User blog comment:Blacknumber1/Suggestions/Ideas for the Freestyle Challenge Finals. Open to your ideas!/@comment-26030957-20150217170215/@comment-25428589-20150217190402

I just wanted to give my input on this, since I am one of the aforementioned judges.

Everyone has different tastes in horror. A story I might really enjoy, someone else might find as boring as watching paint dry, similarly, it's not uncommon for me to find a story boring even though other people enjoy it. This might be why there's differences in ratings, it might not be. To be fair, throughout the first stage I didn't have as much time as I would have liked to rate stories, however I don't think anything glaringly awful got through into the finals & I'm very happy with every one of our finalists.

Building on this, I honestly don't think the first round ratings matter all that much. The only thing we're using them for right now is to try and make fairer groups, but honestly, they aren't truly representative of people's writing skills. Some people got subjects they couldn't work with and scored lower than they might usually & others excelled far more than they normally would due to things such as the subject they were given. This isn't to say the subject counts for everything, as the Justin Bieber entry was excellent and managed to achieve 9/10, but in many cases this is true. In the finals, ratings will be more accurate, as everyone contending in each group will have to use the same subject.

IDK, that's just want I think.