So the star award and the artist award are both criminally underused, so I've come up with some ideas to get a few more of them out in the wild.
Starting with the artist award, since a youtube award has been asked for by a bunch of people, but I'm not going to add that, since I don't want to make spending X amount of money on a capture card a requirement for getting an award, I'll toss videos in with the artist award.
In general what I'm thinking here is once a month we'll hold a vote on videos made by community members. The winner of this will get the award, as well as having their video featured on totalminer.org and I'll post it on the TM facebook also.
Obviously you'd only be able to get the award one time, but the winner would still get parts 2 & 3 should there be a repeat winner.
And another way I'm thinking about getting the award out, is when TM is coming up towards major releases, ie: 2.5, Steam, etc. We'll have a logo design competition with logos themed towards that particular event. For example, we're looking towards the Steam release, so the assignment would be to make a PC themed logo.
For the star award what I'm thinking is it becomes a replacement for MotM. 5 guides is too difficult to get as there's only so many possible guides that can be made. Obviously not held in exactly the same way as MotM, cause to be completely honest the old way of having to pick a new winner every month sucks and messed with the results as things from the beginning of the month tend to slip the mind by the end of the month.
So the new way would be, I give the award whenever I feel like it. Maybe one month there's 2 winners and the next month there is none. Maybe I award 1 every week for a month, and then nobody impresses me for a long time and nobody wins for 3 months straight. tl;dr version. No schedule, awards come when I think somebody has earned it.
Also it would free up everyone who had already won MotM to be a winner of this, as well as allow me to include active testers in the mix of potential winners. They had been excluded from winning MotM because I didn't feel like hearing the inevitable moaning and complaining about how they only won because they were a tester. So a new rule for this will be if I see whining about who won the award, that person becomes excluded from winning the award for the rest of eternity. Simple and easy, just the way I like it.
Questions, comments, concerns?