Build competition feedback

[Oussebon]

PC build competition:

I wanted to give some feedback on it from my point of view, before the builds were selected for voting. So it wouldn't seem like "WAH, you didn't pick my build"; merely "WAH."

Apologies to any feathers if ruffled. It is meant positively, and with a hope of seeing even more exciting competitions in the future.

1. Build briefings were unclear
2. Rules needed clarification
3. Encourages poor building and bad advice for consumers
4. Cyberpunk
5. Stock issues break the competition
6. Behaviour (Plagiarism and trash talking)

1)The “Cyberpunk” build - just says ultra high settings, with no resolution mentioned. But the article posted by PCG later on does then say 1440p. Refresh? More clarity and consistency would be good.

The “Streaming and gaming” PC. The brief doesn’t explain how/what it is streaming. Is it capturing from another device?

Almost nobody has included a capture card. And TBF if you were just building a gaming PC that will also stream for $1000 - and does not need to capture input from a console etc – you wouldn’t buy a $100-200 capture card. You’d stream on NVENC / CPU / whatever. Which is what 90% of people (very sensibly) said, despite the outline saying PCG would “favour” builds with capture cards.

Suggestion: Clearer briefings. They don't need to be much longer to be clearer.


2) There were quite a few questions asked – some answered, some not – that should have been set out in the rules.

Suggestion: Learning from what people found unclear this time to be incorporated in future competitions' outlines.


3) This is one I feel extremely passionate about.

The vagueness of the briefings and/or the rigidity of the budgets lead to poor advice for consumers.

Pricing is often such that for a $500 build, you can get everything you realistically want, except for 1 component that nerfs the system and costs you more in the long run as you replace it. e.g. that trash-tier no-brand PSU that will blow your home up, instead of even a Corsair VS or even EVGA White.

If giving build advice to someone in that position, you’d just tell them to save up another $15 before building. So they don’t need to spend even more replacing things in the immediate future, nevermind the long run. Especially important for very budget builds, because the less money you have, the less you can afford to waste it.

The vagueness of the cyberpunk build. People – unfortunately - really will go out and buy a $2000 PC for their garbo 1080p 60hz monitor so they can play on “ultra max high top settings”. But if the point of high settings is to improve image fidelity (ideally at a smooth framerate) you’d get a better experience spending $1500-$1600 on the PC and the rest on a higher res, higher refresh, adaptive sync monitor.

Suggestions:
- Target budget a 'favoured' criterion, rather than rigid rule. Overspend needs to be justified by entrant. At PCG Competition Judges' discretion to accept/reject overspent builds
- Brief to specify refresh and resolution of monitor, especially for expensive builds
- Scope to host a future competition not just for a PC, but for PC + monitor. Or the whole package with PC+monitor+KB+M.


4) Request: Please, please stop using cyberpunk as a vehicle to encourage spending

PCG may need the revenue from those affiliate links, but perhaps there are alternative ways to get people to click and buy and support PCG that don’t steer people to a mindset of “futureproof purchasing” for unreleased titles.

Perhaps a more positive mindset to encourage would be to recommend builds for current-gen gaming, with a (wide open) eye to the future, only.

Especially when there’s a chance we’ll see new GPUs with better ray-tracing support than the current gen by or around the time Cyberpunk launches…


5) The competition is ultimately pretty meaningless with stock fluctuating as wildly as it is right now. Half of what I posted for one build was out of stock within days for instance. Fine for a thought-experiment, not so much for a competition.

I don’t have a solution for that one, other than to suggest the competition format isn’t agile enough for the current times. Perhaps someone smarter than me has an actual solution there.


6) I noticed at least one instance of clear build copying (edited in). It’s a bit sad, though also understandably inevitable; you can’t not see other people’s posts.

There was also a bit of trash-talking going on too - less than I expected, but more than there ought to have been.

Suggestion: Sending entries via PM rather than posting would eliminate that. Though it could see less footfall as people feel less encouraged to out-do each other publicly. But it would eliminate the naughty behaviour and keep things as civilised as they deserve to be.

