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I believe the short-list system is a form of (unintentional) gatekeeping and more opportunities should be given to the quiet worldbuilders to shine. We are writers and creators first and foremost, not marketers and influencers.

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I agree. If the number of likes are visible, it may sway others to like it too. Hide the number of likes and then the person reading the article can vote based on merit vs popularity.

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I agree that this needs addressing, but the suggested solution is unwise.

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This is well-thought-out suggestion, and I agree that there's a problem, but I don't think this is the solution—at least not for me.   For me, the lack of a central public place to see rankings is part of the problem. Right now, in order to see where you rank for Challenges, you have to go through every article individually and collate the data yourself. And some of us—who might be called unhealthy for this behavior, I understand—will do that. And that adds to the stress, because it's a lot of work.   I do enjoy the challenges, and I do enjoy expanding my world and world-building in general, but I'm publishing my work to build an audience. And Likes and Comments are a critical way of gauging whether or not I'm achieving that goal. (Not as critical as how many books I sell, but still very important).   So, while I agree that something might be done here, I don't think hiding Likes is the answer.

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I understand this completely. Time and time again, when Summer Camp, World Ember, or Community Challenges arise, I feel disheartened to put my stuff out there, or even on the discord channel as I see so many people out there with 15 or 100 likes while I either get 0 to 4 likes total, and that's with commenting and liking other people's articles (sometimes 10 or 15 articles in a row).   Being unable to see other people's likes after an article has been submitted would help boost morale and maybe it would stop the greediness of people harassment of other's begging for likes so much. What you get is what you get. I don't know how easy this would be to implement, but I'm sure it would be extremely helpful to people like me and Jacob-W.

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I am all for more fair play within challenges, and while I don't think that this will solve the issue, adding to this discussion might yield something positive for the entire community.

+10

While I see and acknowledge the problem(s) this suggestion seeks to address... I do not believe that the proposed solution will have any long-term, meaningful impact. For many people, competition is inspirational and motivating. And for many others, like myself, the human need to compete is a bit of a turn-off. There seems to be a strong focus on competition within the WA community and I think that's becoming increasingly divisive. I'm casting a minor + vote because I think this issue needs to be discussed and I'm interested in seeking a solution that builds a stronger community for everyone.   I would like to see less emphasis on competitions. While I really enjoy the challenges, the built-in competitive nature of those challenges leaves me less-interested in participating. I think having the option to participate in challenges while opting-out of the competition might be a more healthy approach. And I think placing some limits on how competitors may promote their entries within the WA Discord and platform would be welcomed by many. Otherwise those that are annoyed or turned-off by such promotions are likely to simply tune-out or spend less time engaging.

-10

I second the comment below (Naelin), still even if I don't agree with the suggestion it's good to see a discussion on the problems

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I usually upvote even the suggestions I disagree with, but I want to make clear why I think the specific suggestion is a bad idea for the community:   I wholeheartedly agree that there is an increasing amount of unhealthy competition in the challenges. I wholeheartedly agree it is something that needs thinking and actioning.   That said: First and as mentioned by many, the problem with the challenges is unrelated to the likes. You can remove the like counts out of the entirety of the website, people will move their unhealthy competitiveness to the next best thing. Anyone that has stayed in the Discord long enough has seen people accusing "the usual winners" of anything from farming likes to having a "horde" of mindless-liking fans (aka accusing this of being a popularity contest... just read the comments below), to "being so talented that it's not fair for them to participate".
I've personally seen this happen several times where the accused person was not even participating in the challenge/WE/SC.   Besides this, I think the idea of hiding the likes during the competition sounds good on the surface, but it does not only work like just a bandaid, it will actually be damaging.   There are two ways to implement this suggestion: Hiding all likes (from all articles or just the related template) during the competition: This will not only be unfair for the people not participating (Challenges have only a couple hundred entries, while there are thousands of active users), it will also cause confusion and bug reports from people that are not involved enough to realise there is a competition going on.
Hiding the likes only for articles submitted to the competition: People will just wait until last minute to submit their articles to the competition, or remove them when they realise they cannot see the likes.   I think this is also damaging in another way: The idea attempts to solve an unhealthy behaviour by supressing it..
While likes (in general) trick us into wanting always more of a thing that has no upper limit, and therefore are not exactly healthy, I don't think they are the core of challenges themselves. I delved a bit on this on an analysis I did last SummerCamp, but the core of it is that we start participating on the challenges for the worldbuilding, and slowly end up participating for the badge or for the prize, losing the original reason along the way.   I unfortunately don't have the magical answer to this. I think it will require softer methods, many of which are already being encouraged by D&J (such as the always important "if you have more worldbuilding than when we started you won") and probably with more managing on a community level.  

