Voting in majors is currently defined by five categories that follow some sort of theme for said major; definitions by each BotBr may be different but they seem to all fall into roughly the same areas

The problem I have is that the overall score is judged by the average of these five categories; this isn't really indicative of how good a song is but more rather how it managed to fit into five separate categories not revealed until the end of submission period.

It would be nice to have a separate, perhaps bolded category labelled "overall", "goodness" or something along the lines, where the purpose is explicit - to rate how good the song is (akin to voting in an OHC, where 1 is a bad song and 7 is a great song)
You could then just leave the other five voting categories as their own standalone lists

just my $0.02

I was thinking about this earlier, I REALLY liked a couple songs but they only fit into one or two categories, but then there were some other songs that were -okay- but were a balance of all categories. It seems like the -okay- song would then be rated the same as the REALLY good song when it averages out. :/ (not okay)

If implemented (and I think it should) I think that maybe 'overall' in majors should be a larger range than 0-7 also. (maybe 0-14???) since there's SO many songs to vote on.
ex. You may like one a little more than the other but don't feel it deserves a whole extra point so you rate them the same (which isn't actually how you feel about it) so i dunno??? maybe a larger range would be okay or do half steps (0-7 but as 0, 0.5, 1, 1.5 etc)

Pick the vaguest rating of the 5 available and use that as an overall meter. Poo based rating headers usually are awarded that honour for me.

But I like the voting categories being silly and open to interpretation! ;(

@goto: but the vaguest of the five available is still not an "overall" category for judging how good the song was overall :(

@Slimey: yeah, so leave those (you'll still have the list of five categories), just add an overall rating so you can judge how good the song was overall instead of leaving it to the average of five random categories

I make sure the average of my votes aligns with how good the song was overall in my own subjective opinion.

But then you're not sticking with the category merits you've defined yourself, so just adding a separate category for overall rating and leaving the rest of the categories to the interpretation stuff would nicely solve that

But I do give bonus (and penalty) points depending on whether the song fit the respective category or not! :P

I know, carry on with that

I'm just saying that if this were added, you could simply devote each of the usual five categories purely to what you think their merits are

and leave the actual song rating to a separate category

since uploading file sites are blocked from work, paste this into your browser address bar!!! an EXAMPLE ( pls work superscripts i dont wanna be scrub )^; )

lol nvm even with superscripts it was TOO BIG

EDIT FOUND A PASTEBIN THAT WORKED
http://paste.ubuntu.com/7531564/
(paste the long text into your address bar for a mockup1!!!!)

ye

I guess while we're on the topic, I'm not at all a fan of the voting category system since it introduces a hidden "you have to fit 'x' theme all of a sudden" sort of thing. While I get that it's all subjective and such, it's going to distort folks' natural tendencies by railroading their thinking. I guarantee there's a lot of stuff like "well I really loved this track but it doesn't really fit 'flora fauna' so I guess I'm going to have to give it a 1" going on.

The oddness probably gets evened out given that a bunch of people vote and the categories kinda sound like they're spread apart in terms of maybe-theme, so the actual effect prolly isn't nearly as big as the paranoid Xaserbrain thinks -- I just don't see the advantage to it, though that's just my own random opinion. :P

My own 'solution' to the 'problem' is to 'monovote', keeping all ratings for an entry in sync (I.e. All 6's, all 7's, etc.), except for Pants which is always a 7 except for critical fuggups because all true BotB entries deserve the pants. :D

I <3 Xaser's post

If we were to have a "monovote", I would think the 1-7 rating should be increased to 1-35, cause, you know, averages.
I don't really have much else to add to the topic tbh, but that's one thing that came to my mind.

