Board 8 > [VGMC] Video Game Music Contest 15: Nominations thread, part 3

(+) Yeah! (+)

...well i hope it got in anyways

Plasman posted...

last dub i think

Nope!

*Fucking collapses*

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Haha I think my last switch in this topic might have been an incredibly bad idea

Wait so it looks like all the 6/3s got in and none of the 5/5s?

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sergiocornaga posted...

Haha I think my last switch in this topic might have been an incredibly bad idea

Tell me about it. I think I killed Aurora for Fuse Man only to delete it and panic.

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DoctorJimmy133 posted...

Wait so it looks like all the 6/3s got in and none of the 5/5s?

I destroyed Chani's Eyes. Oh my god.

dowolf posted...

XP I LOVE YOU

just saying

i am the unsung hero of vgmc

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so uh, there were 257 songs at the 6/4 barrier, so only one will be dropped. It will be one of the unlocked 6/4s that has been in a prior contest.

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Sad to see songs that used to make it in get little/no attention these days

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barreldragon88 posted...

Sad to see songs that used to make it in get little/no attention these days

people tend to want new stuff in, and there's a lot of new people

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Hbthebattle posted...

people tend to want new stuff in, and there's a lot of new people

tbh as anti-returner_songs as i am at a personal level (as in i have no interest in supporting things that've been in before, even if i love the songs more than what i'm nomming. not because i have a problem with others nominating returners); i think of all the contests to include returners, this would be the one BECAUSE of the high influx of new people who hadn't been exposed to this contest in the same way before.

(we've seen a few cases of this too; like the new participant chz ("hidekunihorita") supporting id~purpose toward the end. CHz would be more eager to do so than many of id's other fans, because of not having seen it in this contest repeatedly over and over again wearing it out, the way it has worn it out for id's other fans like me)
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Let's see this VGMC's after-action report for me:

14 Original Nominations:
Made the Field: 1 (Library of Ruina - Children of the City)
Starlight misses as Song #258 at 6/3.

23 Supports at Close:
Made the Field: 8

I came into this VGMC with 3 main songs I was excited for: Reverse Babel, Anima Ataraxia -FGO-, and The Owl. Now, my previous attempts at nominating Soulsborne stuff has never gone well so I kinda expected The Owl to miss but I was so hyped for Reverse Babel and Anima Ataraxia. It was absolutely crushing for them to get absolutely zero support over the entire course of the contest. Reverse Babel was particularly surprising to me because yo where'd my falcom peeps go? I was also low-key pretty excited about Kimigatame only to get absolutely knifed in the back by a different version getting nominated (later!) and getting in instead lol.

Discovering Library of Ruina through Iron Lotus and String Theocracy and my own listening leading me to Children of the City was pretty much the sole bright spot for me. If that had missed too I'd just be devastated.

I'm still very bummed and demotivated and I think this is by far the worst I've ever personally done in a VGMC nomination phase but man 1 for 14 yikes. Supports also fared pretty dismally as well.

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reverse babel I kind of like, but i... associate so much negative emotion with that song for Reasons that it was hard for me to support it unless i saw it getting close.

anima ataraxia i have on my list of potential supports and then kind of forgot about, "whoops"

...the same is true of "the owl" double whoops.
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After jumping ship repeatedly at the end, I was attached to 24 songs that got in, and if I had actually known what was going on and had good info regarding the last couple minutes, I could have easily made that 27 since I only spent my doubles at the very last minute and 3 went onto songs that didn't need them. I'm a little salty about that because I could have protected a bunch of things that missed at 5/5 (or 5/4, but that wouldn't be a guarantee.)

Oh, and I'm on one of the three songs that might get bubbled out, which I also could have doubled.

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+ Tree Of Saviour | Amicably | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2Yn7mHkSj4

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xp1337 posted...

I'm still very bummed and demotivated and I think this is by far the worst I've ever personally done in a VGMC nomination phase but man 1 for 14 yikes.

If it makes you feel any better, I think Children of the City is one of my top two new discoveries this topic, so I'm quite happy you were here and nomimated it.

