Z-I-v Summer Contest 2020

Anonymous was the wrong word, my apologies. But votes are private until they are revealed at the end of the week.

Where did I say in my suggestion of separating out discussions in a separate thread that they had to happen after the end of voting? In that suggestion I intended for them to happen during the voting phase (I wrongfully assumed that was implicit, given I mentioned it addressed all of your concerns).

I'm saying your comments don't really add value because it just sounds like complaining, honestly. Taking the example of that alternative discussion - instead of just saying "it's dumb" in several sentences, why not suggest to instead have those separate threads active while voting is taking place? Iterate on an idea to come up with a solution that works for everyone, instead of just arguing against what's suggested.

I agree with your thoughts regarding where the DDR series has gone (I haven't really played on a machine since ITG days, but played on a DDR A machine fairly recently and didn't understand or particularly like the new mechanics or trends in what I played), and (what I think is) your opinion regarding what goes into voting.

Before maybe 2018-ish, votes were public. People would vote for their favorite files in this thread instead of PMing a host. They would then add their votes up to the running total.

Some people (well, at least one person - but probably more) would just add their votes to whoever was already at the top. I can also think of two occasions on which people said they hadn't played all the files but posted their votes anyway.

Anyway, one reason to vote for whatever was at the top was because then, you wouldn't have to play through all the simfiles, and it wouldn't look *too* suspicious.

Another user was caught basically gaming the system by strategically voting for files in a way that would personally give him the best possible outcome. Of course that can still happen but it's not nearly as easy and now it can still be called out in the current system.

Alright, giving them little credit it is.

That's great! It also has nothing to do with what I said! The comment about peer pressure having an effect on votes, as in "everybody else likes this file, I better vote for it or people will think I'm dumb", if that's the peer pressure you're concerned about then make the votes on the spreadsheet anonymous.

Anyone that wants to shape their vote according to popularity instead of voting in earnest can already do so. It's not that hard to tell which ones will be popular. The feedback boogeyman is ridiculous because not everybody posts feedback. The 5-7 people that would post feedback for absolutely every song in their group, that's not going to account for the 35 that won't post any feedback. Equating it to people posting their votes in public is baseless.

The issue with the downtime is that the gap in time means there will be little discussion because most people moved on to playing the next week of files. The quality of the feedback improves if there's back and forth discussion about it with everybody. Better feedback is useful for anyone that wants to just do better in this contest or improve in general. The thread was getting interesting when people were actually talking about the files for once, now (other than this shit) it's back to the cycle of people asking if their song choice is okay, submitting files, viewing and accepting results, rinse and repeat.


Oh, keeping the votes private until they're all in is how it should be done and I don't disagree on that, I don't think that should change. Actual votes and comments/feedback on the files aren't necessarily gonna be the same thing though, and not everybody is going to post feedback. Hell, barely anyone was posting same week feedback before it was disencouraged to do so.


Yeah it's mostly complaining about the way things are run. There are still suggestions in them. Narrowing my posts down to me saying "it stinks and I don't like it" without any arguments over 3000 words is just dishonest. The way feedback should be handled (IE a separate thread) isn't what I'm arguing about, I think there should be multiple threads for a contest so people that just want to follow updates or get feedback don't have to wade through a bunch of other stuff, but that's not what I'm arguing about, disencouraging current week feedback is a way bigger issue to me.

---

aight whose dupe is this lol

---

Alrighty, here's my entry for the week:

snow storm -euphoria- / Yooh
2 | 6 | 9 | 13 | 16

Originally stepped by Oni-91 in week 6.

I believe I put the credit properly (my alias is in the #CREDIT line, for the individual chart artists, and title shows as "snow storm -euphoria- [Shortysnmn2010]". Happy to change formatting if something else needs to be changed.

I may make a minor change or two before submissions are locked in, but they'd be very minor (small BPM tweak or re-arrange a couple arrows on heavy or challenge after playing on pad this week).

Regarding difficulties, I use a machine learning model to score difficulty of charts (I don't auto-generate the steps, just predict the difficulty after steps are manually created in Stepmania editor). My model was a bit unsure how to score heavy and challenge. It predicted heavy as 13.5 (hard 13 or easy 14) and challenge as 16.4 (hard 16 or easy 17). I'd say they're a 9 and 11 on ITG scale. If these difficulty ratings are way off, would appreciate knowing so so that I could fine-tune the machine learning model. Thanks!

My time was in twenty-fucking-eleven.

---

well... that was a lot to look at...

...anyway.

---

What if an entrant's votes don't align with the consensus and they don't get points? How are they supposed to learn from it other "My taste sucks and I suck for it"? Encouraging public feedback during the voting phase is important because otherwise entrants like that have no real ledge to climb up through. Considering how many entrants there are, many of whom are relatively new to the scene, you can't assume everyone's at a level of proficiency that this scenario isn't possible.

except .... 2007

I also like how I've been asking the last 24 hours "why do I always without fail fuck up when its contest time" and the most cogent response has been to the effect of either 'step music everybody else does' or 'git gud lol'

---

After a decade of Zenius simfile contests, I can still say that this is the highest correlating factor to an entry's ranking 🤷‍♂️

---

Is anyone shocked? ZIv contests are quite literally "the show where the points are made up and the scores don't matter".

---

Yes, that's because you give points to what you like. It's a competition based on opinions, not hard science or anything, this isn't the fucking SATs.

Can we stop with this already?

The zoomers don't like your stepping style, there's not much you can do about it. Sorry.

Alright. I will.

I quit. Fuck all of you.

---

Would it be worth it in later tournaments to have a dual voting mechanism? One dimension could be personal opinion, with the other being technical (how well the steps fit the song, regardless of our preferences)?

Or perhaps have both a public voting aspect and a few judges that vote more technical-oriented, with feedback from judges on each simfile? I'm not sure if there'd be enough volunteers as judges (would be quite a commitment), but seems like that would resolve some of the animosity shown here.

if u think about it, all this drama is junko's fault technically so,,, frick u junko

---

I don't know what the heck happened in here, but just know that if for any reason you want to hear my feedback for your chart / why I voted the way I did, I'm just a PM away.

---