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  Tl;Dr: I don't think this will be a healthy way to deal with the issue, as it approaches it by supressing the problem instead of addressing it. Besides this, I think this would negatively impact non-competitors, while competitors will be able to either easily avoid it or just moving the competition to a different focus.

+10

This is complicated, and I think no matter what we do, competition will bring out both the best and the worst in people. Likes, in general, will always be sought after by some, as they produce a dopamine boost. And others will always find competition in and of itself distasteful and/or stressful.   Honestly though, some people work best under the "stress and anxiety" of competition. I do see the best articles during the competitions, from myself and others. And we all have the personal choice whether or not to participate. Perhaps the onus of deciding if it's too stressful should be an individual decision.   >>>> Shyredfox brings up an excellent point about an option to submit for the badge versus submit for judging - that seems a relatively easy way to reduce stress for some people. I fully support this idea.   I do like Kefkejaco's suggestion of somehow featuring new entries or just a revolving feature of random challenge entries, which is not contingent upon likes. But I'm not sure this will alleviate some of these negative feelings, nor will it push a wall of text to the top of the shortlist.   [Sorry if I hurt feelings here (and this is not directed at anyone in particular), but I'm not sure complaints, vilifying people with followers (who also started off new here), and eschewing community participation creates healthier competition. Nor is it fair or becoming to assume all winners and shortlisters are there through nefarious means. Some of those articles are excellent.   Meanwhile, some people seem unwilling to do even the most basic formatting available through a click of a button, and others seem unwilling to even say hello in Discord. What would motivate people to read and like those articles, then? Out of hundreds.]

+10

I'm unsure if this change would actually fix the problem, and I think some of these comments on the suggestion are an example of why.   I'm going to give this a small positive vote because I do think it's a topic worth exploring, however.   There seems to be two styles of comments in here -- the first kind, I agree with. It's that this problem with negative emotions surrounding challenges is something that has to be dealt with on a personal level. No matter what World Anvil does to mitigate it, the nature of competition means that not everyone can win, and *that's okay*. It's about seeing what others do, learning, growing, making your own work better.   The second kind of comment is the one that worries me. The sort of "boiling it down to a popularity contest" comment. It feels so dismissive of your fellow authors work. No one is like-farming, no one is where they are merely because of popularity -- they get to where they are by reading, learning, and improving. This is done mainly by taking in new ideas and concepts by reading other peoples work and engaging with it. It's so disheartening to see people suggesting that these efforts equate simply to "popularity" or "too much free time".   The final thing I'd like to mention is that I also think there's nothing wrong with competition, if approached in a healthy way. No one is forced to join them, and for me personally, they've been the biggest influence on the improvement of my own work. Trying to win is a great motivator, and while loss can sting, it's also a great opportunity to learn.   In the end, please try to remember the human behind the article.

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World anvil has a serious issue with its events. Ever since the Hero's Journey challenge a small group of people have been using your influence and that fact that they have tons of free time to put themselves on the shortlist, rather than skill.   I put up a suggestion like this a few months back and it got shot down, I hope you have better luck!   One thing I'd like to see added to this suggestions is that the "fog of war" should effect the author to some degree too. I think that the author should only know how many people liked their article, not who. this prevents link mining tactics, where people go around liking as many articles as possible, hoping others with reciprocate.

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Prefacing this with: I didn't come to WA to compete; I came to write. I find most competitions toxic and gross. They encourage people to do terrible things to themselves and others. Ick.   In World Ember, I competed against myself, against that urge to procrastinate, and in the same spirit of Nanowrimo. I did, however, watch the competition side of things, and in my observations, the biases are real. It doesn't necessarily mean they're bad, but imagine being a first time competitor and opening the leader page the second morning into World Ember, only to find the well-known, long-established users already there with 20+ likes - in almost every category available...   It's discouraging.   It's downright disheartening.   I haven't seen any categories dedicated to first time competitors either, where emphasis on being new is the highlight, or being a fantastic css coder *isn't* the emphasis (because, let's face it, presentation is a large percentage of that appeal, too).   (I'd like to add here, that just prior to WE I also observed private-world users get wholesale shutdown, too. There should be a whole slew of milestone badges for users who sign up and/or pay for WA, private or not. Fitbit doesn't deny me a badge just because I don't effin' run the Boston Marathon. And badges ARE motivating.)   It's hard enough to establish oneself in a new community as it is. This community isn't unfriendly or unwelcoming; I'm not at all suggesting otherwise. People have been helpful. But I like the idea of blotting out the like counts from pages for the duration of the competition (I'd remove them from the leaderboards, too, at least for the first few days, but that's me). I don't encourage hiding likes from the public indefinitely. Likes are badges, too, except given by the greater community: they are encouraging.   I don't view this as the entire solution to a growing problem, but I do believe it's a positive step in the right direction. Articles should be judged based on their quality and merits. And just to echo someone else's sentiment: not all challenges have to be competitive, either.   If not this as part of the solution, then at least a "rethink" on how some of these community programs are sponsored and approached.

