[VGMC] Video Game Music Contest 18 announcement!! Noms are 4/17!!

VGMC 18 nominations will open on Wednesday, April 17th at 9pm Eastern time (UTC-4)!!
Note that the time for rollovers has been pushed from last year's 7pm to 9pm since I am likely to have to work later this year.

This year, I don't have any really big things to announce, just some tweaks. But one might be a little bit of an impact so we'll go over that right away!

Lock Threshold Change
The requirement to lock a song is being bumped from 6 +s up to 7. I debated bumping this even up to 8, but last year locks didn't go super insane so I think a bump by one will do for now. But with our community holding pretty strong after the influx we got after locks were introduced I think it's almost a requirement to raise the number. Those with a good memory may remember I almost did this last year even, but yeah I can't let it go by as it was any longer.

The Schedule
9pm Wednesday, April 17th - Nominations open, 5 unique nominations allowed with no limit to supports.
9pm Thursday, April 18th (start +24 hours) - Unique nominations raised to 10.
9pm Friday, April 19st (start +48 hours) - ALL nominations AND supports stopped. 48 hours pause enacted to let people listen to everyone's top priority nominations over the weekend.
9pm Sunday, April 21rd (start +96 hours) - Nominations and supports resume, unique nomination cap completely lifted. Go crazy!
9pm Saturday, April 27th (end -24 hours) - No more songs will lock past this point if the lock cap has not already been hit.
9pm Sunday, April 28th - Nominations close!

The main difference here is that noms are extended an extra day to encompass the entirety of the second weekend as well.

Like last year, this topic is getting out later than I really would have liked, but that's my fault for taking on other stuff that took up my March (looking at you GENRE-SHUFFLE 4 lol). Regardless, if people were hoping for other changes, since I didn't have much of a chance to hash more things out myself nor get discussion going in the community earlier then I am still open to considering other changes!! There's some bigger ones that I actually would've liked to iron out for this year (i.e. the "drop protection" system UF8 used for BOST 2022) but I'm also sort of in a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mindset and last year really kept me a believer in the lock system as well.

Anyway, get hype!!!!!!

where bracket

I am swimming in a vgm sea, my vgm sails directing my Drifting Ship (hahahhsa like the song by SHU)

I can already feel the sunshine

Oh hell.

Is Tournament of Champions 4 happening this year?

While probably unlikely, is there a maximum number of songs that can lock (that is lower than the total number of songs in the contest)?

Man I don't get out of work until 10, I'm gonna be stuck on page 3 with my first noms.

Yeah, ToC4 is the foremost thing on my mind. I wonder if we should reduce the field to 192 to accommodate for that? But if the field is reduced, then we might need to raise the nom cap to 8 or 9.

One thing I don't like is the start of day 1 noms where everyone races to be first. It stresses me out, people sometimes preemptively post by mistake, plus there are other undesirable things about it. If there is any way we could get rid of people racing to be first on day 1, whether this contest or the next, it would be nice. No idea how that would be done, though.

Also, hype!

Haste_2 posted...

One thing I don't like is the start of day 1 noms where everyone races to be first. It stresses me out, people sometimes preemptively post by mistake, plus there are other undesirable things about it. If there is any way we could get rid of people racing to be first on day 1, whether this contest or the next, it would be nice. No idea how that would be done, though.

Everyone privately submits an ordered list of their Day 1 nominations before Day 1 starts.
A list of everyone who submitted something is put in a random order.
Songs are ordered snake draft style.
It starts with the first song of the first random person.
Continues to the first song of the last random person.
Next is the second song of the last random person and snakes back to the top.
After that is the third song of the first person and so on.

It's too much effort to bother with, but it can be done. There are probably other ways to do it as well.

+ Hong Kong 97 | Main Tehme | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qxqz-0wJZ0

TeamRocketElite posted...

Everyone privately submits an ordered list of their Day 1 nominations before Day 1 starts.
A list of everyone who submitted something is put in a random order.
Songs are ordered snake draft style.
It starts with the first song of the first random person.
Continues to the first song of the last random person.
Next is the second song of the last random person and snakes back to the top.
After that is the third song of the first person and so on.

