voiceteam

How does Voiceteam work?

An overview. For exact details, go to this year's Rules & FAQ post.

Sign-up phase and matching with a team

When you sign up, there will be some questions about fandoms or tropes you like, and mods will use that to match you up with people with similar or overlapping interests. During the event, many challenges or prompts encourage working with others, and your team is often a good place to find people to collaborate with. If you wind up on a team that isn't a good fit for you, there will be several check-ins throughout the event where you can let the mods know, and we can work with you to find a better fit!

Orientation/entering the Discord server

On the date in the schedule, a new Discord server will open, and you'll get an invite to join and get to know your team. Some channels will be visible to everyone, but there will also be a set of channels specifically for your team. Many participants will add colored or themed hats to their profile pictures (for fun, it's not required!) and start linking resources or posting memes to get into the spirit of Voiceteam. It can be a little chaotic! We (participants and mods) are generally a friendly bunch though, and happy to help answer any questions!

This year, there will be three short practice challenges to complete for fake points, to learn (or remind you) how challenges work (and hopefully get started on having fun!)

Challenges/prompts

There will be three rounds, each with ten challenges/prompts. The challenges from Voiceteam 2024 Round 1 are a good example. Some are more straightforwardly related to podfic-making, like High Five, which had players make a list of five audio fanworks they'd like to create and gave points for both making the list and making those fanworks. Others might be about podfic listening, like Choose Well, which had players listen to a podfic while doing something good for them. There's always a range of different challenges so there should be something for everyone!

It's not required to be around right when the challenges are revealed, but it can be fun to watch it happen live (watching the emoji reactions tick up is some prime entertainment)! If challenge drop isn't at a good time for you in your time zone, there's also an option to preview the challenges four hours ahead of time.

Fulfilling challenges/prompts

Each challenge will explain how to get points for it, but generally everyone who works on a project will get full points for it, no matter the size of the contribution. Unless specifically stated in the challenge text, you're encouraged to fill each challenge multiple times! Each challenge remains open until the end of the round, at which point there’ll be a two-day break when no challenges are active.

Each creation you make can only be turned in for one challenge, but you are free to count each chapter of a podfic as a separate creation (allowing you to turn them in for different challenges). There are no cross-posting requirements, though there will be an optional collection on AO3 and you’re encouraged to share what you make with your team and the whole discord server!

Points cap and earning points

The goal of the points cap is to give people an achievable target and discourage taking on so many projects you burn out. We will provide each team a scoreboard that will show your points for each round, so you will not be required to do any math! This explanation is just for your information.

Points for projects you work on will be associated with a particular challenge in a particular round. Your points for each round are capped at either 200 (low cap), 400 (high cap), or 0 (points break).

Let's look at an example of how points are earned. In 2024, Round 1 contained the Moooood challenge, worth 35 points, to make an audio fanwork involving animal noises you make with your own voice or body. If you make a podfic that fits the challenge, you get 35 points. If your teammate makes a podfic for the challenge, and you contribute some animal noises, you both get 35 points. There are also some bonuses that may apply, such as the length bonus. If a teammate makes a podfic for the challenge that's over 10 minutes, there'll be a 10 point bonus, so if you contribute more animal noises to their podfic, now you both get 45 points. Points add up a lot faster when you work together! In this hypothetical scenario, you're already at 115 points (out of your 200 or 400 point cap), and you haven't even tried any of the other nine challenges yet!

Project 1	Project 2	Project 3
Challenge points: 35	Challenge points: 35	Challenge points: 35 Length bonus: 10
Contributors: You (podfic, including animal noises)	Contributors: Teammate (podfic) You (animal noises)	Contributors: Teammate (podfic) You (more animal noises)
Total points: You get 35 points	Total points: Teammate gets 35 points You get 35 points	Total points: Teammate gets 45 points You get 45 points

You'll notice in the above examples that collaboration is really lucrative, points-wise. In Project 2, each person did less work than in Project 1, and each player still earned full points. Sometimes a single project can have small contributions by 10 or 20 people or more, and every contributor gets full points for that project! (Don't worry, the person who coordinated the project does get a bonus for the extra work of organizing all those people!) So here's an important strategic tip: if you're ever overwhelmed trying to figure out how to earn more points for a round, the answer is almost always collaboration!

Once you reach the points cap, any additional projects you made after that, for these or other challenges in the round, will not earn you any more points (though they may earn your co-creators points!). You can switch cap in either direction before any challenges are revealed, or from low to high at any time until the final round ends. There'll be an opportunity to pick points break for any particular round of challenges after each round is revealed.

Team scoring

In order not to benefit larger teams or teams with more people picking high cap, every team's score will be multiplied by a magic number that will make up for this. This means you can pick low cap or go on points break and that won’t negatively affect your team’s score! Some teams are interested in trying to win, but plenty of teams are not!

Tiebreaker

After all three rounds have ended, there will be a tiebreaker challenge. This is how we decide the winner of Voiceteam if there was a tie for first place. But the Tiebreaker round can be fun to play with your team even if you aren't on one of the teams competing for first place! It's a chaotic free-for-all with no point caps, where teams strategize to see how many points they can earn across a 24-hour period. Participation is optional, and you won't harm your team's chances if you choose to sit out.

Mod dares

For each set of challenges, there will be an extra twist called a "mod dare" hidden somewhere within, or associated with, the Voiceteam server. Teams can choose to try to find the dare, and if they find it, can choose to complete it. An example dare from Voiceteam 2024 was to create a team slogan, and then find a way to incorporate the team slogan into all 10 of that round's challenges. Working together on a dare can be good for team bonding, since dares are meant to be completed as a group rather than on your own. But they're also totally skippable, especially since you don't earn bonus points for completing them.

Chaos

The Voiceteam discord server is often a chaotic place to be. It can be overwhelming, particularly at first, but things often become more calm as the month progresses. You are not required to engage in the chaos if you don’t want to. It is perfectly acceptable to mute any channels that don’t appeal to you or to simply stick to your team’s channels.

After five years, there are many in-jokes. These are a few of the main ones:

Team hats: Teams often choose hats to add to their user icons to represent their teams. These hats are optional, but people often find them an easy way to create team unity and esprit de corps.
Flan: In Voiceteam 2022, there was a challenge called Flanfiction, which was: "Create something—anything—that in some way is connected to audio fanworks and in some way is connected to flan. NO CLARIFYING QUESTIONS PERMITTED ON THIS CHALLENGE." Players got very creative and silly with the challenge, and flan has since become a symbol of Voiceteam chaos.
Craig: Craig is a Discord bot that can record audio from voice channels. In theory, he is very helpful, but in practice he is often glitchy and ends up with damaged audio. Players have a love/hate relationship with Craig, but one thing we can all agree on: he is not to be trusted!
Voiceteam filk: Filk is fandom songs, usually with new lyrics written to existing tunes. There has been a lot of filk written about Voiceteam over the years, since Voiceteam itself the one common reference point that everyone within the server shares. Players will often share filk from previous rounds, or start planning new filks, soon after the Voiceteam Discord opens.

While you might feel out of the loop during the first few days, there will be plenty of new shared experiences, jokes, and references across this year's rounds, so if you just dive in and go through the experience with us, everything will make sense by the end!