The thing is...

I want certain votes to have more weight than others.

That is to say, I feel like the average/median of where a game ranks on lists in general, that should be more important than the sheer amount of votes... but only when a game has many votes already. Basically, the more votes a game has, the less each individual vote should affect it; the less votes it has, the more important it'd be for it to get more votes in.

That's my point of view, at least. I think if over 20 people put a game on their lists, that's already enough to determine that it's a popular game among the community, and also enough to have a pretty formed opinion of how the community as a whole feels about the game. From that point on, whether it got 20, or 30, or 40 votes or whatever, I don't think it should matter nearly as much as the average/median ranking of the game (which of course, is still being influenced by every vote).

This is how I've felt since pretty much forever. I always thought about creating some kind of miracle formula that'd properly separate the popular games from the not-so-popular, and then rank the popular games by how much people like them, instead of by how popular. I've wanted to do something like this since my first year doing this, but I'm no math genius so I just stuck with the old formula, and then thought it was fitting to continue using that until the event's first decade came to a close.

I'm still no math genius, but the median/votes thing did look quite nice initially, and I've already figured out how to tweak the formula so as to put more weight on the votes. Then it's just a matter of deciding how much weight is fair. I've been trying to do it without looking at the game names, just the numbers, and am basically trying to fit the ranking within a certain guideline...

Like, every game in the top 20 should have double digit votes; every game in the top 100 should have at least 5 or 6 votes, and so on.

Maybe I'm being biased with this, but I really am trying not to be.

Edit: also, the thing about giving games a specific amount of points based on where they ranked is... really quite difficult to do as things are. The way I compile the lists normally goes like this:

#1, 1pt
#2, 2pts
#3, 3pts...

With #50 getting 50 points, and unlisted games getting 60 points. This is the method Leadified used and I believe it's also how Smeags did it. This is good because it makes the lists easy to compile, as you can just list the numbers as they are. It leads to less mistakes, basically. Right now, it would be a pain to go through all the numbers and change the amount of points for everything I've compiled, but even for future years, it'd inevitably lead to a lot of mistakes if I was writing down numbers that didn't correlate with the numbers on each list. Maybe I could try to think of an automated way of doing it, where it'd automatically turn every 1 into 100 and so on, but I really don't know how to do that.

And then again, this method can also feel arbitrary. How many points should be given for each standing? You have a 51 point gap at the end of the top 10, but does that accurately reflect how each person feels about their own list? Not for me, I feel there's a really small gap there and I could've listed a different game at #10. This is different for each person, and that's why I don't really like the idea of this system.

About the median experiment, well, I am trying to find the right balance. Obviously making the whole ranking based on the median alone isn't gonna turn out any good, I've already seen what the list looks like with that method and it's quite silly. Instead, what I went with yesterday as a test was multiplying the median by the number of votes it got, and the results looked a lot more fitting like that. Different from what they've been in the past, but in a really good way, with some of the more beloved games by not-so-many-people climbing up the list above some games that just get loads of votes but not as high. These games that got loads of votes were still ranked quite highly by this method.

So let's talk about Leadified and his method, because that might actually be contributing to the current problem.  I can see now that a low score is good.  However, #50 gets 50pts, and unlisted gets 60pts.  That means just being on someone's list improves it's score by 10.  That means that if you have a lot of Mario/Zelda games that appear in the 30-50 range on many people's lists then they are really going to shoot up in the rankings, even if most of those voters don't really want to see that game in the top 10 and it is on their own list.  So, one simple thing you can do is just make unlisted games worth 51pts instead of 60pts.

Alright, it's done!


I... gave up, honestly. I tried so many different systems, many of which initially looked good, but all of which ultimately failed at the basic task of the thing: which is to never have a game's score worsened by an additional vote. So, yeah, that's it. I'm going back to the original system, but with a small alteration which will lessen the impact of a game not featuring in a list. This little change will have an impact on the results, but only as little as the change itself. Looking through the list, it's a very minor difference.

Anyways, that's that. After two days of thinking hard about this, I couldn't come up with a definitive solution. Maybe another year, I suppose. Now it's time to move onto the other bits of work to finally get these results out there. Thread will be up in a few days.

People just should come to terms with the fact that Nintendo is the best.

Alright, it's done!


I... gave up, honestly. I tried so many different systems, many of which initially looked good, but all of which ultimately failed at the basic task of the thing: which is to never have a game's score worsened by an additional vote. So, yeah, that's it. I'm going back to the original system, but with a small alteration which will lessen the impact of a game not featuring in a list. This little change will have an impact on the results, but only as little as the change itself. Looking through the list, it's a very minor difference.

Anyways, that's that. After two days of thinking hard about this, I couldn't come up with a definitive solution. Maybe another year, I suppose. Now it's time to move onto the other bits of work to finally get these results out there. Thread will be up in a few days.