I'm seeing some of the same items multiple times. Some items twice, and item or two 3 times. I know I haven't seen all the items yet as I haven't seen my own.
It seems I'd be giving the competition an unfair advantage by voting for their items multiple times without voting on my own. Please fix this soon mods, as I'd like to vote properly instead of skipping on repeated items.
Thanks for putting this whole thing together!
Go ahead and vote on them. Remember, last year we had over 500,000 voting pairs processed. You getting a particular item 2, 5, 10, or even 20 times is just a drop in that bucket.
RPG Superstar 2013 Top 32, RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
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Marathon Voter Season 6, Dedicated Voter Season 7
aka Draconas
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The way the voting system works from what I can gather from last year is that each item is in a database where each item has to be checked against every other item at least once. Now this is probably randomized but the system prioritizes items with fewer votes so that everything has roughly equal votes before the same item comparisons start to crop up again. There isn't anything inherently unfair about this type of voting system as every person's entry is getting equal attention, it's just that the laws of probability haven't yet swung in your favor that when the next items you're voting on coming up in queue that one of them isn't your item.
Last year it took me hundreds of votes before I even saw my item. By the end, when I was somewhere between 1000 and 5000 votes cast, I think I'd only seen my item a total of 2 or 3 times.
P.S. As an aside, using the Both are equally good/bad button isn't really speeding up the process of seeing your item. It just throws that combination back into the queue for someone to vote on. If everyone was doing that, we'd get no where by Jan 14th.
I'd prefer not to use the equally good/bad button, and some of these items coming up multiple times look pretty cool to me. They're items that I WANT to vote for multiple times. but if one vote for one of these items bumps my item out of the competition, then I've only got myself to blame for the other guy winning... I voted for him to win even though I had no opportunity to vote for myself.
To say that every vote counts, but that they're drops in the bucket, leaves me in a bit of a predicament. If a moderator can assure me that my item is receiving the same repeated appearance for other users, and those other users can be assured to vote so they don't skip my item like I'm skipping theirs, then I'm fine with voting multiple times for the other items. But if they're not aware of this, they may come to the same conclusion I came to.
A side note, it seems like the items I'm seeing multiple times are mostly the items that I voted for... not items that I voted against.
Ok, now I'm also seeing repeats of items I voted against, and the repeats are happening more often (every three or four pairings contains at least 1 repeated item).
RPG Superstar 2015
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Marathon Voter Season 6, Marathon Voter Season 7, Marathon Voter Season 8, Star Voter Season 9
aka mamaursula
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I'm seeing some of the same items multiple times. Some items twice, and item or two 3 times. I know I haven't seen all the items yet as I haven't seen my own.
It seems I'd be giving the competition an unfair advantage by voting for their items multiple times without voting on my own. Please fix this soon mods, as I'd like to vote properly instead of skipping on repeated items.
Thanks for putting this whole thing together!
While I did not enter last year, I know of several items that were entered. I never saw them in my voting pages and as you can see, I voted over 1,000 times. This is just the method by which we collectively work as a computer hive mind ranking to the smallest decimal which item is better than the next. Your item is being seen by hundreds of other people who are saying "Why do I keep seeing this and not my own?" I know it's frustrating, because everyone gets the thrill of knowing that theirs really made it, just hang in there. At the end you will be shocked at what some of the other voters will come back with in their compiled math and statistics. If you doubt it, check out last years threads that popped up after the Top 32 were announced. Every one but 32 people were really bored and dying for something to do. We got very creative and math was involved. We're such nerds. :-)
Thanks for the quick replies.
Hey cris,
The math behind the voting here is very cool, but it's also a little tough to wrap your head around. I'll see if I can dig up one of the nice explanations from last year, but rest assured - everything's extremely well managed, and you're not hurting your chances one whit by voting on other items.
Until I have a good explanation to link to, let me just give you the five-cent intuition: you are not voting on which item is best, and we are not counting which item got the most vote-clicks. Instead, you are making links in a huge chain of items - I like A better than B, and B better than C, and C better than D...
Imagine you build this whole entire chain without ever voting on your item, and at the end, I ask you: OK, where in this chain does your item go?
Well, obviously, you say "It goes at the top." You've already put all the other items "in order," so by saying "my item is better than the very best item," you're actually saying - with just one vote! - that your item is, in fact, the best of all.
