Ravished in a Flash 2.0 - The Flash Fiction Tournament is Back

[Two Stews In a Pot]

The grass is always greener on the other side

Oh man, there's something that goes with this theme so well that I couldn't help myself! Doesn't matter if I win or lose the round, this story is getting posted

[Claire]

With a little more than 24 hours to go, two of the quarterfinal matches are currently tied:

• QF-2: @YellowSnowDotCom VS. @Painkiller
  • Obligado - 8 Points
  • Mens sana in corpore sano - 8 Points
• QF-3: @Two Stews In a Pot VS. @Alan Smithee
  • Tormented - 11 Points
  • The Princess and the Sexbot - 11 Points

Be the deciding vote that determines the winner!

[AdmiralPiet]

I would, but I maxed out my deciding power already.

This might have been discussed before, and I missed it, but I feel the voting via Reputation works for the all-vs-all rounds, less so for the one-vs-one
Would it maybe better to use a poll ?

[SoftGameHunter]

I would prefer the polls myself. The rating forces double-duty onto a single number. Express a preference and give an absolute rating. And in the first round there were mentions of changing the ratings after the round finished. To me this shows that one number can't specify two quantities.

It's not the end of the world, but I'd rather vote.

[Claire]

This might have been discussed before, and I missed it, but I feel the voting via Reputation works for the all-vs-all rounds, less so for the one-vs-one
Would it maybe better to use a poll ?

(summon: @SoftGameHunter )

So I can tell you what the reasoning behind using the rating system is:

1) Get users in the habit of using ratings. I think neither of you was here before the first tournament. Back then, we had trouble getting stories to a rating of 10 even. The forum launched on April 4. By May we had I think one or two stories with a rating of 11, that was it. We made a few changes to the UI and used ratings as the voting mechanism. For the semi-final in mid May, we got stories with ratings of 16 and 18 for the first time with the Milk Run story that recently became popular being one of those two.

Also, the ratings tend to make matches closer. One person can give one story a 3 rating and its competitor a 2 for example. I'm not saying that is better, just that it tends to produce closer outcomes which might make last minute turn arounds more likely. Just from an entertainment perspective, this could be preferable. Basically, in a rating system stories that convice a lot of readers have a advanage over polarizing stories that might do better in a poll.

2) Polls have the disadvantage that you would need one poll for each match. So for a full quarterfinal that's 4. And each poll needs its own topic. I think the single poll we use for the "normal" contests works because it is shown on the index page where it serves as a constant reminder to returning users that they haven't voted yet. So for a tournament with 1 vs 1 matches we would have to put as many polls on the index page as we have matches in a given round. That could be a bit much to put on the index page. On the other hand, it would be a good promotional tool to highlight clearly who is competing against who. What I'm 99% sure about though is this: If the polls are only accessible from within the topics they are attached to, you will lose a lot of participation.

So if we want to use polls for the next tournament, we could either create one discussion topic per match or hide these poll-topics from view and only make the polls visible on the index page. If we go with the former, that could help with getting out of isolated commentary for the individual stories and deliver a more match focused commentary? For the first tournament, I created separate topics no for each match but for each round. I even tried to liven things up a little with some cringe commentary.

Ravished in a Flash 1.0 - Quarterfinal

As you can see, that didn't resonate. But I would love to get something like that going.


But to summarize: Rating as the voting mechanism tends to produce closer matches and familiarizes users with the rating feature but it might be hard to track who competes against who at first glance. Polls might crowd the index page, but they make matchups very clear and serve as a constant reminder whether you've voted already or not and for whom. Using the necessary match-topics to create polls could help with furthering discussion around matches instead of just individual commentary on each story.


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What I'm personally less concerned about is that using the rating as a voting mechanism distorts the rating of stories. Not because it doesn't but because contests do that anyway. For example, I'm under no illusion that my story Dear Diary only made it to the Popular Stories board because of the extra attention from the contest. If I had published Dear Diary in isolation, I'd expect it to do about as well in terms of rating as my story Self-Defence maybe but it would be nowhere near close 30.

In the popular stories board, we currently have 15 stories. 5 long, 3 medium, 6 short and 1 flash. 8 of those are contest stories. So contest stories are clearly overrepresented compared to their share in all stories. Which means that contest stories are either on average vastly better than non-contest stories or their contest participation gives them extra attention, or both. To me it's clear that the difference in attention is the main issue here.

