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About Game of the Year polls: Looking for volunteers
mcc
glitchRegistered User, ClubPA regular
glitchRegistered User, ClubPA regular
Hello The Penny Arcade. If you recognize me, it's probably because for some time I've been doing a yearly megascale "Game of the Year" poll on this forum. (200-300 nominees, each voter ranks their favorite 20, it spits out a ranked ordering of the best 200 or so games of the year.) I've been doing the poll since 2014 (ten so far!) and, uh, basically I'm coming by here to say I'm not doing one this year*. But! There does seem to be a core of people here who really like the GOTY poll. So I wanted to offer, if there is anyone here who would be willing to run the poll in my place, I would be more than happy to share the software and help you get it set up.
We will need:
- Someone willing to make a list of nominees. (My rules are usually: Non-beta release must have come out in America in the last year, no ports no expansion packs; with leniency for ports or expansion packs that feel like "full conversions", or late additions where the original was an omission in a previous year.)
- Someone willing to host the software. It requires a web server running PHP and MySQL. Whoever runs the thing will need to do some minor work at the end also-- the scripts spit out a results grid automatically, but I always do some simple ballot-stuffing detection checks and do a nice formatted writeup where I explain the results.
And if you wanted once you have the source you could maybe make any changes the community felt like, fix up my serviceable-but-creaky javascript or somehow link ability to vote to your PA forum login so cheat detection gets even easier. I dunno.
Anyway, what say you, PA Forums? If I upload the vote script source code to bitbucket, can y'all run the poll without me?
--
* (It's exhausting every year, and I don't really play enough video games anymore to feel certain about the quality of the nominees list I curate, and, uh, the less said about this last thing the better, but I've been one of the designated targets of something called "gamergate" for the last two months and it's leaving me just not feeling good at all about the idea of putting a bunch of effort into any kind of "gamer culture" event. :sad:)
We will need:
- Someone willing to make a list of nominees. (My rules are usually: Non-beta release must have come out in America in the last year, no ports no expansion packs; with leniency for ports or expansion packs that feel like "full conversions", or late additions where the original was an omission in a previous year.)
- Someone willing to host the software. It requires a web server running PHP and MySQL. Whoever runs the thing will need to do some minor work at the end also-- the scripts spit out a results grid automatically, but I always do some simple ballot-stuffing detection checks and do a nice formatted writeup where I explain the results.
And if you wanted once you have the source you could maybe make any changes the community felt like, fix up my serviceable-but-creaky javascript or somehow link ability to vote to your PA forum login so cheat detection gets even easier. I dunno.
Anyway, what say you, PA Forums? If I upload the vote script source code to bitbucket, can y'all run the poll without me?
--
* (It's exhausting every year, and I don't really play enough video games anymore to feel certain about the quality of the nominees list I curate, and, uh, the less said about this last thing the better, but I've been one of the designated targets of something called "gamergate" for the last two months and it's leaving me just not feeling good at all about the idea of putting a bunch of effort into any kind of "gamer culture" event. :sad:)
+1
Posts
I hope we can get some cool people to carry the torch moving forward.
Thanks for running it so long @mcc! It's been an enjoyable annual event in this community, and a forum fixture.
Yeah, I'd be glad to run it... But I don't currently have a (good) place to host it. I have this creaky ol' Linux laptop here, which is where I host my sig and such, and my upload bandwidth isn't spectacular. Let me think about it.
And thanks for running it all these years. It is my favorite thing on these forums.
This is a clickable link to my Steam Profile.
Could we please finally drop that rule? It's bad enough that those not living in the US get the short end of the stick when it comes to game releases, no reason this practice needs to continue in the poll as well.
Just limit it to games that were released in all territories this year.
Thanks for having hosted this for so many years, it's always been fascinating to see the results and the breakdowns. I'm sure it'll end up in good hands.
And thanks for being awesome.
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Paging @Infidel, administrator of www.padev.net!
That's of course up to y'all. I do want to note the reason for this rule, though: The overall goal of the rules is to give every game one chance, and give every game the most equal chance possible. So consider what happens if a game has come out in Japan, but not America or Europe, assuming (?) most of the people on this forum are in America or Europe. The game is now horribly disadvantaged because only a small minority of the voters possibly had a chance to play it. Say the next year it comes out in US/EU-- do you put it on again? The "no expansions, no early access, america only" rules really are kind of garbage and are impossible to enforce, but whatever rules you pick I think you want to avoid a situation where a game gets on without anyone having gotten a fair chance to play it, or where a game goes on two years running and winds up with its votes weirdly split across two years.
Super awesome!
But that's exactly what's happening with the current rule.
For example, Captain Toad Treasure Tracker is being released this December in the US, but Europe and Australia are getting it in January. With the current rule in place that means I'll have no chance to vote for it, and while I'm pretty sure I'm gonna love the game I don't exactly wanna lie about having played it to boost its place in the ranking.
So why not just move the game to next year's vote when everyone had a chance to play it? Americans have to wait a year to vote for it but that shouldn't really be a problem since I've basically had to do it every year. Bravely Default was released in Europe in December 2013, but the US got it in February 2014, so it'll be part of this year's vote by the current rule. I couldn't vote on it last year, but I didn't mind waiting one year to give everyone the chance to play it.
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https://bitbucket.org/runhello/votescript
If you're not sure how to use Bitbucket, just go to the download page
https://bitbucket.org/runhello/votescript/downloads
And click "download repository".
@Infidel, is this something you can work with? You'll notice that administering the poll requires running a certain number of shell commands both before and after (there is a fraud-detection step which has to be done by hand) so if that is more work or responsibility than you want, we may need to find a different host.
It wouldn't be too hard for me to adapt this into a thread-based poll, is that a format that could be workable here? Something along the lines of make a post starting with !vote and then list your choices (copy/paste from the list in the OP or something) and it registers your vote. The website would show final results and could display your registered vote to allow people to confirm.
This is (I think) different from the past in that you would publicly have voters and votes known ahead of time. If this was an issue, maybe a forum account and PMs could be used instead?
After somehow forum-voting -> database, the rest of the code could carry the tally and display still.
Thoughts?
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Let me know! I don't know how these usually run as the poll progresses. If the results are updated real-time or in regular rounds that still can be the case, with public or private voting.
In the past it's just been one set of results after voting has ended.
I think he's referring to the page where voting happened, though. You could rearrange the order and have it be sorted until you're happy with it and submit it.
The way it worked in the past is this:
Rather than writing our own lists, there's a GIANT list of all the games which were nominated to be in the list. People had the opportunity to check off which ones they were interested in, and then click "update" and it grouped those up top, with a drop down to choose a number placement. After that, you could Update at any point to rearrange them, or Submit, with only the top 20 being counted.
It's kinda how the netflix DVD queue works.
This is a clickable link to my Steam Profile.
The rankings could be submitted via the forums for validation. (Copy/pasta from the vote site.)
What about that?
PM it to a forum account to validate your PA identity, akin to email verification.
If that's a goal, I'd say go for the key. Less chance of a copy/paste error mucking up your vote; let the big data go directly from the form to the DB, and just the auth token via the PM.
This is a clickable link to my Steam Profile.
Thanks.
Think it's an issue having it tied to PA functionally? It isn't like you have to even be active here, and forum accounts are free.
I know a little bit of HTML and CSS, but certainly can't claim to be an expert in this stuff. I'd love nothing better than to learn though, so if there's a demand for general volunteers like that, I'd be happy to help.