So let us say there are 1,500 submissions...

[goldomark]

How many pairings can we vote on if pairs can appear twice?

With quick gorilla math I get 4,497,000 (1,500 x 1,499 (an item can't appear against itself) x2).

anyone has a better formula?

[Ziv Wities]

Pairs aren't supposed to appear twice. Which means for N entries, the number of pairs is precisely choose(N,2) = N*(N-1)*0.5.

combinatorics:

choose(N,K) is how many unordered sets of K elements you can choose out of a set of N elements. choose(N,2) is always N*(N-1)*0.5, because you choose the first element (N options) and then the second element (N-1 options - all the options except the one element we've already got picked), but that doesn't distinguish between a pair (X,Y) and its twin (Y,X). Dividing by 2 (=multiplying by 0.5) fixes that, because there are precisely two possible ordered pairs for every unique unordered pair.

For N=1,5000, the number of possible pairs is then 1,124,250.

However, I'm not entirely certain that the system is indeed letting every individual voter vote on each possible pair. There might be some shaving here. But the tech team would need to answer that one :)

[goldomark]

I've seen pairs appear twice. Other people too. They just switch sides. The one on the right appear on the left side and vice versa.

[Ziv Wities]

That's not supposed to happen, unless you choose "vote neither"/"equally good/bad" the first time around.

This might be a bug. If it is, then (A) the number of votes goes up to N*(N-1) (in this case - 2,248,500), and also (B) I hope it doesn't screw up the final results, because a ranking with two (possibly conflicting) rankings between a single pair should probably be considered invalid input.

Paizo staff - where should this be reported to, and what details are necessary?

[DeciusBrutus]

I'm not positive that I've seen a possible loop (voting on A vs B, B vs C, and C vs A; or any longer loop), but I'm 25% sure that I've had the opportunity to create an impossible loop.

[cwslyclgh]

I believe the system has safegaurds in place to prevent that from skewing the results.

[Ziv Wities]

Creating an impossible loop shouldn't break the system, as far as I can tell. It's built to handle those.

[gbonehead]

I've been keeping track; at this point I'm somewhat sure there's somewhere between 1750 and 2050 valid entries, give or take a few. Of course, that's an estimate using some pretty darn shaky math, so take it with a grain of salt.

I've seen 333 unique entries, and none have been repeated more than 3 times. Yet.