I think part of the problem is that the award is called "best of show", which sounds to me like what was most recognized. An award with this title should really be based on something mostly objective, like how much discussion the games had or how many reviews they got, and there should be an explanation for it in cases where it's difficult to choose. Then you could have a "judges' pick" which is more like this year's "best of show", and maybe split the "judges' picks" into several categories, like "most unique".

Or, you can have a simple "honorable mentions" (around 5 of them) instead of trying to determine what's "best" to make it feel less competitive.

Honestly, one of the big issues this year (and maybe last year, I'm not sure) was a severe lack of activities. There was "fight night", some live gameplay, and the workshops, but the rest of the time, there was just trailers being looped on Livestream. this meant that there were a lot of occasions where there was just nothing to do on NCFC.

Other than having more people streaming at Livestream, one thing I might propose is to change the "workshops" to "activities"; "workshops" seem to have a fixed purpose of acting like teaching sessions, and I think it's pretty obvious that you're not going to get many of those from the last 3 years.

Some tutorials on how to stream with LiveStream would also be a very good idea, even if they only show how to do it with one particular gratis program on Windows. I would be happy to personally volunteer to translate the Windows instructions to GNU/Linux instructions as well, if I can figure it out.

I also suggest having the site be designed for the next event much earlier than it was this year, maybe as early as January. There was no discussion about NCFC 2011 long after it ended, so there's not much point in keeping the forum open at that time, either; archive the 2012 discussions earlier and leave it locked with a single announcement telling the dates of the next event. Then you won't have people assuming that NCFC is dead and you also won't have all that spam the forum gets over the course of a year.

Anyway, that's just my thoughts. Take it or leave it.