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Personally, I'm not a very competitive person, and if I feel competitive, I usually just take it as a motivator, not a stressor. I have yet to join any big competitions because of real life stress, but I'm planning to join Summercamp so I would actually like to see some change. Mainly, because I'm honestly not fond of a Like-garnering-based competition period. I know that this is technically a "community" challenge and as such it makes sense to involve the community. But looking at the state of the social media obsession some people have just makes me think that maybe you should write off popularity based contests entirely.   When it comes to competition and what I personally understand under the term "Healthier Challenges", I would think of challenges in which you can change your place in the leaderboard easily. Challenges you have control over your place without running a marketing campaign. Things like word count, number of articles, maybe leaderboards of people who have published the most in one category like characters, cultures, vehicles etc.   If you really want to do something like-based, I would prefer to have a leaderboard for people who have given the most likes or made the most comments. This way, it would be at least rewarding for everyone involved and I would argue the amount of people who mindlessly go and would dig up every article to like just to be on the top of the leaderboard would be a miniscule amount if that would even happen. I've had challenges before where the most generous likers were rewarded with a mention or been on fanfiction sites where there's a leaderboard for the most generous review-writers for the week/month and it seems to work really well, yet nobody obsesses over it.   So, while I don't think hiding the numbers of likes will actually do anything (much like how YouTube's recent decision to remove the visibility of the dislike-button didn't do anything worthwhile), I would like to see leaderboards that encourage healthy competition with each other instead of encouraging others to see other users only as potential likes.

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Voting to bring attention to the popularity-contest issue

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I'm sorry, I disagree. Getting anxiety, about not being good at something, makes you wanna go further and makes you try harder. Although you had some good points, about the popularity, you lost me on that argument.   I'm not giving you minus points, because I do agree with the part about popularity. So voting yes on this one, but disagreeing with your premise.

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I like the concept of making community challenges more accessible for new users and support the concept of keeping challenges positive that Jacob-W wants to do here. I'm not convinced this is a solution. Author's will still feel like they need to get more likes. It is a marketing campaign. Reaching people multiple times is part of the process. Without support or marketing knowledge, I can see how the effort made can be misunderstood and how repetitive loss will make authors and others uncomfortable or annoyed. Plus, the number of likes you need to get is going up.   How about writing groups when new users want to participate in challenges? Give every new user an instant network of 10-15 other users. That could put them on a more level playing field. Could short listers lead the groups? Share best practices and things we as a community don't want to see done? Give everyone more tools to grow their network. My writing when I started was not as good as now and still needs to grow, we don't want people to be left unsupported but we need the independent learning process too.   That leads to another thing I consider when someone says it is a popularity contest. Is it more popular WA users that are ranking in the short list the most or is it people that are doing something visible for the community? Satrium does stats. We got to know him because of that and because he is supportive and involved on Discord. Amelie, Kefkejaco, and DrunkenPanda read and comment on almost all the articles. Their stories and articles were also solid. I can't keep up with how much they read so try to do other things. Then the whole pie gets bigger for all of us.   Should a really great article with no community effort by the author be on the Community Challenge short list?   Can we do more to support people after the challenge to process their feelings? That is a direction I would prefer. I feel uneasy about making it even more of a surprise for everyone at the end.   I click +10 to say I support Jacob-W making this effort but would rather see other changes.