If you look deeper into the popular stories, then you will see that only 1 out of 5 long stories is a contest story - and that's the only one shot of the long stories. For the medium stories, 2 out of 3 are contest stories. For short stories it's 4 out of 6. For flash it's 1 out of 1.

That makes sense once you realize that reader attention is heavily focused on what's at the top of the board and that long multi-part stories published over a long period of time spend a lot of time there naturally compared to short stories that need to get pushed back there by reader comments.

To oversimplify this a bit: Long multi-part stories have it easier to make it to a rating of 30 without getting help. Short stories and flash fiction compensate for this disadvantage by getting promoted more often via contests.

So I would recommend to take a pragmatic posiion regarding the ratings. They are highly subjective anyway and attention is naturally skewed toward longer stories by how the forum software works. Giving flash fiction a little extra push by using ratings as the voting mechanism is nothing I would worry about. Seeing the low attenion flash fiction gets under normal circumstances I don't think this is such a bad thing.

[SoftGameHunter]

Every time I think I know who a particular competitor is, I find out I'm provably wrong! I don't know anything or anyone.

[Lucius]

With a little more than 24 hours to go, two of the quarterfinal matches are currently tied...

With a little more than 10 hours to go, the same match-ups are tied again.

• QF-2: @YellowSnowDotCom VS. @Painkiller
  • Obligado - 10 Points
  • Mens sana in corpore sano - 10 Points
• QF-3: @Two Stews In a Pot VS. @Alan Smithee
  • Tormented - 14 Points
  • The Princess and the Sexbot - 14 Points

It's up to you to decide!

[AdmiralPiet]

@Claire Alright, I see this has been thoroughly thought through.
You raise good points for the rating system in favor of polls.

[Claire]

@AdmiralPiet No, I'm absolutely for trying polls some time. Let's see what the forum is like when the next tournament comes up!

[Claire]

And we got our results for the quarterfinal!

Matches

• Theme: All By Myself
• QF-1: @Pumpernickel fucker VS. @MasterDebater
  • The Listening Post - 14 points
  • Home, sweet home - 10 points
• QF-2: @YellowSnowDotCom VS. @Painkiller
  • Obligado - 12 points
  • Mens sana in corpore sano - 11 points
• QF-3: @Two Stews In a Pot VS. @Alan Smithee
  • Tormented - 14 points
  • The Princess and the Sexbot - 14 points
• QF-4: @Ink Splotter VS. @Evil Twin Number 3
  • Conclusive Evidence - 12 points
  • Violets spring invasion - DNE

----

With these results in we have the following winners:

For QF1 @Pumpernickel fucker beats @MasterDebater 14 to 10, thus eliminating... @Blue from the tournament!

For QF2 @YellowSnowDotCom beats @Painkiller with a very close 12 to 11 score, thus eliminating... @Shocker from the tournament!

For QF3 we have our first ever tie between @Two Stews In a Pot and @Alan Smithee with a 14 to 14 score. According to our tiebreak rules, the story with more 3-point ratings advances to the next round in case of a tie. In this case, @Alan Smithee wins because of two 3-point ratings over @Two Stews In a Pot's single 3-point rating.

For QF4 @Evil Twin Number 3 sadly never finished their story. So @Ink Splotter is matched against the strongest of the three losers from the other three matches instead. That is @Two Stews In a Pot, making him the winner of the match with a 14 to 12 score thus eliminating... @AdmiralPiet from the tournament!



Advancing to the next round:

• @Pumpernickel fucker
• @YellowSnowDotCom
• @Alan Smithee
• @Two Stews In a Pot

Eliminated from the tournament:

• @MasterDebater, aka @Blue
• @Painkiller, aka @Shocker
• @Ink Splotter, aka @AdmiralPiet
• @Evil Twin Number 3, aka @DayDreamNights

A very big thank you to the contestants who leave the tournament after this round. You were great and those final scores were really close, most within one rating! And congratulations to our glorious winners!

As a reminder for our semi-finalists: You now have 4 days left to write a story for the theme:

The grass is always greener on the other side

I will soon post the new matches after assigning them at random. But I can aleady guarantee that I will not rematch @Two Stews In a Pot with @Alan Smithee after they already faced off in the quarterfinal.