this is entirely because you are coaxed to believe there are five distinct categories. adding an "overall" category will increase that number to six and further manifest the central limit theorem

just assume you are giving a score between 5 - 35, vote 1 on all "five" categories and increase your score from the top, and do not increase the score on any category unless its preceding category is given 7

or make a randomizer that takes an integer in [5,35] and returns five integers in [1,7] that sum up to that number

there are five distinct categories

they all get separate awards and everything

there are five syntactically identical categories bearing different const names

if "overall" is a small deviation from the average of the "five" existing categories, it will not affect the ranking in ways that make this category a necessary addition; if it depends on existing categories inversely then it simply serves as another vote-balancing category that practically puts it on the same situation as thrm; but if "overall" varies independently from the "five" existing categories then it should not even be called "overall" as the implementation of "overall" as a monte carlo method defeats its very purpose as being the average of the existing categories

the act of adjusting votes on individual categories is by itself approximating the qualitative average of various aspects of a song, with the quantitative average of these votes as the arithmetic mean of samples on a linearly interpolated interval; this is why if one votes 1 on a category but they think 5 should be the average score, they will increase the scores on other categories from a total of about 20 by 4, so as to approach a full sum of 25 points

We decide to assign them properties based on their names and it so happens that our assignments are mainly coherent with one another

If you're suggesting that the categories are completely worthless then why haven't we already abandoned that system

that is for the same reason why we don't have 3 voting categories instead, or 8, or 255, or over 9000

the set of voting categories is simply iterated through; the only part of implementation that needs to change with voting categories is graphical layout, not the semantic content of the const strings associated with these categories