(The Fine Draw is the other. I seem to be going through a bit of a Genesis phase, even though I use to hate the system.)
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Raetsel_Lapin posted...

If it makes you feel any better, I think Children of the City is one of my top two new discoveries this topic, so I'm quite happy you were here and nomimated it.

=)

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OK SO THE SONG THAT IS GETTING CUT:
-the song that is NOT new to the contest
-the song that is NOT something that recently lost on the bubble
-the song that was determined by "calculating how many supports each person had that did not get into the contest, and then added those numbers up among those who supported those songs (doublers had their value doubled because they cared twice as much!!!)"

Ar tonelico II - EXEC_over.METHOD_SUBLIMATION/. ~omness chs ciel sos infel

goodbye ar tonelico ii song; maybe it will have its luck another time.

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(also apologies for not being clear more overtly, as some people seemed to not really realize we were intending on doing this method again: this was determined using the system gamebop used to decide which to allow into vgmc14 last year, though with a few differences in criteria based on feedback, those being the two things i listed in the bullet points, along with the 3rd point being slightly different from how we did it last time)

thank you gamebop for going to the work to calculate this!
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kranz will carry the torch

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Toxtricity posted...

-the song that is NOT new to the contest

Yeah so I said this on Discord but I do want to put it in the thread also that I'm strongly in favor of not using this criteria moving forward.
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i honestly think next year we should just do it by voting in some form. i'm personally opposed to rng. i like the calculation-y methods of vgmc14-15 more than rng, but ideal is one where people can narrow down what to save from what's unsafe collectively with more control.
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Forgot to listen but I only really cared about 14.3 Billion Years getting in so neato

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Recording for transparency: this attached post was me. It was a lone minus for Aurora, a lone doubling plus for Fuse Man. Which saved Fuse Man and doomed Aurora. In case someone goes over the numbers and freaks out.



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on the topic of "how did you do". well, post-locks went notably less well than locks did for me, but i shouldn't complain too hard with how well locks /did/ go for me.

one thing i will say is that i am incredibly glad i clung to monolith gate as a 1/1 the entire time. no matter how un-optimal it seemed. i had just seen it in tooo many of the lists of things people had made listing what they were planning on supporting (in more places than the things that had actual substantial support numbers), and in the end, it rang true and relevant that that many people actually really were interested in the track for it to last minute jump all the way to a 6/6. paying attention carefully to all those playlists and pastebins and whatever actually payed off

thank you everyone who supported that one lol i have a crazy intense attachment to the coded soul ost so it means a lot to me that any of those i threw at the wall actually got in
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The fact that I got a nom in because of the end rush (or maybe just simply final day is more accurate) is stunning. I know some people would consider 4 noms (as well as eights supports) getting in disappointing, but I'm just happy to get a handful of my noms in each year. If I could be guaranteed to get in four with no possibility of more (and of course less) each year, I would take that deal.
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KCF0107 posted...

If I could be guaranteed to get in four with no possibility of more (and of course less) each year, I would take that deal.

after enduring vgmc10, same tbh
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Toxtricity posted...

OK SO THE SONG THAT IS GETTING CUT:
-the song that is NOT new to the contest
-the song that is NOT something that recently lost on the bubble
-the song that was determined by "calculating how many supports each person had that did not get into the contest, and then added those numbers up among those who supported those songs (doublers had their value doubled because they cared twice as much!!!)"

Ar tonelico II - EXEC_over.METHOD_SUBLIMATION/. ~omness chs ciel sos infel

goodbye ar tonelico ii song; maybe it will have its luck another time.

RIP. That makes three years in a row where one of the songs I nominate bubbles out. I guess I can't complain too much since I'm probably still doing better than most in terms of number of songs that made the contest.
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KCF0107 posted...

