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Poll Results!
🕑 Added 2024-09-29 12:43:50 +0000 UTCAlright, folks! Sorry I didn't get these out a bit sooner, but tallying up the weighted votes for the monthly story poll always takes a bit of time. Time which I haven't had to spare for the last few days. Anyway, we actually have two polls to deal with here. I'm going to tackle the Poll About Polls first, as the results will influence the Monthly Poll...sort of. It didn't actually change the result this time, but it will show you how it will work going forward, at least!
The Polls About Polls
Thankfully, this poll had a solid enough turn out that I'm comfortable with making a final decision without any farther debate. For those of you who haven't been paying attention. The Poll About Polls was, well, about polls. Specifically, it was about how to handle the fact that one story keeps dominating every poll and not giving the chance for others to be updated.
No, I'm not just talking about One Piece - Halfway Broken.
While that story is the current dominant power in the polls, the same issue happened before Halfway Broken even existed with Can One Displaced Hero Save the Galaxy?. When Displaced Hero was still a poll story, it similarly dominated the polls, shutting out Eridium Dreams and Pandora's Box, despite both of those stories being around the same age. The Poll About Polls provided multiple options to try and balance things a bit better (or not!) and let people vote on what their preferred solution would be. You can read more details about what the possible solutions were in that poll's post. For now...
The exact numbers of the poll results are:
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Progressive Weighing: 47%
Switch Out an Automata Update: 30%
Keep them as they are: 22%
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Thanks to everyone who voted! The results told me quite a lot. First and foremost is that by far the majority of people (77%) want to see some sort of balancing system to give other stories a chance. That makes me confident that I won't see too much backlash for providing said balancing system :-p.
Secondly, of course, is the actual winner. The Progressive Weighing System means that any story not updated for at least 2 months will start getting bonuses to the vote totals. The first month (so month three after not getting an update) will be a +20% worth of votes. Each subsequent month it doesn't win will increase that by +10%. So, if a story loses despite the +20% boost, the next month it will get +30%. Then +40%, and so on, until it wins and resets. This doesn't make it certain that a story will win often. But it does make it virtually inevitable that it will win eventually if it has any support at all.
On that note, this month's poll will be the first time it's applied. I decided to go ahead and back-date the bonus, since Pandora's Box was updated in June. As such, it got a +30% to the October Poll. Which...didn't make it win. But I think you will see how it will help with closing the gap over time, without disrespecting the majority vote. Which was sort of the point ;-). Note that, as A Very Confuse Pokemon Adventure was updated this month, it won't get a bonus just yet. However, it did do well enough (nearly tying with Pandora's Box before the boost) that it will be getting a permanent slot in the voting poll. With this new system in place, I'm more willing to add stories permanently to the monthly voting, assuming they are popular.
October's Story Poll
Okay! Back to our regularly scheduled poll! As this is the first time the boost from the new Progressive Weighing System is in use, I'm still playing around with how to represent that. For now, it's represented with the extra percetage being in (+40%) like so. With a before and after with it. So Harry Potter: Pandora's Box becomes:
50(+30%)=65.
With the bolded total the effect vote count. Hopefully that makes sense...
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One Piece: Halfway Broken - 134
Harry Potter: Pandora's Box - 50(+30%) = 65
A Very Confused Pokemon Adventure - 48
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As you can see, One Piece: Halfway Broken still won by...well...a fair bit, honestly. However, I think you can also see by the fairly decent vote boost Pandora's Box got that the new weighing system should make it possible for the less popular stories to get updates. Given that even the boosted numbers were only half of Halfway Broken's votes, I'm unsure if my initial thoughts on boost numbers are sufficient. I may increase the size of the boost if the gap doesn't close. But for now, the initial 20% boost, followed by 10% increases is what I'm going with. We'll let a few months at those numbers go and see if it works out. If it doesn't, I might end up boosting it to an initial 30% then 15% more for each month. Or even 40/20. I'm determined to get this right, it's just going to take a bit of experimenting :-).
All of that said, One Piece - Halfway Broken will still be getting the update in October :-). We'll see how long it can hold off the other stories now that the new system is in place!
Comments
Novus Peregrine
I don't think that's actually all that fair to say. It damn near tied with Pandora's Box, prior to the boost that story got from not getting updated. And that was with it never having been published anywhere but here, for Patrons only. It will eventually get boosts from the system as well now that the new system is in place, and it also got the first half of it published to other sites publicly for the first time this month. So it's likely to continue putting on a strong showing.
Christian E. Y.
I feel like pokemon 2b adventure got shafted by the voting system. Now im sad.
Novus Peregrine
I good thing to forget...for me at least ;-). Not that I exactly price gouge people. The $1 to get the early access chapters is literally the smallest amount Patreon will let you charge for a paid tier :-p. Still, that's what makes me want to not ignore the people that pay for the voter tier, since they are intentionally paying above and beyond the minimum just to have a say in what gets updated :-).
