Contest Discussion Topic (2.0.X)

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People who only give their votes without comments already existed in the old voting system as well, and as far as I can observe, the vote:comment ratio hasn't changed significantly. The actual process of voting (without comments) is a matter of a few seconds in either system, so I don't see how the current system encourages people to "vote-and-run" any more than the old system did. The one exception would be people whose opinions diverge a lot from the overall consensus. In the old voting system, they had to explain themselves lest their votes be ignored in the final tally. Now you can post completely crazy rankings (like putting Eggslimer Battle first or something) without any comments, and nobody would care because even the most divergent votes don't influence the overall score very much (which is why Mystic changed to the new system to begin with). However, highly divergent votes come from one of two groups of people: a) trolls. Nobody wants to hear what a troll has to say, so this is not an issue. b) people whose opinions are sincerely different. And since their opinions are different, they're probably itching to declare their disagreement with the consensus already, so they're likely to post comments anyway.

So really, the only reason to stop posting comments because of the new voting system is if you're secretly a troll who wants to skew the average, which is a pretty futile exercise. No, the real reason that there are fewer comments is that there are fewer votes to begin with, and the ratio has stayed roughly the same. I don't think this has anything to do with the new voting system, it's because of the six-month gap and the fact that activity in this community is declining. You might be fooled by the decent number of entries in this contest, but you have to remember that they were submitted over the course of half a year. I assume that many of the people who used to vote in the OLDC have simply stopped coming here on a regular basis. They either missed the OLDC (which usually doesn't take place in February) or maybe they played the maps and thought "this isn't worth coming back for". This will change when 2.1 comes out, which hopefully won't take that long. I'm fairly confident that we won't miss more than a few OLDCs in the meantime.

Sounds reasonable enough. I dunno, I just feel like numbers would prompt people to explain themselves more thoroughly, while this "ranking" system requires a little less explanation since you're not really applying an independent, objective value to each entry - just a place on a list. But if you say that the ratio hasn't changed at all, then I'll take your word for it.
Maybe I'm just feeling the ol' community-stagnation-depression. :(

Also, I wasn't saying that I didn't like the new voting system, though that's kinda what it sounded like :P
I DO hate the unintuitive way averages tend to weigh scores sometimes. I certainly won't miss that. Though, I do have to say, I'll miss the top-ten leaderboard thing. Will we have one of those? Or do they just not work with this new system?
 
Though, I do have to say, I'll miss the top-ten leaderboard thing. Will we have one of those? Or do they just not work with this new system?
Well, purely theoretically, we could divide each entry's overall score by the number of voters and n-1 (n being the number of maps in the division). That gives us a number between 0 and 1 that you could interpret as a percentage and compare between maps from different contests. Of course, this would be completely useless in practice because the number tells us nothing about the absolute quality of a map; it depends heavily on the number and quality of the other entries in the division.

Let's take two previous contests as an example: The first is March/April 2011, where the single player division consisted of two terrible maps. The second is January/February 2012, where the single player division consisted of two great maps. Now imagine that these contests had been held with the new voting system. It's obvious that the "averages" as outlined above of both maps have to add up to 100%. That means that the closer the two maps are in quality, the lower the "average" of the better map will be. In March/April 2011, the gap between the two entries was 0.25 points. Because the range of scores was pretty narrow, the results probably would have been similar in the new voting system. For example, the better map could have gotten 63% and the worse one 37%. In January/February 2012, the gap was only 0.08. The votes were more divergent, so the new voting system might have given a different result, but let's say it would have been similarly close. In that case, we could except the "averages" to be closer, like 53% to 47% or something. If we construct a leaderboard from this, the (terrible) winner from 2011 is in first place while the (great) winner from 2012 is in second. This is obviously nonsensical.
 
Or to put what SC said simply, no, leaderboards won't work with the new system. It's all relative to the number of maps and votes now, leaderboards need absolute scoring systems to be able to compare maps with.
 
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