I see why you'd want that, but it does make people wait till they are done before entering. I barely had much of a patch of firepro done but was encouraged to enter it. It got shitty ratings for 2 years instead of 1. I do not believe anyone knew/cared how much more was done between entries. Just "it was here last year -5 by default"
I'm not delusional, it was both my first project and a niche game but I feel like it was passed over the first year for being incomplete and largely ignored the second year because it had been entered before. It almost broke me of wanting to do anymore projects at all.
And now my complaints about the contest itself:
My biggest problem with translation patches category in general was that there was no metric for judging.
Popular games win and niche games lose ; difficulty of hack, amount of text, quality of translation, etc are all treated as superficial things.
Judges, when they bother to show up, rarely leave feedback. When I entered, it made me feel as though they didn't actually try anything/everything. This area needs fresh blood from people who actually care. Shout out to Panda for always typing *something* up.
Shifting entry deadlines, shifting judging deadlines, etc are an issue and some sort of new standard needs to be set and enforced.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.