Lurker > azuarc

davidponte posted...

I think its less about the win rate, which I'll argue is similar all around because every deck runs the same cards, and just the fact that the same Pirate package is in literally 50% of all decks.

Win or lose, seeing STB and Patches turn 1 in half of all games you play is not very fun and exciting.

I run it in my main deck just to have some early game so I don't stagnate. Before I put in a very extensive pirate line-up (9 cards), I was sometimes getting run over by aggro, and often losing the board to control with a deck that can't readily take it back against minions too big to burn. Dragon priest is really the only match-up I feel seriously disadvantaged against now.

xp1337 posted...

man that ruling just makes me feel like i'm being told "i'll allow it but you should feel bad if you try"

As right you should!


xp1337 posted...

Okay, here's another one: Trails of Cold Steel II - Aria -Holy Saint, Holy Spirit-

Another gray issue, the way you've depicted it, but it was written for a game, and it appears in a game...they just happen to not be the same game.


Mac Arrowny posted...

Aren't there a good number of songs that have been in the contest where only the short version plays in game?

Yeah, mostly rhythm games. Why the long version is permitted isn't clear to me, but I had this explained to me before; I just don't recall the reason. Whatever it was, it was enough to keep from rearing up and proclaiming a change to the standards. On a personal note of honor, though, I do not nominate "long versions" of the tracks I've supported from Deemo.

Does stuff need nerfing? Pirate warrior doesn't really bother me. Shaman, I'll admit, always seems to have answers to everything. But if the win rate is under 53%, obviously it's beatable.

I'm not going to lie. I have some misgivings about this ruling, since I feel like it's setting me up for other songs to be argued, but that's how I'm going to play it for now.

But yes, of course we want the in-game version.

Hey, sorry for not responding sooner. Do yourself a favor and if your parents are alive, tell them to sell off all the stuff in their house before they die. My back is killing me. ><


For older songs for which I'm aware of a ruling already in place, like Ring a Bell, I'm going to trust the wisdom of my predecessors, just as I'm not going to overturn the eligibility of Homestuck even if I could make an argument on its behalf. And if there are previous rulings for songs, I'd like to know what they are, but in this case I believe I have to pass judgement myself.

So speaking generally, since this is a discussion topic and you might like to know my thought process, the basis for eligibility on a song is always going to be "is this video game music?" My working interpretation of that will be "was it written for the game?" Most songs have a single composer or team that did the rest of the soundtrack, so duh, this is usually easy to decide. When an outside artist contributes a single, though, we need ways to establish a basis for what is, admittedly, a subjective criteria.

In general, release dates are a great tool here because they can point to a very obvious cause-and-effect relationship. Ain't No Rest For the Wicked was released by Cage the Elephant about a year before Borderlands was released. Even though it wasn't an established mainstream song until afterward, such that many gamers were first exposed to it through the game, there's no mistaking that it was not written for the game. I'm usually going to ask for the release date of a track in various media first because it can often establish ineligibility.

Unfortunately, Over the Clouds is not that clear-cut, either in terms of release date, or in terms of obvious intuitive factors like my Metallica example earlier. It was written by a pop artist. That's a strike against it. The release date coincided with the game's release. That works in its favor. The other song on the single was released for another product that was available to the public 4 months prior. I'm really not sure what to make of that. The lyrics don't appear to have anything to do with the game, but it's also used in the intro. Not a great deal of help so far.

However, what strikes me most is that the most watched link on YouTube has over 10 million views. Normally this wouldn't mean anything, but when this happens with VGM, you can see a trickle down effect of people watching the rest of the OST, or choice other videos related to the game. However, the next most viewed video for anything related to God Eater has less than a seventh of the views on OtC. Therefore, most people who know the song know it for distinctly non-VGM reasons. I'll admit it's an imperfect reason, but it's why I'm inclined to label Over the Clouds a non-VGM song. (Hold that thought.)

By comparison, if Mac's screenshot is accurate, I see no reason to preclude White Light. Eyes on Me was permitted in two contests and, according to the research provided, Superfly was writing the song in large part from inspiration taken from the game. Put that way, it's very hard to argue it wasn't written for the game. But here's the funny thing, if I use the same argument as above for White Light, it's an even worse offender than Over the Clouds. So, in what is a complete and total edge case, my personal philosophy is to favor inclusion over exclusion. Therefore, by a very narrow margin, I'll allow it. (Oh, and White Light, too.)


I will probably not put this much effort into a single song's eligibility during the nomination period, so if anyone else has any iffy songs to consider, now's better than later.

I feel that. I have a deck with 5 total cards over 5 mana, and against one aggro deck, I ended up wtih all of them in my starting hand. Obviously, I lost.


In other news, I have the play a friend quest, and nobody online. Never mind.

Also, does anyone know a wqsad458? They sent me a friend request, I accepted, prodded them for a response and got nothing, and defriended them. Now they're trying again, so either they're a B8 person or a spambot.

Had too long a day. I'll catch up with all this tomorrow. ><

Fun fact I realized today: Death Magnetic, the Metallica album, was released for DLC on Guitar Hero 3 on the same day the album was available to the public.

