firstly, all of the delays in the current system, have been down to the people running it not hitting their deadlines.

in 2005, i have decided to run it all myself, as in all the years its ran, only once has it not turned to shit. anyway:

people are moaning that with the current system, the nominations are generally toned towards the latter part of the year, and people forget about the earlier part. one suggestion, is to keep the current format, but split voting into 3 x 4 months, or 4 x 3 months. eg:

Jan - April
May - Aug
Sept - Dec

and so on.

however, the disadvantages of this, are if Jan - April is a shit 1/3, and May - Aug is a wicked 1/3, tunes that would normally get included wont, because there would need to be an exact amount from Jan - April to make the numbers work, regardless how shit the 1/3 is, so the tunes from Jan - April could all be shit, just to make the numbers work.

So anyway, some ideas have already been suggested in the grand final poll. id like it if those ideas would be re-posted here and explained in full detail, so they could be ran without further consultation. this would also iron out any problems there might be with them.

One thing. apart from myself, and the other people who have ran this, no1 else understands the shear volume of work involved in running this, atm counting the nominations is a full nights work, counting the first batch of heats is atleast 3+hrs plus, it really is a big task.

so before suggesting amazing ideas, remember the work load involved, and if the idea is fantastic, but 3x the work load, then it'll be rejected.

thanks.

I suggest tournament style voting.

We could split the year into 4 periods of equal time (10-11 weeks), as has been suggested. At the end of a week's worth of voting, the top 4 songs from each period could advance to the finals, held at the end of the year. Nominations for each period's voting could, as usual, come from volume of nominations in a thread in this MD forum.

Once the 16 songs for the finals have been chosen, they should be arranged in head-to-head competition, based on their total amount of votes. In this system, the song with the most overall votes would face the song with the 16th most votes. 2nd most would face 15th most ,and so on. here is a graphic which might help explain what Im on about (I used this year's top 16 as an example):



I think this is a way to keep things fair while making the tabulating process easier. It should also keep administration of the voting to a minimum, and make defining who wins simple as well.

Also, voting should not be longer than 7 days, imo. Anything longer than that is overkill. In the first two round, over 85% of the total votes came in the first 7 days.

I like your idea tribu, but the problem with the tournament style voting is that the number of quality tracks aren't equally distributed throughout the year. For instance, you might have 4 amazing tracks on the first period, while having 4 mediocre tracks the second period, making it unfair to rule out those other 3 great tracks in the first period.

I think the voting has to be made simpler: the song with more votes wins. End of discussion. So if, for instance, you want TA's to vote for their top 5, the points would go something like this:

1st place vote: 5 points
2nd place vote: 4 points
3rd place vote: 3 points
4th place vote: 2 points
5th place vote: 1 point

If you want to make it a top 3, then it still works, except first place would get 3 votes and so on. This is the system used for the France Football magazine player of the year and it seems fair to me.

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::: VOTE FOR PEDRO :::

I'll build off of the first idea...

January - April
May - August
September - December

10 tracks will be selected each 1/3 of the year. Thne after the 30 have been selected at the end of December, to eliminate the problem of:

quote:

if Jan - April is a shit 1/3, and May - Aug is a wicked 1/3, tunes that would normally get included wont

Just have an addition 10 track be able to be notminated that have come out at ANY time of the year EXCLUDING the 30 that have already been chosen. Therefore you are left with a top 40 of the year.

Now the top 40 should get broken up into 5 polls of 8 choices, where 2 are selected from each poll. That leaves you with a top 10. Then the final poll is taken and ta da! You have a track of the year.

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Infected Mushroom

"Dancing With Kadafi"
"Symphonatic"

'Nuff Said...

I suggest we break out of the box that says there is only 1 category.
Each category obviously takes x hours of work to run, but there are a gazilion members here. Volunteers could be found.

I will only suggest 1 new category...
Amateur track of the year. No reason why this group of hard working individuals shouldn't have their own category

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Светопресавление
your pearl casting hero

Tribu's idea sounds okay.

But to start the whole thing at the beginning of the year is not good, at least for me. It would be better if everything started off after 1/3 of the year or maybe after six months. That way people can choose from various good tunes. If you started earlier you would get few good songs in the first few months. And those songs wouldn't probably be good candidates in the final tournament. By starting at a later date users have the opportunity to go back and choose a track that they liked earlier in the year. I doubt good songs would be forgotten after a few months.

Plus, you have to take under consideration the participation of the members. Would it be a good idea to have the members voting for the best song for a year? It's a long process. But I don't think they would mind anyway.

