2011 Community GOTY Awards: I need your input

mr_n00b wrote:

I approve of this consensus, though I still believe releasing a raw score list as an extra is not a bad idea.

I might start up an adjunct thread, "What's your real game of the year?" at the same time, because it is an interesting question. I doubt there will be much consensus there outside of games like WoW and TF2, however, as most of the games people mention will be older and not everyone will be playing them at the same time.

Mine's Darksiders. It was totally awesome; I beat it twice.

Minarchist wrote:

Mine's Darksiders. It was totally awesome; I beat it twice.

With a stick?

I'll never tell.

Your new sig is hilarious, by the way.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
mr_n00b wrote:

I approve of this consensus, though I still believe releasing a raw score list as an extra is not a bad idea.

I might start up an adjunct thread, "What's your real game of the year?" at the same time, because it is an interesting question. I doubt there will be much consensus there outside of games like WoW and TF2, however, as most of the games people mention will be older and not everyone will be playing them at the same time.

My main concern with maintaining two separate threads is that I feel most people would only have patience for just one, in which case sticking to a more standard format makes a heck of a lot more sense.

Perhaps the June voting thread would be a more appropriate time to take the "unrestricted" approach to GOTY.

mr_n00b wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:
mr_n00b wrote:

I approve of this consensus, though I still believe releasing a raw score list as an extra is not a bad idea.

I might start up an adjunct thread, "What's your real game of the year?" at the same time, because it is an interesting question. I doubt there will be much consensus there outside of games like WoW and TF2, however, as most of the games people mention will be older and not everyone will be playing them at the same time.

My main concern with maintaining two separate threads is that I feel most people would only have patience for just one, in which case sticking to a more standard format makes a heck of a lot more sense.

Perhaps the June voting thread would be a more appropriate time to take the "unrestricted" approach to GOTY.

mr_n00b wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:
mr_n00b wrote:

I approve of this consensus, though I still believe releasing a raw score list as an extra is not a bad idea.

I might start up an adjunct thread, "What's your real game of the year?" at the same time, because it is an interesting question. I doubt there will be much consensus there outside of games like WoW and TF2, however, as most of the games people mention will be older and not everyone will be playing them at the same time.

My main concern with maintaining two separate threads is that I feel most people would only have patience for just one, in which case sticking to a more standard format makes a heck of a lot more sense.

Perhaps the June voting thread would be a more appropriate time to take the "unrestricted" approach to GOTY.

This is a fair idea. I think it's fun to ask what you play the most vs. what's your favorite game to release this year.

I've got a wacky idea. Instead of ranking games (which a lot of people don't like, or forget to do), how about each person gets five votes for game of the year, and you can vote for any game more than once. That way, if one game completely blew you away, you could give it multiple votes, otherwise you could spread your votes out across up to five games. The final list would be tallied by total number of votes received by each game, rather than by arbitrary scores.

If you wanted to get super-fancy with the calculations, you could let people list more than five and give fractional votes to those indecisive people who can't pick their favorite games.

Also, I know it's a bit of work, but I'd request that you compile or find a complete list of 2011 releases so people can make sure their votes count. I can never remember what came out when, and my pathetic google-fu is often not helpful. Some web site out there somewhere must have a complete list of releases by year for console and PC.

BadKen wrote:

Also, I know it's a bit of work, but I'd request that you compile or find a complete list of 2011 releases so people can make sure their votes count. I can never remember what came out when, and my pathetic google-fu is often not helpful. Some web site out there somewhere must have a complete list of releases by year for console and PC.

Google is wise. I could probably put together a Google doc enumerating all 2011 candidates for ease of use.

I'm a fan of BadKen's idea, but I'd like 10 total votes in that kind of system so I can at least recognize some of the great games I've played that might not otherwise get any credit.

This is a great idea that can only be made better through infographics.

I demand pie charts!

Just to further complicate matters - is it worth doing a PC list and a console list?

