Board 8 > [VGMC] Video Game Music Contest 15 announcement!! Noms are 4/15!!

(+) Yeah! (+)

it's also a pain if you don't include the link when you support, though not strictly necessary (if you're later in the alphabet.)

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azuarc posted...

it's also a pain if you don't include the link when you support, though not strictly necessary (if you're later in the alphabet.)

I was originally going to mention this under "advanced (not really lol) tips and tricks" but decided it just added further complexity. When I say you should just copy/paste the original nominator's nom to support it that would naturally include the link (unless they were a silly person and didn't include it)

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"Username that starts with 'x'" privilege. Although, I guess 'T' isn't exactly bad either.
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I'm mentioning it mostly because there will be other people who won't include the link, and I want to make it clear not to mimic that behavior because it's irritating to fix when someone early (or simply earlier) in the alphabet supports a track without, and the song goes into the sheet as having no link.

If anyone wants an explanation for how the script works, it's a two-phase process. First you run the parser, which grabs all the text off the page, converts it into data, and adds that data to individual text files with a record of each user's supports, doubles, and retractions. Unless the host alters that file manually, everything in that file will be listed as:

+ Game
Song
Link

++ Game
Song
Link

- Game
Song
Link

et cetera.

Then, after that's done, you run the compiler. It starts with the first person alphabetically, figures out what they're (still) supporting, addresses any issues with their nominations by spitting out an error message, and then puts that info in a giant array (2-d data grid). After it finishes with first person, let's say that's Advokaiser, then it will move on to the next...Akkrillic, perhaps. And it figures out Akkrillic's nominations and adds a new line to the grid for every song Akk has that Advo did not. But if there's a duplicate, it just adds his votes to the line with Advo's and doesn't change anything else. However, it uses the link from whoever is first in that sequence, and if the first person doesn't include a link, then it just says <LINK MISSING> and doesn't care that someone later has it.

And after going through every single person, it converts that array into a file that can be uploaded to googledocs.

This information provided in case you were morbidly curious or in case it clarifies anything else that might be relevant.

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I mean... outside of cases where a link is genuinely not available at the time, the original nominator should always be providing a link. >_>

The case you're referring to is a hypothetical where someone like me supports one of your noms and goes "well alphabetically I don't have to do anything" and omits the link. (hypothetically, personally I never do this because I think it's bad practice) But the original nominator should always be supplying a link so that people can actually... listen to the nom lol. >_>

Though I guess if you're joining a nom train and instead of finding the original nominator you look for the last one and it's someone doing that it could be a problem. which is why i think it's bad practice. and also keep notes on where songs i have an eye on were originally nominated.

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Can someone link me retirees? None of my day 1 noms will be since they're all recent (one of them literally came out 2 days ago -- gotta give fresh songs some representation!) but I'd like it handy just in case.

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trdl23 posted...

Can someone link me retirees? None of my day 1 noms will be since they're all recent (one of them literally came out 2 days ago -- gotta give fresh songs some representation!) but I'd like it handy just in case.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1K1XdLWiUKB2kX99qYBgnRbLU_sCz4dvZSByKKJHCT6o/edit#gid=362808128

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someone with write privileges there should fix Kuroi Uta to actually be Kuroi Uta

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with a bolded U?

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better than it being "Ita"

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Nominations thread is live! https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/79407803

ban everyone who posted in the first topic

especially those who broke the rules to point out the breaking of the rules

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oof I wanna go home already >_>

A lot of my picks were already posted lol

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FL81 posted...

oof I wanna go home already >_>

A lot of my picks were already posted lol

Isn't that good?

Isn't that a good thing?

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eh, it can be good and bad. Good because they have more support, bad because being the first nominator makes those songs more spread out.

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We hit 50 posts in 18 minutes.

Last year took a bit under 2 hours.

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So actually some discussion in the Discord made me think of this and maybe it's worth asking.

How are the new hosts treating the legality of Utawarerumono: Mask of Truth - Fuantei na Kamisama? The original use of this song was as the opening theme for the anime adaptation of one of the earlier games. However the song was later used in in the Mask of Truth game, both in the game/story itself and in the in-game sound test or whatever its called.

Azuarc ruled this ineligible in the past which tbh makes sense to me but I figured why not check.
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PIayer_0 posted...

We hit 50 posts in 18 minutes.

Last year took a bit under 2 hours.

i am in some kind of existential hell. i may not survive rush part ii tomorrow.

reinstate the 20 nom limit before it is too late

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pyresword posted...

So actually some discussion in the Discord made me think of this and maybe it's worth asking.

How are the new hosts treating the legality of Utawarerumono: Mask of Truth - Fuantei na Kamisama? The original use of this song was as the opening theme for the anime adaptation of one of the games. However the song was later used in in the Mask of Truth game, both in the game/story itself and in the in-game sound test or whatever its called.

Azuarc ruled this ineligible in the past which tbh makes sense to me but I figured why not check.

Yeah, when I was doing some name checking this occured to me too and I dropped Watching Shooting Stars Go By from my ideas list. It was the 2nd Anime Ending but also appears in Mask of Truth later.

