Lemmings Forums Level Contest #16 - Voting Phase (Current: Final Round)

[IchoTolot]

Okay, so, by now most of you know how voting works.

Just as a quick guide for those who are new to the contests - the voting is broken into rounds, and each round you're allowed to vote for up to a certain number of levels. Votes are for the levels that you want to stay in the contest, not for levels you want to be removed. Just to be clear, you are allowed to vote for fewer levels than the permitted amount, and you are allowed to vote for your own levels. Generally, the number of levels that qualify for the next round will be the same as the number of levels that each user is allowed to vote for. The results so far are only visible once either the voting closes or you've already voted.

Please remember that discussing the levels anywhere on the forums (except private message) is not allowed while the voting phase is in progress, even if the level in question is not in the current round, even between rounds. However, it is okay to discuss levels that have already been eliminated. This rule does not extend to anything off-site, so you can eg. continue posting Youtube videos of your playthroughs, discuss in IRC chat, just don't draw attention to them on the forums.

There'll be voteoffs for each rule, to get down to one/two/three remaining levels each. After this, all qualifying levels will go into a mixed voteoff.
I've decided to keep the percentages of "surviving" levels of the rule-voteoffs somewhat similar to give every rule a fair chance. Example: A rule with a 66% survival-rate and one with a 33% survival-rate for the mixed rounds doesn't seem that fair to me.

There's only a prize for the 1st place winner - of course, getting close to that still means you made a great level.

So... let the voting begin! Each round will be open for voting for 3 days, except the final which will be 4 days.

All levels are still avialable in the discussion topic: https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=4091.0

[IchoTolot]

Planned:

Rule 1 -- 3 levels to 2 for the mixed rounds (~66% survival rate)
Rule 2 -- 5 levels to 3 for the mixed rounds (~60% survival rate)
Rule 3 -- 4 levels to 2 for the mixed rounds (~50% survival rate)

Rule 1

Round 1

Colorful Arty's "Spider Attack!"
IchoTolot's "Trinity Tower"
SQron188's "Powerplant Faceplant"

Tiebreaker

IchoTolot's "Trinity Tower"
SQron188's "Powerplant Faceplant"

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________


Rule 2

Round 1

Colorful Arty's "Sunset Sprint!"
Crane's "Run!"
IchoTolot's "2 Minutes Before The Mall Opens"
Nessy's "How To Self-Destruct A Factory"
nin10doaddict's "On the fritz"

Tiebreaker

Colorful Arty's "Sunset Sprint!"
IchoTolot's "2 Minutes Before The Mall Opens"

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________


Rule 3

Round 1

Crane's "Two's company..."
Nessy's "Butterfly Cult"
SQron188's "Forest Stroll"
Proxima's "The Sign of Four"

Tiebreaker

Crane's "Two's company..."
SQron188's "Forest Stroll"

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________


Mixed Group

Round 1

Colorful Arty's "Spider Attack!"
IchoTolot's "Trinity Tower"
Crane's "Run!"
Nessy's "How To Self-Destruct A Factory"
Colorful Arty's "Sunset Sprint!"
Nessy's "Butterfly Cult"
SQron188's "Forest Stroll"

Round 2

Colorful Arty's "Spider Attack!"
IchoTolot's "Trinity Tower"
Crane's "Run!"
Nessy's "How To Self-Destruct A Factory"
Colorful Arty's "Sunset Sprint!"
Nessy's "Butterfly Cult"

Round 3

Colorful Arty's "Spider Attack!"
IchoTolot's "Trinity Tower"
Crane's "Run!"
Nessy's "Butterfly Cult"

Tiebreaker

IchoTolot's "Trinity Tower"
Crane's "Run!"

Final Round

Nessy's "Butterfly Cult"
Crane's "Run!"

[IchoTolot]

Seems like a tiebreaker is needed here.

Next round is open.

[IchoTolot]

Moving on to rule 2!

[Crane]

With future tie-breakers on the first round, is it possible to do the next rule at the same time as the tie-breaker, or doesn't the forum allow multiple simultaneous polls?  Just that they're looking rather frequent and slow down the contest.

[IchoTolot]

With future tie-breakers on the first round, is it possible to do the next rule at the same time as the tie-breaker, or doesn't the forum allow multiple simultaneous polls?  Just that they're looking rather frequent and slow down the contest.

There is no option for multi-poll as far as I know.

Also I am not sure about if doing that in the first place is a good idea.

People often complained about forgetting to vote, so I am more on the side of the slower approach here. I rather have high participation than a fast process.

