Standback's page

If our item is DQ'd, how will we find out?

This gets asked over and over every year. The answer is:

If you don't know the rules for disqualification, then you should read the rules for disqualification!

If you know the rules for disqualification, but you're not sure whether or not your item merits disqualification, then either:
(A) you should be more careful to keep away from DQ with your submissions!
and/or,
(B) you do not actually know the rules for disqualification!

Formatting, mechanics, game balance, coolness, and originality are all major recommended considerations for voting.

But voting is your choice. Vote by what seems better to you. Your own criteria might be affected by the suggested criteria, but ultimately, there's no formula and no hard rules.

"Please submit your Awesome Math Minuscule Guidance Input!

Would you like to minutely guide the Awesome Math in a fashion slightly favoring ITEM A?

Or does your puny brain find it preferable to nudge the Awesome Math ever so slightly more towards ITEM B?"

I read it. It's even more fun than the voting booth!

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 :)

I honestly think this forum is trying to invoke an early cull by sheer hyperfocused curmudgeonliness.

I heartily approve; carry on.

I confess; I'm baffled by anybody objecting to style and formatting requirements.

Anything you post needs a stage of proofreading. Otherwise you're just saying "I don't care enough about this to make sure it doesn't have glaring errors."

Now, as far as I'm concerned, you can have your first draft smeared in lipstick on a sheet in Comic Sans font. You can write it in 1337speak. You can fill it with (PUT FORMATTING HERE) notes. Whatever works for you.

But once you're done writing, you're ready for proofing. and proofing just means going over the entire thing, correcting errors, and getting it ready to publish. It's straightforward; it's well-defined; it's nearly mechanical, if you actually know all the rules. If you see the value of both a spellchecker and forum BBCode tags, you should be able to see that formatting is A Good Thing (tm).

The only question is: do you know all the rules?

Some are easy. Some are hard. Some are extremely easy to check an existing reference for; some get mentioned frequently in the forums so regulars know 'em; some are obscure, nasty surprises. (Hint: the obscure, nasty surprises? The other voters won't know the right way either.)

But really, all it means is having a vague sense of what bits might need formatting, and an idea of where to check on what formatting is correct there. Poring over the forums will give you this really, really quickly.

If someone's showed good attention to formatting and proofreading but missed a couple of minor things, I'm not going to ding him for that. If someone's work is riddled with typos and style errors, though, I know for a fact that he didn't put a whole lot of effort into not making any mistakes. And if I see somebody who's clearly dotted every i and crossed every t, I go, "Hey, this guy really knows what he's doing."

There's also a long-standing RPGSS guideline, whereby nobody subjects an item to direct public critique unless its creator has OK'd it specifically (or, y'know, made it into the Top 32).

That's aimed to make the contest friendlier and kinder - you will never be subjected to criticism or mockery, unless you specifically say that you're willing to hear other people's feedback.

(That being said, Clark has a long-standing tradition of pointing out general trends and individual errors, without tying them to particular items and submissions. Now that the public also sees the entries through voting, we can also join in the fun.)

Filigree is the "dark and stormy night" of 300-word magic item submissions: there's nothing inherently wrong with it, but it's not necessarily getting the effect you're going for.

Obviously, all judging is subjective, but it's a matter of public perception more than anything else.

You'd never see a jury seated with no women on it. "American Idol" and similar shows all have at least one woman on the judging panel. Justice is supposed to be blind and impartial, but it's generally accepted that it's a good thing to have women and minorities on the Supreme Court. No establishment who expected to be seen as having a firm commitment to diversity would have its hiring or admissions offices made up of nothing but white males, even if they're the most fair and impartial guys in the world. It just looks bad.

I would predict that if Paizo put a female judge on the R1 panel next year and promoted it, they would see an uptick in submissions from females who felt more welcome because there was someone "like them" on the panel. It would demonstrate Paizo's commitment to increasing female presence in the hobby more than any podcast or marketing campaign or similar gimmick.

I just wanted to say a big "thank you" to Paizo and the individual organizers who clearly took this point to heart. I immediately noticed that every single round's judging panel has a woman on it. This hasn't gone unnoticed, nor unappreciated.