It's too much effort to bother with, but it can be done. There are probably other ways to do it as well.

I am not willing to devote more than the bare minimum effort to make the working playlist, so you would need to devote a lot of effort into magic into making any kind of usable system for this. They will all be fundamentally kludgy

Lock Threshold Change
The requirement to lock a song is being bumped from 6 +s up to 7. I debated bumping this even up to 8, but last year locks didn't go super insane so I think a bump by one will do for now. But with our community holding pretty strong after the influx we got after locks were introduced I think it's almost a requirement to raise the number. Those with a good memory may remember I almost did this last year even, but yeah I can't let it go by as it was any longer.

The Schedule
9pm Wednesday, April 17th - Nominations open, 5 unique nominations allowed with no limit to supports.

Whoa. Buddy. Pal. Bro. Yes. But also oh god. I wonder if we're likely to straight up start filling the cap immediately...

Anyway I'm just happy about the support fix, I put in my request on the lock system revision because I was concerned over how damaging it'd be with this change but there's really no way to know for sure without actually doing this. If it does end up being absolute bedlam then hey at least i can say i was right (but just in case i will say that you might want to put in a clarification or something that it could get emergency bumped up to at least 8 lol, the idea of locks potentially running out before even the unique nom limit is reached is scary!!!)

Tag. I am out-of-town for the next month so may not be able to do noms at all this year, but looking forward to the contest either way.

Dang a 2am start for noms D: Well maybe I'll stay up late that night >_>

andylt posted...

Dang a 2am start for noms D: Well maybe I'll stay up late that night >_>

Same lmaooo :p 2am on thursday is not helpful but it could be worse for me so i will not complain

can someone link the master vgmc spreadsheet?

excited to listen to a handful of noms and then get distracted and not listen through nearly enough

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1K1XdLWiUKB2kX99qYBgnRbLU_sCz4dvZSByKKJHCT6o

oh ok so i misinterpreted the no limit to supports line my bad

with that in mind then, well for one thing i am still incredibly disappointed that you'll continue to prevent support of songs this way, but that aside, i am also pretty concerned over this current plan. you're really putting the freeze before the full amount of noms have been unlocked? (i mean sure there's supports but the idea is usually meant to be to use them *after* listening to everything). i get that you're probably trying to just encourage only 10 total per user but imo it'd have honestly been better to just flat out limit to 10 unique noms and 20 total than this (of course, i'd have been more for 10 and 30 total personally)

also another matter that i wish had been tackled is just the fact that even with the freeze, 5 per day seems to be a bit excessively stressful for day 1 with the current crowd and lowering to 4 or 3 per day could've been a good move. (getting a rule adjustment to further push for people provide loop/end points for their own nominations would also be a very nice thing)

thirdly, given that i'd been hoping to run bost23 significantly earlier than last year to leave sufficient room to start bost24 around the start of next year, i do hope that this contest can start more swiftly after noms than last time (in all fairness, that contest series is prob going to be a bit less involved moving forward so ideally it won't be as heavy a commitment as it was in the first iteration)

without commenting on the other things and recognizing the rules are already in place, I like the idea of a lower first day limit so I can listen to more peoples noms easily and get a better sense of what their faves are

this is coming from a place of me being tremendously lazy so take it as you will

So I Pm you for my entry?

Comprehensive VGMC Nomination List:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qZxAoO6iaKSFj3CpMhx9F9Gs8hCa0zRI8oclVObxEhI/edit?usp=sharing

Now most are with their original Youtube links! (obviously a lot of them no longer work, and there are no links for the early contests) Let me know if you notice any major errors on the first two tabs. For example, some game title standardization still needs to be done: if you want, let me know anything you want fixed, and tell me how to fix it!

Taggg

UF8 posted...

you're really putting the freeze before the full amount of noms have been unlocked?

