Let me preface this post with the idea that I like the idea of awards a whole lot! They're a fun way to show off the top of the top achievements on this site, and people should be proud to have them! It's only a small part of the site, but I have a few ideas that'd fix this little thing right up, and make it fresh again :D

The most important thing for awards is that they should require a prestigious achievement to obtain, and should look impressive enough to denote the achievement. A big issue with trophies right now, I feel, is that they're rather inconsistent, and they're getting quite devalued; many are being given out for fairly niche and easy to get categories (particularly in Summer/Winter Chip), as a result there's a lot of page clutter that doesn't necessarily imply much at all! There are also a lot of ribbons that also seem to be handed out for rather small major battles (example: http://battleofthebits.org/arena/Entry/Funk+After+Death_/6897/), overshadowing somewhat more major achievements in far larger-scale battles. As a result, the feeling of getting a trophy is a bit arbitrary; having a few trophies given out sparingly and consistently is much more a mark of pride than giving out prestigious awards that are indistinguishable from less prestigious ones!

I think one big way to going about fixing this would be to not give out so many ribbons for smaller competitions it doesn't seem to make sense that ribbons are given out for placing in categories with three or less people in them! (There is more competition in one-hour compos...)

Another way would be to give the more prestigious ribbons a more prestigious look! It could work by giving the most amazing awards (i.e. top places in high-entry, major battles) a more impressive ribbon, or even a Trophy Cabinet, to store these things! Something like placing top 3 overall in the larger battles would fit this perfectly. It also seems quite strange to me that the overall ribbons seem almost indistinguishable from the category winning ribbons, and since there's often a lot of overlap between the people that top the categories and people that top it overall it'd work very well to give the overall ribbon a special new kick.

To this end I'd recommend a tiered system of major battles; anything with over 80 entries (this should cover all the Winter Chips, excluding the first one), you get all five voting category ribbons for placing... for placing overall, you get either a super special ribbon or a trophy, BotB's highest of all honours! Anything with over ten entries gives you a ribbon for placing overall (in larger compos with multiple format categories, ribbons will also be given to anyone who places in a format category with more than 10 entries). Below that and a smaller ribbon is given, perhaps on the scale of an OHB medal, or perhaps not even at all!

Let me know what you think...! I'll answer any questions you guys might have :)

edit: wow i did not mean this to be so big haha, apologies in advance for the wall of text

Shorter Version: Make the harder-to-get trophies appear bigger and more impressive than the comparatively not-so-hard-to-get ones. Perhaps divide award categories down into tiers, affecting the eye-candyness of their appearances: trophies, medals and ribbons, depending on the scale of the compo.

I support this notion %100!

a perfectly concise summary :D thank you!

i like trophies the way they are, the inconsistency is part of the charm

Make them bigger, smaller, fancier, uglier, that's okay. But don't take away our trophies. ;(

Trophies are fine how they are, but maybe something could replace tincans in major compos. Or at least, tincans for a specific major entry should be labelled in order to show what they're attributed to (whether they're 4th-7th in overall, format-specific, voting-specific...) so that I don't have to lie in wonder at what an entry got a tincan in!! They're fine for OHC's though cause it's very clear why they were given.

I also agree with Chip Champion and Slimeball.

Aren't trophies for a podium place overall in a major battle already given?

"Aren't trophies for a podium place overall in a major battle already given?"

Yes, but they're visually the same as trophies from other categories. The neatness of the trophy feature is visiting someone's profile and having this neat texture of trophies and medals to look at and know at a glance the BotBr's achievements. Making podium place trophies larger or somehow stand out above the other icons just makes sense.

I really like the idea of at least making the trophies visually larger or something for the major compo overall-placement category. Like, I've top-three'd in 5 non ohc compos, two of which had 20 or more contestants. I'll admit, I love to visit my profile every now and then just to look at my trophies and ohc medals and feel good...it's an awesome feature, but it feels a bit shallow cos I know that only five of the trophy-flurry are a noteworthy accomplishment in my brain. It would be that much cooler to have some larger trinkets to gawk at and know that relatively fewer people have them. It would also make going over to Strobe or Zan or Kulor's profiles like visiting a shrine or something.

We don't HAVE to have trophies in the first place, but we do, and they add a very tasty and fun dimension to the competition here. We don't HAVE to differentiate between the trophies by making different categories appear more visually impressive than others, but it will add an additional tasty and fun dimension to the competition here.

edit: not to swing my opinionated cack around, these are just thoughts. the whole trophy thing really is fine the way it is, but i like experimenting with new ideas. like yea, don't fix it if it aint broke, but it's fun to take things apart sometimes.