(Well, another way would be to submit a cellphone made of filigree.)

Opening the discussion thread.

Hey...what happened to Ziv? Let's play!

Yo Steven!

I'd really like to get back to running the game I promised, though. I'll get back on it in the next couple of days.

Very cool concept, really interesting execution. Attention, Paizo: This is exactly the kind of product I'd love to see - particularly with the new full 64 pages, which can give you room and breathing space to give new rules and extra guidance on running something new and complicated.

Because here's the thing: I like my adventures to be new, weird, and complicated. That's what I look for most in new material - that's the stuff I can't duplicate myself.

There's a lot here I really like, including the theme and the major NPCs. My biggest concern is that the overall product, when actually played through, may feel somewhat incoherent. From the player's side, this feels to me like a whole lot of bouncing around randomly, without much sense of direction or clear goal. I'm going to reread and see how well I think it holds together. But at any rate, it'll be a really tough choice between this and Steven's "Golden Watch."

Kudos on a marvelous run and an excellent entry!

Michael, you get big props from me for great execution of a high concept. You found a cool way to base your encounter around an R3 monster, and tie it into the Golarion setting in a way that makes sense but is still interesting and unexpected. To me, that says you can take the many restrictions inherent in writing game modules, and come up with exciting, original material within those constraints.

I'm not really seeing the big issue with is-a-location/isn't-a-location. It would have been nice if you managed to hype up the general location a little more, but the location is also pretty clear to me as-is, and has obvious potential for interest, originality, and playability. You made clear what the location was, you made its relevance clear, and you detailed its central encounter. It might be a small location, or a focused one, which is fine by me. (It might not have been seen as inspiring or interesting or fun to play by some, which is also fine by me.) As far as I'm concerned, you're good.

This encounter makes me sad.

Encounters that provoke strong emotional reactions make me happy :)

Got my Snows of Summer PDF printed out today... Haven't gotten too deep yet, but so far, it's Spicerific and Irrisensational!

I've got Steven, Nicholas, Sam and Landon slated to play. I think we'll keep it at that so far. But I'd love to try PbP first with one of the R4 entries - and I'd really appreciate if somebody else GM'd, so I can get the feel for PbP playing. Any takers?

I'm assuming Sam and Landon want in; I'm also assuming Steven and Nicholas, as active participants, won't be taking part in publicly-posted contest-related games (unless the PbP is locked somehow? I have not looked into this yet).

Midnight's the reveal time here in Israel, too... for the big Top 32 reveal, I wanted to pop in at a small cafe right by my house, take a cup of hot chocolate to go, and have it on hand to celebrate or console myself when the results came up. They close at midnight, and alas, 11:50pm proved to be cutting it too close even for hot chocolate.

Well, I wanted to circle back and weigh in on this, and I've been swept up in a slew of urgent Now-That-You're-Out-Of-The-Contest tasks, but I do want to in my thoughts before the next round starts up. I've started writing a couple of times, but it's come out long and meandering - so instead of an essay, here are points and observations, in no particular order.

• With this entry, I aimed for a "high concept" - I wanted a fundamental tweak that'd represent a major, overwhelming change to how a class is used, while keeping in line with the class's flavor. I think I found that concept. Some people didn't like how this archetype's really all around one single power. Perfectly fair; it definitely feels less "archetype-"y." Personally, I really like that I found one point to twist, and achieve such a pervasive effect on the druid's other abilities - wild shape and summon natures's ally. The layers are in the synergy. I think finding a single point of change causing rippling affects to other abilities is cool, clever design.

• That being said, I'm dubious about the mechanical balance I've struck here. Bubble of brine is big, and poised to be used in unpredictable ways. Jerry Keyes hit on some of them.

• If there's anything here I'm kicking myself over, it's on having trimmed so much flavor text, I left practically no context - and I didn't realize it. Somebody who didn't have druids on the brain could easily miss the tie-ins with other class abilities - I'm pretty sure some of the earlier posters did miss them; at very least, nobody mentioned them outright before Clouds did, judges included. Also, lines like, "the brinebinder can summon aquatic allies however far from water he may be" or whatnot really set the tone - and I just didn't have 'em. I consider it a personal failure that three days into the round, nobody was talking about siccing sharks on foes while on dry land. I'm crushed, people - crushed, I tell you!