The thing you're purposefully ignoring is that everyone has a limit for how many songs they're willing to listen to before they shut down and say fuck it. They'll support maybe a few things that pop up later that they know, and ignore the rest. If we don't put in a freeze, you may as well forget about nominating anything after day 2 anyway unless it's already well-known. Certainly not the sort of things you'd normally be trying to roll out there.

So, ironically, the person the freeze helps the most is probably you .

Haste_2 posted...

Comprehensive VGMC Nomination List:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qZxAoO6iaKSFj3CpMhx9F9Gs8hCa0zRI8oclVObxEhI/edit?usp=sharing

is this every VGMC nomination in history

what the hell

azuarc posted...

So, ironically, the person the freeze helps the most is probably you.

normally this would be true but actually i'd been planning around the idea that my 10 unique nom limit would be accepted so actually not

In case people forgot like me, the nom schedule is identical to last year, assuming 20 unique noms and 128 locks still. Even "April 19st" is a typo from copypasting last year's post!

I feel like I'm already late to this topic, but we have a good 11 days to discuss potential rule changes, even if they're not implemented until a future year. Here are some broad topics to consider:

1) Hosting support: Should we open up hosting duties to the community? Seeing deo forget or be unable to post this topic multiple times this week, I'm reminded that 4 months of nominations, bracket construction, topic posting, and vote tallying is a lot of work to put on one person! With the growth from 128 to 192 to 256 and loop/composer tagging, it's only getting worse while we're getting older with outside responsibilities and life changes. deo already gets a lot of help with admin stuff, we're just missing a more official way to contribute. How can I help with posting the topic when deo's away? How do I tally votes accurately? Maybe we can lighten the load by assigning each day of the week to different people for the match topic, but there need to be resources to support that. Many of us know how hosting works by now, and the contest will probably progress towards being more community-run anyway.

2) Long bracket stage: Is 256 songs still worth making the bracket take over 3 months to finish? Can we either reduce it or do something to get through it faster? Last year's songs averaged 3m48s *if* you skip at the loop, which was over 20 minutes of critical listening per day, for half of May and most of June. That's just round 1, the first half of the contest! We can at least do a survey on how people feel about 256, and there's nothing wrong with trying 128 for one year before returning to 256 again. Separately from the bracket size, I've often mentioned how energies are high to start the contest, which we should utilize to power through matches in the first few weeks. This can range from an official "super week" to occasionally posting future matches that people can vote in now to save time later.

3) Noms and representation: Does everyone feel like their voice can be heard with the power of supports and doubles? A community bracket would ideally represent each demographic proportionally, *except* no one gets rounded down to zero representation. We're in a stable B8-Siiva-Supra period where we can try things that were vulnerable to bad actors in the past, like giving people the power to push in that one darling song. It would be a big leap to do auto-include noms, but we can try something with going beyond doubles. Everyone gets three triples? Or two quadruples? One quintuple? Maybe they can distribute their 20 votes across as few songs as they like, but with a cap per song. Representation is connected to bracket size too - we grew to 256 to have more tastes represented, yet doubling the field doesn't shift any demographics directly...we just get more of everything in the same proportions.

4) Nom deadlines: How many rules do we add to try and satisfy everyone? All these deadlines are getting to a point where I have a hard time keeping them in my head, not to mention the newcomers parsing them for the first time. Some people like locks and some people like a moving cutoff, should both deadlines be stuffed in together each year? It can satisfy both sides, but it's also more criteria to worry about. This year, I'm reducing my original noms and have seen comments considering the same - will that make supports more concentrated and push the cutoff higher? I have no idea, so now I have to track how many songs are locking daily, check how many lock slots are free before the deadline, decide if I want to push for any locks, drop songs before the last day, then manage the moving cutoff at the end (whose speed is itself affected by how many users' votes are sitting on locks). I'm getting too old for this! Casual, public games are fun because they impose rules that are easy to learn and play with, and that goes for both veterans and newcomers.

