Warning: modafanil addled rant about this competition and the state of Halo below. Skip to TL;DR unless you have a few years to spare.
I may as well throw in my two cents here:
This competition has always been a shitshow, for starters. That's kind of how it is with online competitions run by people whose day jobs don't involve running online competitions. That's not even necessarily a criticism, because as online competitions go it is actually not bad. In fact, it's mostly very slick. But still a shitshow, still primarily a popularity contest, which is inherent in a community where image both heightens success and also defines it.
I remember being pretty gutted back in (I'm guessing) 2009 when The Animatage lost out on the 'most original' category to a jumptage made by very popular names in the Halo community back then. It seemed ridiculous to me that a standard montage, which doesn't need to be original to be entertaining, was being judged for 'originality' against a jumptage which by definition has to be original to be entertaining. I felt like they were being judged on an even playing field when the field was anything but. If a jumptage has unoriginal clips that don't push boundaries, it automatically sucks and nobody will watch it. If a kill montage contains the same, it's just one of the thousands (especially back then) of average cookie cutter montages being released which can still get plenty of views and mild praise.
To be fair, (my memory of even last week is really poor so I'm reaching here) I feel like back then as a precious little 18 year old introvert who'd yet to try therapy or mushrooms I may have failed to eloquently explain or even rationalise that point to even myself, and I think I may have bitched about this double standard without actually explaining it, right there in the thread, even when the voting was happening, (lol), and potentially threw away a few votes and maybe even the win. Who knows, we're talking seven years ago here. Regardless however, the main point I chuckle at to this day was still that a montage I had poured my heart and soul and time I should have spent in class into editing, a montage which to this day I am surprised to still get nostalgic comments and gentle, humble little circlejerks for (as I now view it with a very critical eye) was being scrutinised to death on illogical terms next to a very well done jumptage by some very well known Halo figures. Sadly, this is how the whole competition is, and I'm sure it's even worse for other people.
Like I said, these competitions are primarily popularity contests. That's not to say that the entries that win did so only on the basis of the popularity of the people involved, (they're all great of course) but it is a huge factor in the outcome and always has been. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't remember a vaguely unknown or less popular person in the montage world dropping in and stealing a top three or even a category out of nowhere. It certainly didn't happen this time around, (how did Evadur come away empty handed, for example?) and it's a shame because it creates the sort of atmosphere that puts people off joining our sadly dying world. Competitions should be the sort of thing that people look at and imagine themselves being the ones wearing the crown or drinking a year's supply of coke or going to some creepy guy's sweet factory and witnessing all kinds of mentally scarring violations of common sense health and safety rules. I really doubt anyone vaguely new to the montage scene is looking at this competition and thinking 'I am so going to enter if they do one of these again!' which is sad. Even if there was a 'best newcomer' or 'best uncool kid' category, it would still at least address the misbalance of this type of competition a little bit.
Like others pointed out, it's also weird that it's so common in this contest (well, this year's for sure) for a montage to take a top three place and one of the four categories... especially stuff like best editing and best gameplay - every montage is being judged on these qualities. Even if it's a jumptage or a plasma pistol tage or a hostboot tage, people are still comparing them to established qualities of gameplay and editing. No shit the top entry has the best gameplay; it's almost impossible to win 1st place without gameplay considered the best by a large number of people. Doesn't that then inherently mean the categories should be separated? I think they would work better as an 'honourable mentions' subcategory, for example. Then you wouldn't need to have people rightfully point out that a slick as fuck edit that wins number two without really breaking too many boundaries seems an odd choice for 'best editing' category. I'm not at all saying this because I thought I would win best editing: for the record, I 100% assumed my entry, having gotten rekt by a social H5 montage in the first round and only gathering around 2 pages of replies, (1/4 of it wince-level trolling from someone whose every post depresses the shit out of me and makes me want to slice out whichever portion of my brain handles empathy - which, to be fair, most people who entered something can also say) was all but forgotten about. I didn't expect to open the thread and see my name, just as much as I didn't expect to open the thread and see a polished, clean and 'traditional' edit in the 'best editing' spot. I can't even remember the names, but I know for a fact I watched so many entries that deserved that spot more, especially in light of the montage in question having already won the second best spot.