[27/05/2014 23:57:00] Jack Harrington: HertzDevil can you boil "the set of voting categories is simply iterated through; the only part of implementation that needs to change with voting categories is graphical layout, not the semantic content of the const strings associated with these categories" into a simpler phrasing
[27/05/2014 23:57:14] Jack Harrington: I understand that something should happen to the names of the voting categories
[27/05/2014 23:57:17] Jack Harrington: I can't understand what
[27/05/2014 23:59:44] HertzDevil: the names of the individual categories are irrelevant to the implementation of botb's voting system
[00:00:23] Jack Harrington: They affect it, however, and my suggestion is merely assuming that we are to keep the current categories as they are (due to sentimential value or whatever)
[00:00:33] Jack Harrington: If your point undermines that, however, you can develop that however you wish
[00:00:36] HertzDevil: from the logical perspective adding a category named "overall" is the same as renaming an existing category into "overall"
[00:01:01] HertzDevil: and the same as removing all existing categories and using only ome category named "overall"
[00:01:04] Jack Harrington: People attach sentimential value to having the five categories because they apparently "are a part of BotB culture"
[00:01:27 | Edited 00:01:33] Jack Harrington: What's your proposal in more solid terms
[00:02:25] HertzDevil: thus equally they can attach null sentimental value
[00:03:11] Jack Harrington: So you're arguing for something that you haven't stated
[00:03:17] Jack Harrington: I don't get it
[00:03:23] Jack Harrington: What exactly do you want to happen if something is to change
[00:03:49] Jack Harrington: or is this just a cynical observation that if this happens, sentimential value is going to fuck it up and we'll end up with a skewed voting system anyway
[00:06:47] HertzDevil: there are not "the five categories"
[00:07:17] HertzDevil: only five syntacticlally indistinct categories with const names not bound to their implementation
[00:07:42] Jack Harrington: Alright I'm going to try asking a different way
[00:08:04] Jack Harrington: Do you believe such a system is fundamentally unsound when regarding a major music compo in which there is not meant to be a set theme apart from the technical limits
[00:08:09] Jack Harrington: i.e. formats
[00:09:14] HertzDevil: formats are also iterated through
[00:09:33] ıpı: ............................................................................................................................................................................................................
[00:09:42] Jack Harrington: The formats are irrelevant since the music created within them are generally accepted to be at "a certain level"
[00:09:57] Jack Harrington: Do you believe the voting system is currently unsound with regards to how submitting entries works
[00:10:15] Dozzyrok: ......... Hi
[00:10:17] Jack Harrington: Five categories with sentimential values arbitrarily (and somewhat cohesively) attached to them
[00:10:26] Jack Harrington: And if you do believe that is unsound, what would you do to change that
[00:10:39] HertzDevil: my proposal is to add a centralized voting page akin to that of fcm that allows sorting of all voting categories and the total score because apparently certain people feel the need to evaluate how and why they believe voting 1 is more frequent or less frequent than voting 7
[00:11:42] Jack Harrington: So in essentiality to de-anonymize the scores as they are given
[00:11:52] Jack Harrington: Or is this per-person
[00:12:09] HertzDevil: both can work
[00:12:14] Jack Harrington: Hm
[00:13:19] HertzDevil: but if the categories are anonymized, then there should not have been any numerical difference between having one category and having five categories
[00:13:34] Jack Harrington: Either way, your idea is a slant/tangent to mine, because I more or less regard the fact that voting [as it currently is] is skewed by the sentimential values attached - wherein the sentimential values are regarded as part of "BotB culture" and not to be changed, so a sixth, explicit category shall be added
[00:14:26] Jack Harrington: Your idea seems to more or less say "The five categories are irrelevant and logically can be replaced by anything, so why not simply rejog it so you can see what you're doing and let you decide whether or not to pump more points into X or detract from Y"
[00:15:12] HertzDevil: such value attached to "overall" is "statistically tolerable deviation from the numerical weighted average of the existing voting categories"
[00:15:50] Jack Harrington: Okay, yeah, I see your point now
[00:16:12] HertzDevil: and the central limit theorem means entries near the mode of the vote distribution will be more fluctuated
[00:17:09] Jack Harrington: How would you tackle the issue that the sentimentiality attached to the current five voting categories (as they are) skews the averaged score, since entries are not meant to abide by a theme but the categories somewhat impose one
[00:17:56] Jack Harrington: For example: a mediocre, extremely relaxed, more atmospheric/natural song would score very high in flora fauna but generally be average otherwise
[00:18:12] HertzDevil: no
[00:18:28 | Edited 00:18:33] HertzDevil: the sentimental values are attached to the naming of these categories
[00:18:31 | Removed 00:18:35] Dozzyrok: This message has been removed.
[00:18:33] Jack Harrington: blah blah interpretation every botbr is different blabh labh bhalhbdljkfglkdjf
[00:19:16] Jack Harrington: Yes I mean the naming of the categories
[00:19:19] Jack Harrington: Not the categories themselves
[00:19:20] HertzDevil: not the implementation of the voting system
[00:19:41] Jack Harrington: akfhskdjfhkjh I'm an idiot
[00:20:11] HertzDevil: if one category should be added there must be a logically sound reason to use 6 categories instead of 5, and 6 categories instead of 7
[00:20:44] Jack Harrington: That is regarding my proposal
[00:20:50] Jack Harrington: Your proposal I'd assume would be completely different
[00:21:14] Jack Harrington: if you're at all of the opinion that the naming of the categories skews said scores in categories (and therefore overall)
[00:21:38] HertzDevil: because like i said one existing category can be renamed to "overall" as these names associated with categories are mutable depending on the host
[00:21:54] Jack Harrington: "I REALLY liked a couple songs but they only fit into one or two categories, but then there were some other songs that were -okay- but were a balance of all categories"
[00:22:21] Jack Harrington: This is an example of how the category names can skew voting
[00:22:28] Jack Harrington: I am asking what you would do if you were to solve it
[00:22:38] Jack Harrington: Not how you would criticize my method of solving it
[00:23:10] HertzDevil: you don't "solve" the central limit theorem
[00:23:32] Jack Harrington: So you're saying there's nothing that can be done to make voting fairer
[00:23:37] Jack Harrington: Anything is in bounds
[00:23:45] HertzDevil: lower bound only
[00:23:46] Jack Harrington: Changing categories, introducing a completely new system, whatever
[00:23:57] Jack Harrington: How would you personally implement voting to fit with BotB's 1-35 range
[00:24:02] Jack Harrington: within Majors
[00:24:15] HertzDevil: same implementation as ohc
[00:24:38] Jack Harrington: Averaging would be a bitch, though - people may well wish to rate something 27 but they're stuck between 25 and 30
[00:25:08] HertzDevil: there should not have been 5-35 to begin with
[00:25:39] Jack Harrington: I highly doubt altering the score range itself would be healthy for the rest of the site, though
[00:25:46] Jack Harrington: Okay, assuming you're forced to keep within 5-35 then
[00:25:51] Jack Harrington: Or 1-35
[00:26:05] Jack Harrington: tbh BotB can handle x <= 35
[00:26:22] Jack Harrington: I guess it's another "quirk that makes BotB culture"
[00:26:24] HertzDevil: then the central limit theorem comes into play
[00:26:51 | Edited 00:26:59] HertzDevil: where 100 people voting on 5 categories is same as 500 people voting on 1 category
[00:27:06] Jack Harrington: Theoretically
[00:27:29] Jack Harrington: Realistically the names of the categories are going to mess that bell curve up
[00:27:45] Jack Harrington: Let me draw a quick diagram of how Winter Chip IX went
[00:30:00] HertzDevil: adding another category will make the score distribution tend to the normal distribution more quickly
[00:30:12] Jack Harrington: http://puu.sh/944rC.png
[00:30:52] Jack Harrington: The bell curve assumes the most entries will place around 20, and that the distribution on either side of 20 will be even
[00:30:55] Jack Harrington: It is not
[00:30:56] HertzDevil: this is why theoretically the best solution is that only 0 or 1 can be voted
[00:31:23] HertzDevil: because it tends to the normal distribution at the slowest rate
[00:31:30] Jack Harrington: Do you have a fetish for the fucking central limit theorem or something
[00:32:26] HertzDevil: actually it works like
[00:32:58] HertzDevil: the expected value of the score difference between two entries becomes smaller
[00:32:59] Jack Harrington: okay okay okay i get it we're all slaves to probability
[00:35:34] HertzDevil: thus the ranking becomes less representative near the mode of the score distribution
[00:36:01] Jack Harrington: I'm surprised I didn't call the "irrelevancy" card fifty messages ago
[00:36:11] Jack Harrington: Anyway, thanks for your sociopathic/cynical input
[00:36:13] Jack Harrington: Good night now