I say one man, one vote. If you can't decide between 5 games, then each gets 0.2 of a vote. If you want to get real fancy, go ahead and weight your own votes (e.g. 0.8 votes for Gears of Duty 7 and 0.2 votes for Dorklight). So, basically, the BadKen system.

But hey, I'm happy to go along with whatever eldritch system of vote tallying anyone wants to come up with.

Jonman wrote:

I say one man, one vote.

Why stop there? One man, one Real vote, one Imaginary vote. 1+1i vote per GWJer.

In a perfect world RAGE would be good, and I'd give it a full contribution of 1. But that, sadly, is not reality. Instead it gets my Imaginary vote, 1i. I'll distribute the Real value to so called "good" games.

Nothing Complex about it!

You people.

Can I name the same game 5 times, so it gets all 15 of my allotted points (5+4+3+2+1) ?

Rather than have two separate voting threads for 2011 and non-2011 releases, I say people can vote for whatever game they want, as long as they played it in 2011, and then the final results can be tallied for overall, 2011 releases, non-2011 releases, etc. Similar to how multi-platform and platform exclusives have been tallied in the past. I think naturally 2011 games will get the lion's share of the votes, and I'd expect GOTY will go to a 2011 release, but it would be really interesting to see if an older game broke the Top 10 overall, or what the most popular game was in people's pile of shame.

If we're sticking to 2011 only, I think people picking their top 5 is plenty. If it's open to all games, top 10.

Opening voting on January 1 sees reasonable, and a week should be adequate time for people to vote.

Minarchist wrote:
Nightmare wrote:

Day 20001: Clockworkhouse necros it

At which point he'll be 85 years old?

You don't think he will still be clocking then? Once a clocker, forever a clocker

Tell me, tboon, at 85, are you still like you were when you were 27?

IMAGE(http://www.threadbombing.com/data/media/4/oh_snap.jpg)

I have to admit, I actually laughed out loud at that one.

I don't even remember what games I played from this year.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Tell me, tboon, at 85, are you still like you were when you were 27?

Absolutley. A little slower, a little heavier, but I still pack a mean punch.

GOTY awards is to see how games compare to their contemporaries; i.e. games that came out the same year.

My two (okay, probably ten) cents:

1. Make one thread - and only one thread - for the voting and confine it to the whole month of January, start to end. If there are people that want to include December releases into their ballot, they've got the whole month to do it.

2. Voters submit an ordered ballot of 5-10 games for Community Game of the Year, with each position in the ballot scored like an MVP ballot (#1 gets 10 points, #2 gets 9 points, #3 gets 8 points, etc). The only eligible games for this ballot are games that were released in the 2011 calendar year and ballots that don't fit the profile (i.e. outside of 5-10, no ordering) earn 1 point for each game mentioned in the ballot.

3. Voters also submit an ordered ballot of 3-5 games for a "Most Played / Time Sink" of the Year, with each position in the ballot scored like an MVP ballot (#1 gets 5 points, #2 gets 4 points, etc.) All games, including games released outside of the 2011 calendar year, are included in this ballot and all other previous rules for balloting (out-of-format ballots earn one point per game listed) apply.

4. If you don't mind maintaining the thread, make regular updates to the OP of the voting thread with the raw vote totals (no "MVP" rankings involved) and a reference to which post/ballot was counted last, but cover the results with a spoiler tag so that new incoming voters won't face any undue influence on their votes from the existing totals. That way, people who want to track how their favorites are standing up can hover over the numbers, but there's still some drama left for the actual award unveiling thread.

5. For the Community Game of the Year, you could break up the results by overall ranking, overall ballots counted (no ranking considered), platform ranking, and publisher ranking. For the sake of brevity, keep the Time Sink award simple with an overall ranking.

5b. If you're willing to take the time for it, I think it would be interesting to see the top ranked GOTY candidate from each month in 2011 as well, just to get a high-level view of how the year fared.