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I already expressed my thoughts about competition in the WE feedback to J&D. I would like competition to be discouraged because having avversaries is not the best way to harvest the potential of WA community. But everyone needs to understand this on their own. It's not something that can be forced. Meanwhile, I think implementing this suggestion would improve the quality of life of both the people who usually are harassed because of their success, and that of the newcaomers who are stressing trying to reach that success. I quite agree with the fact that the number of likes don't need to be known by anyone but the author (even if I will miss the satisfaction of being the first to like some obsure article hidden in the depth of my faves authors worlds)

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I think this is important, but I am divided on whether this is the right solution. Angantyr said it perfectly.

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It’s a great idea for new comers and wont get people stressed about winning

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As a new member of World Anvil (and an extremely engaged yet not technically proficient as of yet) I vote yes to this to this suggestion. I haven't figured out the discord yet so popularity will be a problem but will also shield me from the "fog of war", as you so eloquently put it. Catch 22. So again yes to this suggestion because I feel marginalized as an "Old Head" who has no idea what a Discord is. LOL. Have a great day and thanks for the suggestion!

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This would certainly reduce a lot of stress and make it easier for those who're more easily stressed by the subconscious compulsion to cross-compare themselves with others to, well, not do that. Certainly would make it easier for folks like myself to have the confidence to even try to enter these challenges.

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I'm of two minds on this I think. On one hand, the amount of Like-begging and rabid promotion of one's work that we're seeing in the Discord and on the site (the amount of times I've gotten really useless comments on my pages simply so that the person could use the signature to point out their article...) is simply unsustainable. That's not the point of the competitions. The point of the competition is to participate and reward people who do a bang-up good job on their contribution. As strange as it sounds, the point of the competition isn't to win (or at least it shouldn't be), it's to do one's best work. Suggestions like these would remove the "comparison" aspect until judging time arrives.   All that said, I'm very much in agreement with some of the comments below that I'm not sure that this specific fix would be the solution. I'd even go a step further and say the problem isn't people focusing on Likes. It's that Likes (and by extension, views) are the metric that determines who ends up on the shortlist and no alternative method of determining them has been created yet. WorldAnvil simply isn't a social media site and except for a handful of wonderful beans that go through and read a large chunk or all of the entries (whom I adore and appreciate so much), there's no way for good work to stand out from the sea of responses without external promotion (which inevitably happens on Discord, Twitter and Twitch) or already being a popular WA writer (and therefore having a large number of followers to share the article with). The WA staff and the community need to grapple with this idea that articles with the most Likes are the best articles, because that simply isn't always true.   I'm supporting this mostly as it's a very important topic for our community to discuss and want to ensure that the topic is seen by Janet and Dimi as they plan for future competitions. But I'm of the opinion that the competitions as they are facilitate this behaviour and this suggestion likely won't end up solving the issue.

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If I could add more than 300 coins to this I would! This is an excellent way to help tone things down. It's not perfect. But I'm not sure there is a way to make a challenge contest perfect.   I'd also like to combine this with the WE option to "submit it for judging". That paired the entries down a lot and made it more feasible to judge. Some people just enter for the badge.   I also want to bring up - that it shouldn't be just trolling for likes. EVER. The most "popular" and liked articles are by the authors that put in a TON of work reading and leaving thoughtful comments AND wrote excellent articles. They make them readable, they make them fun to read, and they work hard to incorporate feedback.   But it's not sustainable to do read and comment ALL of the entries. Satrium was chatting in my stream today about encouraging people to read and comment on 5-10 random articles and I love that idea. It's doable. And it would ensure people get comments and views. Would this mean people that leave comments on other's articles, since we're a supportive community get to be in the running? I don't know.   Also, I'd like to see a "how to write a great competition article" post written (if we don't have one already), so people at least have a checklist. And have examples of articles that won so people can see where theirs compares. It would also let people know it's more than just filling in the blanks. There's feedback, editing, grammar and spell checking, formatting for making it easy to read, etc. Q had a guide like this for a while, but I think he took it down. I've followed it and it helped me write better articles!

+200

I'm of two minds on this (is that how you say it?). On de one hand, I do genuinely believe that this will alleviate a lot of stress for challenge participants. Personally, I haven't gone through too much stress because I don't participate to win. In fact, most of the time, I don't want to win, but I'll get to that later. One way in which the current situation negatively affects my voting behaviour is when I see an article I really, really like, but then discover it already has a truck load of likes, I don't leave a like on the article. After all, it's pretty much set up for success anyway. I could better spare those votes for people who flew under the radar. It kind of sucks, because it keeps me from showing my appreciation for certain articles. On the other hand, as I said before, I don't participate in these challenges to win. In fact, the whole idea of winning a challenge, and having to show up in Twitch chat to claim my prize, is a whole other source of stress for me, bigger than the stress of not making it in the first place. Let's be honest, I have crippling stage fright when it comes to the internet. Even though I would love to get the appreciation, it's a double-edged sword for me. I'm still going to upvote this because I still believe that the outcome of a measure like this will be net positive. And I do admit, even I get a hit of frustration and stress when I see someone's like count skyrocket in just a few days while others struggle to get more than ten likes over the course of the entire challenge. If this turns out not to be the right solution, we can always try something else.

