Celebrating 10 YEARS of VGC's Greatest Games Event!!

[Bofferbrauer2]

mZuzek said:

Thanks for all the nice words guys, I really appreciate it.

Machina said:
This isn't a criticism, because using the votes from every individual list from 10 years' worth of this event would be an absurd amount of work, so can totally understand why you just went with average rank. But using average ranking alone has produced some strange results, like Fire Emblem: Three Houses getting a higher rank (#29) than it achieved in the one year it was available for voting (#30). Same with Smash Bros. Ultimate (#15 but 'only' managing #17 in its first year).

Yeah, I get how the average ranking can be unfair and those two games were something I didn't feel particularly good about, but when it came down to it, I couldn't figure out any other method that wouldn't feel arbitrary and also unfair in its own way.

Bofferbrauer2 said:

A suggestion for the future to remedy this would be to allocate points to each position each year. For instance, a 100th position would be 1 point, a 1st position 100 points. Add all the points up and rank them from there. Might be some extra work, but I don't think it's much more, if any, than what he did already for this ranking.

I mean, I don't know about this "future" because if there is another thread like this, it'd be 10 years away. Who knows what'll happen by then, really.

But anyways, yeah, this points system you mention was actually the first thing I tried. The issue with this one is that it heavily disfavors any games that came out during this decade - for example, Breath of the Wild ended up outside of the top 50 using this method, below a lot of games that never made it into any year's top 20, and that just didn't feel fair to me for a game that's won every event it was available for.

Then I tried coming up with formulas that would add extra points for the years a game hadn't been out for yet, or try to find some middle ground between the total points and the yearly average, but it was just... everything felt so arbitrary at that point, like I was trying to twist the rules to manufacture the list I wanted to have, rather than the actual list that was made by everyone.

So, instead of going with the arbitrary, I decided to go for the simple, and that was either total points, or average points. Total points felt way more unfair, so I went with average.

That said, I am considering changing the points system for this year's greatest games event (I've been considering it for years now, will probably end up not doing it ), and if I do, it might be something that can be used for a whole decade compilation like this. Maybe the next decade celebration thread will actually take into account all the individual votes from every user through every year? That isn't as much work as it sounds if one already has access to all the spreadsheets from all the years (which I didn't!), as long as the points system used can be easily added up. And even if I do stop doing this, I'd give the spreadsheets to whoever takes over.

How about a this:

1. 10% extra for one missed year
2. 25% for 2 missed years
3. 40% for 3
4. 65% for 4
5. 90% for 5
6. 125% for 6
7. 180% for 7
8. 260% for 8
9. 400% for 9

Freshly released games tend to shine brighter in one's mind, that's why the multiplier drops off more and more the less years it ran.

Last edited by Bofferbrauer2 - on 02 November 2020