Regardless of the ruling it personally makes me sketchy about nomming it. At least myself.

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I tend to agree but also I will throw away my principles like yesterday's garbage for a chance at getting Fuantei na Kamisama into the contest >.>
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Those who get their noms in on the first page probably have an advantage, but if you post within the first 10 posts, I wonder if you have an added advantage over those who post in the middle or bottom of page

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I was an advocate for Fuantei na Kamisama being legal last year so I am inclined to say it's okay this year as well. Even if it was a song for the anime adaptations before, it's pretty clear that it also meant to be for the games, considering they loop the song when it's used in game and have remixed it twice in the game series lol. I worry some may say I am biased in this because it is a song I would pretty much insta-support, but if push comes to shove the looped version does not fall into a gray area of eligibility... so it seems silly to say the regular version of the song is ineligible.

@pyresword @xp1337

((tl;dr yes pls year of fuantei na kamisama))

Coming in early with the stats this year! After 36 hours, I think we have a good number of participants accounted for in the spreadsheet, so let's have a look at the support votes in play!

We currently have 66 nominators accounted for in the spreadsheet - as I wrote that, it changed to 67 but I don't want to redo the numbers. Each person gets an effective 35 votes to allocate, but how many will a song need to make the bracket? The lock threshold is currently 6 votes, but will the final cutoff be the same? Higher? Lower? If you do the easy math, we have (66 people)*(35 votes)/(256 slots) ~= 9...hey, what gives?! There's no way I'm gonna get 8 other people to hop onto my song!

The reality is that a significant portion of votes always end up unallocated to bracket songs. If the safe cutoff is 5/5, there are always songs holding votes at 5/4, 5/3, 4/4, and even 1/1! There are lots of reasons for this:
- People just don't have time to keep up with updates in real-time at the end. This is totally reasonable, and to you I recommend going for the lock deadline instead!
- People are just too stubborn to let their beloved songs go as the end times approach. Why are you still sitting on your 2/2 when the cutoff is at 4/3 and rising?! Your emotions make you weak!
- People do keep up with updates and they do shift towards a song with momentum, but...it just barely misses because the cutoff jumped at the last minute or they couldn't get that last support. These are the ones that hurt the most, the 5/4's and 4/4's gazing up at the 5/5 cutoff.

So, if 100% of votes don't end up allocated to the bracket, what's a better estimate? In VGMC 13, it was around 56%, with (69 nominators)*(25 votes) and a 4/3 cutoff. In VGMC 14, the locking system was added with a threshold of 5, and efficiency improved slightly - 60% from (66 nominators)*(25 votes) and a 5/3 cutoff.

What? Efficiently allocated votes were around the same, but the cutoff went from 4/3 to 5/3?! The answer is that the cutoff can move as high as you want if people coordinate - remember that we can reach a theoretical cutoff of 9 votes this year. More answers lie in the proportion of clearly dead votes that people didn't reallocate - in year 13, a whole 18% of votes ended on songs at 2/2 or below. In year 14, this was only 12%. Kill your darlings, people!

For this year, I'll use VGMC 14 as reference since it also had locks. We had 66 nominators both last year and this year (at the time of writing), so the math works out nicely! Some factors remain; new people still have time to join, and locking at 6 is probably harder to coordinate than locking at 5, so let's take VGMC 14's 60% efficiency and consider 55% and 65%.

If we take (66 nominators)*(35 votes)*(55% efficiency)/(256 slots), we get 4.96. That's a great deal compared to the locking price of 6! This would happen if people are very stubborn or otherwise do not actively shift their votes away from probably-dead songs.

If we try (66 nominators)*(35 votes)*(65% efficiency)/(256 slots), we still get 5.87. So it looks like there's a small premium paid to get songs locked at 6, but I take no responsibility for that claim! If there are still participants yet to join and they're more willing to compromise than previous years, we could easily end with a cutoff above 6/3.

But I don't care about the final cutoff! I'm just worried about how many songs will actually lock!
Okay, let's also look at how eagerly people went for locks last year. Exactly 40% of votes were used on that year's threshold of lock-at-5, so if we apply that to this year, (66 nominators)*(35 votes)*(40% allocation)/(6 to lock) is 154 slots locked. Honestly, if I tweak the 40% number things don't change much, so people would have to be really enthusiastic about locking to lock the entire field of 256. It's not just about coordination, but making compromises and concessions - if you think of your initial supports as scoring 9/10 for you, you would be shifting your votes to songs that are only 7/10 or 8/10 to help them lock. But hey, why should you have to be the one compromising here?! If you stay on your 9/10's and wait, that'll pressure other people to give up their 9/10's and join yours instead! Yes, yes, the perfect plan...and then no one budges from their 9/10's because everyone's thinking the same thing.

Hmm, how about adjusting the lock threshold? With 40% allocation, a lower threshold of 5 gets you 185 locks, and even lower at 4 still gets you 231. A higher threshold of 7 takes you down to 132. There looks to be plenty of wiggle room, so I wouldn't worry too much - we do have more people (supposedly) and +10 votes this year, but we're also adding 64 bracket slots that need 4-6 votes each to be claimed, which offsets a lot of the pressure.