More opinionated thoughts:
I come back to this contest precisely because things change and fiascos happen - last year was uneventful without many newcomers or rule changes, and I couldn't tell you much about the highlights. I do remember the weird but fun VGMC 14 wildcards, the Drift Stage conspiracy being unravelled, and the full bracket lock of VGMC 15 - those are fun memories! I loved the retiree sets of 13 and 14, but I'd get bored if retirees looked like that every year. 18 years has gotten us to a solid community and we shouldn't be afraid of trying small changes, even if they work terribly and promptly get reverted. VGMC will still be VGMC!

Personally, I've always been here for the bracket phase and retirees, but I'm planning to skip a few rounds this year because of how long 256 songs take. But I also see people say nominations are the best part - maybe that's a sign that we need more events like crowdsources, community mixes, or VGM gift exchanges? Putting all your worth into a song making or not making a bracket among 500-1000 other songs has never seemed like a healthy way to connect with a community. The idea of people stopping to appreciate your songs is an illusion too - there's no time for reviews or repeat listens when there are noms to get through, supports to organize, deadlines to worry about...it's more an outdoor music festival than a hangout at a friend's house. I guess I'm saying that VGMC has never felt like it was about anything other than the bracket for me, and it's great that people can find the fun in noms but maybe there can be a better-shaped hole for their square peg.

Well, I wrote too much as usual but it's always fun to gather for a VGM event with such a long history. The community has shown its resilience over the years and I'm sure it'll survive for many more, whether everything goes smoothly or makes grown-ups type angry words on the Internet!

PIayer_0 posted...

In case people forgot like me, the nom schedule is identical to last year, assuming 20 unique noms and 128 locks still. Even "April 19st" is a typo from copypasting last year's post!

ahh, i had a suspicion after i vaguely recalled making the same mistake over the phrasing used last year, but i didn't want to check out of embarrassment >_>

PIayer_0 posted...

1) Hosting support: Should we open up hosting duties to the community? Seeing deo forget or be unable to post this topic multiple times this week, I'm reminded that 4 months of nominations, bracket construction, topic posting, and vote tallying is a lot of work to put on one person! With the growth from 128 to 192 to 256 and loop/composer tagging, it's only getting worse while we're getting older with outside responsibilities and life changes. deo already gets a lot of help with admin stuff, we're just missing a more official way to contribute. How can I help with posting the topic when deo's away? How do I tally votes accurately? Maybe we can lighten the load by assigning each day of the week to different people for the match topic, but there need to be resources to support that. Many of us know how hosting works by now, and the contest will probably progress towards being more community-run anyway.

well i've been fully stonewalled on this front after begging for years so idk if this is actually happening or if i'm really just blacklisted by everyone in the community at this point (probably)

PIayer_0 posted...

3) Noms and representation: Does everyone feel like their voice can be heard with the power of supports and doubles? A community bracket would ideally represent each demographic proportionally, *except* no one gets rounded down to zero representation. We're in a stable B8-Siiva-Supra period where we can try things that were vulnerable to bad actors in the past, like giving people the power to push in that one darling song. It would be a big leap to do auto-include noms, but we can try something with going beyond doubles. Everyone gets three triples? Or two quadruples? One quintuple? Maybe they can distribute their 20 votes across as few songs as they like, but with a cap per song. Representation is connected to bracket size too - we grew to 256 to have more tastes represented, yet doubling the field doesn't shift any demographics directly...we just get more of everything in the same proportions.

i'm not going to comment directly on this thought for now, but i will say that i've personally been interested in taking a different direction entirely and making doubles a more rare resource if anything. i'd been thinking heavily about giving doubles a one per day limit, as well as only allowing them for supports because i'm more opposed to the idea of people forcing in songs others wouldn't support than ever tbh. But I do know well, as one of the more outcast nominators to begin with, that it's a point worth discussing.

PIayer_0 posted...

