Cramchakle wrote:

Mountain Stronghold

This link does nothing for me.

M57 wrote:

Cramchakle wrote:

Mountain Stronghold

This link does nothing for me.

I told you I didn't want to give it away yet!

Fixed it.

There must be some sort of voting site available which allows you to collaboratively come to a decision - rank each option in order, allocate points, have a second round with only the top 10 options then rank again to come out with the overall winner, something like that.

I've shied away from using a 3rd party system because to keep the integrity of the process, we'd need everyone who wanted to vote to create an account on the 3rd party site and somehow tie it to their wargear account, and I assumed that extra hurdle would decrease the already low turnout.

As a first time voter, I found the voting process confusing.  I think that it would be better to separate out, "Let's brainstorm on options" from "Let's vote."

As for the voting itself, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_instant_runoff_voting_to_other_voting_systems has a ton of options to consider.  I personally like Copeland a lot.  Each option is given a score which is simply "number of other options it wins in a head to head match with, minus number of other options it loses to."  The only downside is that it is easy (particularly with a small number of voters) to have ties.

However we can eliminate the possibility of ties by ranking voters from most important to least.  In the event of a tie, drop the least important voter and recalculate.  Continue until there is no tie.

How can we rank voters?  If you have more boards, you're more important.  If you have the same number of boards, the one with a higher global score is more important.

I seem to be a little too important in that system...

It actually gives everyone almost exactly the same voting level.  You'd be guaranteed of having your vote counted, but your vote would count for no more than anyone else who got counted (which would be most people who voted).

The nice thing about that voting system is that it satisfies the Concordent criteria.  This means that if there are two boards who are liked by the same people, there is no concern that people will "split the vote" between them and one that is overall liked less will win instead.  (Any point based system does not have this desirable property.)

Update: I should note that another nice property of this system is that the definition of a vote really becomes, "ranked two boards, preferred one over the other".  Therefore there is no need to actually play all of the boards in a contest before voting.  Just rank the ones you played relative to each other and you will neither directly harm or help the ones that you didn't vote on.  The flip side, of course, is that you should rank all of the boards that you have opinions on relative to each other.

Well, whatever it is, we should plan on making the change for the start of the 2014 season. Let's get the current one underway and spend the next half a year figuring out how to make this work better.

j-bomb wrote:

i still think the contest should be who ever puts out a map .

there are not that many maps put out in a year. maybe if you could just submit the map you like the most and have it run six months. that would give people enough time to play it and not limit the designer. granite it would have to be a passed board.

it might even tighten up the review board to make it a little harder to have  a map passed.

i like the contests but i don't see why we need a theme.

I'm entirely ok with this. We could possibly go the route of movie awards and have a "Best Overall", "Best Graphics", and "Best Use of Innovative Gameplay" instead of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd.

The Crammy's!

Cramchakle wrote:

Well, whatever it is, we should plan on making the change for the start of the 2014 season. Let's get the current one underway and spend the next half a year figuring out how to make this work better.

I agree with getting things underway with what we have right now.

However voting for the current contest has not started yet.  I'd like to suggest the system that I described be used to tally the votes when it does.

If Ozyman wants me to write some code to do the calculation, I can certainly do that.

M57 wrote:

The Crammy's!

http://youtu.be/3TKK6d3-h2U

>As a first time voter, I found the voting process confusing.  I think that it would be better to separate out, "Let's brainstorm on options" from "Let's vote."

That is how the theme voting has been every other time.  This voting was a little more clusterfuckery than usual.

My main complaint with the more complicated systems is that they are more complicated.  If we have something were you rank things to vote - it makes it a bit harder to vote because deciding if some map is your 4th favorite or your 5th favorite is harder than just picking your top 3.    Also if you have to rank every map to vote it makes it more complicated for whoever has to transcribe the votes (which so far has been me, but maybe someone else would like to volunteer to be the vote counter).  It all seems like a bit of overkill for something as trivial as this.

Ozyman wrote:

I've shied away from using a 3rd party system because to keep the integrity of the process, we'd need everyone who wanted to vote to create an account on the 3rd party site and somehow tie it to their wargear account, and I assumed that extra hurdle would decrease the already low turnout.

not necessarily, there's polls i see on the sidebars of both bluemilkspecial.com and theonering.net from time to time that don't make me go register and only allow me to vote once. of course neither has one right now.

If transcription effort is the bottleneck, I could quite reasonably do that.  And also show my calculations.

I'm not sure of the effort tradeoff.  Telling people "don't vote unless you've played every map" reduces how many are going to vote.  But it is true that ranking all maps is more work than ranking the top 3.  That said, I think that the extra effort of playing all of the maps for the last contest was more work than ranking the half I didn't rank would have been.  And nobody said you actually have to rank all of the ones you played.  So I think that is a net positive.  Others may disagree.

Heck, if I'm transcribing, I can say that I'd accept ties.  So if you want to you could say, "I like A, B, and C best, in that order.  I also played D, E and F, and did not like them as much."  I know exactly how to make sense of that.

I dont know btilly, in the current system: I just have to play games and say 1.A board, 2.B board, 3. C board.  and that's it - it's really simple. One could argue having to include all the contestants I played might be more complex for the user.

So is it decided for RPG? Or are we going with a medieval/RPG duel theme? If the Voting is still open, then:

1. Medieval

2. Open

3. Interesting Game Mechanic

I think we've decided on RPG, but any medieval board could pretty easily be shoe-horned into an RPG setting without too much work.  Maybe take a look at chainmail which was the precursor to D&D:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chainmail_%28game%29

It seems like we have a pretty good contingent of RPG experts here in the forums, so I imagine you could get some help with theme details if you needed.