I know some people would consider 4 noms (as well as eights supports) getting in disappointing

Those people are ridiculous and it feels a little obnoxious when they complain about stuff like that. Getting 4 noms and 8 supports in is great! Nice work, KCF!
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It feels like this year is the best year for me in terms of getting nominations and supports in, but it's hard to gauge because of the increased size of the field. I have 4/16 nominations in (would be 6 if I wasn't beaten to Heritors of Arcadia and over-nove), and I didn't keep track of how many total supports I gave out, but in the end, I have 17 supports (not including original nominations) in.

And I think best of all, the vast majority of my nominations had at least one support on them in the end. 12 of my 16 nominations had at least one person supporting it, and one of the four that didn't, Chant for Sanctuary, peaked at 4/3. I haven't been keeping track of what past years looked like for this either, but 81.25% of my nominations being supported at least once at some point during the nomination period is a number that I'm very happy about :)

looks like i managed 5 and 7 supports. nice

unfortunate my deku and drift stage options fell short but given everything else that really doesn't matter. hugely grateful to have stuff again after the drought last year. plus i'm just glad to successfully execute my first and last gag

Managed to get 5 in out of 11 nominations, which isn't too bad... 6 of 12 counting "planned" nom Gentle Sloe Cave. I didn't deserve it. And I had three pre-contest nom "considerations" make the bracket, too.... And then three failed noms/supports last year ended up getting in VGMC 15! So yeah, lots of things seemed to go my way! Finally, 25 noms/support that make the bracket! Needless to say, I feel like I helped get in a lot of great music this year, much moreso than in past contests.

Biggest disappointment is failing to get Boss Battle 3 in, (EDIT:) as well as Memory of the Wind ~Legend of the Eternal Wind~. I'm a sucker for old-school FF and real orchestra pretty music, and this one has both! RIP.

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I got 4/12 of my noms in (5/13 if not ninja'd on World's End Valentine) which I'm pretty happy about for my first time nominating. No confidence in any of them making it past round 1, but I didn't expect any of those four tracks to make it at all while the ones I was hopeful about drew crickets so who knows!

Also, lots of new discoveries. I don't even know how the hell somebody unearths stuff like russell brand for doom ii - EVENK but that is a jam

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DoctorJimmy133 posted...

Also, lots of new discoveries. I don't even know how the hell somebody unearths stuff like russell brand for doom ii - EVENK but that is a jam

haha i'm glad you like it. I got into zan-zan-zawa-veia's music like 8-10 years ago from looking for modern chiptune artists that were considered prog rock adjacent in style, zzzv was regularly cited as one of the best examples of that so i checked it out. i mostly only knew his nes chiptunes (that weren't for games in any form) at the time

after that i sorta drifted from his work for a while but then like 5 years ago someone told me that a song i loved was very reminiscent of his MIDIs for Doom levels. that piqued my interest so i dived into looking up all of the original music he wrote for the Doom community, actually quite obsessively (they're incredibly scattered) and i fell in love...it's some of the music I get most addicted to listening to whenever i poke in. sometimes i've gone days listening to nothing but them lol, basically always in the mood for them

i started nominating his music for vgmc around vgmc12? but i don't think any tracks got in until 2048 Unleashed - Soilscraper and some others found their way in the next year.
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Predictably I did not listen to very many nominations - honestly just wasn't in the mood to listen most of the time - but I got 3 in among my original noms and they were the 3 I most wanted in so that's nice.

Looking forward to the bracket! There's pretty much always some great discoveries there and 256 is a lot more manageable to me than four digits.

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3/15 in original noms for me, but I can't complain too much given that a lot of stuff I've championed or introduced to the board in the past wound up getting in too.

(not that that'll stop me from complaining, mind.)
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What are we considering "original" noms? For example I was the first person this year to nominate resurrectedreplayer, but I have a hard time considering that my original nomination.

In any case counting that it looks like I got in 4 out of about 22 or 23, which is...not the worst? I'm pretty sure I've done worse than that before. My supports also did reasonably well this year.
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Yeah so it turns out I managed to somehow get 13 of my original nominations in, so I cant really complain about anything.

Roaming the Wastes next year for sure

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Mac Arrowny posted...

