As you all looked at LMRs home ribbon some new things have been added. However, SOMETHING IS MISSING. take a guess. If you guess challenges you are correct. What ever happened to that? Why did they take it away? Who knows. I think the challenged brung out the true creativity that makes this sight AMAZING! Sure the prizes where nice, but nothing beat the thrill of either winning or judging other peoples robots. Should they bring the challenges back? Give me your thoughts.
It’s a challenge Jim but not as we know it, not as we know it!
I think the challenges failed because:
1. they were poorly defined
2. the rewards were not matched to the difficulty of the challenge
In order to avoid these problems I suggest we get a bit more organized.
Instead of random challenges with random deadlines we should have just one scheduled and community endorsed challenge.
For example, there could be a LMR Monthly Challenge.
Each month a number of challenges are proposed and at the end of the month the challenge with the most votes becomes the monthly challenge. Contestants now have one month to build and submit their entries.
In order to ensure more substantial prizes there should be a jackpot system. The jackpot can come from donations or from contributions made by those who submit challenges. Maybe contributions could be a requirement for submitting challenges. This would create an incentive for better challenges. I’m not sure if contributions should be mandatory but people would come up with more interesting and well thought out ideas if they had some “skin in the game”.
The winners could be determined by the community, or by people who contributed to the jackpot, or a combination of both.
I’m not sure how/if the size of the contribution should be factored in the vote, I’m just trying to get the discussion going.
I would like to see more
I would like to see more challenges here, too.
Even without prizes I think that I would enter the competitions if they were interesting…
Challenges
Having recently joined and having never built a robot, I can not be as emphatic, but, I would think as long as the challenges were reasonable with ample time frame, you wouldn’t need to offer prizes as the learning experience and competition might be enough.
I think a month is far too
I think a month is far too little time to most people to make a good job of something, what with most people having school/university/work/etc commitments.
Can’t agree with you
Can’t agree with you more…some of us only have a little bit of time out of the week to be able to do much…this includes weekends when some of us want to get out and do other things.
I agree
I agree that one month is too short, the interval itself is not that important, the idea was to have a consistent schedule. Actually I myself would prefer to have about 3 months to work on a challenge like https://www.robotshop.com/letsmakerobots/node/5236 or https://www.robotshop.com/letsmakerobots/node/4979.
I agree with everybody who said that challenges are interesting enough without prizes, I have spent hundreds of dollars and many sleepless nights just to participate in a contest like Eurobot, witout expecting a prize, but I think prizes will draw more participants.
Examples
After reading the Fritsl comment on one of that links, I agree that a example should be shown on the description of the most of the challenges.
So …
Are we going to have a new challenge system or not?
I’ll Try My Best
I’ll talk to the Admins to see if they will agree to get it back on. But Like Antonio said. We do need to get more organized. Perhaps we can create a commitee to brainstorm ideas. CROSS YOUR FINGERS!
Just E-mailed
Just e-mailed to the admins. Will see what they probably in a few days.
You got it!
Yo everyone, sorry for not reading this before, and thanks to Towlieboy78 who took action and mailed me (Frits).
I took down the challenges because I saw they where not really used: In the beginning I put a lot of work into making them, and a couple of really good ones followed.
However, lately it seams that they got dominated by strange newbees who never build a robot themselves, that thought of some inconsistent dream-project and made it a challenge. This, and companies trying to get PR by starting challenges, but having a hard time really make things happen.
So - when I needed space on the top menu, I thought that it was about time to delete that one.
But sure, if you guys are willing to make some thought through challenges, and / or if you want the old ones as inspiration, I will just take down… hmm… Video - yes, that will go, and in 5 minutes Challenges are back up 
Let’s give it a try, see if it works out well - and if not, we will just take them down again
Thanks a lot, and again sorry for not reading this before.
Frits / Webmaster
- Live now, and I have
- Live now, and I have changed the rules a bit, and will now delete some old / obsolete challenges.
May the best nerd win