Voiceteam

Voiceteam Mystery Box is a two-week mini spinoff of Voiceteam to wrap up the holiday season and start the new year! Starting on 12:01 AM UTC December 27th (7:01 PM EST on December 26th), we will announce two new point-earning challenges per day for five days. All ten challenges will remain open until 11:59 PM UTC January 8th (6:59 PM EST on January 8th). Once all the challenges have closed, the team with the highest score wins!

TIMELINE

Sign-ups: Now – December 21st
Discord server opens: December 23rd
Challenges post: December 27th – December 31st
Check-In: December 29th
Challenges close: January 8th
Results & Celebration: January 10th

Voiceteam runs on UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). Sign-ups and challenges close at 11:59 PM UTC on the dates listed. All other scheduled events happen at 12:01 AM UTC on the dates listed. To get a sense of what that is where you live, you can do a Google search for “midnight UTC in my time zone" or enter your location on this time conversion website. Your mods—eafay70, forzandopod, irrationalpie, klb, novalinium, and twtd—are in EST (UTC-5), MST (UTC-7), and PST (UTC-8), but we have players from across the world. Anyone from any time zone is welcome and able to participate!

MAJOR CHANGES FROM LAST YEAR

• We recognize that this year’s Voiceteam Mystery Box will take place during a scary and difficult time in the world. While we have decided to go forward with this round, to offer a source of joy, community, and structure to those who might need it more than ever right now, we are changing this year’s rules to allow any player to go on retroactive points break for any reason at any time. We hope this will allow players to feel safe shifting their focus away from Mystery Box with minimal stress, if other things come up that more urgently require their attention.


• As we did during this May Voiceteam, we will have a safe space for trans creators in addition to our safe space for creators of color.


• This year, we are making official the role of Discord “ghosts”! Past players who are unable to play this year but still want to stay involved have the option of participation in this way. Discord ghosts will not be part of a team or able to submit any creations on Airtable, but they will have access to All-Team Channels in the Discord and can help cheer on and support all of the players from there!


• We are adding the following question to our sign-up form: “We want to be able to offer a positive space for all participants, particularly within teams. If there are any fandoms you're uncomfortable interacting with, please list them here so we can avoid sorting you onto a team with anyone who has any of those as their primary fandom.”

RULES

1. For Mystery Box, we’ll be offering team sign-ups and individual sign-ups. In team sign-ups, teams of between five and fifteen players can sign up as a complete group. In individual sign-ups, individual players can sign up to be matched by mods with others who signed up individually. Individually matched teams will have up to twelve players. If you would like to sign up individually, but are reluctant to be on a team made up entirely of people you may not know, we offer the option of a “sign-up buddy.” If you and your buddy designate each other on the sign up form, we’ll put you on a team together. Please note that to keep matching from becoming overly complicated, sign-up buddies must be reciprocal, so if person A requests person B, person B must request person A (and not person C)!


2. Each player will have a cap for how many points they can earn for each day’s challenges. You can sign up for a lower point cap (100 points max for each pair of challenges) or a higher point cap (200 points max for each pair of challenges).


3. Since team sizes and point caps will vary, each team’s final score will be scaled. Points will be determined by dividing the number of points each player earned by their total maximum (based on their choice of point cap), averaging this number for all the players in the team, and then multiplying this number by the average team size.


4. This challenge is all about adding fun and connection to our lives, not adding stress! If you choose to sit out a couple days or to only take on a single challenge for the whole event, that’s perfectly allowed. You may take a points break for any day’s challenges—just let the mod team know you want a points break within 24 hours of that day’s challenges being revealed. If you take a points break, your score is not included in the team’s scaled score for that day. Players who prefer to participate without concern for points are welcome to take a points break for all 5 days!


5. Challenges will sometimes leave room for interpretation. If you are not sure whether something counts, please check with the mods. We support creativity and will often be generous with what we allow!


6. Completed creations should be submitted to the mods via an Airtable form. A mod will look over and verify your submission and will reach out to you if we disagree about the point value or need more information from you. You are also encouraged (but not required) to share your creations within the Discord and/or crosspost your creations to our AO3 collection so that other players can see and enjoy them!


