The rest of the exchange year...

[chock_coal_ate_bawks]

...is worth wanking over, too.

Discuss Chocolate Box, Age Gap Exchange, Unusual Bearings, etc.

Comments

Re: Almost Chocolate Box Time

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, it's really really not on ToT's level.

It's still pretty impressive! The treating ratio is way higher than in most exchanges. But if anyone's basing their Chocobox expectations on ToT (purely in terms of number of treats per participant), they're setting themselves up for disappointment. For a variety of likely reasons, it's high, but that high.

Re: Almost Chocolate Box Time

[(Anonymous)]

I haven't participated in ToT so I'm not familiar with it. How does the mod manage it? Are treatless people assigned as pinch hits? Is the period between the due date and the reveals longer so people have more time to work on treats?

Re: Almost Chocolate Box Time

[(Anonymous)]

The ToT mod issues official community challenges, but otherwise it's the same system of an unofficial treatless spreadsheet and participants/other interested parties banding together to try to make it happen. There's still a week between the due date and reveals.

I have a few hypotheses, and any or all of these could be partial factors in the difference:

-Chocolate Box's higher signup count means there's proportionally more casual participants compared to hardcore treaters

-Also it's just harder to organize shit with nearly double the number of people

-Trick or Treat's character-based OR matching means the participant pool self-selects for people who are more flexible about what they can write and draw, and what they want to receive - means they're both easier to treat + have an easier time treating

-Something about the time of year, both in terms of their spots in the exchange schedule (people burned out after YT? ToT takes advantage of a clearer schedule? more casual participants finding Chocobox via YT, whereas in the fall, YT newbies are too late to sign up for ToT?) + general life patterns (maybe more people working on theses in spring semester?)

(standard disclaimer that this is only comparing treating rates. Both exchanges have their advantages, and I love both a lot.)

Re: Almost Chocolate Box Time

[(Anonymous)]

-Chocolate Box's higher signup count means there's proportionally more casual participants compared to hardcore treaters

I think this might be the main reason. The first year there were more than twice the number of fics than the number of participants (292 sign-ups, 617 stories), then the number of participants increased and it was a worse ratio (404 vs 775). This year we'll see if there's a correllation, but we'd still need another 80 fics to get twice the number than sign-ups.

Re: Almost Chocolate Box Time

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

Yeah - I was disappointingly off in my predictions for last year's works count. I do like getting the numbers from year to year.

Re: Almost Chocolate Box Time

[(Anonymous)]

I think the biggest influences on ToT's numbers last round were the smaller signup pool -- it's just easier to get 2 treats per person with ~300 people than with ~500 people -- and the cat bribe.

And IIRC, Trick or Treat hadn't quite managed to hit 2 treats for each participant in the previous rounds? They came very close, but I don't think they hit it.