4) Nom deadlines: How many rules do we add to try and satisfy everyone? All these deadlines are getting to a point where I have a hard time keeping them in my head, not to mention the newcomers parsing them for the first time. Some people like locks and some people like a moving cutoff, should both deadlines be stuffed in together each year? It can satisfy both sides, but it's also more criteria to worry about. This year, I'm reducing my original noms and have seen comments considering the same - will that make supports more concentrated and push the cutoff higher? I have no idea, so now I have to track how many songs are locking daily, check how many lock slots are free before the deadline, decide if I want to push for any locks, drop songs before the last day, then manage the moving cutoff at the end (whose speed is itself affected by how many users' votes are sitting on locks). I'm getting too old for this! Casual, public games are fun because they impose rules that are easy to learn and play with, and that goes for both veterans and newcomers.

one of the many factors in why i've been pretty strongly against the lock system the way it fits into the mix presently is how thoroughly casual unfriendly it is (or moreso just extremely biased towards those who are more actively involved, as it functions basically just the same as a regular deadline but without a preannounced date attached for the most part ). I get that people may still be strongly against my thoughts here but I like to think that the drop protection system i also test ran in bost actually was a success as an alternative that didn't have that same effect (it seems a bit unwieldy in and of itself, but the primary purpose of it really is just to give the hosts an excuse to explain the state of noms each day more than anything, since the protection itself doesn't have any unfair advantage tied to it that people can game... well, i think anyway, it's rather difficult for me to be absolutely certain when i'd been doing it in a much smaller contest that also had limited merit to trying to "game the system" through support manipulation, seeing as it had no cap on them lol. outside of that, the final day's cutoff shifts are always an issue too and i'd also be interested in hearing ideas on how to further alleviate this, not just for VGMC but obviously for the mini-BOSTs moving forward too). that all aside, i do agree that confusing scheduling is perhaps a major issue in making all of this really casual unfriendly. buuuut at the same time, i think that making it complicated can also be a net positive in this regard. i mean yeah, we've got these convoluted rules like X noms per day and only half of the field can be locked and 2 days of break in the middle of noms, but they're all there to serve a pretty valuable purpose, and i'm very biased but i'd be taking it even further in this direction in the name of making it more seamless. This may seem a bit funny coming from someone who just ran a contest based around harrassing nominators constantly for input but i really do want to reduce the load on people coming in for the first time or even just casually. in my personal defense, for bost that was predominantly done through putting off all the heavy set decisions till AFTER noms and letting people just come in and say they're supporting whatever games they're familiar with in general, obviously that's not an applicable option here... but even just things like changing the approach to supports would do a lot to make it less... you know, competitive, and i think that's what we might need in the future

anyway yeah i've rambled aimlessly enough here i think, i just hope to have my two cents considered more in the future since i'm pretty hurt that all of my weeks of planning out a revamp got turned down again lol

PIayer_0 posted...

1) Hosting support:

This could honestly be as simple as "if the topic isn't up within half an hour, somebody else should take it upon themselves to do it." The bigger question is that of vote-counting, because that could be delayed. In the distant past we mostly trusted whatever Ed Bellis counted, and occasionally there would be DQs that we wouldn't even know about, but at this point those of us here aren't generally trying to game the system or pull fast ones, there's a much higher degree of transparency, and there's usually extra people counting to the side. So if I were to consider anything in this regard, it would be for tallying.

PIayer_0 posted...

2) Long bracket stage: Is 256 songs still worth making the bracket take over 3 months to finish?...We can at least do a survey on how people feel about 256, and there's nothing wrong with trying 128 for one year before returning to 256 again.

Won't be needed. Unless attitudes have shifted tremendously, I can already answer this one. People will not like the idea of cutting the field in half. I did it for a few years due to participation rates -- and it was probably the right decision then -- but with current participation rates limiting to 128 often makes the difference of some users getting crowded out of getting their songs in. At 128, locks would need to be reevaluated and the threshold for getting a song in goes much higher, which means only the most popular tracks make it. We'd also likely have to tinker with the number of nominations everyone gets. This would end up being a mess.

I do agree with you -- the contest runs throughout too much of the year. That's always been a feature of VGMC. But now that the community does more than just run VGMC once a year, it's no longer "contest season" and "off season," so concluding the contest more swiftly would be great...it's just a logistical nightmare.