• A major problem here is that bubble of brine is a pretty homebrew-y effect. Very dangerous to base your whole concept around - homebrew-y effects chew up wordcount like crazy, and still have holes left over at the end. I sweated hard to nerf the bubble from being able to just swallow up anybody within range and render them useless, and I still don't think it's enough - but by that point, I'd gone far past "committed" and was edging towards "desperate". If you're going to take anything from this little analysis, it's this: homebrew effects usually don't make it into Superstar. This one did. That's a lot of why it floundered. Handle with care, and keep a simpler backup plan if at all possible.

• I waited too long to write this entry. Way, waaaaaay too long. I had plenty of time to prepare, and even the time I had after the big reveal would have been plenty if I'd done a better job employing Butt In Chair, Hands On Keyboard. Boy did this show. This entry might've looked a whole lot better with another draft or so. At very least, ocean's pilgrim wouldn't have had so many silly mistakes, and it wouldn't have felt quite as tacked on (QUICK! What're the rules for polymorph? Permenantly polymorphing somebody mid-game sounds hard, I'll just zap 'em down to first level warrior and be done with it! A thousand faces is mostly useless, so I can put something else useless in instead of it, right?) No less important, more time would've at least let me review the entry calmly, which is crucial to a final draft. It may not look like I handed this in a minute before deadline, but the entry time you see up there is up tight against when shabbat started - I was ridiculously close to the wire.

• I feel compelled to note that the natural swimmer ability was not my own creation; it's taken from the Aquatic Druid archetype from the APG. I firmly believe that using an existing design is better than making a change merely to be different. However, I had no appropriate way of indicating in the entry that this is what I'd done, so this could easily have been mistaken for original design. If there's some better way to do what I did here, I'd be glad to hear it. I hope nobody feels I've misled them unfairly with this.

All that being said, I'm very proud of my work in both rounds. I had a blast finally getting to take a crack at the contest. And while I would have loved to advance, my R2 entry enjoyed some enthusiastic appreciation, and also had clear and obvious flaws - the two of those together made the Top 16 reveal extremely easy to accept in good grace. That, and also (as I've said elsewhere) the absolutely stellar level of competition this time around - we've got such an incredible roster of talent, it's impossible to feel too badly at not making the cut.

Many thanks to all of you who enjoyed having me in the contest! :) And, a very special thank-you to Curaigh, to Jacob W. Michaels, to Anthony Adams, and to Nnesk - these guys were my sounding board and my critique group, and I simply cannot express what a constant help and encouragement they've been to me. Guys, you are incredible. Thank you so much.

That's it from me. Now, back to the peanut gallery!

Only if y'all submitted River Kingdoms monsters :P

I've got a lot going on right now - I've got plenty to say about what went wrong and what went right with the Brinebinder, but most of them'll have to wait.

In the meantime, I wanted to thank everybody who commented on my archetype. I largely agree with pretty much every criticism offered - and, of course, I'm also in agreement with the ones who liked the central concept.

One of my criminal flaws here was burying my lead - while all the mechanics are there, I see that a lot of my last-minute edits came at the expense of both flavor, and clarity of the central concept. A special thank-you to Clouds Without Water - the first to explicitly call out my intention with this archetype, which was to bring underwater creatures and combat up on land. That was my core, my high concept - but in retrospect, this element was left almost entirely unmentioned in the entry itself. I was biting my nails for a few days trying to figure out whether I'd managed to completely obscure the goal I was aiming for. My thanks, as well, to those of you who appreciated this goal - with a vote, or a comment, or a smile.

Anyone else want to step in instead of me?

Would it be feasible at all to do this off-site?

This would be likely to violate Paizo's ownership of entries if the actual bodies of the entry were copied off-site. I'm not familiar with Reddit, but possibly if everybody were careful to limit their thread to a link to here.

Really, Redditing and Google Docs are very awkward workarounds at best. I'd really like to see a dedicated subforum next year - I honestly can't see what the trouble would be, and I think the value would be tremendous.

