LogFAQs > #934683904

xp1337 posted...

A bunch of voters were showing up only for Undertale matches and voted for Megalovania. I want to say azuarc reluctantly let it pass for most of the contest (or maybe it wasn't altering outcomes I forget) but it went up to another level in the finals and ended up swinging the match. Though azuarc might have a better handle of the exact details, I'm doing this from my spotty memory.

That's kinda sorta what happened. The actual rendition is a little less dramatic than that, but pronounced enough that I felt I needed to step in, but be aware that anything I write here will be an incomplete story that doesn't really reflect the full nature of the situation.

Voting in the finals is an awkward situation because on one hand, you'd love to pull in the extra people who see "FINALS" and think, hey, there's going to be a great match here. On the other, people who haven't read the rules have a very high probability of just picking the song they know without giving any credence to its competitor. I honestly had no idea which it was when 8 or 9 people who were either new or infrequent voters dropped in for the finals, however those people almost unilaterally voted for Megalovania. Taking their votes away swung the match from something like +6 to -2.

So I had a dilemma. Did I keep their votes, under the guise of that being the majority, including the walk-ins who were happy to vote in the finals, or did I DQ them and stick to only the contest regulars? Mind you, this was the first contest I hosted after taking over from lefty, and I'd never seen a situation like this in the years I'd been a participant (from year 5 onward.) Fortunately, I kept a backlog of who voted for what, and was able to track that at least two of the infrequent voters had established a pattern of strictly voting for Undertale -- as in, literally the only days they showed up were for Megalovania and ASGORE. And some of the posters (Ulti, notably) made it pretty obvious that they hadn't listened to both. This was enough to merit a deeper dive.

I recruited lefty, and we tried to contact a lot of the new voters to ask if they'd listened to Elferia or not. We confirmed who was definitely legit and, in the end, I cooked the results to engineer a tie. There was simply no way to decide who should have won, but if I had been forced to choose based on those results, it would have been to toss most of the extra Megalovania votes and award it to Elferia. So I forced a tie and re-ran the match. If anything, I was being generous to Megalovania in that regard, and maybe that's because I would have rather seen Megalovania win.

Elferia won the rematch. Not by a landslide, but by roughly the amount I would have expected if we had left the new voters out. I still feel uncomfortable knowing I threw out a bunch of board votes simply because those people weren't regulars in the contest, but it was the closest I could come to generating a result that was fair and consistent with the rest of the contest.

If you participated in the semis or finals of this year's contest, you'll recall that I had an addendum in the post that any new posters had to copy-paste a statement that they had read the rules and were abiding by them. It seems weird to add a TOS to VGMC, but that's been something I've done every year since just so we don't have a repeat. Then again, I doubt we'll have quite as high-profile a song in the finals ever again. This was the first year after Undertale won BGE3, and it had completely flooded the bracket, with more than one song per division represented in the bracket. (That's never happened before, even in the early days with Smash and Touhou, mostly because there were 16 divisions rather than 8.)

So yeah, Undertale was a little nutty that year, completely permeating the board in a way that I doubt a new game will ever manage again, so the likelihood of anything like this happening again is so ridiculously remote, but I still watch the voting records for suspicious behavior, which is the primary reason I still leave that "host may disqualify" bit in the rules, even though it always makes me look shady. The reality is I think I've DQ'ed maybe two votes per contest since.

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VGMC13 champion: Ar Nosurge - Class::EXSPHERE_NOSURGE;