PIayer_0 posted...

we can try something with going beyond doubles. Everyone gets three triples? Or two quadruples? One quintuple? Maybe they can distribute their 20 votes across as few songs as they like, but with a cap per song.

Adding more doubles+ is one of those things that sounds appealing, like when deo gave everyone more total nominations a couple years ago. Functionally, it doesn't really improve anything, and has a strong chance of having the opposite effect from its intentions. Some folks will get one song in that they care about (maybe,) and then nothing else, while others work the system to maximize every one of their choices and end up with 20/20 in the field (or 25/25 or however many we get.)

PIayer_0 posted...

we grew to 256 to have more tastes represented, yet doubling the field doesn't shift any demographics directly...we just get more of everything in the same proportions.

I wonder if this is actually true or not. I feel like the first 128 to get in recent years have heavily favored songs I'm less interested in, and the tracks I enjoy are more frequently in the back half. This led to a bit of a meltdown on my part one year where it felt like everything was incredibly divergent, and yet the final bracket wasn't all that bad. I'm not sure if the same would happen at 128 on a smaller scale, but without tinkering with the numbers, it's hard to say.

PIayer_0 posted...

4) Nom deadlines: How many rules do we add to try and satisfy everyone?

There are a lot. At the very least, it's probably confusing to anyone new. Other than the freeze itself, the two major features of this -- the limit of 5 on the first day and the existence of locks -- are both my doing, but the first was technically a suggestion and limited to day 1 and the second was never intended to be quite as major a feature as some people made it out to be. I just wanted a way to appease the folks who hated the nom shifting games that take place at the final deadline.

I'm not certain we need two days of holding to 5/day. After the first day, it's basically open season in my mind anyway, and if we keep the freeze, it still takes a fair bit of dedication to get to the end of the day 1 nominations by the end of it. The hard deadline for locking is mostly for administrative purposes, so that's the only line on that list of dates I would consider cutting, but it would simplify the start-up phase of nominations a good bit.

PIayer_0 posted...

I also see people say nominations are the best part - maybe that's a sign that we need more events like crowdsources, community mixes, or VGM gift exchanges?

There's truth to this. Once upon a time, VGMC was the only game in town. Then BOST happened. Then discord. Then other communities and the chase and vgm-quiz and who knows what else. While VGMC might be the big signature event everyone looks forward to, there's certainly merit in evening out the interest and participation throughout the year.

And there's certainly no harm in tinkering with the system, so long as we're not looking at big sweeping changes. The two-phase system of year 10 possibly could have worked long-term with some tweaks, but it had some definite issues that needed addressing, and I especially felt bad for Toxtunnelprocessratioin11/16time only getting one track -- nominated or supported -- into the field, and losing in R1.

But okay, you want a change that has some precedent? How about this...

One of the two years I ran 192, it was with byes for a third of the field. Now, this was problematic because the methodology of selecting what got byes and not was biased. Left purely to me, that probably would have been a disaster....but what if those are the locks? What if the field only consisted of 64 locks, with a higher threshold, but the tracks that got that demonstrated the sort of obvious support that warranted a free ticket to R2.

I'm sure this idea will have problems, foremost among them how it reinforces the significance of locks, but it would get rid of 32 R1 matches, it would reward the songs that have strong returns early...I dunno, it's something to think about. I know it won't go over. People are generally against the idea of reducing the field size. But it's an interesting take, at least.

UF8 posted...

I get that people may still be strongly against my thoughts here but I like to think that the drop protection system i also test ran in bost actually was a success as an alternative that didn't have that same effect

I honestly do not even remember what the drop protection system was. Can you give me the TLDR version?

azuarc posted...

I honestly do not even remember what the drop protection system was. Can you give me the TLDR version?

As I remember it, at the start of each day of the nominations process, a list of the current top X (not sure exactly how many it was) nominations in terms of nom count would be posted, and no one would be allowed to drop their support for anything on the list.

i wouldn't mind a shift to 192 if people felt strongly about wanting a smaller contest, but 128 is just not enough.

