LogFAQs > #952956359

PLAYER_0 posted...

That's all I have to share for now! Might give an update closer to the lock deadline if we see even more people joining or I notice a trend in vote coordination. Toodles~

This kind of stats write-up seems like the kind of thing I would have done ten years ago. Now I look at it and realize that it's seldom as fun for the reader as the person exploring (especially folks new to VGMC for whom this is massive overload), it's got a lot of value-based statements baked into it that new users might not care for and/or might see as nominations being too much of a game and not enough of a prelude to the contest, and also that there are too many confounding variables to think that a straight percentage extrapolation will be accurate.

I think it's great that you did this. Ten-years-ago Me certainly approves. I'm not certain I agree with the conclusions, though, and I could also argue with if things worked the way they should have. For instance, locking was a rare perfect storm in that it was a new change to the system that pretty much everyone approved of. There's that saying about not making everyone happy all the time, but this was easily the most popular tweak I made to the VGMC formula...however, there was one thing I was a bit leery of, and that was how much of the bracket got locked before the deadline. About two-thirds, as I recall. The reason the final cut-off ended so high is because people were funneling into a very small pool of songs, and things shot up like an artesian well. I'm pretty hopeful that proves to not be the case this year, especially since we have a full week after locking ends to continue to shuffle nominations.

One other factor I certainly want to talk about is the psychology of locking versus not locking. Personally, I think it's usually better to not push for locking a track, but that's also because I believe pretty strongly that it's best not to commit all your voting potential early in the cycle and especially not your doubles. You'll basically never see me use a double with less than 48 hours to go, because why the hell would you? But for some people, that security and/or status is validating. Last year, that was very much the case, with the system being new. This year, who knows. After experiencing it once, people might realize that locking isn't as essential, or the plethora of new people or people wondering what to do with ten extra votes will buy into the hype of "ooh, I could lock this song" and we end up with people who are completely tied down at the locking deadline. How it plays out in practice is anybody's guess. I do think that with an extra 4-5 days of nominations, there's the chance that people watching the votes oh-so-gradually coalesce may get bored or impatient both before and after the midpoint. It's potentially awkward to be completely out of the game while everyone else is shuffling their noms around more than a hawker running a shell game.

I will say that the one bit of numbers prognosticating I did was when this topic went up and it was announced that locking was at 6. I did a lot of contemplating over how 6 this year compared to 5 last year, and I think I ultimately concluded that 6 this year was still a bit harder than 5 this year in the sense of vote distribution -- with 33% more bracket, 50% more votes doesn't go as far as it seems. Especially since it's not 50% more votes. It's only 40% once you consider doubles. In that regard, 5 last-year votes, with equivalent distribution across a wider bracket, would be like 5.26 this year. So we'd need to increase the voter pool by 14% to compensate just to reach 6....but again, is that really fair? Will people focus on the spread of votes during the run-up to the locking deadline, or just "can I lock this? Y/N"

So at this point, I'm just gonna kick back and watch it unfold. And do my damndest to try to listen to the whole playlist and hopefully discover some cool new stuff.

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Only the exceptions can be exceptional.