Those people are ridiculous and it feels a little obnoxious when they complain about stuff like that. Getting 4 noms and 8 supports in is great!

You can look at the results and say that I "got" 24 songs into the bracket when you factor in that I play the support game at the end...but of course I did. I shifted votes to ensure that happens. Honestly, considering that, 24/30 is pretty poor results considering three of my doubles at the end went for nothing -- which I am a bit bitter about.

But if you want to talk about songs I picked out and said "hey guys, could we get this in?" I had abysmal results. I nominated over 20 songs. 5 got in. One wasn't actually my pick, and one was more of a joke to see what happens if I drop something before the lock deadline. The only songs I can truly say I nominated that got in were Best of Times, Terminal March and Tonitrus.

All of those were locks. I had absolutely zero luck with the post-lock period. And given the doubles thing where I saved them for the last minute and then tossed them onto what I thought needed them, and only successfully preserved two songs, it's pretty easy (albeit inaccurate) to say that I should have just focused entirely on locks.

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And while I'm tossing out sour grapes, I have to say, I find the "I won't support any returners no matter what" attitude extremely obnoxious. And elitist. If a song made the bracket once, there's a reason for that -- somebody liked it, and convinced other people to jump on board. If it gained that status once, and demonstrates the potential to gain it again, doesn't that mean it's more deserving? Just because it didn't win its division in that one shot we gave it doesn't mean it should be deemed ineligible later. Yes, I understand that there's tons of great music out there, and yes, I recognize that it's upsetting to see Id Purpose get in each year and mow down three contestants before flaming out. But you know what else is upsetting? Seeing someone proclaim from their pedestal that they won't support something because it was in the contest back in VGMC7, and watching it die on the vine as a result.

We already have a retiree list for a reason. But if so many of you are going to take that stance, we might as well just retire the whole damn total stats sheet, down to songs that made a single R1 appearance over a decade ago. This attitude has been on the rise for several years now, and honestly I'm sick of it. I don't mind if you want to say "I won't support something that was in last year," but extending that argument any farther is absurd. How many tracks have we lamented over the years that got a rough R1 draw, or that ran into a retiree in R2, or lost to the literal champion? You're telling them they can't get another chance? Imagine if sports did this. "Sorry, I know your record was 6-0 before you fought that dude who went on to win the belt, but we're never signing you to another fight again." "Hey, I know your team just missed the playoffs last year, but we're releasing all of you from your contracts to fill the roster with minor leaguers."

Sure, you can tell me, "Oh, that's just my attitude. Not everyone does this." You can point out that a plurality of voters support returners as a general rule. But there are enough of you to make a difference, and you are taking people with you in subtle ways. A much larger slice of the participants than purely the vocal advocates are anti-returner, but aren't taking a hard-line stance. I could name quite a few people who have expressed or implied that they're trying not to support returners in general. Some of them in ways they might not even openly realize. The voter pool is gradually taking a stance of being anti-returner, and with so many new people here, why are we even concerned with anything more than the results of the last year? Shouldn't the turnover in voters mean that we don't need to focus on a turnover in the song pool?

As the stance of one person, "no returners" is fine. It's annoying to me, but I can accept why a single person -- particularly of some of the specific people involved -- might take this stance, especially if you're far more heavily involved in digging for new music than I have been over the last three years. But it's becoming a movement. And I won't stand for that. All music should be given a chance, not purely songs that meet a particular criteria. (Other than if you liked it, of course.)

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I... think I may need to take a break until the bracket is announced.

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if you think a no-returners attitude attitude is "elitist" you're really misunderstanding why some people adopt it imo and i won't stand for someone trying to shame THAT preference.

this contest in particular i'm actually pretty pro-returner because there's so many new people so anything that's been in before will have more of a chance than people who may have been worn out by repeated shit in the past

but i just legit personally have no interest in nominating something that's gotten in before; i won't get any emotional fulfillment out of it. there's so many songs. i have to use some factor to narrow down what i want to help. there's a multitude of ways something having been in before means that it's already on a pedestal of attention that newer picks won't be (SO many guessing games, mini contests, personal rankings, etc; that explore that stuff. which i think is good!!!). So i feel the job of throwing something into that pool has already been done and i won't get the same feeling i get when i'm exposing people to something new; which is the main thing i enjoy with this stuff.

but you should not be going out of your way to make me feel bad for that; people have been doing this /forever/ too and just didn't talk to each other enough to make it clear.

