Has Anyone Seen My Item? The Name Is...

[Taylor Hubler]

Just kidding. I know that would disqualify me. Don't reveal names of your items until the results are posted!

But the anticipation is killing me! I really want to know if anyone has seen it and what they think of it. That honestly is my favorite part of this contest, as selfish as that sounds. I love telling everyone what I liked about their item and talking about my favorites just as much.

Last year I thought I had a strong item, but people felt it was a joke item and there were a few mechanical issues. This year, my item is much stronger, but I keep seeing items just as strong come up for voting. This year is tough!

So do you feel anxiety over how others see your item?
Do you think this year has much better items than previous years?

[Allana Sliwinski]

I can't wait! I keep wondering what people have thought of it so far. I can't wait until after when I can hear peoples thoughts.

Out of interest, what did you submit last year? Are we allowed to speak about that? I didn't do it last year.

[Taylor Hubler]

Last year I submitted a party cracker that created a crowd of party goes. It was a fun idea but I didn't do well with executing it.

[Kaartus]

I am pretty excited as well, first time entry into this i'm keen to see how I do.

[Lightminder]

I had an idea for one but decided to watch and learn this year, good thing too, my planned item was bunk! Learning lots.

[Crusader of Good]

I'm starting to wonder if mine was DQued since I haven't seen it yet. But I don't remember doing anything to be DQued for yet...

[Andrew Marlowe]

I wouldn't worry yet. Last year alot of us didn't see ours for quite some time. I had two set of eyes voting and we didn't see it until after the cull as I recall. So don't worry yet.

[Crusader of Good]

alright thanks. I'm just worried that I might have been dqued but I guess there are quite a bit of targets to vote on in the pool that someone else is probably voting on it and that's why I haven't seen it yet.

[Kiel Howell]

Crusader, unless it was extremely blatant then any mistakes you made won't automatically DQ you. Like "Saber of Light" that was a metal torch that projected a blade made of light...you get my point.

After the Culling...now THAT'S when to start worrying. Last year there were multiple culls as well.

[Jacob Trier]

CalebTGordan wrote:

Last year I submitted a party cracker that created a crowd of party goes. It was a fun idea but I didn't do well with executing it.

I remember that item - I thought it was a fun idea, and voted for it on several occasions.

[Crusader of Good]

k thanks for reassuring me guys. get a little paranoid sometimes. I'll try to chill.

[Allana Sliwinski]

I'm over in the rambling thread and I keep seeing posts and thinking "oh god, is that mine? It's mine... ugh" even when the odds are against it. Damn critical nature.

[Covent]

Cathara wrote:

I'm over in the rambling thread and I keep seeing posts and thinking "oh god, is that mine? It's mine... ugh" even when the odds are against it. Damn critical nature.

Honestly, I have seen several negative posts that I am pretty sure were directed at mine, so we are in the same boat.

Chin up! We will get through this and at the least it will be a good learning experience..

You should have seen my item last year, it might as well have been labeled "This is what not to do". Yet, I am back for more this year, so there is hope for anyone.

In short, good luck.

[Allana Sliwinski]

Good call! It's a good learning experience :)

[Ziv Wities]

Crusader (and any others): if you're fairly certain you know what the DQ criteria are, and you're fairly certain you didn't do anything that might meet those criteria, then you're probably right.

The odds of seeing your own item are quite small (last year IIRC I saw my own item twice in the entire voting period).

Even if you feel you're seeing a lot of items repeating, that's just simple statistics. If there are 1000 items, and you've seen 250 of them already in your voting, then your chance of seeing your item in a given vote is only 1/1000+1/999 ~~ 1/500. But your chance of seeing something you've already seen is ~250/1000 for the first item, plus ~250/1000 for the second item (if you want to be precise, it's 250/1000 + (750/1000)*(249/999) = 0.44 ) , and even your chance of seeing two items you've already seen is as high as 1/8. And these numbers just get worse and worse the more unique items you've seen :)

Last year IIRC we guessed there were about 1200-1300 entries. With those numbers, it would be quite unremarkable to go 400-500 votes without encountering one particular item.

[Crusader of Good]

so, possibility I make it to marathon and never see mine, yet by chance make it into 32?

[Joseph Kellogg]

Fun fact: In a group of 23 people, there is about a 50% chance that two of them will share a birthday. It's surprising how quickly repeats show up, when there are lots and lots of things that might be repeated.

By the time you've voted only 10 times, you are 20 times more likely to see a repeat than that one particular item of yours that you're looking for.