 

[Frindis]

My look at it/response to yours @Oussebon

1. I did not really think much about the resolution they wanted, only that I guessed the majority of new components would be sufficient. As for the capture card, I did not really take notice as I was only going for a 2K build based on my knowledge of computer parts.

2. As a person who has never built a computer before, I did understand most of it. I was a bit insecure about the shipping part though, but I think I got it right.

3. I don't know much about this subject, only that I did have a hard time finding that one last component for my 2K build which was a decent graphic card for my rig. I used the majority of my build time just being certain that all the components matched properly, as that is something I have absolutely no clue about.

4. Maybe somewhere in the middle? There will always be better hardware to get, but the quest in minimizing the red line by indulging in some early meta builds, could potentially even save you a few bucks?

5. As far as I know out of stock would not matter, only the price you originally put down.

6. I agree that trash-talking or any type of toxicity should not be on this forum, but the best way to combat this is to find the core of the issue and remove it.

 

[Oussebon]

4. Maybe somewhere in the middle? There will always be better hardware to get, but the quest in minimizing the red line by indulging in some early meta builds, could potentially even save you a few bucks?

Buying 16gb RAM instead of 8gb RAM is futureproofing and saves money and time in the long run. Buying a 1TB SSD when you only need 500gb for now is futureproofing, and saves money in the long run.

There's absolutely a lot of middle ground open, and sweet spots to be found.

The problem is that is you buy an expensive RTX card now, hoping it will play Cyberpunk well with raytracing - that not futureproofing, that's called gambling.

What happens when you find out it runs like toffee and you need an RTX 3070/80/ti with 2nd Gen RTX hardware to really handle it... What happens when you buy an R7 3700x, but the number of NPCs are so CPU heavy you really wanted an overclocked i9 10900k?

If you're building a PC now because you need a PC now, built it for now, with a careful eye on the future. Encouraging builds specifically for Cyberpunk is unhelpful, to put it mildly.

5. As far as I know out of stock would not matter, only the price you originally put down.

That's correct. The problem is, nobody can build half of the specs people have posted because everything's going in and out of stock right now. So it's hard to call the builds 'useful' if you can't buy them

 

[Frindis]

@Oussebon But, is it gambling when the game comes out in September? I mean, how much will technology advance in such a short time. Would it be not more valid if we talked about a game coming out in two-three years or so, something more in the general direction Star Citizen?

As for your answer about out of stock, I understand the dilemma

 

[SHaines]

Thanks very much for the well-written response. There's good feedback here that we can try to implement more effectively in the future.

We didn't want to overload folks with too many rules, giving them some freedom to avoid just having a couple distinctions between builds, since the heavier the rules, the more restrictive the options. However, being clear about the rules is always the goal, so we can work to improve that in future contests.

 

[Oussebon]

@Frindis It's a good question. But, I say Yes, it's gambling.

The game's performance demands aren't known. And while we can be optimistic the game will release in September, until it's released there's always a chance of further delay to launch.

We've also been expecting new Nvidia consumer GPUs this year. There's a chance they may launch around when Cyberpunk does. Perhaps they will be much faster. Perhaps they'll just stuff twice as many Ray Tracing and Tensor cores on to make ray tracing less of a slideshow than it has been up to now.

And we're also expecting new AMD CPUs from around September, (almost) certainly before the end of the year. And Intel have announced new CPUs today.

If you didn't need that £500 9900k for now, and you only bought it for Cyberpunk, you could have waited until June and got the i7 10700k - which is faster and £100 cheaper. And has a Z490 mobo with more features, and support for the next gen of Intel CPU.

Buying hardware for an unreleased game is always, always a gamble.

Buying it during Covid 19, when new hardware is expected, and the game is from a studio that has a history of delaying launches (even without Covid 19) is an even bigger gamble

@SHaines Thanks for the kind words and giving it a once over - much appreciated. I'm sure there will be more competitions and am looking forward to them already