I also want to address what others said about Hyena as judge. Hyena is as solid a nicotine addict as you can meet in a dark alleyway, but that's really irrelevant. Again: is no part of this competition hoping to further, better, bolster, (insert more -er words here) the Halo montage community? Maybe I'm just even more nuts than I thought I was, but surely attracting more people and trying to keep the scene on life support must be part of the objective. If so, why would you expect any newcomer to not be put off by the fact the judges aren't excluded from entering, and especially not excluded from being a judge whilst also being one of the most popular names in Halo right now. It's nothing to do with transparency or Hyena being either the worst and smelliest kind of shit or the freshest, most buy one get one free bottle of febreze in the shop (hint: he's the latter) and everything to do with that kind of conflict of interest just by definition being something that makes even the daring '10TB of BluRay ISOs on my PC' type rulebreaker like myself frown. It just sends the wrong message - except it actually in this case sends the right message, because it gives you a huge clue what the competition is about. Unless you can literally prove to me that the same number of eloquent, experienced, montage hardened judges couldn't have been pulled from the community whilst also having no desire whatsoever to enter, then I think it's fair for people to criticise it as a weird decision.
Honestly speaking here, I'm not upset because I didn't get a $75 reward for Take That!. I'm actually trying to break into the big world of editing footage that doesn't involve video game men shooting each other, so if I was mad over $75 then I presumably wouldn't have much hope for my career. Anyone who is subbed to my channel knows I have been working on it on and off for about two years, way before the competition was announced. The only thing I was upset by was losing out to a steaming heap of shit Halo 5 montage. No offense to Kampy, who I think was the one involved, but I say that because I think Halo 5 is a steaming heap of shit, as does 99% of the community here, so getting outvoted by a montage involving Justin Bieber in Halo form with Justin Bieber music and editing was kind of like waking up as an eight year old on Xmas day and finding santa clause shitting into your stockings, except when you go to noscope that pussy to teach him a lesson he fucking sprints away to the fireplace, then does some weird fart and thrusts his way up the chimney. I blame the Russians.
Jokes aside, it stung, but kind of in an ironic way: I had joked with Koggy and my wife and a few homeless people who couldn't get away from me (they had no home to go to) that I would probably get knocked out in the first round by a big name, so karma sorted it out and also put a cherry on top. It doesn't matter though: like I said back then, the bottom line for me was that this competition inspired me to pick up something I had shied away from for months because it was so exhausting, and to churn that shit out in a few months. I quite possibly may never have finished Take That! otherwise, so I genuinely am grateful to this competition for giving me the kind of artificial deadline I need to act like a functioning adult. I'm also grateful to everyone that put their time into entering it and running it, it's genuinely the most exciting the Halo scene gets for a while.
I think the bottom line is that with Halo in the state it is, everything nowadays takes more effort. The lethargy of trying to stay hyped in a near-dead community is fucking real. Investing time and (especially for the bigger entries) shitlots of time into a product where you know the views and feedback are ever diminishing gets harder literally every fucking second. One of the biggest draws of these types of competitions used to be the exposure, but now this competition gets a fraction of the votes, and an even smaller fraction of that already tiny fraction as comments, which for a lot of people (if they're like me, which I guess they actually might not be) are some of the best rewards you can get. Investing hundreds of hours into something, especially if it is just for this competition, and then getting a hundred extra views and maybe 8 extra comments if you're lucky is a pretty poor investment. I know this is partly an inherent factor of Halo being dead, but the issues I have mentioned with the competition make this fact a lot worse. I'm at the stage now where I feel like there's a good chance I will make my final with all the actually very good clips I've been weirdly saving since I started playing like some dumbfuck magpie who hasn't heard of the word 'depreciation'. Maybe it will be a year or whatever, but the point is that if it were to coincide with another mystical THF competition, I wouldn't bother entering. Not out of spite, but just because there's no point... I never integrated with the scene much, but at this stage I've sent enough animated emojis to ishii on skype to think at this point I could light a trail of diarrhoea on fire, slap a custom HUD on it and get him to put it on the FBW channel when it next opens for business in a year or so. That's most of the views you're going to get these days, and I can live without a few nicely typed positive comments split evenly with some pure essence of desperate autism. That's just the way it is - I'm not a bad loser, in fact I've taken so many huge throbbing Ls in my life I'm literally the champion of losing at this point. There just seems like nothing to gain from entering anymore.