I've copy-pasted to re-cast this as a Google document, so reviewers and reviewees can keep the list slightly up to date.

God bless you, Mr. Garrett. :)

I was dearly hoping that someone who is not-me would do something like this.

Brinebinder (Druid)
A brinebinder walks on land, but draws upon Outsea magic to bring the ocean with her wherever she goes.

Natural Swimmer (Ex): At 3rd level, a brinebinder gains a swim speed equal to half her land speed. This ability replaces trackless step.

Bubble of Brine (Su): At 4th level, a brinebinder can summon a bubble of seawater as a standard action. The bubble's center must within a 100-foot range and on the ground, and its area is a 10-foot radius sphere. A successful Reflex save (DC 12) allows creatures in the area of effect to escape to a square adjacent to the bubble’s edge. The bubble automatically quenches any nonmagical fires and functions as dispel magic against magical fires as long as those fires are size Large or less. Creatures may enter the bubble freely; leaving (and movement inside the bubble) requires a DC 10 Swim check.

Combat within the bubble uses the underwater combat rules. If attacked from land, creatures inside the bubble gain cover (+4 cover bonus to AC) against foes that do not have have freedom of movement effects. This cover does not enable the target to make Stealth checks or prevent attacks of opportunity. Magical attacks from land into the bubble are unaffected, unless they require attack rolls or state that they do not function underwater.

As a free action, a brinebinder may select any willing creature inside the bubble (including herself) as a focus. The bubble becomes mobile, remaining centered upon the creature, who may move at its base or swim speed. Any other movement severs the focus. When swimming, the focus swims up to five feet above the ground. Absent a focus, the bubble remains stationary. Creatures in the path of the bubble’s movement make a Reflex save (DC 12) or are engulfed, as above.

Each bubble persists for one hour, after which its water drains away into nothingness. A brinebinder may use this ability once a day.

At 8th level and every 4 levels thereafter, a brinebinder gains an additional use of this ability per day (multiple bubbles may be active simultaneously), and the radius of the bubbles increases by 5 feet. This ability replaces 4th level wild shape progression.

Wild Shape (Su): A brinebinder gains this ability at 6th level, except that her effective druid level for the ability is equal to her druid level – 2.

Ocean’s Pilgrim (Su): At 13th level, once daily, a brinebinder may polymorph one human into a merfolk, or one merfolk into a human as though using polymorph any object, transforming him into a level 1 warrior. This effect is permanent until dismissed by the subject. This ability replaces a thousand faces.

Please can you correct the Swarm Slurper link on the main Superstar page, the entrant deserves his entry name to include that r in slurper!

...and while you're at it, I would not be displeased to see Mike Kimmel's Glose and my own humble Viel restored to a more respectable spelling.

Remember, kids! I before E, except after C, and in 'weird' because it's a weird word, and in 'veil' because-- because-- OH LOOK A SQUIRREL!

Sorry to hear that, Anthony :-/ I'm not really dipping much into the other Top 32 'till my R2 entry's done, so I haven't seen what you're talking about... but public critique is so much of what this contest is about; I'm sorry to hear you're getting any guff at all over your hard work.

IMHO, any criticism is helpful criticism (though knowing how to address criticism is a skill in and of itself...). You're more than welcome to assail my veil, although I already got your initial reaction to that before submission :D

I will say, though, that while I've enjoyed the reviews of yours I've peeked at, the Flesh Reading Ease and Flesh-Kincaid scores feel kind of misplaced to me. I don't really know how good of a scoring system that is; I don't know how well these measures work on a mere 300 words; I don't know how this score might be affected by common game terms like "bard," "grappling," and "doppelganger," which I think a lot of average teens wouldn't know or certainly wouldn't use in everyday conversation - let alone "moderate transmutation and abjuration".

But back to the point - you know RPG Superstar really really well. You want to review all of the items - then by damn, review all the items; that's what we do here :D You've developed a rubric, including all kinds of stuff most others aren't paying attention to? GREAT, that's shining some light where others haven't reached; worst comes to worst some people disagree with your criteria. You don't need to announce your project and you don't need to apologize. And if you're worried you might have crossed some line accidently - ok, take a step back, see what it was that came across poorly, and take steps accordingly.