Wow, too much reading. It is true that 'overall' already exists as the amalgamation of the 5 categories. It's more than sentimentality, it's what's in place already and quite a bear to adjust. In regards to the bell curve, a score below 20 means a few extra bad things for a track and I believe BotBrs are voting as such.

I don't want to dismiss this, nor can I fully explain how it all began. I do know that 5 categories + an overall gets displayed in 6 boxes on the sluts pages. Any multi-format battle has an even number of battles just to make sure every row of slut boxes is a pair. That's an aesthetic choice I made 9 years ago. I'm rather sure that the five categories existed since the first 'BotB' remix battle which predated the site by 2 years. "Shit in Pants" award is the only one I can remember, but I bet I have them listed somewhere.

I had more things to say but I got distracted whilst relaxing after work . . .

i liek the pantsplosion category because every mario pants deserves a 7 in pantsplosion

I'm more just complaining that the Overall isn't representative of purely how good the song was, but rather by an average of the five other categories - it's either voting by what you believe the categories' merits are (skewing the Overall) or voting what you believe to be a fair Overall score (messing up the five categories).

The suggestion was just an addendum; I'm being quite pernickety here but I do believe that Overall isn't really judged well in theory.

I'd always interpreted the categories as relative to the song. (i.e. It's cool, but the fever could've been done better, so 4). That way, most of the time, the scores are still somewhat "steady".

Also, "pantsplosion" I also pretty much interpret as "overall".