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This is the step in the right direction. But I think the next step should be that we do away with revealing who made the shortlist until the day the winner is announced. So that it's up in the air who the winner is and it could be anyone. But this is a good start in the right direction

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I think this is a wonderful idea and an excellant way to preserve mental health for challenges.

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Good idea, I like it.

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I like the idea for this, I think a lot of stress during the challenge can be taken away from some people. After all the likes should not have any influence on the enjoyment of people who happen to stumble upon.   However, I also think that no matter what people will still harbor those same negative emotions during the reveal of the shortlist. And that will still be a difficult issue to solve. But this is a step in the right direction.   This is sadly not an issue that can be solved through WA I think as it is more of an issue that the people themselves are dealing with. The only thing we can do as a community is giving people the love they deserve and try to diminish their nasty brain goblins.   So I would still think implementing this is a good idea but we will have to perhaps do a bit more as a community to diminish it further. Commenting on and sharing other people's articles are great ways.   So perhaps we could combine challenges with things like raffles for people who commented on other challenge articles. Or we could have a feature of all new challenge articles of that day. This could push people to other people's articles which can help boost their mental health even if they don't make the shortlist.

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Excessive sharing is obviously a suboptimal thing to do. Although I have not witnessed this behaviour personally, on the discord or elsewhere, I can totally see this change removing unnecessary pressure for people who do worry a bit too much about numbers compared to others.   I do however think that, for example, leaderboards should still in some way be displayed on challenge hubs so that great articles can still be appreciated by the community. I don't particularely want to take the spotlight away from creators that deserve it just because people would not stop comparing their numbers with others.   If we could find a way to balance private like amounts, leaderboards and other public showcases of great articles, that would be ideal in my opinion.

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Challenges and community competitions should be fun, and stressing out over them is the opposite of fun. Its not a perfect solution, but there rarely are "perfect" solutions. I personally think its a step in the right direction, and I can't currently think of anything better.

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I've seen this really negatively affecting various people, so yes I'm in favour of this suggestion, as it is a step in the right direction. Over the last couple challenges, it has become more and more competetive to the point that people are actually stressing out way to much.   But, even if this is a step in the right direction, I do not believe it will fix the issue. During the current challenge, I've seen many people taking the like counts of previous challenges as a threshold they have to reach to make the shortlist and stressing out about being close to that.   Overall the challenges can be very stressful for people, and I do not think there is a way to completly mitigate that. I know that the challenges are not meant to be competetive, but with the current system people will make it competetive no matter what.   TLDR: I believe this is a step in the right direction, BUT I think this might just lead to people refering to the like counts of previous challenges instead.

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I vote Healthier challenges with both hands, even though I am conflicted about the proposed solution.   I get where this is coming from and the Like-based system was, is and will be causing people to go out of way just to get one or two — from DM-ing to spam on social media servers. But that said, in my opinion all algorithms will, because the source of the problem is the underlying human behavior. With a change introduced, people will start cracking the new algorithm, or spam even further, because now, they will have no threshold. The second side I'm concerned with with this solution is transparency. No public information means it will be based solely on trust without means of verifying it by themselves. No verification and the lack of information most often results in distrust. Thirdly, the "remove publicly visible Like count" solution aims at quieting of negative emotions but in a passive manner. It really, in my opinion, covers the source of problems (human interactions, emotions towards competition) with a blanket to be revealed at the end of the competition. I would hope for an active solution that enforces community behaviour, just like Dimitris's Read & Comment Article challenges were. (I do not suggest that this would be mandatory, since it could provoke half-assed comments and that would be terrible... Do I have an alternative solution? No, and some will hate this rant. Still I think this point of view needed to be seen, so I'll take the chance.)   To be honest, I think smaller challenges should be treated the same as bigger ones such as WorldEmber and SummerCamp. During WorldEmber there were Like shortlists for a multitude of the categories. Anyone could see and have no complaints over the result and the dynamics of the change could be seen throughout the entire month. If someone was outstanding, they stayed outstanding. Should someone jump in the last second, that would be visible.   DM-ing people about an article and without the specific wish of the DM-ed is a violation of privacy and should be banned within the rules of the competition (not my idea but I agree with it 100%).     Positive sides of the suggestion   This will seem contradictory to the previous part but I like some of the possible effects of the suggestion, should it be implemented in the presented form (hide the public view of the Like count). It is the elimination of the Like-based bias, where people may be more more willing to Like an article with more Likes and less inclined otherwise, should they be too lazy to read the piece and decide on their own.   As a final note, I think that with Challenges, where there are prizes involved, fame, bragging rights and similar, there will always be a thrill to make it to the shortlist and stand out. I believe this is a vital part of such challenges, being a strong motivator and a one that would be difficult to remove without making it feel bland. People compete and that is good. It is a problem of support and means to cope with lack of abilities/tools to make the article better and understand how that can be addressed to level up the game, e.g. people will always respond better to an article with an eye-catching visual and well structure than to a bulk of text with no paragraphs.