You've been brandishing Template Fu for months now. Don't let him go hungry :D

Oh, look! Here's Ziv, drinking by the bar! No, wait -- now that you focus your gaze, he's actually by the fire. No, that's wrong too -- he's hunched over at one of the tables, a mug of warm cider long grown cool, working away at his archetype!

Hiya, everybody :) Pleasure to be here. I'll introduce myself a little more completely when I have the time, but until then, just wanted to pop in and let people know I'm here too. Cheers - wishing fun and success to us all!

Has anybody given props to the witchfrost heart? I loved that one! That was the nasty, blood-themed item that slip your enemy up and hits him while he's down.

I thought it was really well-written, with great atmosphere, and deliciously cruel without being gonzo-gross. I thought it was an excellent entry - kudos to the author!

If you want to make a thread that is about your item, and only your item, there's always the Homebrew forum. It's available 12 months a year.

With all due respect, the Homebrew forum is very very different than RPGSS feedback. The considerations are just different - Homebrew items don't need mojo; they can be SIACs; they sure as heck don't need to follow the template. No less important, advice there isn't given from the vantage point of "I voted for/against your item, and here's why," which is pretty crucial here.

If we won't have a subforum, we'll do fine without, but IMHO the Homebrew forum is neither here nor there.

Yup. Let's not overthink this too much, OK? We don't need to preemptively establish rules and guidelines and templates for this. People will ask for feedback; people who want to respond, will. It'll work.

We've always managed before. We'll do fine this time, too.

Joshua, the Paizo folks have made clear that precise rankings will not be announced.

You can also see from Clark's description that such numbers could be rather difficult to interpret - if #85 is stronger than #1, then lower down in the ranking, precision will be even sketchier. The ranking is extremely useful at the scope of the entire contest, but the precise ranking of one individual item doesn't tell you very much at all. The actual, targeted feedback you'll get from people will be much more helpful :)

Thomas, with all due respect, I disagree with you here. Spoilered for length and logical compartmentalization:

Hope I've covered your objections :) These are good points, and I'm glad you brought them up, but I think that upon consideration, they're pretty easily overcome.

ETA: Ack! Neil'd, alas.

I feel the twist this time will be another country themed one.

Comin' up next, folks!

• My Heart's Sore, 'Cause Your Teeth Are In It
  
• Darling, Won't You Please Tell Me Your CR
  
• Your Prismatic Sphere Is Giving Me The Blues
  
• We'd Be Identical, Except Your Tentacle
  
• My Baby Left Me (For My Doppelganger)

Personally, I think a better rule-of-thumb might be this: Is every member of my gaming group going to be thrilled to see this item included in the game?

I don't need all the characters to want an item, if all the players are going, "Oh, what a cool item; I can't wait for Bruce to be able to use it!". And the GM can absolutely be included in that statement - the item should make the game more fun for him, too (Item requires half an hour of extra prep time before each session? No thanks!).

Superstar items are cool because they change the game by adding in new, exciting abilities. An ability that's appropriate for all characters is one (extremely laudable) way to do that. But:

• It can be hard to pull off, since the different classes are so diverse and used in vastly different ways.
  
• Many of the best "anybody can use this" items are actually more on the lines of "it doesn't matter which party member hangs on to this, so long as they've got it available," because they're items that aid the entire party.
  
• There's lots, lots, lots more design space which does base itself on individual classes or class-features, which needn't be ignored.

IMHO, there are many different types and flavors of Superstar design. Saying "this awesome type of item is less awesome than this other awesome type of item" isn't going to get you very far. They're both awesome, and finding 32 awesome entries - with any flavor of awesomeness, and I assure you there's more than just those two flavors - is hard enough as it is.

I sincerely doubt anybody deliberately created a "girly" item in response to SKR's post. That would require the submitter to be aware enough of the contest to see a particular forum post, cynical enough to decide his best bet is to attempt to create a false pretense in an anonymous contest, and incompetent enough to make his effort poor, blatantly "girly," and painfully missing the point. I may not have seen the particular items some people have complained about, but generally speaking, I don't like leveling charges like that, which assume poor intentions based solely on poor execution.

