LogFAQs > #972785695

VGMC 17 nominations will open on Wednesday, April 19th at 7pm Eastern time!! The current plan is to have nominations open for 10 days, and end at the same time on Saturday, April 29th. There's a few big changes to way nominations are structured this year, so let's hop into how this shinding will go down:

Nomination Slot Decrease
The past two years we increased the total amount of nomination/supports that you can use to 30, including 25 single noms and 5 double noms. This year we're scaling it back to 20 total, 15 single and 5 double. We had a clear overabundance of nom slots going around last year with the fact that the entire field was locked so easily, so forcing everyone to be a bit more selective with their slots should help curb the madness a little bit.

Nomination Staggering Changes and the Mid-Nom Freeze
Last year, we elected to stagger the amount of unique, new nominations you could make per day to help make it easier to keep up and listen to all nominations. Despite our efforts, it seemed to be just barely feasible for the most dedicated people to actually do this, and anyone that ended up falling behind struggled to catch back up. To help those that wish to listen to everything, the trickle of nominations will be slowed down just a bit more, and the semi-impromptu nomination/support freeze that happened last year will be pre-planned instead. Here's the current calender of how nominations will be structured:

7pm Wednesday, April 19th - Nominations open, 5 unique nominations allowed with no limit to supports.
7pm Thursday, April 20th (start +24 hours) - Unique nominations raised to 10.
7pm Friday, April 21st (start +48 hours) - ALL nominations AND supports stopped. 48 hours pause enacted to let people listen to everyone's top priority nominations over the weekend.
7pm Sunday, April 23rd (start +96 hours) - Nominations and supports resume, unique nomination cap completely lifted. Go crazy!
7pm Friday, April 28th (end -24 hours) - No more songs will lock past this point if the lock cap has not already been hit.
7pm Saturday, April 29th - Nominations close!

Lock Cap
This year locks will be returning once again, but there will be a cap to the amount of songs that can lock to 128 songs. Again, further safeguard against the complete locking of the field that we had last year. Because of the existence of the cap, there will no longer be a timed deadline for locks. To keep things easier to deal with, locks will no longer happen in the last 24 hours of nominations even if this cap is not actually met by that time.

Bracket: Tiebreaker Safeguards
Last year we passed up on actually implementing any sort of safeguard for if a match went into too many tiebreakers, and we once again had some stubborn matches crop up, so this year there actually will be a plan! Should any match reach a second tiebreaker (or in other words if a match is run for a third time) and that match remains tied when voting ends, rather than the match ending normally, all current votes in the match will be locked in (this includes if you take a vote off and make it a "no vote") and voting will be extended through the next day and anyone that had not yet voted will be allowed to do so. The match will be appended to the next day's matches and new votes will be taken in the new thread. The match will continue to be open for as long as a tie may persist at a match day's rollover. Keeping to a time-based closing was chosen over "the next vote decides it" so as to prevent funny business like someone getting a friend to hop in and decide it.

I know this may be a lot to drop just a week before I'm looking to opening nominations, which... is pretty much all my fault cause it took me a while to iron some details out and then I got sick right before Easter weekend that meant I didn't get it up when I wanted to lol. So sorry if this is super sudden for some people!! But I do want to start earlier rather than later to minimize chances that the contest runs over time in the summer where I will be very, very busy. Hope you all will forgive me when we make this the best VGMC yet!!!