Not that I'm anybody whose opinion matters on this, but that's never stopped me from giving my 2ยข. Keep the black badges largely as they are: a prestige bragging right, and a financial reward. Free admission for life if you don't want to wear it around the con. Screw trying to say they're non-transferrable: it'd be impossible to enforce without compromising DC's way of doing things and if you're good enough to earn more than one black badge, then you're good enough to get your friend in for free too. But to that end, black badge contests should be contests that take skill, and skill that's related to hacking. CTF: obviously. Tamper evident: sure. Deviant's awesome locksport contests: yep! Beverage cooling, FPS games, short stories, and the like: sorry, but I don't really think it's deserving.
Other gripes from the POV of someone who attends defcon largely for the contests, but acknowledges that I've never put in any work on organizing them:
* contest organizers should definitely know ahead of time if they're getting black badges for their winners. And they should advertise that fact ahead of time. Black badges aren't just rewards to someone who's put on a good contest but an incentive for contestants to play it. If people don't know there's a badge on the line, they're less likely to play.
* contest listings ahead of time are pretty unorganized (with all due respect to the cat herding volunteers in the contests team). Many of the forum links on the top of the DC21 page went to forums with no posts. The mix of contests and events made it hard for people to figure out ahead of time what they wanted to dedicate their (sober-ish) Defcon time towards. Why are there contests listed in the results page (https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-2...t-results.html) that aren't on the DC21 main page, or in the contests forum?
tl;dr I got off topic; keep black badges as rare prizes worth something.
Other gripes from the POV of someone who attends defcon largely for the contests, but acknowledges that I've never put in any work on organizing them:
* contest organizers should definitely know ahead of time if they're getting black badges for their winners. And they should advertise that fact ahead of time. Black badges aren't just rewards to someone who's put on a good contest but an incentive for contestants to play it. If people don't know there's a badge on the line, they're less likely to play.
* contest listings ahead of time are pretty unorganized (with all due respect to the cat herding volunteers in the contests team). Many of the forum links on the top of the DC21 page went to forums with no posts. The mix of contests and events made it hard for people to figure out ahead of time what they wanted to dedicate their (sober-ish) Defcon time towards. Why are there contests listed in the results page (https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-2...t-results.html) that aren't on the DC21 main page, or in the contests forum?
tl;dr I got off topic; keep black badges as rare prizes worth something.
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