The only reason I got to Marathon Voter last year was that it took about 2000 votes before I finally saw mine. There were others that I saw literally dozens of times.

[Ziv Wities]

Crusader of Good wrote:

so, possibility I make it to marathon and never see mine, yet by chance make it into 32?

Ok, let's see.

Last year we counted roughly 885 valid submissions; let's round that up to 900.
The probability of seeing your particular item in a given vote is P = 1/900+(899/900)*(1/899) = 2/900 = 0.00222.
The probability of NEVER seeing your item across N trials (==votes) is simply (1-P)^N.
So a marathon voter with 1000 votes would have a probability of (1-0.00222)^1000 = 0.108 of never seeing his item. That's 1 out of every 10 marathon voters.
A dedicated voter with 500 votes has probability 0.32 of not having seen his item; a star voter with 100 votes has 0.8 probability of not having encountered his item.

Just to repeat: only one Star Voter in five has seen his own item. Only two Dedicated Voters in three have seen theirs. And even for Marathon Voters, for every 9 who have seen theirs, there's also one who hasn't.

So don't get too worked up quite yet :)

Math Proviso:

I'm making a simplifying assumption here - I'm assuming pairs are chosen randomly, when in fact, once a particular pair has been drawn, it won't be drawn again. That would be very tough to account for in our math, particularly since you're not the only person voting and "removing" pairs from the pool. I'm assuming the probability pretty much remains indifferent to this factor.

and yet:

Crusader of Good wrote:

so, possibility I make it to marathon and never see mine, yet by chance make it into 32?

Nope. If you make in into the Top 32, I guarantee you, it's not by chance.

[Magical_Beast]

CalebTGordan wrote:

Last year I submitted a party cracker that created a crowd of party goes. It was a fun idea but I didn't do well with executing it.

I liked this item and up-voted it several times last year. If your idea this year is equally interesting and tightly executed, you might just make the top 32!

[Landon Cole]

Following on from Ziv:

If we say there are one thousand items, there are 499,500 pair combinations. Assuming that no pairs will be repeated until all pairs have been presented and, iirc, that there were about half a million votes last year, it seems that very few, if any, pairs will be repeated. If we take out the bottom 25%, there are still 280,875 pair combinations.

[Monica Marlowe]

CalebTGordan wrote:

Last year I submitted a party cracker that created a crowd of party goes. It was a fun idea but I didn't do well with executing it.

I remember that one! Sadly I did not vote for it very often because I just didn't feel it had any practical in game function, but I did think it was clever for distraction purposes and making yourself look important :-)

[Eric Hindley]

The other problem I remember from last year was too many people were using the "both are equally good/bad", especially if they didn't like either item. All that did was throw the pair back into the pool and make someone else vote on them. I suspect this is why I saw some of the lowest quality items over and over, but only saw about half the top 32, despite voting well over a thousand times. If nobody wants to up vote a given item, it sure seemed to turn up a lot...

Then again, maybe that's my skewed memory.

[Bardess]

Then if I don't find my item, that means it's great! ^___^

[Aaron Miller 335]

Found mine the first night, also found format mistake I made for no apparent reason?

[Taylor Hubler]

Magical_Beast wrote:

CalebTGordan wrote:

Last year I submitted a party cracker that created a crowd of party goes. It was a fun idea but I didn't do well with executing it.

I liked this item and up-voted it several times last year. If your idea this year is equally interesting and tightly executed, you might just make the top 32!

Thanks! Last year I had ten items written up and that was just the one I liked the most. This year I had a brilliant idea that just wouldn't go away and was the only item I worked on for this year's contest. It certainly is tighter in mechanics, but I am worried that I may have missed something.

I look forward to talking to people about it in more detail.

[In_digo]

Aaron Miller 335 wrote:

Found mine the first night, also found format mistake I made for no apparent reason?

Aw, that sucks. Now you're going to see it every time >.<

[Amy Gillespie]

Still haven't seen mine yet. I must sob at being a horrible failure! ;)

[Anthony Adam]

Amy Gillespie wrote:

Still haven't seen mine yet. I must sob at being a horrible failure! ;)

You aren't alone, so chin up and soldier on!

[Landon Cole]

I've just had a pair come up twice in a row, but in the other order the second time, suggesting that the order of pairs does matter.

[Taylor Hubler]

Amy Gillespie wrote:

Still haven't seen mine yet. I must sob at being a horrible failure! ;)

I must also be a horrible failure then!

