communities and I'm glad we have a diverse way of giving our players pats on the back.

We do a few different things.

First, we have Member and Character of the month. In the past, we had the members nominate and vote for Cotm (Motm wasn't around back then). But after a while it became apparent that people were just nominating and voting for their friends; and the winners always came from the same pool of characters. Now, my co-admin and I choose Cotm and Motm each month. We don't choose any of our characters because it becomes a conflict of interest.

At the end of every term, we have superlatives. The members get to choose the superlatives themselves, as well as nominate and vote for the winner.

We're also planning to have a huge award thing for our 1 year anniversary, in which the members will get a chance to nominate and vote for the winners in a bunch of IC and OCC categories.

On my board we are doing Best Couple and Non couple of the month as its a family board and a lot of the people interacting are non couples but have relationships of the family way. Admins and Mods are nomating character quotes and then the members are voting on the quotes to see who wins, it lets everyone have a say but also adds order.

I tend to do awards in rotation, one month we will have CoTH and MoTH then the next couples and then the next we do a mix of the two then go back to Coth that way you can have people work on differenet points of the game. I find it also keeps the game more active as people don't know what will be up next so they are writing as much as possible to make sure they can have a number of nominations if it happens.

The nomations are taken from only active members during the time of the last voting and to the current. We normally start looking at people around the 20th of the month and have voting the last weekend of the month and have the winners on the board by the first of the new month so we can keep track of when we look at posts :D

We do two monthly awards: MotM and Thread of the Month. I think doing TotM encourages the members to look around and read other people's writing, not just their own, and it gives members a sense of what the story is on the whole forum, not just their threads.

The voting for both of them goes the same way. The staff are part of the voting process but they get no more say than anyone else. I'm not personally a fan of staff making those type of executive decisions; the forum is for the members, and only they have the right to decide who they value, in my opinion. So to vote, I first have nominations. Everyone can nominate for each category with a short explanation of why they are nomination that person/thread. Each person/thread needs two nominations to get into the final poll. After about a week, I place a poll up with those who qualified by getting two votes, and then there's another week in which members can vote in the poll.

Right now, my board is just starting out. When it grows larger, I'll think about adding more awards.

On my previous board we used to have the Admin/Mod Staff vote for who they thought earned the title but now I'm trying the voting thing with no success. No ones voting or even nominating members, I don't know how to fix this and I am thinking to scrap the whole CotM all together. I do however have the quotes :)

In the board I used to run, I would have one big MotM fest divided up into several categories. These categories were:

Fighter of the Month: The person who shows the most combat-literate roleplay throughout the month.
Comedian of the Month: The member with the funniest roleplays.
Drama Queen of the Month: One who is active in the plot and rp development sections, making epic plotlines and demonstrating a keen structure of the understanding of human emotions.
Roleplayer of the Month: Simply put, the most literate/active/dedicated/best quality roleplayer.
Community-Member of the Month: The guy/girl who helps benefit the site whether it be submitting ideas, or helping out the newbies.
Villain of the Month: Simply put, the evilest of evil.