Shemeska
Adventurer
More than anything else anyone could speculate about, I think it's a comment on the website's user friendly navigation, or lack thereof. The only reason I even knew about the "Sell your Sole" contest and the Dragonlance contest was that there was a link on Enworld. Never saw anything on the WotC forums about it, and to take a page from Shia Labeouf, I'd rather eat broken glass than dig through the main website.
I never heard of the split the party content before now. And with only 128 entries, I don't think many people did either. Marketing or whoever else was running it dropped the ball something fierce.
That said, I actually won three small contests that WotC had over the years during the first several years that UnCon was running, and when Knowledge Arcana the fanzine was being hosted by WotC and had some quasi-official standing of sorts. I won a spell design contest and got some 3e character sheets, a demiplane creation contest and won a copy of Savage Species with a few folks there at WotC signing it for me, and I think I got my custom avatar on the WotC boards for the third win for writing a story that got into an issue of the original KA.
All of those contests were run and organized by some of the WizOs, back before Gleemax, back before a lot of them left/resigned, and prior to a metric ton of long-time posters leaving the WotC forums. At the time communication and community mood both were much better in my opinion. I don't notice when promotions and contests are run anymore unless I find it out second-hand through a website other than WotC's.