WTFL;DR:
Halo is fucking cliquey. It's more cliquey than High School Musical set in an alternate universe where there's also a hardcore (or just more realistic) race war at play in the musical numbers. As an ex-introvert (or extroverted introvert?) I used to shy away from the community side, because it didn't feel very welcoming, and it felt like I would have to try too hard to 'prove myself' and I've always resented the BS teenage style notion that you have to stick your neck out, maybe even put on some facade, just for the most basic level of acceptance. It's saying something that out of all the shitty, cliquey Halo communities, this one is the least shitty, and the one I still visit. These days however, being the least shitty community isn't enough to run a good competition. As a montage producer, you're lucky to get 2000 views spread between your own channel and FBW. THF had their own Halo channel that could have done well, but it was given up on. FBW still holds the most active subscribers, but as far as I can tell it's just Ishii running it now and that guy is a hard working chap with not much free time, so it is largely given up on too. Both of those are channels that would still benefit from some kind of system where up to 20, 40 (it really doesn't matter) quality Halo content producers are given access, and are allowed to upload if just one other person on the team gives it the green light. The roster could be updated every week to reflect the average commitment to these channels, even. I digress, but the point is there's no excuse for there not to be a community channel uploading Halo videos, because all the lack of one has done is made the remaining community (on YouTube at least) even more cliquey - it's now a rush to have your own successful channel, to upload clips all the time if you want to stay relevant and keep a good viewcount for your serious content (ie montages). There are a few channels with a 'high' (for Halo) subscriber count, and they don't even bother promoting other Halo content, at boosting views of the community as a whole. Maybe it's competition, maybe these people really think they can make any kind of money with a few thousand subs on YT (the answer is no, no you fucking can't) but for whatever reason, the atmosphere is such that they'd rather take a shot at a tiny amount of visibility rather than help pull the Halo community up, and it's sad. The only person I know even trying this is SillyGoose, and it isn't close to enough. This forum doesn't have any pull when it comes to getting people visibility, so the only real incentive is money, and when it comes off like and functions like a popularity contest that's not going to attract any newcomers, or inspire any uninspired oldcomers. I think the best possible function of these competitions is to strengthen, invigorate and promote the community, so when it fails at these things, then it is definitely a problem.
This 'cliquey' problem resonates down through the community right through to this competition. Even if THF never does another one, it doesn't matter: someone might, and it wouldn't hurt to hear the flaws in this competition so they can avoid making them themselves. If this post is offensive to anyone involved in the competition, or anyone at all (which I doubt, because it's way too long to bother reading anyway) then I am truly sorry. However, my man Sucky said it best: 'A forum isn't really a forum without dissenting opinions'. See that? Nice. Eloquent. Gets many points across with few words, rather than the opposite like I did. I could learn from this guy.
PS: A heartfelt congratulations to all the winners. Every single winner here represents fantastic skill in at least a few disciplines. It's all quality content. My rant isn't directed at you in any way, and I don't want it to come off like I think none of these wins are deserved, because they clearly are. It's more just rambling thoughts about issues with the competition that developed into a rant about the state of Halo. Oh and thanks to anyone who said nice things about my entry. That's always been the best kind of 'reward' for me.
PPS: I really appreciate all the time and planning that goes into this competition, so I'm sorry if my post seems overly negative. I just think it's productive for the future of our troubled, feeble community for everyone to make their opinion on this kind of stuff heard. Peace.
Footnote: reading this post with a less overstimulated mind a few hours later, I guess the real TL;DR of my post is that I think the best kinds of competitions like this are ones that bring in more posters, more contributors, more everything. Even if the end goal is just to bolster this website a little, nothing wrong with that (it's usually the inspiration for these things) and helps the cause overall. I feel like the way these competitions are run doesn't do that at all now: they feel very closed off and uninviting, and that's genuinely sad.
I could probably just delete the rest of the post with it condensed that sensibly, but I really did enjoy the majority of it where I ranted about the state of Halo and don't want to take that away from past me. Good job, past me. You nailed it.