LogFAQs > #936095523

Locking definitely feels ideal for making the nomination process more accessible to everyone. Instead of working with a moving cutoff that could get as high as people want it to, you have a concrete notion of "safe" to work towards. I personally didn't use any of my votes to secure locks because I was greedy for a under-5 final cutoff. Still, things worked out really well for my songs thanks to lots of last-minute supports, but it could easily have gone the other way and I'd be spamming all-caps messages in Discord.

I think locking is completely separate from the concept of a deadline, which is what I really think causes all the stress and secret crafting of plans. Everyone waits on everyone else to finish spending their unused supports or give up on their 1/1's, but they want to give them more time to listen through the playlist/figure out their supports, but maybe they're already set and waiting for you to make a move, but you don't want to give up hope on your songs just yet, but maybe they're thinking the same thing, but you want to optimize the efficiency of your votes...

I'd like to see us double down on a deadline-less system, which early locks kind of do by letting 5's in regardless of when they hit their milestone, but they still had to happen by Friday and left a second deadline for Sunday. You could actually just let the first 192 songs to reach 5/x into the bracket, maybe after an initial listening period so the early listeners with free time don't decide everything. Or at least lock the first 160 or so, with the remaining 32 taken from the top-voted songs by a deadline. That would be similar to this year, but there's only one deadline based around silly mindgames instead of two, and it's only to decide the minority of the field.

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