LogFAQs > #935269566

I'm listening. It's an interesting idea. It runs counter to what I was going for, but I'll listen to input.

My purpose is creating this variant was to give songs that got a really tragic bracket placement a chance to be heard...y'know, twice? Literally every song will play twice this way, and I can only see that as a good thing. A big reason we run guessing games and play the whole song is to double as a listening party. Nominations are the best part of the contest for several reasons, but one is because we get to listen to a ton of new stuff. It's easy to overlook or underappreciate something in the literally hundreds of songs trotted out there for the bracket.

It wouldn't feel great to be a strong retirement candidate in your three-pack only to get eliminated by a new challenger who dropped in from the division next door

I feel like this is a bit of a non-issue. Sure, it feels bad, but are you telling me this scenario is unfair? The song that lost in R1/R2 and won their nine-way must have also been a strong retirement candidate, too. As far as I see it, that song has proven itself more than a song that merely was the best of four songs. And since, in general, bracket design is intended to put the top 25% of the bracket in separate four-packs, that means that if I or Mycro or whoever thought you met that description, there's a good chance you didn't face stiff competition to get there. Where this idea shines is when we miss the mark. VGMC12 literally had two 16 seeds retiring. Last year, The Final Song, a previous retirement round competitor, lost in its first match. And what about the songs that simply get a really bad placement each year because of low confidence but might have actually done okay? 23 songs on our retiree list also lost in round 1 in a previous year. Two of them, Meaning of Birth and Seymour Battle, lost twice.

I feel like there are a ton of scenarios this patches over. Either bracket placement is done semi-randomly and you end up with matches like Baba Yetu vs MGS2 main theme in round 2 (hi VGMC1) or you have someone placing them intelligently, and you're subject to their biases. I certainly feel the second is better than the first, but even with a second person involved in bracket design as I used Mycro last year, there's still going to be mismatches. Two years ago, I purposely gave Besaid a bad placement (because something had to go there). Last year, I intended to redeem it a little, but Mycro decided it wouldn't do well and it still got a poor position. I feel bad for the people who nominated it two years in a row, got it into the bracket, and then received that kind of treatment. I seriously doubt that it would ever retire, but doesn't it deserve better than to run into a buzzsaw each year?

So basically, I'm trying to make sure that every song gets an opportunity. An opportunity to be heard. An opportunity to win a match. An opportunity to not simply be fed to the eventual champion.

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VGMC13 champion: Ar Nosurge - Class::EXSPHERE_NOSURGE;