Wednesday, May 25, 2011

The Saxxys

I've been spending quite a bit of time voting on The Saxxys, and I have this feeling that not many other people are.

When I start voting in a category, it is thick with ineligible videos. As I proceed, the number of videos that have nothing to do with TF2 thin out as I flag them.*  If my work is making a significant change in the proportion of ineligible videos, days after the beginning of the contest, there must be very few voters indeed.

I can't blame the people that don't vote, why bother voting between two videos which obviously aren't going to win anything? This is by far the most common pairing of videos, and it's a waste of time.

I'd guess about half the videos are ineligible. Half the remaining videos are so terrible there's no chance of winning.** Only about one percent of the videos are good enough I would suggest anyone watch them. If I were running the contest, I would change two things: I would allow the voter to flag both videos as ineligible, and I would have a button that would indicate a vote against a video. An average voter can recognize that a video's general crumminess means it's not going to win anything, even if it's technically appropriate for the category.  If a video got enough of these anti-votes, it'd be moved off the list of eligible nominees.

*this could be a psychological effect, which would mean that none of this is significant.
** A particularly annoying kind of video is a demoman sticky jumping to the enemy, and hitting them with the Ullapool Caber (see below). If it had never been done before, I could see the attraction. Instead of a novelty, it's become the most common thing in the contest.

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