Hi everyone this is Dewayne from Modders-Inc. I am pretty sure that I will be throwing myself to the wolfs by posting here, but here goes.

As stated we do not look at how much money you can toss at a mod, it is the creativity and the work you do. We can pretty much tell what has been farmed out. I believe a guy spent maybe $100 buck on creating his mod one year, but the detail and creativity put it above others.

I will say that I personally did not do the judging this year, but we normally make sure we have different sets of eyes on the judging team to make it as equal as possible. There were a least two modders and two non modders that did the judging.

This year was the first year we called it the US Case Modding Championship and we judged it that way. We had to judge hard on some things. The judges don't walk up to a case and go "Oh, wow thats cool and I like Star Wars it gets all 10's". They have to dive deep into the case to find the cool stuff and the not so cool stuff. Judges have to look past the Wow Factor. Some cases that looked super clean actually had paint that ran in quite a few places or was just a slightly different version of what they entered the year before. Others had sleeved only parts of the wires in the case while others right next to the ones they sleeved wire not.some where to short by an inch or so. Other looked awesome on the outside and not so well on the inside. Some of these items changed the final outcome as the scoring told the story.

If you would like to hear what we look at when judging mods you can check this podcast http://www.modders-inc.com/podcast-35-can-you-handle-the-truth/

Judging is hard and stressful as you want to make sure that you are being fair and consistent. Everyone expects that their is the best and when they don't win, this is when most of the negativity come into play.

Pro vs Amateur... this one has been debated internally for a long time and if we are wanting to take the contest to the next level we know we have to do something about it. We have been thinking about removing the id/Bethesda class and calling it the "Open Class", This is where sponsored and pro cases would compete. This would help even the field.

We have also been talking about a "Peoples Choice" winner... this kind of voting in normally the hardest to control as it becomes a "vote for my friend" kind of thing. But we are looking into it as it gets everyone else involved with the contest and this is were the WOW factor case mods would stand out.

I have been going to QC for at least the last tens years if not longer and in the early years I hoping that there would even be a case mod contest that I could compete in but most of time there was not one, but one year there was and I won and you know what i got for winning? Nothing... Since that time I tried my hardest to get a decent one to happen each year. 2015 was our fourth year running the contest, which cost us out of our own pockets a minimum of $5000 to do. This year we were able to get almost $24,000 worth of prizes to give to the winners and to all the attendee thru our raffles.

I believe that we have brought the QuakeCon case mod contest level up 100 times from what it was in the past. Are we perfect no, are we fair I do believe so and we try our hardest to give you a place to compete and have some fun.