There are lots of simple, more innocent ways of arriving at sparkle-laden uber-girly entries. A contestant might actually be trying to promote "girly" items based on the well-known, stereotypical "lack of appeal to female gamers" - they might not be good at it, but that doesn't mean they were deliberately banking on brownie points from the judges. Or they might be identifying "girly" themes and items as lacking from existing material, a hole to be filled - I'd fault their skill at niche selection, but that doesn't mean their process is poor. Or they might be drawing inspiration from existing TV shows, anime, and so on.

By all means, vote down lousy "girly" items. But, to me, suspecting people's motives this way seems a bit hostile.

Boring names are killing my brain. The name of a mundane item is not sufficient as a name of a wondrous one. Salad forks, lounge chairs, and elbow pads need not apply.

But, a-ha what if the so-called "mundane" name is in actuality a PUNNE (or, a play on words)?!?!?!

The lounge chair causes foes to feel sleepy and needful of rest!
The salad fork allows you to fork your selection of salads, offering an ample variety of substitutes whenever you are rudely presented with only a single entrée!
What the elbow pad chooses to pad your elbows with is machine guns!

I'm still reading Guide to the River Kingdoms for ideas as well as working out what boxes need to be ticked to make an archetype superstar-worthy.

Same boxes as always, I'm afraid:

1. Have a really cool idea.
2. Don't make any mistakes.

GM_Solspiral wrote:

you should resort to eeny meenie miny moe

Inaccurate data is better than no data?

Hah! I LOLed. Amusingly, though, in this particular case - kinda yes. The ranking of a very close pair, particularly a very poor pair, is not ultimately significant. OTOH, clearing the way to rank other pairs, pairs whose relative positioning is more substantial - that's more directly useful, I think.

Not that any of us are disagreeing here - we're all in favor of avoiding the "equally good/bad" button if at all possible. And it pretty much always is.

Hmmm. Producing a "Dramatic Renditions of Selected Wondrous Items" podcast does sound like a fun community project... }:-D

I've noticed an interesting trend with entries having "charges". When did this become so popular?

<snip>
What is everyone else's feelings on the subject of charges? Is it the wave of the future?

Similar to what I said on the subject of attunement, I think charges are a natural specifically for the innovative, mechanics-playful nature of RPG Superstar.

It fixes the price range. Using charges is one of the main way to drastically reduce the price of a high-level effect. That's often desirable, and sometimes necessary, since magic items are often underpowered relative to a spellcaster attempting the same effects.

It provides flexibility and balance. A lot of items use charges like staves do - one charge for a minor power, more for a major power. This can be abused, but if it's well-done, then it's smart design - it provides a clear mechanism for balancing between two powers of wildly different magnitude.

Sometimes, "consumable" is the right use-pattern. Most Superstar items are simply not as straight-out useful as a +N weapon. Some are very niche - they'll be really awesome in some situations, but they probably won't see much everyday use. So, let's say you see your item being knock-dead awesome about 10 times throughout a standard campaign. Do you make it a once-a-day item? That'd be overkill, and it'd mean the price would be figured for way more use than you're actually getting. A once-a-week item? Maybe, but what if 2 of those 10 times were in the same week? That'd suck. Or, hey, you could give it 15 charges, and get exactly what you want.

Recharge methods give you an extra layer of complexity. Again, Superstar items often look for ways to do things differently. It may not be better, but at very least you can aim for being fresh. An expend/recharge mechanic adds that extra complexity - and if it's done well, it can be a cool mechanic that directs you to using the item in a more interesting or thematic manner.

In the first year of Superstar, the coin belt of beguiling did nicely specifically because its use of charges was very well-considered - it had a cool visualization, where coins are detached from the belt in order to consume charges, and overall it had great flavor. Charges can be cumbersome and make using items less fun, but - like anything else - if they're done well, they certainly have their uses :)

Uh... is that a 2x.xxx gp one-use item? I doubt that was the creator's intent but as written it's one shot...