Now, the actual mechanism here is way, way more complicated than that. The "chain" isn't straight; it can branch every which way (Say, you like A more than B and A more than C, but you haven't voted between B and C),and your own votes will mesh in with everybody else's, which will contradict your own. That being said: the cool math makes this all work, and basically manages to meaningfully combine between everybody's votes.
Being a database administrator, I can wrap my head around that. Thanks for the information. I had assumed it was based purely upon who has the most clicks.
Ziv, thanks for the explanation of how the ranking is done. That makes me feel better... was really starting to hate the pick X over Y with items that I hated showing up over and over and over again. It makes much better sense now that I read your post.
Glad I could help :)
Whiskey Jack, I hope it's clear now that "ranking" between items you don't like is really important too - first of all, that's what allows Paizo to make the cull, which means more interesting voting for us all :) And secondly, each individual vote is just part of a much more complicated net. Once you start thinking about "clusters" and how the data is likely to look over groups of submissions, that' when things get really interesting. :)
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"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?"
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I think the no vote button actually hurts you in moving past items, since it didn't get ranked and compared to the other items. I don't understand the math, but based on last year I believe the more you choose not to vote, then those items are just tossed backed into the Queue and you are more likely to see them again until you have ranked them. Of course you will still likely see many of them again, and sometimes again because the system wants to know how you rank it compared to different items so it needs you to vote on them more than once. The more you vote on one specific Item compared to various items helps it sort the best and the worst when compiled with all the other voters opinions. I voted a ton last year and the one item that I recognized I only saw three maybe four times.
I just had a weird couple rounds. While not consecutively, I've had three items come up within the same couple minutes.
- Item A vs B
- Item B vs C
- Item C vs A
I don't doubt that there's balance to it, it's just weird to see them face off like this so quickly.
And I still haven't seen mine. Makes me paranoid it was disqualified for some reason. Oh god, did I write it in French and not check it? Did I accidentally send in a blank item? Was it all a dream?!
rofl Ice.. me too.. think mine was in Latin.
I just got
-item A vs item B
-Item B vs Item A
-Item B vs Item A
Yes I got the same match thrice in a row (once flipped), think it was a glitch?
Same for me......those exact same two items that timstermon mentioned
I'll neither confirm nor deny whether those items were the ones in my case as well.
Not really, Whisperknives, since they were only being paired against each other on the repeats... it shouldn't affect their standings against other items.
It happened to a lot of people at the same time, so it covers a lot of items.
it shouldn't matter... if a person votes on the same pairing of items multiple times it shouldn't really impact those items vs. other pairings. the number of votes for an item are not what is used to determine its final position, that is determined by how well it does in comparison to other items overall (I don't think I am explaining this very well... if Item A vs Item B is voted on a thousand times say. and Item A wind 75% of those match ups Item A is placed above item B in the standings... if Item A is then paired against Item C, and item C wins say 80% of the votes, than even if they are only voted on 500 times, Item C is still ranked ahead of Item A.... hope that is a helpful example).
I think part of the confusion over the voting process is that its a method that almost no one uses, in fact I think I've only ever seen it once before for something on this scale
Ah, statistics! You wonderfully baffling science you!
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RPG Superstar 2015
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Marathon Voter Season 6, Marathon Voter Season 7, Marathon Voter Season 8, Star Voter Season 9
aka mamaursula
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I'm seeing a lot of items I consistently vote against repeatedly. I get what you're saying, but I think I may be biased against some of these items now- after I vote against an item ten times, the next five times I see it I'm going to vote against it (or compare it less favorably to another item, to be more accurate). I'd rather vote for which is better out of two really cool items than which is less bad of two not so great items. But if a lot of voters have a similar bias against not-great items they see repeatedly, mediocre items may end up at the bottom while other mediocre items get bumped up.
Of course, someone might see items I think are really cool and say 'I keep seeing this lame item.' But every year cool items end up in the top 32, so I have to hope my item (which I've seen twice out of 500+ votes) makes it into that category.
The other thing to consider is when are you voting and how many other people are voting at the same time. Obviously we do not know (yet) even the rough number of entries nor do we know the exact means by which the great Paizo Coding Monkeys designed the algorithms, but there is some method and madness to it. I know when my husband and I voted at home at the same time, it got a little wonky last year. I am certain the kinks are worked out, but there is going to be a pattern. Items will bubble to the top and then never be seen again, we hope.