[Crane]

Fair enough, just we had two tie-breakers in a row that will increase the voting period by at least 4 days.

[IchoTolot]

Speaking of tiebreakers: The next round is up!

[IchoTolot]

Moving on to rule 3 now.

[IchoTolot]

The next round is up!

[IchoTolot]

Only 1 day left to get your votes in!

[IchoTolot]

The first round of the mixed group is open!

[Crane]

Please, no more tie breakers!

[IchoTolot]

Please, no more tie breakers!

Well, that depends on the votes, sorry.

If, for example, it is the semi finals and it is up to desicion which 2 of the 3 levels go into the finals: I cannot start the finals if 2 levels tie for the 2nd place. Redoing the semi-finals with 3 is not a fair option, as 1 level clearly qualified for the finals. So we need the tiebreaker to clear things up.
Levels can end up in a very different voting situation if they are paired up in small groups. Usually the result is more precise than when put in a bigger group.

Yes, they lengthen the voting phase, but I can offer to hold a poll after the voting ends for this contest to shorten the voting time to 2 days either for all votes or only for tiebreakers.

I hope that will result in a compromise.

[Crane]

Apologies - it was meant to be slightly in jest, if only because every single stage up to this point has resulted in a tie-breaker.  Mind you, I guess that implies that everyone was stepped up their game in regards to making quality levels.

[IchoTolot]

Apologies - it was meant to be slightly in jest, if only because every single stage up to this point has resulted in a tie-breaker.  Mind you, I guess that implies that everyone was stepped up their game in regards to making quality levels.

Votings have indeed become a lot closer.

I will nevertheless make a poll after this contest's voting to ask if a slightly shorter voting round time is desired.

[Proxima]

...or maybe an overhaul of the entire voting system?

[IchoTolot]

...or maybe an overhaul of the entire voting system?

I can ask around about that as well if you wish for the next contest. You can think about a cocrete new plan if you want.

Smaller adaptations won't be a very big deal.

Still the basic rule for a new system will be that all levels shall be treated equally.

But for a big change I want 2 things:

1.) A majority for an overhaul determined by a poll.

2.) After that: A concrete plan to what the new system should be. As I don't know how which desired attributes a new system should have and what exact flaws shall be corrected - here the persons wanting a change shall help me out. I want concrete ideas!

[SQron188]

I'd say don't fix it if it ain't broken

[namida]

Some people feel that it is "broken", though. It's really a subjective question that's up to the community to decide on the answer to, rather than one that has an objective answer.

Personally, my opinion here - if people make use of the playing phase, they should mostly know the levels by voting time; so for that reason, I think allowing multiple polls at the same time (this can be done by having multiple topics) should be fine. Perhaps as a tradeoff for this, the open duration for each poll could be a bit longer.

I think the best way to do this would be to run each rule's single-rule voteoff independently, then once all three are complete, proceed with the finals as normal. Another possibility to keep things moving might be to start the creation phase of the next contest before the previous one's voting is complete (maybe once the mixed-rule votes start?). This would require a minor adjustment to the "choose next contest's rules" prize, with it instead being "choose the contest after next's rules".

To avoid overload, perhaps subforums could be created for some of the recurring popular contests - the official contest, LOTY, maybe the level solving contest if it stays popular.

[SQron188]

Personally, my opinion here - if people make use of the playing phase, they should mostly know the levels by voting time; so for that reason, I think allowing multiple polls at the same time (this can be done by having multiple topics) should be fine. Perhaps as a tradeoff for this, the open duration for each poll could be a bit longer.

I think the best way to do this would be to run each rule's single-rule voteoff independently, then once all three are complete, proceed with the finals as normal

That's an interesting idea, I wonder how well it'd fare in practice. 3*(1 to 3) votes at a time shouldn't matter if people vote for levels they appreciate, and most of the voters are competent in regards to what is being voted and presumably do not squander their votes, etc.

Another possibility to keep things moving might be to start the creation phase of the next contest before the previous one's voting is complete (maybe once the mixed-rule votes start?). This would require a minor adjustment to the "choose next contest's rules" prize, with it instead being "choose the contest after next's rules".

Hmm, so in essence, that would reveal the contest rules to the potential participants sooner. This could be a solution if we absolutely cannot wait for the following contest - I suppose the results of the poll would decide here.
I'd just hope for a sufficiently long creation phase in such a case!

[IchoTolot]

I think multi-poll in multiple topics is way too chaotic. If there is a strong preference for it we can try it though. I will make a topic after this contest has ended.

I will also propose a shortening of the time period from 3 to 2 days in there.