"But when its bearer utters the command phrase Ok, I want to win the WHOLE ENTIRE GAME right now, the item's true power becomes known!"

Heck, if I won the dang thing, I'd totally just take seeing my name in print on my module as all the pay I needed!

Though I understand the sentiment, having writers paid for their work is a good thing. I don't want to see it undermined any more than it already has been. :P

Adam, I suspect the organizers didn't design the system with Marathon Voters in mind :) Seriously, on the first update there were 505 people who voted 100 times or more - and at least 1000 entries. The dedicated voters are obviously the most vocal on the forum boards, but they're hardly the entire picture.

I'm confident that if this year's experiment is a success (and I'm sure it will be), then next year they'll be able to tweak the system, or use a new system that better addresses voter burnout. That being said, modifying the existing system in the way you're suggesting is not an easy fix.

Working with big numbers means dealing with a lot of randomness - consider that at the time of the cull, if there were 2,000 original submissions in the pool, then each one of them was only voted on a mere 200 times. If you let that 200 roam randomly, then most items will be fine, but some items would get drastically undervoted - and there would be nothing that could be done about it. And we did want the cull, didn't we?

It'd be really nice if there were an easy fix for this. There might be one! But this isn't it. For a fix to be viable, it would have to include some sort of built-in balance with the guarantee of roughly equal votes per entry. The two are inherently in conflict, so any fix that doesn't address the balance is going to cause more trouble than it's worth.

I dunno, you can probably streamline this client-side.

No you can't. Because it's much much much more important to balance the relative number of votes each submission receives, than it is to balance the variety of submissions each voter views.

The method you propose destroys any control the server has over which entries get voted on next. If the 1,000 users supposed to vote on the tennis racket of splendiforousness somewhere in their first 1,000 votes happen to be the voters who get bored after 10 pairs, then you have no idea where that racket is supposed to be ranked.

The result would be that "which items get voted on enough for a reliable ranking" would be randomly determined by "which pre-calculated sequence of items was assigned to dedicated voters." You really don't want that.

The combination of one minute delay and endlessly repeating items is making the voting process truly torturous. It's like working overtime as a line worker in a boredom factory.

You could always, y'know, stop voting. :P

I'm spending most of my days now coddling my newborn and trying to get him (and his mom...) to sleep. So I'm already reduced to a mechanical lulling device. Voting gives me marvellous little nuggets that don't require more attention than I can allot 'em.

After many votes, I'm starting to wonder if the Paizo staff, former winners, or former judges have added their own bad items just to mess with us. It could explain some of these items that drive us bonkers.....

Nah.... They wouldn't do that....

I saw at least one that made me seriously suspect deliberate mockery. It seemed to take the auto-rejects one by one - a randomized SAK of SIACs, with an alliterative name and an introductory backstory...

My theory is that they've put placeholders in to check that the mathed-up ranking produces reasonable results :P

If you submitted a magic cell phone though, better luck next year - we're all tired of that one.

I would totally vote for a magic cell phone, except none of the versions I've seen so far have had Snake installed.

I assume that the items were assigned an ELO-rating which rises or falls with each vote depending on the score of the compared item. Also I think item pairs are constructed based on the relative elo ratings or else a mediocre item could end up top because, by chance, it was always paired to very bad items.

No, I don't think that's how the system works at all.

Items don't have a score of any kind; the voting data is simply the collection of comparisons each item's been in. The system will ultimately be looking at "paths" through the entries:

• If A > B > C, then we know A > C.
  
• If we know A > B, and also C > B, then we know B's lower-ranked, but we don't know the order between A and C.
  
• If A > B > C, and also A > D > C, than we know A's best and C's worst, but we don't know what if B > D or B < D.
  
• This is all made more complicated because the results collect votes from different people - so one voter may vote A > B > C, while another voter may vote C > A. The mathematical algorithm does a lot of work to come up with reasonable results even with conflicting data like this.

When all the data's in, the math magically builds up the strongest "paths" through the data, and finds the items that've come out the best. Since every item is compared to many, many other items, each one can be placed in the final ranking with great confidence. The odds of a mid-range item not getting paired to anything better are vanishingly small.