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Honestly, I wouldn't even make it just for challenges. Make likes only author visible. There are no dislikes on WA and the likes do not function as any real form of currency.   This may make people think you could easily "farm" likes with alts, but any Enchanter or Moderator can see through that easily enough.

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I do believe this is a good idea. Seeing the number of likes on an article isn't really necessary to people who aren't the author anyway, so I don't see that as a problem.   Overall, I think that the like-to-vote system is a good one, but I have dealt with much negativity (even to the point of insulting those who do make shortlists) by people who claim it isn't fair. It's possible that hiding the likes will decrease the amount of "ammo" these people have as well as helping some people as they work on finding healthy coping mechanisms.   There will always be people who will never be pleased unless they win, but this might help people who aren't like that.

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As someone who obsessively observed the shortlist every day once upon a time, knowing the damage that did to me and having seen how it hurts others as well, I really like this idea.

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Soooooo... hmm. Okay. I'm going to commend you here, cause this idea is really good. I mean realllly good. Short of the big events like summer camp and world ember, I don't even compete anymore. Note that it isn't just because of the potential stress, but it still should be said.   I'm going to upvote this. I'm going to upvote this more than I initially want to. The reason why is because it's a good idea that comes from genuine place and could actually help a little bit.   Now I'm going to give the bad news. From personal experience, making the shortlist is but the first in a series of stressful, anxiety inducing, stages of a competition.   With this feature, if you dont make the shortlist or barely scrape by, if you can even tell that with this feature, it's still gonna hurt. Like, it wont soften the blow for everyone and some may actually feel the hit worse cause not only did they not make it, but it could be a complete shock for them.   That being said, let's say someone does make the list. The next stage is judging. The wait for the big reveal can be agonizing for those unable to get their mind off of it.   Once upon a time, and still on occasion, the next challenge would be announced right when a competition closed, and this helped a lot. That judging process is just as bad for those on the shortlist. All of this fails to factor in the pain of losing.     Now we could say, "Screw it, let's hide the shortlist as well." That takes away from those who made it on the shortlist. Just getting on the shortlist gives you a lot in exposure to the community.   For the first two years I was on world anvil, I hit every single shortlist for every competition I entered. That's how my work started getting more attention. Then the pain of loss which frankly you cant really help in one way or another. It sucks to lose if something matters this much.   I personally think that this idea is awesome and may actually help, but I think a far better solution would be forming coping mechanisms to help with this stress and anxiety. We all need people to talk too when the brain goblins come. Self care, and the like will make a bigger impact than any feature would.   This is beyond world anvils control. They can't really do that for us. I'm sure they would in a heartbeat as would anyone in this fine community. They even make a point to call them challenges. We use the word "competition," or at least I make the mistake of doing it. They aren't their to compete, whether that's something you like to do or otherwise. They're there to challenge yourself by making something new.   This kind of puts the responsibility on us, though it sucks to have to say it. We're the ones who get so competitive and it can easily set us up for failure and out us in a mindset that is prone to those negative thoughts.   As a final note, I think suggestions like this are getting closer and closer to a happy medium. It's why I love it so much. It feels like a compromise and takes advantage of things that have ALMOST been done before. Weve hidden stats towards the end if world ember for example. Great idea and bonus points for posting a feature that seeks to better the expirience for ALL of us.

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I dunno much, but I do know this sounds like a good idea. Besides, if it doesn't work out, we can always try something else.

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