Tronny

A Tronny is an award given to community members for outstanding achievement, lack of achievement, or doing nothing at all. The Tronny Awards are held annually at the end of ever year, or at least they are supposed to be. It is a very sketchy tradition. Ideally the awards will be given out over the holidays, sometime around Christmas or New Years.

=Tronny Awards Procedure= The current procedure involves the entire community in a fully open and transparent fashion. All that is required is a single Tronny enthusiast with good organizational skills, time, and the dedication to make the event happen. This is by no means the final procedure.

Discussion
A self-appointed Tronny MC will start a clearly labeled discussion thread. Using a title such as "20XX Tronny Categories and Nominees | OPEN" is a good start. This tells the community "Hey, it's Tronny time! Let's talk about what categories we should have and who should be nominated." If everyone is paying attention the discussion will be fruitful. The Tronny MC should create the discussion thread well in advance of the actual Tronny Awards ceremony and a few weeks before the voting starts. Starting the discussion sometime in November is good. This allows enough people to see the thread and respond with their thoughtful, creative suggestions. The MC should clearly state when the discussion ends and when voting begins. Also, they should remind the community to follow these helpful guidelines:


 * Limit your nominees to one deserving person per category. If two tronners are submitted for a single category only the first should be counted.


 * Do not submit categories without nominees. If a new category is created make sure it meets the following criteria:


 * The category should not be redundant or too similar to an existing category. We don't need a category for "best cutter in Fort" when cutting itself is a prerequisite of being a good attacker.


 * The category should not be vulgar, racist, or sexist. Be creative and fun with your categories and try not to me mean.


 * Only categories with more than one nominee will make it on the ballot. Be thoughtful when making a category and choose one that will easily fit more than one nominee. For example "best project god" is too narrow and can only have Z-Man as a nominee (and winner).


 * When picking categories and nominees, think about the whole community. Armagetron is more than just Fort/Sumo and Clans.

''Community members can nominate themselves. Why the hell not? It's a Tronny, not an elected office.'' The MC might start the thread with his own categories and nominees and perhaps provide a template with popular categories to copy and paste. When the time for discussion ends, the MC should thank the community and label the thread closed. The categories and nominees must be gathered from the discussion and presented in a well-organized, legible ballot. Here is an ideal Tronny Discussion Thread as an example.

Voting
Like the discussion thread, the Voting Thread should be started well before the Tronny winners are announced. Early in December is a good time to start a vote. The voting portion of the Tronnies requires much time and organization by the MC. This is because transparency must be maintained while protecting the secrecy of the votes. To avoid accusations of fraud or favoritism the MC much show there are no more votes than voters and each voter must be able to verify their vote. This is accomplished with voting receipts. The process is as follows:


 * 1) Voters PM the completed ballot to the MC.
 * 2) Voters must also post in the voting thread to confirm their vote has been placed.
 * 3) The MC records their vote and gives them a receipt in the form of some random alpha/numeric identifier.
 * 4) The MC must keep track of the votes and receipts.
 * 5) After the vote is completed and winners announced, the vote tally and receipts should be released to the community.

The MC should disregard ballots with new categories and nominees. Also, nominees can vote for themselves (for the same reason they can nominate themselves). In case of a tie, winners will share the award. Tronnies are awards given for recognition. It is not a competition. Here is an ideal Tronny Voting Thread with ballot.

=History= The Tronnys originated in 2010 with the player apparition, assisted by Woned, Desolate, and an unknown number of other players. The forthcoming awards were announced on December 31st to be decided by a secret committee and the winners revealed sometime later. "'These fortress/sumo community awards, or Tronnies, are based on the entire year of 2010, no earlier and no later.'~apparition" As owned explained a few posts later, the secret committee was comprised of members of the active Fort/Sumo Clans/Teams and categories/nominations were limited to this range due to the fact the committee didn't know much outside of it. The first Tronnies were generally well received with a small handful of community members feeling a little turned off due to it being secret, narrow, and in some cases, mean spirited.

The following year's Tronnies did not fare nearly as well as the first. The secret committee did not have the same enthusiasm for the project and nominees were not announced until nearly a month after the categories. Instead of adding suspense, the delay caused the novelty to wear off. Others lamented the lack of diversity and bias. Community members deeply questioned the methods. Committee members appeared to fight among themselves. Everything was generally hostile, which further damaged interest in the Tronny Awards. Still, after the winners where announced there was much rejoicing.

Tronnies in 2012 were an abject failure. After receiving harsh criticism of the 2011 awards, apparition opened the Tronny selection process to the public. However, interest was at an all time low and participation was slight at best. Apparition disappeared from the thread (and the game) leaving the Tronnies abandoned. While the 2012 Tronies started on time, two months past without a single award given. On July 31st of 2013, orion tallied up the votes and revealed the winners. No one seemed all to excited about their awards except for chrisd who is excited about everything (so that doesn't really count, right?). A few days later, Soul announced he would take over the Tronny Awards and run it with a secret committee. But this was proven to be easier said than done.

The 2013 Tronnies started with all the grace of a category 4 hurricane making landfall. Soul and orion followed the original formula, but the community and atmosphere had changed. The original group of 2013 categories and nominees suffered all the problems previous Tronnies had (centered too narrowly on Fort/Sumo, lack of diversity in nominees, apparent bias, etc...) and without any of the clever and fun "current event" style categories. After a few rough pages of personal attacks, sinewav stepped in with an alternative solution meant to bring the Tronny Awards back into the open. Soul gave it one more shot before sinewav usurped the Tronny Awards like the absolute overbearing jerk that he is. At the time of this writing it is not clear how the 2013 Tronny Awards will play out. However, participation and enthusiasm is fairly high. Hopefully this year will teach the community valuable lessons on how to improve this tradition. It will be interesting to see how the 2014 Tronny Awards will be run.

=Awards By Year=