7. Each team member has the final decision about their own creations (including their part in collaborative creations, if they choose to participate in any). There are no minimum requirements for the quality or size of your creations.


8. If a good-faith plan is made for multiple people to collaborate on a work and some members aren’t able to meet the deadline, the partial project can be submitted for points by the members who did finish in time.


9. The mods are committed to supporting a positive experience for our players! Please feel free to come to the mods to request support with any issues, including but not limited to: feelings of exclusion, conflict with a group member, and concerns about the rules or structure of Voiceteam. If you suspect a problem might be brewing but are unsure whether it’s worth checking in with the mods, PLEASE give us a heads up about it. We’ll keep your concerns confidential unless you give us the go-ahead to share them, but we can help you think up solutions or make mod-level changes as needed to address the problem. For more serious problems, see our anti-harassment policy.

Code of Conduct for Players
This is a community space, and players are expected to act in ways that take the needs and feelings of other players into account. Specifically, players should not publicly complain about their team, give unsolicited critique of another player’s fanwork, or pressure or exclude team members. Pressuring team members includes repeatedly suggesting ways for the team member to earn more points, or repeatedly checking in on a team member's progress, without that team member having agreed to that type of interaction first.

Any player who breaks this code of conduct will be contacted by the mods and asked to stop. If this type of behavior happens repeatedly, they may be asked to leave Voiceteam or asked not to return in future years.

The above code of conduct is not intended to silence calling out or calling in of racism, transphobia, or other behavior harmful to historically marginalized communities. This community will always make space for that kind of feedback, and the mods will always work to support players who speak up about this type of behavior. This includes calling out/calling in of the mods.

Code of Conduct for Mods
Mods will not delete any words by players from our Discord unless those words violate our anti-harassment policy and their deletion is requested by the affected community members. In case of deletion, we will keep screencaps of the unedited conversation for accountability reasons. If necessary, we encourage participants to hold us accountable to our own actions. We aim to mod this event from within the community, not above it. We will always be open to suggestions and feedback from members of our community for how to improve in our anti-oppression work and our work on making Voiceteam a fun and healthy community.

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FAQ

I haven’t played Voiceteam Mystery Box before. Can you give me a clearer understanding of what it is and how it works?
We recommend you check out our New Player Q&A, which is made of questions new players asked in the Mystery Box 2023 Discord and the answers they were given by returning players.

If you want more information on the origin and general vibe of Voiceteam, in awesome audio documentary form, you can check out An Abridged History of Voiceteam, created by TheLordOfLaMancha during Voiceteam Mystery Box 2023.

Do I have to be an experienced podficcer to join?
No! You just have to love podfic. There are non-voice ways to participate in audio fanworks for points, like contributing writing, beta, editing, directing, or graphics. There will also be some challenges that can be fulfilled without audio fanworks. No one has to do every single challenge.

How big of a commitment is this going to be?
No bigger than you want it to be! The point of this event is to have fun and make friends, and if you end up getting inspired to create a bunch of stuff, cool. If not, that’s also cool.

What is Discord?/Tell me more about how the Discord server is going to work.
Discord is a text-based chat platform. Every server (like the Voiceteam server) can host multiple text and voice chat channels. Some of the channels will be open to the entire Voiceteam community and some will be visible only to members of your team.

Voiceteam players will be emailed an invitation to the Voiceteam Discord server on December 23rd. You can spend the first days saying hi and getting to know your team—we’ll provide some optional icebreaker questions you can answer for each other—and then the first list of challenges will be posted at 12:01 AM UTC on December 27th.

I don’t have a pre-made group and don’t like the idea of being matched to a group of total strangers. What can I do?
While Voiceteam is a great place to make new friends, we also know there are lots of reasons someone might not feel comfortable being thrown into a social situation with a group of strangers. To address this, we have the option for “sign-up buddies”! People who sign up in individual sign-ups can choose one sign-up buddy, who will be guaranteed to be on the same team with them. Please note that to keep matching from becoming overly complicated, sign-up buddies must be reciprocal, so if person A requests person B, person B must request person A (and not person C)!

