Advanced Tips for Challenge Creators

This page is under construction. Will eventually include advanced tips on challenge creation, how to read the CSV/pick out cheaters/select a winner, picking proper tags, using emojis, using content sharing to help score, etc.

Feel free to join us over at the Guild Leaders & Challenge Creators guild to ask any questions and share your challenges!

Challenge Creation Tips
Please read the section on Creating a Challenge before beginning.

Tags
Once you have determined the name, guild the challenge belongs to, and number of gems, you will also need to enter a tag name. Because many users participate in many challenges at once, it's necessary to use a short but descriptive tag. If it will be a recurring challenge, a date or number addition to the tag may help differentiate it from past or future recurrences of the same challenge. For example, a challenge to help you stop smoking may have the tag "StopSmoking0516" for May, 2016, but "StopSmoking0616" for June, 2016. You can also use emojis within the tag. This can help add a theme of sorts to your challenge, which can be especially helpful if the challenge requires participants to respond in the guild chat.

Tasks
If this is your first time creating this challenge, make sure you know which order all the challenges should appear. The tasks created first will appear lowest. For example, if you want challenge participants to check off the following To-Do's in a challenge to stop smoking, you would enter in the 15 day streak To-Do first, followed by the 10 day streak, followed by the 5 day streak. Participants in the challenge can rearrange the task list once they join the challenge.

Advanced Challenge Mechanics
There are some ways that you can design your challenge to ensure that it is being used for its intended purpose.
 * Habits in challenges are hard to enforce because they do not need to be checked off to prevent damage from occurring. If you have a Habit that should be checked off once a day (i.e., +/- Stayed on task at work), then you can have a Daily that reminds participants to check that Habit (i.e., Mark productivity Habit). ChallengeNotes.png
 * Often, challenge creators will required challenge participants to write a response in the notes section of a task. A challenge creator can see the notes section of every participant (both through the CSV file, described below, or through the challenge page), but not checklist items. Using the notes can ensure that the task is being performed properly and not just being checked off to gain the points.
 * If a challenge requires participants to post responses in the chat of a larger guild, emojis may be helpful in discerning normal chat posts from those pertaining to the challenge. Requiring participants to put an emoji before their challenge response makes it easier for challenge creators to identify and keep track of challenge chat participation.

Large Challenges
Rarely, trying to edit or join a large challenge with many members will result in an "Entity too large" error. This error makes the challenge difficult to join, leave, edit, or close. Cloning and closing the challenge annually (or more frequently if it has a large number of participants) prevents this error. If a user is having a hard time joining a challenge due to this error, they can fill out this form.

Challenge Description
Your challenge description should at minimum describe what the challenge should be used for and any instructions that the participants need to keep in mind. However, there are other things that you can also include in the description:
 * How you will choose a winner (e.g., using a random number generator for those that have completed a specific task or simply those that participated in the challenge, the participant with the highest score on a required Daily, etc.)
 * Past winners (to keep track and possibly avoid giving it to the same person twice)
 * Gamification - Creating a story line about the challenge.

Challenge Editing
When you edit a challenge, the challenge is affected for both current and future participants alike. For example, if mid-way through the challenge, the challenge creator adds a task, that task will then appear on the tasks page for each participant, and any user that joins the challenge after that point will also see the new task. This may be helpful for warding off cheating by adding To-Dos in a spaced out manner for a month-long challenge, but beware! Adding a new Daily to an already existing challenge may result in damage to your participants if they don't see it before their Cron. A feature to delay damage from newly added Dailies for one Cron has already been requested. If a task is deleted from the challenge, a broken megaphone icon will appear in the task and state that the task has been removed from the challenge; the participant will then be prompted to keep or remove that task.

Challenge Completion
At any time during a challenge, the challenge creator can check participants' progress by clicking on their username in the "How's Everyone Doing?" section of the challenge beneath the task, or by downloading the spreadsheet, or CSV file, consisting of all users' challenge progress by clicking on the blue "Export to CSV" button beneath the challenge tasks.

The CSV file lists the UUID and username of each participant and the following for each of their challenge tasks: the task type and name separated by two colons (e.g., "daily::Brush your teeth" or "to-do::Clean your room"), the task value, and any text in the notes box. Task value change at Cron depending on the task type. The CSV file can make it easier to identify participants who have "cheated" in a challenge. For example, if your challenge has a To-Do that states "Go to bed on time for 14 days" and the participant has a task value of +1 for that task, they may have checked off that To-Do immediately upon joining the challenge, rather than after 14 days of adhering to the challenge's principles. Optionally, the challenge creator can remove any participants with a large negative score on any Dailies or Habits that hints that the participant was not as successful within the challenge.
 * For Habits, the challenge creator can easily determine if the participant is doing well on that Habit by high positive values.
 * The task value for Dailies may appear positive if the participant is regularly checking them off or it may appear negative if the Dailies have been going unchecked.
 * The task value for To-Dos reaches a maximum value of +1 if the participant checks it off on the day they join the challenge, and will become more negative in subsequent days depending on the difficulty level of the task. If the value for the To-Do is 0, then this means that either a) the participant joined the challenge the day you downloaded the file and has not completed that task yet, or b) the participant has been in Resting in the Inn, preventing the task value of the To-Do from decreasing. The CSV file does not express whether a participant has successfully checked off a To-Do or not.
 * Note: Skills that affect tasks values, such as Brutal Smash and Searing Brightness, do NOT effect the task values of challenges. This is to make comparing the task values between challenge participants easier.
 * In addition, the CSV file makes it easy to scroll through to see any notes that participants may have edited per challenge guidelines. For example, a challenge Habit may state "Pick a bad habit, and write the habit in the notes." The participant may write "Forgetting to floss" in the notes section of the Habit, and then presses the "+" button every time they remember to floss and the "-" every time they forget to floss. The CSV file will show "Forgetting to floss" in the notes column for the task of that user.

If the challenge requires the participants to actively participate in the guild chat, the owner may wish to double check that participants who have checked off tasks requiring chat participation have actually done so. This can be made easier with the use of emoji, as mentioned above.

Thus, if a challenge creator decides that the winner of the challenge will be randomly selected from all users who complete all challenge To-Dos, a common method for determining the winner of a challenge may be as follows:
 * 1) Download the CSV file.
 * 2) Remove any users who have obviously cheated by immediately checking off To-Dos that require time before checking off (optional).
 * 3) Remove any users who have strong negative values for any Dailies or To-Dos (optional).
 * 4) Remove any users who have not complied with adding notes into tasks that require editing.
 * 5) Look at the "How's Everyone Doing?" section on the challenge page to determine which users have completed To-Dos. Remove any users who have not completed all To-Dos (Note: this method can be tedious if your challenge has many participants; there is currently a feature request for obtaining this information easier).
 * 6) Verify any completed To-Dos that require guild or party chat participation and remove any participants who have checked those To-Dos off but not participated.
 * 7) Use a random number generator from the remaining number of participant's to choose a winner.