marthaurion

Since I have basically no chance of making it past the third round and have made it as far I wished, I’ve decided to post my thoughts on (or maybe I should say problems with) the aniblog tourney rather than advertise. I know that these types of posts have been everywhere, so I’ll try to make it worth your time. Blah blah circlejerk or ramblings about vote manipulation or vote begging…none of that here.

Personally, I believe that asking a friend for a vote is perfectly fine because the tourney has no restrictions on participants and the rules say something to the effect of “vote for the blog you’d rather read.” I’m fairly certain my buddy would rather read my blog than my opponent…simple logic. That aside, let’s look at things a bit more analytically…keep things objective. Sorry…this is gonna be long.

My first qualm with the aniblog tourney is pretty basic, but it is something that doesn’t seem to have disappeared with the new voting system…a relic of my AP Statistics class in high school. Polls should always have a random ordering for the choices. Given two choices (and in this round’s case, four), it’s much more likely for someone to pick the first one given no strong feelings for any other choice. It’s not really a big problem to implement this sort of thing, but it does a lot. Don’t believe me? I ran the numbers. In the first round, 62% of the blogs who won were the ones listed first.

Yes, I understand that the posts have the headers for each matchup that say “XXXX vs. YYYY”, but that isn’t an excuse…it just sounds like laziness to me. Does that even have to be there? Even if it does, I think it still might be helpful to have them below the poll rather than above it so that the first thing a voter sees isn’t that ordering.

Next up on the docket is something that I actually pointed out to someone before the tourney started, getting the response of something to the effect of “oh, it won’t be a big deal…” Time frames. Each match appears for two days, with new matches going up every day. People have stuff to do, and internet traffic reflects that. Typically, more people are online over the weekends than the middle of week (Wednesday/Thursday), which skews samples.

Even if you ignore that, there comes the issue of motivation. Four matches go up on one day, or in this round’s case, one match of four blogs. It’s just not possible to research every blog in every matchup with new ones coming each day. And even if someone had the time, where’s the motivation? Why not just wait for the next set of blogs? With how long the tourney has dragged so far, it hardly seems logical to use an argument of keeping interest in the event.

Let’s take a step back and talk about some smaller things (and by that, I mean things that I don’t feel like talking about for a full section individually). First up, participant selection. The organizers created some rules for qualification (no photo blogs, no translation blogs, etc.) and then proceeded to ignore them. Nothing more to say on that.

Next, settling ties. Rather than do something like create a tiebreaker round, the organizers choose to allow both blogs to advance. I think that’s just unfair to punish the next round blog, which actually had nothing to do with creating the tie. For a similar reason, making the tied blogs auto-lose is also unfair (but is arguably less unfair).

Break’s over…on to another topic. Let’s talk about seeding. I’ve been in a lot of Starcraft 2 tournaments, so seeding isn’t new to me. It makes sense. If the first round consists of about equally matched pairings, it’s unfair to the higher level players, who have a chance of losing while a lower level player has a chance of advancing. In the example above, the platinum level player gets by with a game against a silver player (near the lowest level), while the two masters players (the near highest level) are pit against each other.

There was an attempt at seeding by placing participants from the first tourney in later rounds, but absolutely no semblance of effort in the first round. As a result, first round matches were littered with both extremely close matches as well as complete one-sided roflstomping. Heck…use Alexa or something for all I care. As long as it’s standardized in some way.

I’ll end on something I noticed with the new voting system. The great new system that will make everything better has decided to put vote results up on the voting screen. Before, people would have to click to see results prior to voting, which means that it could be avoided unless you just wanted to see them first.

Now, they’re just there and will subconsciously affect the decisions of everyone, not just those that want to be influenced. The rich get richer, and it’s even more so with this new system. Arguably, this isn’t the biggest deal, but that would frankly be why I put it at the very end.

Well…that was quite a lot of stuff. For those of you able to make it through all of that information, congratulations. At the end of the day, most of this stuff is based on my perception, and I likely don’t know the full story (although am I really asking for much?). For example, I don’t know how they really approached seeding because it isn’t shown like the first tourney. Let me know if I missed anything…hope you didn’t find this too boring. And finally, good luck to anyone still in the tourney!