there is barely any information being stored about the player, simply a representation of how far along the player progressed in the game, so this is far from sensitive information, but in a panel of judges intended to be anonymous, i can see where you’re coming from. i don’t exactly see this being very problematic though, as we often use this data to gauge where players get stuck etc. to improve our own submissions too
i don’t think the potential time it would take to finish each submission is very relevant either, there’s always other options available: either they could allocate more testers like previously mentioned, or they could be testing them to their full capacity even at the cost of delayed results—otherwise we couldn’t exactly call it fair judgement
this is not a decision we just randomly made either; we’ve had our suspicions for a while now and consequently implemented this to investigate—as such, on august 18, 2024, around 5 days after the inspire challenge had ended, we brought it up privately regarding what seemed to be a tester who joined our submission but did not complete it (playtime and join logs is the only relevant data here)
following this, a day after we had sent our message, more testers appeared to join:
to me they appeared to test the experience more thoroughly this time, and we ended up taking second place for technical quality, but of course this could simply be coincidence, so i’ll let you take this information how you will; the point is, there appears to be varying degrees in which a submission can be tested, and as it stands right now, we have no way of knowing why or how this is the case, since the judging process is kept (intentionally?) vague
i realize i may be overstepping boundaries with this, but i think i am within reason here—after all—i’d think a situation like this can undermine the efforts the teams who participated put into their submissions