The idea with all of this is that:
- People that aren't really as concerned with all of the formalities of voting (ordering, confining to 5-10 games) can still participate in the discussion and chip in with their favorites for the year.
- Voters that take the extra time to really think about the ballot (and actually follow the format) get a little "reward" with the extra weighting given to the order of their votes.
- Everybody gets the opportunity to acknowledge some of the games that sucked up their time this year, even if they were released outside of 2011.
- By centering the voting process around January, you get easily identifiable end points around the voting timeline, so that people (hopefully) aren't confused about when they can vote.

Those are some good ideas, Ozy. Some of them aren't too far from what I was thinking about for the final rules. The only thing I'm really not sure about at this point is timing. Looking through past threads, the ones that got the most interest and traffic went up just before or after Christmas and wrapped up by New Years.

Voting will start on the 12th of December and last through the end of the year. There just aren't any December releases worth noting that justify waiting much later than that.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Voting will start on the 12th of December and last through the end of the year. There just aren't any December releases worth noting that justify waiting much later than that.

Oh, now you're just baiting me

IMAGE(http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0qEFr44nhCU/Tiz_5PdXZOI/AAAAAAAAFP0/D5iXdrJbhgQ/s1600/swtor-logo-torwars.jpg)

Can you really judge a MMO on a few days worth of play?

I agree with everything said so far:

1 week of voting
sequential scoring system (#1 gets highest score, -1 point each entry down the list)

I, however, would not be averse to a top 10 as Aaron said. But if folks only want a top 5 that's fine.

What about a top 5 and then a bonus 'underdog' or 'underrated' game?

BadKen wrote:

I've got a wacky idea. Instead of ranking games (which a lot of people don't like, or forget to do), how about each person gets five votes for game of the year, and you can vote for any game more than once. That way, if one game completely blew you away, you could give it multiple votes, otherwise you could spread your votes out across up to five games. The final list would be tallied by total number of votes received by each game, rather than by arbitrary scores.

If you wanted to get super-fancy with the calculations, you could let people list more than five and give fractional votes to those indecisive people who can't pick their favorite games.

Also, I know it's a bit of work, but I'd request that you compile or find a complete list of 2011 releases so people can make sure their votes count. I can never remember what came out when, and my pathetic google-fu is often not helpful. Some web site out there somewhere must have a complete list of releases by year for console and PC.

I like the idea, I did something like this when I asked the community to rank their 10 greatest PC games of all time.

I went to the googles and found the list

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_in...

I was very surpised that the only 2 games that was released in 2011 that I have played is Mass Effect 2 and Shogun 2. I guess I am still about 1 to 2 years behind in gaming. In that kind of contest ME2 is the clear winner.

Scratched wrote:

Can you really judge a MMO on a few days worth of play?

I'm sure that thousands of people will do just that. Hell - thousands already have, and the bloody thing is still beta.

Tanglebones wrote:

Oh, now you're just baiting me :)

But MMOs aren't really games anyways (well, no more than Farmville is at any rate) and so shouldn't be eligible for GoTY awards.

There - now you're being properly baited.

mcdonis wrote:

I went to the googles and found the list

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_in...

In a way, it's would have been more interesting if you hadn't linked that, to see what titles are conspicuously unmentioned in the thread.

I'm up for a community poll for GOTY.

I'd like a top 10 and have entries be tallied rather than given any score. Our community is diverse enough to have quite an interesting top 10. A top 5 seems like it would only consist of a couple of really high profile games.

I think starting on Dec 12 is a fine time to start the poll. I won't have time to play some games that are in my pile, but that's fine. I could have made time for them if I really cared to play them immediately. A retrospective "Favorite Game You Played in 2011 Thread" is cool too, but you should wait until 2012 for that one.

If someone posts more than 10 you could put up an honorable mentions list that has no tally and just lists games.

Whatever system is used for the voting I would like to see a full ranking of the games rather than just seeing the top 5/10.

Also, does Minecraft count for being released this year? I know it officially released in November, but just about everyone had it long before that.