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?