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~
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I noticed there's support for FFXIV's "The Twinning," but the name of the song on the OST is "A Long Fall." Is there a clean way to correct that, or does it matter?

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the solution is "fix it in post"
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trdl23 posted...

I noticed there's support for FFXIV's "The Twinning," but the name of the song on the OST is "A Long Fall." Is there a clean way to correct that, or does it matter?

THANK you. That bugged me almost as much as my accidentally expansion-titling Woe.

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Well I've made it through 100 songs on the playlist.

W...what's that? ...726 you say? Oh god.
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PLAYER_0 posted...

- People are just too stubborn to let their beloved songs go as the end times approach. Why are you still sitting on your 2/2 when the cutoff is at 4/3 and rising?! Your emotions make you weak!

Weak? I'll sit on 1/1s or even 2/1s as a matter of integrity, thank you very much! Someone must leave behind a record of how the b8vgm community failed to see true greatness despite having every opportunity to see it for what it was.

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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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Are we allowed to plug any of our noms here? There are a few I'd like to highlight since as far as I know they've never been nom'd before despite being out for a few years.

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Personally, I think that plugging your songs in any capacity during nominations is something to be avoided. There was plenty of time to do that before the contest started, but at this point, I believe every song should have equal right to gaining attention without their nominator having to explicitly fight for them.

I'm also taking a pretty strong stance on what "plugging" means, though. If you're just mentioning them in passing without going out of your way to (essentially) rally for them, that isn't really the same thing. If, in the greater context of a post, you mention how to were really hoping that {Reach For The Moon} would do well this year, that isn't plugging.

$.02

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yo have you guys heard Bahram Attack y'all should hop aboard that hype train choo choo bring on the supports
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that's a lifetime ban

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First haste and now nfun. The vgmc jail cells are getting quite full this year
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azuarc posted...

Personally, I think that plugging your songs in any capacity during nominations is something to be avoided. There was plenty of time to do that before the contest started, but at this point, I believe every song should have equal right to gaining attention without their nominator having to explicitly fight for them.

I'm also taking a pretty strong stance on what "plugging" means, though. If you're just mentioning them in passing without going out of your way to (essentially) rally for them, that isn't really the same thing. If, in the greater context of a post, you mention how to were really hoping that {Reach For The Moon} would do well this year, that isn't plugging.

$.02

I understand this perspective so I will refrain. Thanks for the feedback.

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hey guys, please support planet wisp act 1,....it really needs your help
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You guys should support Into Free instead!

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Toxtricity posted...

hey guys, please support planet wisp act 1,....it really needs your help

o.0

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azuarc posted...

I believe every song should have equal right to gaining attention without their nominator having to explicitly fight for them.

too bad i refuse i will go down fighting

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/79416428
Topic 2 is now the active topic!

This year we had 7 days, end of locking nominations, then 7 days, as opposed to last year where it was something like 7 days, end of locking, then 5 days? This was a step in the right direction, I think, to give us more time.

But what if next year we did 9 days, end of locking nominations, then 5 days? Sure, 14 days is plenty to get through the nominations, but we still feel a lot of pressure trying to prepare for locks in only seven days. An additional thing is you would think with 9 days, perhaps less known music would get more of a chance that way? (if that's what we want) Oh, yeah, and personally speaking, I've only gone through about 400 pieces of music and will be lucky to get through 600 before lockdown. I guess I just need to set aside more time.

I dunno if that line of reasoning makes sense. Guess we just need to wait and see what happens first.

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IMO, open on Thursday, leaving locking open until following Sunday, close on Thursday would be the most reasonable option that mirrors this year's plan. But we're also making judgements without having seen it play out yet. Maybe next year we go back to 20 (or split the difference at 25) and the nom list doesn't end up being quite as long.

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Thread #3 time!!
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/79420096

Now that the dust has settled, can confirm that before the lock period ended, a total of 172 songs were able to reach locked status and guarantee a spot in this year's bracket! 84 spots left for the end rush to determine~

I'm also for more time before the lock. Seems like 75% of the users are done nominating

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I have thoughts on how things have gone down so far but I figure I'll leave my feedback for until after noms end.

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barreldragon88 posted...

I'm also for more time before the lock. Seems like 75% of the users are done nominating

More percentage of the time coming before the lock, anyway. We've hit a period where basically nothing is happening, and then it's going to suddenly spike into action again. It's possible nobody starts doing much for that until Tuesday or even Wednesday, though, which means we basically just inserted 5 days of downtime in the middle.

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azuarc posted...

More percentage of the time coming before the lock, anyway. We've hit a period where basically nothing is happening, and then it's going to suddenly spike into action again. It's possible nobody starts doing much for that until Tuesday or even Wednesday, though, which means we basically just inserted 5 days of downtime in the middle.

to be fair, isn't that actually a really good thing for allowing people to catch up

UF8 posted...

to be fair, isn't that actually a really good thing for allowing people to catch up

Actually, no, but again I'm saving my big feedback post for after the end unless there's some actual clamor for it right now or something.

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It's going to be a shitshow the last two days lol

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