Wargaming Developers Contest: Seven Top Contest Questions

Today, with the help of Habr, we are launching WGDC ​​- the first official Wargaming competition for the developer community. The goal of the competition is to update our format of interaction with the developers of applications and mods of the game client, look for points of contact and take a step towards mutually beneficial cooperation.

We are well aware that in connection with the contest you may have questions to which the rules will not give an answer. Below we will try to cover the most relevant of them and tell why Wargaming came up with the WGDC, what benefits it can bring to the participants, what we expect from the developers, and also briefly run through the rules themselves. If questions remain and after reading the post - ask them in the comments.
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Who can participate?

If with “adult individuals” everything is clear, then the further rules (format - PDF) require small comments.

The developer can participate in the competition alone, and can put together a team. The competition is focused on the RU-region, but Wargaming does not impose requirements for citizenship: many Russian-speaking developers live abroad, and we invite all of them to take part in the competition.

If you are a team leader, remember that after you added a project, changing the composition of the team is impossible.

What is the prize fund and competition nominations?

The total prize fund of the competition is $ 80,000. We will evaluate the developers in the following categories:

• "The best idea of ​​the project";
• "The best mobile application / application for social networks";
• "The best functional project";
• "The best modification of the game client World of Tanks";
• "For contributions to the development of products and services for the Wargaming community."

To stop at the idea stage, you only need to make a presentation of your project. Those who want to compete for the main prizes will have to confirm their participation in the second stage by making appropriate changes to their project profile.

The important point is that competitive work should be free and accessible to the maximum range of our users, but we will not prevent participants from monetizing it in the future.

With the last nomination from the list above, we want to say thank you to those who, with bare enthusiasm, developed mods and applications even before the start of the competition, and choose the best of the already existing projects.

The “Special Prize of the Competition Jury” in the amount of $ 15,000 can receive a unique project that fully realizes the potential of integrating the company's products and services with other project services and / or end-user interfaces.

The prize pool will be distributed as follows:

	Best design idea	The best modification of the game client World of Tanks	Best functional project	Best Mobile / Social Networking App	For contributions to the development of products and services for the Wargaming community
		Special Prize of the Competition Jury, $ 15,000
1 place	2 000 $ + 250 000 gold + Tour 59	$ 10,000	$ 10,000	$ 10,000	$ 5,000
2nd place	$ 1,000 + 150,000 gold + Toure 59	$ 5,000	$ 5,000	$ 5,000	$ 3,000
3rd place	$ 500 + 50,000 gold + Toure 59	2 500 $	2 500 $	2 500 $	$ 1,500

Who and how will evaluate the work?

Work evaluation will be carried out in three stages:



The initial screening will be carried out by Habr employees - this is a kind of spam filter. At this stage, entries will be screened out that do not meet the conditions and topics.

At the second stage, Events and Community employees will select the best works in each of the nominations.

At the final stage, the jury of the competition represented by the experts of Wargaming will determine the best works according to the following criteria:

• audience value for Wargaming (30% of the total);
• simplicity and clarity of use (20%);
• innovativeness (30%);
• correctness of work (20%).

In more detail, each of these points describes the full version of the rules.

Of course, the jury has the full right to determine the winners according to their subjective assessments and preferences. You should not be afraid of this: we are fully confident in the experience and expertise of judges.

When will be summed up?

Two months will be allotted for the development of projects - from August 15 to October 15. Analysis and evaluation of the work will take another four weeks. The winners will be announced on November 12, and in mid-December, Wargaming will gather everyone to the ceremony honoring the WGDC ​​winners. Place and time of celebrations we will inform in advance on the page of the competition.

Why do we need WGDC?

A recent post about our Public API explained in some detail how the Wargaming Developer Partner Program (WG DPP) was born. The production of third-party mods and the services surrounding our projects began spontaneously and quickly reached such popularity that the load on www.worldoftanks.ru became at some point comparable to the load on the English part of Wikipedia. But it was a dubious achievement. We seriously worked out the mechanisms for completely shutting down the front-end on the peaks of appeals and received a lot of criticism after each World of Tanks update: popular mods stopped working, causing “pain” to the players and paralyzing our support service.

To deny the existence of a strong community, which made popular products and unique localizations, would be an unforgivable mistake.

The launch of the API really helped us reduce the load on our resources. But this is not the most important thing. The launch of WG DPP was a serious step for Wargaming in terms of development philosophy. To make your product as open as possible for everyone, it was necessary to rethink not only the existing approaches to architecture design and service development, but also to change the very perception of the game by developers: this is not ours, but their game.

At first it was scary, but now we are more and more convinced of the correctness of the decision. At the exit, players get the opportunity to create their own unique World of Tanks, and Wargaming begins to hear better the developer community, which not only shares fresh ideas, but also regularly reminds “who's the boss” (a great example is comments on our posts on Habré here here and here ).

During the PTA WG DPP, 27 corrections based on feedback were made. After starting open beta, two to four changes are made with each release based on user bug reports. But we understand that in the issue of work on the API, we need to do several more times more than what has already been done.

The competition is a serious next step in this direction. An API is just a tool, a code. The service will die without people, and you need to work with people no less than with the code. With the help of the competition, we hope to establish long-term relationships with developers, stimulate the development of third-party products and services and eventually form a loyal community. At the same time, “loyalty” is determined by two basic requirements: mods and products should not give gaming advantages to their owners and must bear value for the players. However, experience shows that the "tankers" themselves will deal with the latter.

Than competition will be useful to participants?

Those who decide to take part in the competition may have several motivations. Beginner developers should not be frightened by competition from more experienced colleagues. Not only projects can apply for prizes, but also ideas - for them we have a special nomination with our prize fund.

More experienced developers or even teams that know their value and have already got their hands on other projects will surely attract the amount of the prize fund - $ 80,000 - and the chance of public recognition of their level by the community and potential employers.

If successful, both developers and contestants with the best ideas will be recognized by the players and attendance of their resource. Winners will be able to monetize success at their discretion with strong support from our side.

What do we expect to see in the works of the contestants?

Among the projects may be the concept of a second screen. And the implementation of the clan tablet, so that the platoon leader during the battle could see the map. And crossing a player's profile with social networking APIs, like Foursquare, for a meta-game to appear. And a variety of mobile applications using our API, expanding or improving the current functionality of Wargaming products.

There are practically no restrictions, however, we expect that the developers will not follow the proven patterns and produce different-sized “reindeer gauges”. Any idea, even the most insane at first glance, can be interesting. For example, localization for narrow markets, such as the favorite in Southeast Asia, manga, "skin" for tanks:



Another great example of an unexpected solution appeared recently on Habré is the real speedometer bolted to virtual tanks :



Study the rules, ask questions in the comments and, discarding last doubts, join the ranks of the WGDC ​​participants.