ALSO being clear about this personal stance and preference IS important; because it factors into others knowing what will/won't succeed with someone they think might be a potential supporter. i used to not really say anything once i started approaching the contest this way, and as a result people would be disappointed when i didn't jump on things they expected. so i have gotten more vocal.

unless you're talking about people making fun of people like barrel or whatever (which i almost addressed tbh, i didn't like seeing people do that even if he approaches the contest very differently from me), that actually /is/ kinda elitist imo. i sorta joined in to that at one point out of pressure and felt bad about it, people shouldn't be mocking people here for having different tastes or approaches to the contest.
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On some level I agree with where that post (azuarc's) is coming from, but I don't really think there's anything that can or should be done at the individual level. At the end of the day I think the contest should reflect what the users want and if what they want is new songs then that's fine.

What I wish wasn't the case was that I have this perception that nominating returning songs at all is frowned upon by a noticeable contingent of the community. I don't even really think this is intentional in most cases but it is the perception that I have. (Note: This is moreso based on discord chat than anything that was posted here) And honestly if you boil it down to the individual level and ask "does person X frown on returning nominations", the perception probably isn't "real" even among people who themselves don't nominate returners, and it's not like I think any particular person has ever acted out of line or anything. But, at the collective level this perception still seems to appear because community norms work in weird ways or something

This is also touching on why I made post 424/similar comments in discord. It's not so much because I care about how we decide which songs on the bubble get cut, which I think is a trivial issue at the end of the day, but that I want to avoid codifying this returners=bad notion into the contest rules itself.
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pyresword posted...

This is also touching on why I made post 424/similar comments in discord. It's not so much because I care about how we decide which songs on the bubble get cut, which I think is a trivial issue at the end of the day, but that I want to avoid codifying this returners=bad notion into the contest rules itself.

yeah to be fair even though i agree with the criteria we used this time around; it was based on feedback from how people reacted to the calculation choosing another winter last time which was probably more stemmed from visceral emotion on the part of everyone, rather than actually sound reasons. it was upsetting rng picked something that'd already gotten a chance over the many new things that people had struggled and hoped to get in that just barely didn't make it. I think it's understandable that especially at THAT phase that people would feel that way; but i'm leaning towards using a literally completely different setup for that next year that's more voting-based. not just for that reason, but because i think giving control to participants is more important than an arbitrary code of what track "deserves" to be in (which different people will all have totally differing opinions on, as this conversation makes clear!), and certainly better than rng.
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The potential problem with with vote-ins is that you need a sensible plan that will work both for small numbers of songs and for the case where there's 50 songs on the bubble and we need to select 22 of them.

I don't think that's an impossible problem to solve but it does make things more complicated.
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yeah i was thinking like...planning different systems depending on what the number of songs winds up being basically, and just implementing whichever one fits the scenario.

regardless of what they are, the systems also needs to be announced beforehand, and systems that work fast enough to not elongate the pre-bracket phase of the contest too tediously. but luckily we have like...a year to think about this lol
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azuarc posted...

But if so many of you are going to take that stance, we might as well just retire the whole damn total stats sheet, down to songs that made a single R1 appearance over a decade ago.

Yes that would be great.

azuarc posted...

But there are enough of you to make a difference, and you are taking people with you in subtle ways.

Yes that is the goal.

azuarc posted...

All music should be given a chance, not purely songs that meet a particular criteria.