Increasing the rate of contests can also be a double-edged sword. Too many could tire out people. If there aren't enough right now, maybe additional contests run by other people could still temporary hunger.

[Forestidia86]

Why is it needed to vote for each rule separately?
Actually you can have an advantage when you're in a rule with a higher survival rate than the others, which doesn't seem to be justified.
Why not make one big mixed round with all the levels and then best 5 levels or so go in the next round?

[Crane]

A while ago, I submitted a level for a rule that had only one other submission, and both levels pretty much got an automatic pass into the next round. It is a little unfair, but I'm not sure what the alternative is. Trying to put the survival rate above 66% or so is about as fair as possible for everyone, unless it's changed so each rule is judged separately and there's no mixed group, but I don't think that will go down well and the competition will return to just a single rule per contest.

[IchoTolot]

Why is it needed to vote for each rule separately?
Actually you can have an advantage when you're in a rule with a higher survival rate than the others, which doesn't seem to be justified.
Why not make one big mixed round with all the levels and then best 5 levels or so go in the next round?

A while ago, I submitted a level for a rule that had only one other submission, and both levels pretty much got an automatic pass into the next round. It is a little unfair, but I'm not sure what the alternative is. Trying to put the survival rate above 66% or so is about as fair as possible for everyone, unless it's changed so each rule is judged separately and there's no mixed group, but I don't think that will go down well and the competition will return to just a single rule per contest.

I set the survival rates for the rules as close together as possible while also trying to result in a reasonable sized mixed group, so no big advantage spawns from this. This was the very first thing I minimized when taking over the contests! It could be that before my time there was a more unfair rate though.

Under me the highest diffrence in survival rates was/is 16,666666 %:

Biggest differences I had:

This contest: 50%-66,666666%.
Contest 15:  33%-37%
Contest 14:  50%-66,66666%
Contest 13:  40%-50%

1 big mixed round would be a bad thing. Large groups tend to deliver inaccurate results with the current voting poll way. The results from smaller groups are more accurate with polls as putting 1 level angainst 1 other is the clearest stand-off.
For very large groups a complete different voting scheme would be needed without polls, where the users not just vote for a few favorites from a selection, but deliver a complete ranking of all levels from "most favorite" to "least favorite".
The result would be a median of all rankings sent in.
Only 1 round would be hold this way with an immidiate overall result.
But I must say I don't really like this kind of voting.

I want to make the groups rather smaller than larger in general as a result.

Although I could distribute the levels from all rules together in ~3 groups, with near identical size. Mixing itself is no problem.


All in all I decided that after this contest's voting I will make a poll for 2 things:

1.) Shorten voting time from 3 to 2 days.

2.) Distributing all levels from all rules over a set number of groups with ~ the same size for the voting phase, so rules can get mixed. And survival rates are very colse together or identical, the rates themself will also depend on the number of entries.

[IchoTolot]

The next round is up.

[Crane]

Maybe I'm complaining too much, but in the last round, 2 levels got 5 votes each and 4 got 4.  I expected the two with 5 votes to go through, with the four getting only 4 votes having the vote-off (with 3 going through).

[IchoTolot]

Maybe I'm complaining too much, but in the last round, 2 levels got 5 votes each and 4 got 4.  I expected the two with 5 votes to go through, with the four getting only 4 votes having the vote-off (with 3 going through).

The goal of this 1 mixed group is to get down to the 2 finalists. It doesn't matter if 1 level more or less gets thrown out in the stepping-stones to that.

Compare to LOTY 2017:

10 levels were in a group and the goal was to get down to 4. For the first elimination round I was flexible: 7 was the goal, but one more or less did not matter. The 4 was enforced.

If we get ties, there may be some tiebreakers to ensure only 4 levels out of each group advance to Phase 2. That says: 10/9 to 8 or 6 levels instead of 7 will be acceptable in the first rounds, but afterwards the 4 will be ensured by tiebreakers.

For the rules here it was the same: The surviving rate was enforced by tiebreakers. And now the bigger group gets widdled down to the finalists with the stepping stones (5 and 3 was planned) being flexible.

So here the rule is:

- Survival rates get enforced by tiebreakers.

- Finalists get enforced by tiebreakers.

- Stepping stones are flexible.

[IchoTolot]

Round 3 is up! time to determine the 2 finalists!

[IchoTolot]

1 level advances to the finale. For the 2nd spot we need a little tiebreaker.

[IchoTolot]

The final round is up!

[Crane]

I'm amazed "Run!" got as far as it did - huge congratulations Nessy; "Butterfly Cult" was truly a glorious level!

And thank you so much for being my tester as well.