DFD: Ultimate Smackdown - Prelude

[Renegade]

Update: The Ultimate Smackdown has begun!

As we are nearing the end of the judgement period for Rounds 1 and 2 of our Daily Feature Deathmatch, it is time to prepare for our recently decided Ultimate Smackdown.

The situation, as we imagine it so far, will be as follows:

• You will be presented with a list of all survivors of the first two rounds, that is, all issues waiting to enter round 3.
  
• You will get to vote which issues should die immediately, without proceeding further in the DFD.
  
• In order to be counted, your votes will have to have a certain format; votes straying from this format will not be counted.
  Your votes also have to be contained in one post. If you wish to alter your votes, edit the previous post. Every user will only get to vote in one post, further votes in other posts will be ignored.
  
• In addition, you are encouraged to argue, both for and against issues. While, this time, we will strongly look at the number of people who want certain issues dead, a good argumentation can trump any number of votes - it can kill an issue no one else wanted dead, and it can save an issue everybody else wanted dead.
  This is an attempt to get rid of issues no one wants anyway, but if someone can convince us an issue should live no matter if the community at large wants it or not, then we will honor that.
  
• The developers will join the vote. We will vote like everybody else, and our votes will be counted like everybody else's. After all, we are part of the community as much as everyone else, and we, too, have preferences.
  
• The vote decision process is simple: We will count the number of unique voters in the thread, and if half or more of the participants voted to kill an issue, it dies.
  Remember there are no survival votes in this event. The only question is whether the majority of people wants an issue dead.
  
• However, there's always the little issue of reality: As much as you may want certain issues, some are simply not coming, and as much as you may hate certain issues, we might want to do them anyway.
  After all is said and done, we will look at the outcome of the vote, and we will veto decisions if we consider that necessary. If, for example, an issue survived that none of us has any intention of ever touching, then there's no point in letting it proceed through the DFD - if no one intends to code it, it will not exist, no matter how often it wins.
  
• Thus, in the end, we will all be left with a list of issues that at least more than half of the community doesn't completely hate, and which we as developers would at least code if the community really wanted them.
  
  Which is a vastly better basis for the following rounds than the crap selection we had before.
  
• Lastly, depending on how many issues get axed, we might shorten or even end the DFD after the event. Currently, with ten fights still to judge, we have 67 survivors ready to go, which is only two thirds of the projected number.
  The projected number for Round 4 was 50 issues, so if you kill off enough issues, we might just skip a round.
  And if you bring us down even further, there might not even be a need for an additional round.
  

Post format

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In the DFDs, each of you had his own formatting of his posts, some of you more ordered, some of you less.
In order to ensure this event gets sorted out quickly, we are mandating a certain format, designed to ease our work:

• List of issue IDs of the issues you want to kill, only numbers, no hash signs or other additions, no leading zeros.
  
• Horizontal rule
  
• Paragraphs for issues you want to argue about; issue ID on its own line, in bold, followed by the argumentation.
  

Example

Code:

42
436
1111
[hr]

[b]436[/b]
This issue is a waste of time, Visceroids aren't supposed to fly, and it violates the spirit of C&C to add that.

[b]69[/b]
This feature would increase Ares's appeal to female modders and should therefore be saved at all cost.

displayed as
---
42
436
1111

---

436
This issue is a waste of time, Visceroids aren't supposed to fly, and it violates the spirit of C&C to add that.

69
This feature would increase Ares's appeal to female modders and should therefore be saved at all cost.
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Be aware that we will copy the issue ID lists as they are and have a computer count the votes. If your votes are not marked up correctly, the computer will not recognize them.

We will search the paragraph headers to determine which issues have additional argumentations. If your header does not have the described look, it will be ignored, and your argumentation will never be read.

This may sound draconian, but given that we'll be looking at something like 70 issues, and potentially a dozen voters, we could, theoretically, end up with hundreds of votes and thousands of lines of argumentation.
We most certainly don't intend to play scavenger hunt for opinions in that volume of data.
Even if we don't get that much data, standardization will make it much easier and quicker to parse.

With that all being said, are there any further questions or suggestions?