The idea of collecting ten tracks each time sounds good. I guess you'll have three groups, A, B, & C. After you get your 30 songs you go back to those three groups and look at the songs in the 11th position. Then you get the two with the most points. So you end up with 32.

Once with 32 you do the whole thing that was done this year with 4 songs in each group. The group in which each song is going to go can be done randomly. (Also, this may be a crazy idea, you can have each group in a different subforum, like a sticky. That way you'll get more people to vote. You can also have all the groups in the original subforum where it belongs. But I don't know if this can be done.)

After the voting for that closes you can select the best two songs in each group and put them in tribu's tree. First position goes to the song with most points. In case of a tie you go back and add the points each of the songs in the tie got in the initial process of selection. If there is still a tie, flip a coin.

After that tribu's tree is good to go.

Edit: If the groups of four for the final 32 isn't a good idea, then just go with a tree of 32 instead of 16.

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Last edited by sensorium on Jan-11-2005 at 22:04

Here's my updated suggestion from the TOTY Final Heat Thread. I'm still thinking we should fashion next's year TOTY vote like the NCAA Basketball tournament: 64 total songs. But concerns about having a weak quarter's worth of songs being over-represented and a strong quarter being under represented, make me think we should simply split the year in half instead of in quarters. Odds are good that each half of the year will be filled with an equal amount of quality tracks. We'll vote for the top 32 tracks from the first half in June and the top 32 from the second half in December. Seeding will be determined by amount of votes or weight of votes, per memusa's suggestion.

Now, we can set up the bracketing for the first half of the year in June, but we won't actually go through the bracket voting until the end of the year. That way we can save the first half's bracket and vote along with the second half's bracket voting for suspense's sake.

Then the final four songs (the surviving two of each half) can battle each other out in a one-time Final Four heat.

I feel this setup eliminates the weak/strong quarter problem, solves the unequal representation tracks from earlier in the year seem to get, provides for enough time for purely time-tested tracks to advance (and fads to fade), provides more tunes to vote on than most other methods, and gives the voters an opportunity to carefully advance tunes one by one instead of simply voting for their favorite 1 or 2 songs in a heat of 5 or 6.

What do you think?

Last edited by Nautilus on Jan-11-2005 at 23:01

i have an idea to make tallying the scores up easier...Ill see if I can whip it together soon

let me run it again

quote:

Originally posted by ierxium tribu's tree. ... After that tribu's tree is good to go.

I laughed

quote:

Originally posted by ierxium tribu's tree. ... After that tribu's tree is good to go.

I laughed


I think 64 songs is way too many to have. I thought about using 32, but that still seemed like a lot. Remember that someone (namely, Coup) has to run the tourney, and while tabulating votes this time around I got a taste of just how difficult that can get. I tried to keep things simple on him while remaining fair to people choosing the TOTY.

I like iexrium's idea, but it is very time invasive. If there's a week of voting of voting per round ,were looking at roughly 5 weeks of voting. That eliminates some Novermber and all December tunes from TOTY consideration. I think that by spreading the voting out, and starting with only 16 songs, we can push it to halfway through december and start then.

To combat a mediocre time period, perhaps we could go by total votes throught the 4 qualifying periods. Another idea is to let songs be nominated twice. That way, if a song doesnt get voted in the first time period, it can be nominated later during, perhaps, a weaker time. We should cap it at 2 times, imo. And it wouldn't break from tradition, seeing that Sattelite, a song from last year, is in this years finals

Last edited by on Jan-12-2005 at 04:16

It would be a problem if you had to vote for a track twice. Let's say one track didn't make it the first time. It is probable it wouldn't be voted for the second time. In a way, that given song would be stealing a spot from another new song. Plus, that song would increase the chances of other songs to make to the next round.

Whatever way you choose to do it, it's still going to be a lot of work. I still think 32 tracks is a good option. Three groups of ten for the whole year and the best two 11th position songs.

Hopefully someone else will come up with a better idea.

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quote:

Originally posted by ierxium It would be a problem if you had to vote for a track twice. Let's say one track didn't make it the first time. It is probable it wouldn't be voted for the second time. In a way, that given song would be stealing a spot from another new song. Plus, that song would increase the chances of other songs to make to the next round. Whatever way you choose to do it, it's still going to be a lot of work. I still think 32 tracks is a good option. Three groups of ten for the whole year and the best two 11th position songs. Hopefully someone else will come up with a better idea.

It's all based on total votes, so if a song is better than others, it will receive more votes. In this case, the votes would come via a nomination thread in the MD. If a song is good enough to be in the top 10 vote getters for an 11 week period, it desevres to be considered, even if it bumps another song from consideration. Its all about total votes (or in this case nominations)