I'm indifferent on locks, and probably will continue to be until and unless people start making slates. There's some borderline stuff right now where you'll see e.g. people sounding out dozens of songs for the primary purpose of figuring out what people will support before the contest starts. The lock system definitely encourages and empowers that sort of strategy, and I kinda don't like it because like -- we all recognize the power of your early noms having more visibility, and this + locks sort of allows you to both cut the line and then not allow people to switch to things they discover later in the queue. But is it really a big deal? "eh." I'm probably just being Old Woman Yelling at Clouds atm.

As for more powerful supports, I'd previously proposed turning doubles into triples and setting the number of noms needed to lock to 8. That both reduces the number of songs that can get locked, while also allowing three people to get a song they love in the contest if they all triple it. I still really like that plan, but it's been a couple years since I first proposed it and it doesn't look like it's getting adopted >_>

votes 256 no locks

gotta be 256

with ToC4, why run it at the same time? just do it after VGMC ends

For contest rules I'm a believer in "the less complicated the better" and would err to that side unless there's a good reason or it's clear most people want it.

Not saying anything concrete about specific proposals partially because I haven't really had time to look at them.

Yeah I've always thought ToC4 as a midyear contest would work pretty well.

DanKirby posted...

As I remember it, at the start of each day of the nominations process, a list of the current top X (not sure exactly how many it was) nominations in terms of nom count would be posted, and no one would be allowed to drop their support for anything on the list.

it was top 8 btw (and whatever else happened to be tied with them on noms). it was a pretty irrelevant system needless to say in a contest with no reason to drop supports in the first place but that's kind of the beauty of it imo, as it well and truly ensured that people were prevented from manipulating their supports at the last minute because of things being "safe" and then them getting cut.

so yeah it was mostly just there to advertise the most popular noms each day lol. (the anti-drop effect only lasted till the next tally update the following day to be clear. of course if a nom like say, genshin, was hogging the top 8 the entire time then it was protected from drops that whole time too)

i'd had ideas to make it more of a floating amount if it were to be implemented in vgmc, like say, up to 32 but there'd also be an initial threshold to reach first (like 3 unique supports) before any of them were counted, so it'd likely be way less than that in the first few days. the exact specifics though weren't fully decided tbh

UF8 posted...

i'd had ideas to make it more of a floating amount if it were to be implemented in vgmc, like say, up to 32 but there'd also be an initial threshold to reach first (like 3 unique supports) before any of them were counted, so it'd likely be way less than that in the first few days. the exact specifics though weren't fully decided tbh

since i ran out of edits, to elaborate on some of the ideas here, one of them was that i thought it could end up being like, up to T8 in the first couple of days, up to T16 on days 3-5, and and up to T24 or 32 in the days after the freeze, assuming the freeze had taken place later in

another one was up to T8 if the highest nom was at 4 noms, up to T16 if there were was more than one at 5 or higher, T24 at 6 and so on. as these lock updates would only happen daily, it'd mean it could end up with less than 32 on this window by the end if there aren't at least a couple of noms with 7+ by the start of the final day (which there probably would be, granted)

of course, there was also just having flat out all of the top 32 over the initial requirement from the get go with no additional stipulations but i just felt like it'd be better to not have to see such a theoretically large list of songs spammed every single day. the 8 per day is what i'm using by preference for mini-bost after all

anyway yeah i still think it would be nice to see and i'm just doing my part to keep the idea on the table for the future

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/d/debbe78b.jpg
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/7/735e1de7.jpg
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/0/00c88896.jpg
just some examples on how it was generally handled so people can get a better idea of what the process is (awkward as it is to post these since i may have had to edit more than a few of mine and those changes obv didn't show up on the archives...)