What if I have one or more people I’d like to privately request to NOT be on a team with?
If you sign up without a pre-arranged team, there will be a field in the sign-up form where you can tell us who, if anyone, you would like to request to NOT be on a team with. Nobody except the mods will see what you type here.

What if my team is not a good fit for me?
Switching teams is a possibility—please reach out to us if you would like to request a team change and we will let you know about other teams you could switch to! If a player chooses to switch teams after the challenges have begun, we will have an individual discussion with them about their options for how to handle previous points and points going forward, since those options will vary from player to player based on the specifics of their situation. However, one rule of thumb is that when a player switches out of a team, it will never negatively impact the score of that team.

If you want to discuss team switches or any other concerns or feedback, feel free to message mods at any time via Discord or email. We will also have an optional check-in on Airtable around the time Day 3 challenges are revealed.

Can I change my sign-up after I’ve submitted it?
You can! After you submit your sign-up, we will email you a copy of your answers. If you’d like to make any changes, you can reply to that email and we’ll edit your sign-up for you.

What’s an example of what a challenge might look like?
Here are all of our past Voiceteam challenges.

What if I don’t like some of the challenges?
That’s okay! The challenges are spread out to interest a wide range of different players, and not every challenge will work for everyone. In some cases, you might have feedback about how to tweak the challenge to make it more fun for you, which we invite you to share in the #feedback-about-voiceteam channel or by DMing a mod.
In other cases, you might find over time that seeing what other people create inspires you and changes your mind about some of the challenges. Sometimes players even find that the challenge that seemed least appealing to them at first ends up being their favorite! We encourage you to keep an open mind, and to reach out to teammates for ideas about how to make a tricky challenge fit with your interests, or for cheerleading and support in trying something new.
We do ask, though, that you keep any negativity about challenges that don't work as well for you to appropriate areas, such as #feedback-about-voiceteam or conversations with mods. (Note: announcing that you plan to go on points break right after a new set of challenges drops counts as negativity.) In team spaces, please focus on the challenges you are interested in and/or constructive problem-solving about those that you are having trouble with. This will help keep team spaces positive, encouraging, and fun!

How do I keep track of when drops and deadlines will happen each day?
We know this can be confusing! We will have a time zone converter set up in Discord in a prominent location to help players keep track of when the next drop or deadline is coming up.

We're also maintaining a Google Calendar with these dates and deadlines that you can subscribe to. (If you just view it, it will show up in GMT (UTC+0), but if you add it to your own Google Calendar, which you can do by clicking "Add to Google Calendar" on the bottom left, it will convert to your local timezone.)

What if 12:01 AM UTC is very late at night in my time zone?
Those in time zones where 12:01 AM UTC is too late at night to comfortably stay awake for challenge drops can sign up to get emailed the challenges 4 hours in advance, so that their sleep schedules are not too disrupted by Voiceteam! They will also be given a channel in the Discord where they can discuss the challenges amongst themselves. However, anyone who receives the challenges early must NOT discuss them or react to them in any way outside this channel until the challenges have been officially announced in the Voiceteam Mystery Box Discord.

I observe Shabbat in a way that makes me not able to participate (or have a similar religious or cultural reason that I’d need to take certain days off from playing), but I still want to compete for points! Is there a way for me to do that?
Absolutely! If you will need to take off specific days for religious or cultural reasons but still want to play for points, let us know at sign-up, and we will send you the challenges earlier to make up for the missed time.

Are there limits or requirements for crossposting creations I make for Voiceteam?
Nope! You may crosspost any works made for Voiceteam whenever and wherever you want. You can also choose to not crosspost at all and only share with the mods, or only share within the Voiceteam Discord. One reminder, though, is that since many Voiceteam works are collaborations, all collaborators should discuss and be on the same page about when/where a work will be crossposted.

What if I was already working on something before Voiceteam started? Is there a way to get points for it?
Any creation can earn points for a Voiceteam challenge as long as it is completed during the time that challenge is active. This includes WIPs you were already working on that happen to align with one of the challenges.

