News: Academy For Modding Excellence announces special rules for NWN2 Authors

[BenWH]

The Academy for Modding Excellence will be handling the author recognition awards for NWN2 slightly differently this year, as it is the first year. Normally, we have a veteran award for those who have also produced work in previous years, and a debut award available for all other authors. In order to ensure everyone is eligible for an award, but to help level the playing field, we have split these two awards for NWN2 as follows:

The Veteran Author Award will be given to authors who have produced a work in NWN2 in the current cycle, but have also produced work in NWN1 in previous years. (Submissions for Bioware's original Writer's competition do not count, due to the highly restrictive rules of that competition, but all other modules do)

The Debut Author Award will be given to authors who have produced their first work for NWN2 in this cycle, and did not author anything for NWN1.

This will be an exception only for this year.

[BenWH]

Why did AME opt to handle the author awards for NWN2 this way?

For those of you who have read the goals of AME, you will know that primarily we want members of the public to find the best, and then secondarily, to reward the makers of those works so that they continue to strive for the highest standards.

For this reason we decided to use both awards for NWN2 even though it's the first year.

So how can you have a veteran award in the first year? Well we decided that though NWN and NWN2 are different games, some of the same skills come in handy for both, so it wouldn't really be fair on new authors to lump everyone into the Debut Author category, plus we wouldn't be telling anything new to the public who had stuck with NWN for many years and recognised these authors already.

But on the other hand there are folks who didn't care for NWN and won't know these authors from the new ones on the scene, so we also wanted to have the option to highlight one of these authors to those folks who are new to NWN2 and might appreciate that good work can come from well established authors too.

There were several other arguments for doing this (as well as a couple against), but in a nutshell that's it.

[Alex Hugon]

I think that's a pretty fair way of handling the situation.

Out of curiousity, do you know when nominations will be going public?  Is there anywhere that community members can check out a loose timetable for the awards?

[BenWH]

We haven't (yet) published a timetable, but keep a look out as one will be published in due course, once we are 100% certain we are being realistic with our workloads (plus I like to keep fresh news on the site!)

[Alex Hugon]

We haven't (yet) published a timetable, but keep a look out as one will be published in due course, once we are 100% certain we are being realistic with our workloads (plus I like to keep fresh news on the site!)

Sounds good!  I'll keep an eye out.