[Whiskey Jack]

I haven't seen mine and I haven't seen any comments that I could attribute to it (unless I count the "dull and uninteresting" ones that are not specific about what it is, I suppose)... :-P

[Bobson]

Likewise. I have no idea how I'm going to manage to wait for the end of voting to see how I did...

[Tokoz]

Haven't seen mine yet. =( BUT I had a lot of fun creating it. I feel like it's a good item and would be fair to add to any campaign. If I don't make the final 32, it's only because there's some good competition this year. =)

There's one that I've seen FOUR times so far that I'd love to see win.

[Lightminder]

Spell in a can, monster in a can, and now feat on your feet!

[warfteiner]

Maybe this is a dumb question, but is there a post somewhere that shows the results of how last year's voting went? I'd really like to see how mine was "received"; would give me a bit more context when looking at design choices going forward. Alas, it's too late for this year but still...

[Sean K Reynolds]

warf, we didn't reveal the vote tallies for each item, but we did post the top 100 or so items (based on votes) in alphabetical order. Which was your item?

[Walter Sheppard]

Sean K Reynolds wrote:

warf, we didn't reveal the vote tallies for each item, but we did post the top 100 or so items (based on votes) in alphabetical order. Which was your item?

Sean is referring to this thread.

I think it was super awesome for them to post it -- knowing that I at least came close felt great last year, and definitely made me submit this year.

[RyanH]

Then I'm lucky ... as just a Star Voter I am fortunate to see mine already. I also got to see a comment about my item and while it was negative I was like, "Yay! Someone noticed my entry!".

It's the first time I entered and I jumped in at the last second because of Sean Reynolds' post about just entering already! So I brainstormed with my kids (8, 10) and implemented one of their ideas.

[Akinra]

I have no idea what people think of mine, and I am really ok with that. It lets me work on the roughs of a couple Bestiary entries without the whole 'focus group' though process creeping in.

[Chris Shaeffer]

Just saw my item this morning!!

I have a few nitpicks (some minor, some more serious) with it, but considering that I wrote, reviewed, completely restarted, and edited the entire thing in 3 hours while hung over on New Years' Day (submitting 32 minutes before deadline), I think it holds up pretty well. ;)

[Kenton Abel]

Aaron Miller 335 wrote:

Found mine the first night, also found format mistake I made for no apparent reason?

It can happen to the best. A friend of mine last year worked on his item for six months, and still did the same thing as you.

[Jeff Lee]

Saw my item much earlier than last year, while still a Star Voter. Gotten to Dedicated Voter since then and no sign of it. Which is fine. There is something satisfying seeing it in there paired up against another item though.

[TimsterMon]

Still plugging away, hoping to vote for my item at least once.... (funny, I thought I voted at least 100 times last year, but evidently not, since there is nothing to indicate that next to my moniker)

[Anthony Adam]

TimsterMon wrote:

Still plugging away, hoping to vote for my item at least once.... (funny, I thought I voted at least 100 times last year, but evidently not, since there is nothing to indicate that next to my moniker)

Don't be scared now - i read your post when it said Star Voter, I am on my way to Marathon already and still have to see mine >.<

[Feros]

Anthony Adam wrote:

TimsterMon wrote:

Still plugging away, hoping to vote for my item at least once.... (funny, I thought I voted at least 100 times last year, but evidently not, since there is nothing to indicate that next to my moniker)

Don't be scared now - i read your post when it said Star Voter, I am on my way to Marathon already and still have to see mine >.<

Uh-oh, Anthony. You don't think you've been DeathQuakered, do you? ;)

[Anthony Adam]

I hope not - first year i have ever been well under word limit, so i'm fairly sure I haven't tripped the auto reasons. Fingers crossed.

[Kalervo Oikarinen]

Anthony Adam wrote:

I hope not - first year i have ever been well under word limit, so i'm fairly sure I haven't tripped the auto reasons. Fingers crossed.

I've seen mine only once in 1000+ pairs, so it certainly could take longer. I saw it just before getting dedicated status.

[Kiel Howell]

Fear not! Last year I didn't see mine until well into Dedicated. I happened to see mine 5 or 6 time before Dedicated this year.

[TimsterMon]

I just find it amusing that I'm not really trying to get a thing next to my moniker, really. I'm fairly certain once I get to vote on my item (or rather, IF I get to vote on my item), my voting feverence will wan. I actually think my item is pretty cool and would like to vote at least once for myself (not arrogance, just self-confidence, as I know one vote will not statistically matter).

[TimsterMon]

Whoo Hooo!!! Finally got to vote on mine! Might as well press-on to dedicated (been sitting at this pooter since the morning, now 6pm), have to be close by now...