(yes we still called them locks, no they weren't guaranteed in because of that)

also it was honestly pretty funny that genshin had enough supports on day 1 to not even need any more before the last day to stay on the list to the end

Good thoughts coming out, that's what I like to see! Focusing on what can realistically be done this year (or else bookmarked for next year), we can continue with:
1) Community hosting: Some input from deo would be good here - which duties could use the most help? Running noms, making the bracket, posting topics, tallying votes...maybe you would like a topic-posting break in that long period from May to August? I like the idea of requiring match votes to fall under some criteria, so it's easy for anyone to jump in and tally the obvious ones. Ambiguous votes wouldn't get discarded, but are tagged for deo in whatever shared tallying sheet we set up. Another idea for late topics: People could sign up for a chain of backup timeslots, i.e. azuarc posts if deo hasn't posted by 9:10, Max posts if azuarc hasn't posted by 9:12, P0 for 9:14...
2) Locks, limits and deadlines: This is just a catch-all for small tweaks to the nomination schedule. I don't have strong feelings here, just don't make it more complicated...
3) Multi-noms beyond doubles: The discussion's only just started in this topic, but these have come up enough in past years that they probably deserve consideration sooner rather than later. Like people have said before, it helps songs that are really strongly favoured by 1-2 users, compared to generally liked by 5 users. I'd enjoy a bracket with more of those songs! And we can implement them as gently as we'd like - maybe we just add one quadruple, or convert the existing doubles to triples if that's much easier for hosting.

For the rest, I realize that taking the bracket from 256 to 128 would be too sudden to announce on the spot, but I'm still curious about the reception if it's asked in advance (something like "Should the bracket size of 256 be kept the same, decreased, or increased in two years?"). I have faith that I'm not the only one who's getting too old and busy to handle 100 days of matches every year...just something I want to do a wider poll on, even if it takes a year or two (not sure if we'll do something special for VGMC 20?). Anything with drop protection, separating noms/supports, etc. also sounds drastic enough that it's better considered in a future year.

If the field is reduced to 128 with the amount of users involved, then people like me don't really have much incentive to nominate anything unless we live for pain. It would still be lame, but the only recourse in that event would be ensure that every nominator got a nomination in.

As I say every year when nomination rule changes are suggested, I am fully in the camp of making sure the rules do not further disenfranchise the outliers like me. If it was brought to a vote, I would have voted no for increasing the lock limit as people like me need a lower threshold to get nominations in. I was fortunate last year in getting roughly the mean (3-4) of songs/nominators through both locking and not. I would have liked to see those rules repeat to see if that could have held true again.

KCF0107 posted...

people like me don't really have much incentive to nominate anything unless we live for pain

well

The thing about bumping up from six to seven noms to lock is this: there's going to be a lower qualifying threshold in the post-lock part of noms than if we had stayed at six, so for guys like KCF, it might not be so bad.

azuarc posted...

The thing you're purposefully ignoring is that everyone has a limit for how many songs they're willing to listen to before they shut down and say fuck it. They'll support maybe a few things that pop up later that they know, and ignore the rest.

Why not have people submit songs with the voting a week or two later then? You could easily have a master playlist for people to listen to in that time and also give folks a chance to think.

The bracket takes ages anyway, so does a bit of extra time for people to get invested at the start really hurt the whole process?

-Chaos-Zero- posted...

Why not have people submit songs with the voting a week or two later then? You could easily have a master playlist for people to listen to in that time and also give folks a chance to think.

The bracket takes ages anyway, so does a bit of extra time for people to get invested at the start really hurt the whole process?

we did that once. it had a couple problems (some already ameliorated) and nobody cared enough to try to work them out (though I think it's worth another shot)

If we tried a two-phase system, rather than locks, maybe we'd count off the number of people who supported X songs and give them a free song in. Let the top (256-X) songs into the bracket, and then each person gets their highest song that didn't make the cut.

Of course, this raises the question of "Just how different will that be from simply taking the top 256?" since most of those would be part of the slots that were cut to give everyone a guaranteed slot.

256 is a great number, we should only change it if attendance drops massively.

Seeing as how noms start tomorrow night, can we get the format we are supposed to use for submitting them?

Unless something has changed,

+ Game | Song | URL

I should figure out what songs to nominate soon.