If you're wondering, no, you will not be able to nominate tracks from it. Those tracks were not composed for the game, unlike, say, Buckethead's Jordan.

Thank you, Nio. I'm not sure I understand the significance of having them as ringtones. Was it released in those other formats before God Eater came out?

trdl23 posted...

I haven't been here for a "classic" nomination style, how does that work?

Everyone has 20 nominations and 5 "doubles". You put them on whichever songs you want, and the songs with the most support get in.

There tends to be a LOT of shifting and consolidating of votes under this system, as people who try to lead the way by promoting a bunch of tracks early realize that nobody's biting on some of their stuff and retract it to support other songs. And then the people who have supports on a song that's only got 2 total supports realize 2 isn't going to cut it, so they either cut ties for something else or they reinforce it by using one of their doubles. And then...

The last 24 hours of the nomination period tends to be madness. I was hoping to manage this a bit with the system I used last year, but I don't think there were any clear benefits, and as long as we have a functioning script parser, it isn't that much more work to tally 3 topics worth of posts (with retractions and new supports aplenty) than it is 2.

Even if he (likely) wasn't, I know Nio has the soundtrack, and she's also been a good reference for pop songs in Asia. There have been a few times in the past where she's helped the host deem a song ineligible by virtue of having heard it outside of game context, equivalent to if we couldn't find proof that Florence and the Machine song from The Witcher 2 was out before the game was, and someone said they heard it on the radio a year earlier.

Your summary is accurate, as it stands. I toyed with the notion of permitting the retired list for one contest for the lulz, but I'm not thinking I'm going to do that. And I think 128 is the correct length for the contest. 256 is unbearably lengthy -- round 1 takes as long as the entire contest did last year (in number of matches). At 128, there's less fatigue, we still get to hear a bunch of interesting songs assuming you waded through the nominations, and maybe just maybe it will leave us with the desire to run some other projects in the interim since it won't run for 5 months.

azuarc posted...

greengravy294 posted...

Is there a list of any sorts of all songs ever nominated and been in the contest?

This is mostly accurate: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1K1XdLWiUKB2kX99qYBgnRbLU_sCz4dvZSByKKJHCT6o/edit#gid=0

I made a new rendition of the "Top Unretired" sheet using the super precise ranking formula of Appearances * AvgRound^2, and sorting. While there's some predictable perennials in there, it's still a pretty interesting list to contemplate at the top. Here's what a bracket of the top 64 there would look like:

http://www.bracketmaker.com/tmenu.cfm?tid=465658

Ask Nio. I bet she knows.

greengravy294 posted...

Is there a list of any sorts of all songs ever nominated and been in the contest?

This is mostly accurate: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1K1XdLWiUKB2kX99qYBgnRbLU_sCz4dvZSByKKJHCT6o/edit#gid=0

xp1337 posted...

God Eater - Over the Clouds. I was looking into this to see if it originated before the game. I think I found that it got a CD release in Japan the day before the game's JPN release (and a ringtone like a week or two before or something?). Does that technically mean it didn't originate in a game?

If that's accurate, then technically yes, by past precedents it would be. Not precedents I'm fond of enforcing, mind you, if it's literally only one day's difference. Given the small difference, can I safely assume the song was written for the game?

xp1337 posted...

So, I guess my question is, "How do I know this is real and not the hellscape that is my mind?"

In your dreams, would I remind you that Song of the Ancients / Fate lost to Neon Mines?

JONALEON1 posted...

So it's gonna be 256 entrants this year then?

I didn't say that.

Assuming it loses round 1. You might get to listen to it several times!

JONALEON1 posted...

Will it be the same nomination format?

I wanted to try a different nomination format last year, but I saw no benefit to the nominate-and-support method, so I will be sticking to VGMC tradition and doing it the old way. 20 nominations and 5 doubles.

SupremeZero posted...

Why isn't it VGMC XI

It could be, but we haven't done a space before, and VGMCXI looks like some needlessly complicated acronym. Would you prefer it that way?

Hmm, FFXI doesn't have a subtitle, does it...maybe just VGMC Online. =p

NFUN posted...

Is this going to be excluding (or limited to) past participants?

Outside of the retiree list, there will be no exclusions. That was an idea l3fty peppered in last year before we knew it was going to be a field of 128.

Now, if you want to tell me we should be reinviting the retirees, that's a completely separate discussion, and one I will listen to, but it isn't my intention at this time.

It's been far too long since the board has anything truly VGM-related. When VGMCX ended last summer, I didn't imagine the board would go quite so dead, or that the hole from not running Best OST would be quite so big. As such, I'm making this thread well ahead of time so that hopefully people see it, and start thinking about it, and nobody manages to miss the entire nomination period when it finally opens because they're actually looking for it.

Time frame is not set in stone. I'm very occupied right now cleaning out my dad's house and dealing with other aspects of his estate. I'm not going to pretend that the majority of the work for the contest isn't in the set-up stages. And that's assuming that newbie can update the script to accommodate site changes in time, which he says he intends to work on, but he's been quite busy as well.

But I'm hoping to aim for starting nominations around the beginning of March. So if it comes off that way, consider this four weeks' notice.

interesting topic

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