Melikereading
Lol you know, I totally forgot that weโre paying ๐. My bad.
Novus Peregrine
Because that wouldn't be even remotely fair? People pay more for the voting tiers specifically to weigh in on their favorite story getting updated. Brute forcing one of the most popular stories I have into not getting an update, despite people wanting to vote for it, would kinda be a giant dick move. I want to give a chance to other stories to keep them from dying completely, but I refuse to just high-handedly reject the majority opinion of my Patrons like that. Even with this solution, I let them VOTE on if it would be implemented or not.
Melikereading
Question! Why donโt you just remove a story after two wins in a row? Then put it back up after?
Novus Peregrine
1) Your basic premise is flawed, as it's based on the assumption that the vote ratios are always the same. They manifestly are not. This was the lowest Pandora's Box result in several months, and the highest ever Halfway Broken Result. If the same boost had applied to September's Poll, it would have been 115 vs 72.15. Only a little over a 40 point difference, versus the 65+ point difference of this month. Ratios were different for the months before those as well. The voting is NOT predictable enough to model like that, particularly since Eridium Dreams will also be in the mix. Doubly so as the closer the result is, the more likely people will be to vote for an upset if they happened to like the story that has a shot at winning. 2) A chance was given before the poll to suggest other options, and several people did so. That would have been the appropriate time to make suggestions for entirely different systems. Not now, after it's already been voted for and put in place. I took the best options I felt were viable after public discussion with several patrons and RAN A POLL on them all month. I'm not going to randomly change my entire methodology, that people VOTED FOR, after the voting is already done. As stated in the post, I MAY adjust the boost amounts if they prove insufficient to help balance the polls somewhat. But the point of the boosts is only to give a chance for those stories. Not to FORCE them to get updated, as that would mean blatantly ignoring the majority of my patrons in favor of the few. I will let the currently proposed numbers work out for a month or two before deciding if I need to adjust them. 3) Remember that I update extra stories periodically anyway, in order to keep stories relevant. Both Eridium Dreams and Pandora's Box have gotten small updates this year, despite not winning any polls. And will continue to get such small updates when I can spare the extra time. Eridium Dreams is scheduled to get the next such small update, though I don't know when I'll have the free writing time again to do an extra beyond my monthly commitment. I've committed to just about the maximum amount of time I can possibly spend on writing at the current level of support I'm getting. This isn't exactly my day job.
saganatsu
for either the 2nd or third option, if you think the high voted options need a higher chance/frequency, you can do something like raising the vote to a relatively small power (eg 1.2): for example using october's vote: at 1.2, 134^1.2=356, 50^1.2=109, and 48^1.2=102. for a final result of 62% HB, 20% PB, and 18% PA. at the much larger exponent of 2, you get the final result of 10% PA, 11% PB, and 79% HB.
saganatsu
third option accumulate the non-winning votes, rolling them over to future months. So this month HB wins. next month, PB has +50 votes rolling over, PA has +48. if everyone keeps voting the same way, HB wins again, 134 vs 100 vs 96. in december, though, it would be 134 vs 150 vs 146. PB wins, and gets an update. January, now it's 268 vs 50 vs 194, HB. February is PAs win finally, 134 vs 100 vs 242. like option 2 above, every vote matters eventually, and the update ratio will converge to the chances listed in option 2 over time. The downside is that you need a spread sheet or something to keep track of things,
saganatsu
use a random draw: for example, in this month's vote you'd roll a 232 sided die (virtually), and for 1-134, Halfway Broken wins, 135-184 Pandora's Box wins, 185-232, Pokemon Adventure wins. the benefits of this schema is that every vote matters, as even a story with a single vote can win an update. the downside is that what actually wins is up to chance, so we could end up with long streaks of a single vote. (we still have that now though). for reference the october vote, this would have had a ~57% chance of Halfway Broken, ~22% of Pandora's Box, and ~21% chance of Pokemon Adventure.
saganatsu
make the formula non-linear, for example, first three months +10%, next three +15%, 3 after that +20%. (so after 4 months, a total of +45%, after 7, +95%. this will increase the frequency of works that have a low but consistent number of votes, while not particularly impacting votes that are consistently close to winning compared to current schema
saganatsu
with regards to changing the ratios: if people keep voting identically (base 134/50/48). it's going to be 17 months total, (so 14 months from now) that Pandora's box wins a vote. more for the pokemon adventure. if pokemon was at 40 votes (for ease of math), it'd take 24 months, so we'd be getting one update every 2 years. in practice, this are such long periods of time, that I would expect the votes for the un-updated stories to shrink, further delaying updates of less popular stories. I'd suggest one of three things (in replies:
