cowguin,

naw, just the judge.

Personally it seems like the juges picked randomly for both contests…

Honestly… the 11 word sentence : click click click is like the one who took the less time to think about and it doesn’t even respect the rules : it’s nowhere close to a sentence (without counting that it’s not even funny). Plus, none of them included a sword. Lame…

For the fan art part, I checked the drawings fast and both winners weren’t even in my top 5. Whatever.

All the art went up August 31 or earlier in my time zone, which was when the deadline was set. You see your own time zone on the forums if you’re registered and have specified a region, and I’m on the US west coast, so -8 GMT (or is it -7 this time of year, with daylight savings?)  for me. If you’re in Europe or Asia you’ll see Sept 1 for shots 8 or 10 or 16 hours before I do.  I checked the gallery at midnight and changed the folder permissions so nothing else can be uploaded to it.

As for the art pick, Kaeros makes a good point with his “I personally think the two winners definitely had the best balance between technical skill and the *focal point of a sword.*” remark, but I can’t say if that was really the deciding point, since I didn’t make the decision. I picked 8 or 10 that I liked and sent the links to Ben, and he made the final decision, with input from his wife and daughters. He looked at all of the entries, not just the ones I suggested, and the ones he commented on I mentioned on the contest page.

The only real rule was that the image be Diablo related and feature a sword, and I didn’t know which pics Ben would like best, since his eye, like all of ours, will be drawn to different things.  The sword did have to be prominent though, which ruled out the Druid vs. Goat and Necromancer one. Perhaps I should have stressed that the sword had to actually be visible and and important part of the piece, not just strapped to a character’s body.

On the stories, like the art, no one is going to agree since we’ve all got different tastes. I had to forget about the “allude to/mention a sword” part since virtually none of the stories did, and since most of the entries were humor, the few that were serious stood out more clearly. As with the “caption this” entries, I didn’t pick my personal favorites, but the ones I liked and thought were clever and witty and did best at enlightening or amusing.

(I laughed hardest at the “baal entertaining the japanese” one, personally, since it matched my own sense of humor. I was making similar, tentacle-related jokes back in 2001, but I didn’t think a story with a hentai allusion that most people would not get, and those who did would be offended by, was an acceptable winner.)

Of them all, the click click click was, to me, the clear winner. It was the only one that stood out very clearly in my mind after reading all 500~ entries. Picking the other winner was really hard, and like I said, the best serious one got the other top prize, since there were dozens of very good humor ones that split that vote. As Ben said about the art, he wished he had 10 books to give away. I wish we had more tyrael cards to pass out too, but we’re trying to run a variety of contests, and give people with different skills a chance to win. And the next contests will go online tonight, if I have time to make up the pages for them.

Also, I was hoping for some more bitterness and slander in the comments, to be honest. Check out the juicy rantings our WoW site got with their recent movie poster contest.

http://www.worldofwar.net/n/416648/wow-poster-competition-winners

Seriously, if you guys can’t at least accuse me of trading sex for prizes, how seriously can I take your complaints? Pfft

Funnily enough, though I lost at this contest, I actually won the WoWinterface.com comic contest(I’m Arathius if any of you want to see), I didn’t get the book, but I got what I wanted, the Beta key and the Tyrael pet.

Congrats to the winners, and I would like to thank the people who organized this contest, it was very fun and I hope to see another contest like this one in the future.

Oh man. This was so tough!  I loved the entries so much, and here I had to pick some winners?  I am SO sensitive about judging ART - it’s totally subjective, and who am I to say what’s good?  So, here’s what I did: I opened the files flux sent me, and called in my wife and kids and asked for help.  This just saved me from tearing my hair out, trying to pick on my own. Anyhow, we finally settled on our common picks after LONG debate.  We went back and forth between so many, it became ridiculous!  There were so many awesome entries!  The Goatman vs. Druid blew my mind for instance, but there wasn’t a sword! D’oh!  Some Barbarian was leaping onto Diablo’s head in a crazy attack… Or a Skeleton got a sword in the mouth!  Or whoah, the KING LEORIC picture!  I loved the cold and hot colors!!! I could go on and on. We really liked so many, it was killing me.  I wish I had ten books to give away. But alas, we had to pick two, so I went with the picks of that moment, sent the email to flux, and bit the bullet. That part wasn’t fun.

I want to thank all the people who participated!  Thank you so much!  All the entries were awesome.  I had a ton of fun with this contest (except the judging part!!!), and I want to thank Diii.net for everything. So, again, thanks to all!

I would also like to thank Ben and the organizers for setting up this great round of contests. It was a blast!

Next time I’ll be more careful to read the instructions. ;D

It was fun Congratulations to the winners. It was fun, which is the whole point of a thing like this.. And I learnt a thing or two aswell.

Too bady my brother doesn’t get to have a tyrael pet now lol.. but as he said "my computer is too bad to be able to handle Wrath of the Lich King."

@ cowguin : "Create a piece of fan art (may be digital, pen or pencil on paper, sculptural, costumed, wallpaper, etc) set in any era of the Diablo game world. *Your image must feature a sword.* ".... feature not be the focus necessarily…..

congrats to the winner! I especially loved kaeros’ 11 word story