Trick or Treat 2021 Welcome and Update

[pumpkinkingmod]

Hello, ghosts and goblins! It's time for another spooky season of Trick or Treat. I'd like to briefly introduce myself as the new Pumpkin King—Hello, I'm the new Pumpkin King! Thank you very much to the previous rulers who have made this event so much fun over the years.

The 2021 rules and FAQ post is here. The schedule remains as usual:

Sept 1 – Nominations Open
Sept 8 – Nominations Close
Sept 11 – Sign-Ups Open
Sept 18 – Sign-Ups Close
October 24 – Assignments Due
October 31 – Gift Reveals
November 7 – Creator Reveals

There is one significant update for the 2021 round of Trick or Treat; I've decided to add relationship nominations and matching as an option. If you love the traditional Trick or Treat character matching set-up, you can continue to nominate, request, and offer characters as usual! Relationship tags will just be an extra option for participants interested in that.

Due to these changes, I won’t be using an eternal tag set this year.

Let me know if you have any questions, and I'm excited for the tricks and treats to come!

Edit: Just a note that I'm slowing down on comment replies here but will get to questions as I can. The above changes are confirmed for the 2021 round. No decisions have been made about the 2022 round.

Comments

[fiachairecht]

Gonna get out of your comments after this because, while I do hate this choice I know it probably can't be fun for you for your post to be the Dreamwidth equivalent of the [Everyone Disliked That] meme, but I just want to add my explicit request for you to reconsider this next year. If you've been invested in this as a participant for years you probably also know that, generally, people who have wanted to write and request shipfic have not had a problem doing so. I'd guess that the number of people who sat it out because it wasn't Guaranteed(tm) is about the same as the number of people you're going to lose because of this change, and while I'm aware you can't please everyone, I just don't see the point of flipping this around, especially since it sounds like you reached out to the shipoween mods about adding ships before they decided not to run it this year.

I know that in exchange circles we can get very 'so make your own!' about things, but ... people did. They made Shipoween. And it kinda feels like the people who don't want ship matching are now being told 'nothing's different [which isn't true] and if you don't like it you can make your own' and like ... we already had that, you just took it away. It feels ... not great.

(Also, speaking of feelings and re: something you said upthread - how abrupt this is. It feels abrupt because it is, when you're making this decision 2-3 days before noms open. I genuinely cannot fathom why you needed to change this this round, rather than running something that worked well both with and without Shipoween running in parallel, and asked for input if the Shipoween mods decided to permanently end that.)

[pumpkinkingmod]

I'm not sure "fun" is the right framing, but everyone's commenting out of love for the exchange and has been super civil, which is appreciated.

I'll take your feedback into consideration before next round, and again thank you for chiming in.

Re: Shipoween, I was aware of Shipoween mod's current schedule and situation before I reached out to discuss the idea with them, but yes I'd prefer to take responsibility for the TOT decision.