LogFAQs > #979780390

PIayer_0 posted...

1) Hosting support: Should we open up hosting duties to the community? Seeing deo forget or be unable to post this topic multiple times this week, I'm reminded that 4 months of nominations, bracket construction, topic posting, and vote tallying is a lot of work to put on one person! With the growth from 128 to 192 to 256 and loop/composer tagging, it's only getting worse while we're getting older with outside responsibilities and life changes. deo already gets a lot of help with admin stuff, we're just missing a more official way to contribute. How can I help with posting the topic when deo's away? How do I tally votes accurately? Maybe we can lighten the load by assigning each day of the week to different people for the match topic, but there need to be resources to support that. Many of us know how hosting works by now, and the contest will probably progress towards being more community-run anyway.

well i've been fully stonewalled on this front after begging for years so idk if this is actually happening or if i'm really just blacklisted by everyone in the community at this point (probably)

PIayer_0 posted...

3) Noms and representation: Does everyone feel like their voice can be heard with the power of supports and doubles? A community bracket would ideally represent each demographic proportionally, *except* no one gets rounded down to zero representation. We're in a stable B8-Siiva-Supra period where we can try things that were vulnerable to bad actors in the past, like giving people the power to push in that one darling song. It would be a big leap to do auto-include noms, but we can try something with going beyond doubles. Everyone gets three triples? Or two quadruples? One quintuple? Maybe they can distribute their 20 votes across as few songs as they like, but with a cap per song. Representation is connected to bracket size too - we grew to 256 to have more tastes represented, yet doubling the field doesn't shift any demographics directly...we just get more of everything in the same proportions.

i'm not going to comment directly on this thought for now, but i will say that i've personally been interested in taking a different direction entirely and making doubles a more rare resource if anything. i'd been thinking heavily about giving doubles a one per day limit, as well as only allowing them for supports because i'm more opposed to the idea of people forcing in songs others wouldn't support than ever tbh. But I do know well, as one of the more outcast nominators to begin with, that it's a point worth discussing.

PIayer_0 posted...

4) Nom deadlines: How many rules do we add to try and satisfy everyone? All these deadlines are getting to a point where I have a hard time keeping them in my head, not to mention the newcomers parsing them for the first time. Some people like locks and some people like a moving cutoff, should both deadlines be stuffed in together each year? It can satisfy both sides, but it's also more criteria to worry about. This year, I'm reducing my original noms and have seen comments considering the same - will that make supports more concentrated and push the cutoff higher? I have no idea, so now I have to track how many songs are locking daily, check how many lock slots are free before the deadline, decide if I want to push for any locks, drop songs before the last day, then manage the moving cutoff at the end (whose speed is itself affected by how many users' votes are sitting on locks). I'm getting too old for this! Casual, public games are fun because they impose rules that are easy to learn and play with, and that goes for both veterans and newcomers.

one of the many factors in why i've been pretty strongly against the lock system the way it fits into the mix presently is how thoroughly casual unfriendly it is (or moreso just extremely biased towards those who are more actively involved, as it functions basically just the same as a regular deadline but without a preannounced date attached for the most part). I get that people may still be strongly against my thoughts here but I like to think that the drop protection system i also test ran in bost actually was a success as an alternative that didn't have that same effect (it seems a bit unwieldy in and of itself, but the primary purpose of it really is just to give the hosts an excuse to explain the state of noms each day more than anything, since the protection itself doesn't have any unfair advantage tied to it that people can game... well, i think anyway, it's rather difficult for me to be absolutely certain when i'd been doing it in a much smaller contest that also had limited merit to trying to "game the system" through support manipulation, seeing as it had no cap on them lol. outside of that, the final day's cutoff shifts are always an issue too and i'd also be interested in hearing ideas on how to further alleviate this, not just for VGMC but obviously for the mini-BOSTs moving forward too). that all aside, i do agree that confusing scheduling is perhaps a major issue in making all of this really casual unfriendly. buuuut at the same time, i think that making it complicated can also be a net positive in this regard. i mean yeah, we've got these convoluted rules like X noms per day and only half of the field can be locked and 2 days of break in the middle of noms, but they're all there to serve a pretty valuable purpose, and i'm very biased but i'd be taking it even further in this direction in the name of making it more seamless. This may seem a bit funny coming from someone who just ran a contest based around harrassing nominators constantly for input but i really do want to reduce the load on people coming in for the first time or even just casually. in my personal defense, for bost that was predominantly done through putting off all the heavy set decisions till AFTER noms and letting people just come in and say they're supporting whatever games they're familiar with in general, obviously that's not an applicable option here... but even just things like changing the approach to supports would do a lot to make it less... you know, competitive, and i think that's what we might need in the future

anyway yeah i've rambled aimlessly enough here i think, i just hope to have my two cents considered more in the future since i'm pretty hurt that all of my weeks of planning out a revamp got turned down again lol