How are multi-chapter works scored?
For multi-chapter works, each chapter can be submitted for points separately. Different chapters will each be treated as their own creation, so you can submit any chapter for any challenge, independent of what challenge(s) other chapters of that work were submitted for.

What if I am collaborating on a work with other players and someone doesn’t complete their part by the deadline?
If a good-faith plan is made for multiple people to collaborate on a work and some members aren’t able to meet the deadline, the partial project can be submitted for points by the members who did finish in time.

Do you recommend teams create their own separate Discords or group DMs to coordinate projects on Voiceteam challenges?
We hope this event can be an opportunity for participants to get to know each other better and form lasting connections! However, in the interests of facilitating moderation we'd encourage you to keep to the Voiceteam Mystery Box Discord for coordinating Voiceteam projects with your team, rather than creating a separate team Discord for yourselves. If you do decide to create a separate Discord for your team, we highly recommend you add one or more of the Voiceteam mods so it's easier for us to get caught up in the case of issues - you can always remove us after all of the challenges have closed.

Regarding DMs, all players will have the opportunity to assign themselves the roles “DMs Open,” “Ask to DM,” or “DMs Closed.” Please respect the DM preferences that players show through these roles.

Are minors allowed to participate?
Yes, minors (and over-18 folk who prefer to avoid mature content) are welcome to participate in Voiceteam! To accommodate these participants, NSFW content in the Discord server is kept in separate age-restricted channels. The only time NSFW content would be mixed in with SFW content would be in team-specific channels, and only in cases where every team member is over 18 and has expressed comfort with doing so.

I am a past player who is unable to play this year, but I’d like to still be involved in some way. Is there a way to do that?
Players who have participated in past Mystery Box rounds but are not participating in this round can sign up for a focus group discussion in our planning server. In this focus group, after sign-ups close (December 22nd–23rd), volunteers will read through the planned challenges in advance, give feedback, and ask questions so that we can revise them and make them as good as possible before they’re officially revealed!

Past players who are unable to play this year but still want to stay involved also have the option of participation as Discord “ghosts,” which is a tradition started by flamingwell in Mystery Box 2023. Discord ghosts will not be part of a team or able to submit any creations on Airtable, but they will have access to All-Team Channels in the Discord and can help cheer on and support all of the players from there!

What are your content moderation rules and how do they work?
We have put in place two content moderation rules. If someone finds a fanwork that they think may violate one of the rules, they can report it privately (and anonymously if they want) to the mod team.

We have designed our response plan to prevent this system from being used to harass fanwork creators. We will never publicly share information about any reports, and we will only contact the creator about a report if we are sure the fanwork really is against one of these rules. If it’s unclear to us whether the fanwork violates the rule, the mod team will privately consult with one or more members of the marginalized group impacted, or as close as possible to that group, to assess if harm is being caused to the impacted community by the fanwork. If harm is being caused, we will move forward in private conversation with the creator of the fanwork to discuss the situation together and figure out possible next steps.

If the work is in violation of one of the rules and the fanwork’s creator cannot or does not wish to alter it, any points previously earned by the work will be removed and the work will be removed from our Voiceteam AO3 collection.

What plans does Voiceteam have in place to address racism within fandom and our community?
At the start of Voiceteam, players will have the option to opt into a section of channels intended to be a safe space for creators of color. This space is run by a mod of color, and none of the white mods will have access, nor will any white player in Voiceteam. Most importantly, we ask that everyone - whether you're a person of color or not - respect that space.

We will also continue with the universal bonus of +10 points for any Voiceteam fanwork that centers one or more characters of color. This includes racebent characters.

We are continuing to reflect as a mod team about our anti-racism practices within fandom, which we recognize to be a space deeply shaped by racism. We remain open to suggestions and feedback from members of our community for how to improve in this area.

Will there be a safe space set aside for trans players as well?
Yes! We will also have a set of channels designated only for trans players, and run by a trans mod.

How do I sign up?
Head to our sign-up post on Dreamwidth or directly to our sign-up form on Airtable.

I have more questions!
Please ask them in the comments, or email us at voiceteammods@gmail.com, and we will get back to you as quickly as we can.