"All Songs Matter"

Seriously though just about a quarter of the tracks in this contest are returners and we have people like barrel/tennis/TRE/lefty who mostly push returners, along with new people who nominate songs they have no idea are returners. What proportion of the field do you think should be returners, ideally?
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Toxtricity posted...

yeah to be fair even though i agree with the criteria we used this time around; it was based on feedback from how people reacted to the calculation choosing another winter last time which was probably more stemmed from visceral emotion on the part of everyone, rather than actually sound reasons. it was upsetting rng picked something that'd already gotten a chance over the many new things that people had struggled and hoped to get in that just barely didn't make it. I think it's understandable that especially at THAT phase that people would feel that way; but i'm leaning towards using a literally completely different setup for that next year that's more voting-based. not just for that reason, but because i think giving control to participants is more important than an arbitrary code of what track "deserves" to be in (which different people will all have totally differing opinions on, as this conversation makes clear!), and certainly better than rng.

so my (and possibly many others') objections to this method comes down to the fact that I don't like favoring stuff from people who got less stuff in, period. The fact of the matter is, you have two choices at the end of noms: you can try to compromise to get stuff that's 8/10 or so in, or you can sit on your own things and try to implicitly force others to go to your things. Obviously, everyone has some balance between the two forces, but I do not like systems that encourage that lack of trying to get things in.

And this isn't a critique of people who don't want to play the nomination game, or whatever. That's fine! And being stubborn on a few of your favorites that are on the bubble is also something I did. I refused to budge on a few tracks that finished comfortably outside the cutoff. But at the same time, I cut loose a few 3/3's that are 10/10 from me in order to get some stuff I like a bit less in, which directly caused a 10/10 track I love to not get in because it increased the average number of tracks one of its supporters (me) had gotten in. It makes me feel like playing the nomination game was the wrong move, which is a problem.

But this is probably best a discussion for another time.
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dowolf posted...

so my (and possibly many others') objections to this method comes down to the fact that I don't like favoring stuff from people who got less stuff in, period. The fact of the matter is, you have two choices at the end of noms: you can try to compromise to get stuff that's 8/10 or so in, or you can sit on your own things and try to implicitly force others to go to your things. Obviously, everyone has some balance between the two forces, but I do not like systems that encourage that lack of trying to get things in.

And this isn't a critique of people who don't want to play the nomination game, or whatever. That's fine! And being stubborn on a few of your favorites that are on the bubble is also something I did. I refused to budge on a few tracks that finished comfortably outside the cutoff. But at the same time, I cut loose a few 3/3's that are 10/10 from me in order to get some stuff I like a bit less in, which directly caused a 10/10 track I love to not get in because it increased the average number of tracks one of its supporters (me) had gotten in. It makes me feel like playing the nomination game was the wrong move, which is a problem.

But this is probably best a discussion for another time.

yeah i understand that reasoning. it just adds another strange layer of metagaming that doesn't make any sense so i do see the problem.

I think the thought process behind it for those who worked it up is that, it's really far more damaging for people who already have so little in, to get their stuff that was on the edge totally cut out. for some people this happened year after year even if they did play the nom game hard. there were some suggestions (and even literal changes in calculation this year) that made it so it rewarded participation while still supporting those who had bad luck on influence

i'm typically going to be empathetic to those with persecuted tastes because i used to be down there with kcf even if i'm a bit different these days. it's not fun to participate in the contest and try to get what you like in and wind up with your stuff cut by arbitrary computer after already struggling; while someone who has 19 songs gets their 20th in just because of random chance.

but despite all that justification i don't even want to use that system next year like i said. we did it a few times, probably not next time. no matter what it is, if it's a system where the control doesn't go to the participants, it punishes unfairly (and i would consider random unfair, in this circumstance)

so i think whatever it is needs to be some sort of thing that gives control to the participants. people rating their own noms by priority? voting? something. anything is better than rng /or/ these calculations that don't necessarily represent what the community or nominators value in the songs. i still am glad we tried them and i thank gamebop for going to the effort to set up those calculations these past couple years
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dowolf posted...

It makes me feel like playing the nomination game was the wrong move, which is a problem.

but even with the bubble assistance, the person with a lot of songs in still has more that the person with very little, even with the added bonus from the bubble.

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