ROTY advertisement fairness

[Darren Grey]

Indeed.  ToME has played a significant part in inspiring me to improve my own games immensely, and has had a knock-on effect on other roguelikes.  I know much of the push for ADOM to improve in both interface and mechanics has been due to the general community feeling of "roguelikes can do better", in no small part influenced by ToME.  We need to celebrate these top roguelikes to help the whole genre advance.

[guest509]

  ToME made me addicted to the click and move system. I can't hardly play any other way now. THANKS A LOT DARKGOD!!! :-)

  @Andrew - It seems many people disagree with you. Please don't get angry. I look forward to your poll every year and I don't want you quitting it over all this fuss. I guess most of us think of your poll as a popularity/beauty contest, so have little issue with a wide open nature. I find it just a little odd that people think they have a say in how you run it, but that just goes to show how important it is to the community.

  So please keep running it. K? 

[DarkGod]

  ToME made me addicted to the click and move system. I can't hardly play any other way now. THANKS A LOT DARKGOD!!! :-)

AHAH !!!! My evil plan of world conquest unfolds!

[andrewdoull]

And I really do not understand why you did not, before the poll started, say "ToME has won enough so I have not included it in the list".
Do not tell me you had no idea it would have a chance to win again you knew it would be a contender. So why did you not?

I never thought about ToME while compiling this years poll. Because I had bigger issues to worry about, like compiling a comprehensive list and getting the Roguelike Radio episode recorded. And because I don't want to go down the path of excluding previous winners. And because, as I have said multiple times, I don't understand why you continue to push your community towards voting in a poll which you've already won twice.

You've still not answered that question.

[andrewdoull]

To put it bluntly, your poll is not fair. Why? because it happens on your blog, which is only visited by a small subset of RL players, which is made of for a good part of "hardcore" ones. So if none of the participating games would ask their players to come over it would not be a poll on RLs but a poll on RLs as seen by a small minority. How is that fair to games that try to bring in new players ?

Nothing in life is fair if you consider that criteria. As explained in the FAQ, the poll is not intended to be fair. It is intended to be interesting.

That you want it or not your poll has become the indicator of which roguelike is big, it is probably not what you want and I understand, thus my proposal by email (and that I also posted in a comment there http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.fr/2012/12/badly-worded-apology.html).
TLDR: Proposal is: make it the "new roguelike of the year poll"; only RLs whose first release is this year can participate. And if you truly want to help upcoming RLs, also forbid commercial ones as they have marketing power small indie ones do not. This would be fair and nice to help promote small new ones.

Because making it a "new roguelike of the year" completely ignores the multi-year release early development cycle of most roguelikes. And ignoring commercial games misses out one of the most interesting trends in roguelikes of recent times - since most hybrid roguelikes have also been commercial.

As for the ingame thing, as thomas biskup so eloquently put it: this is 2012 (well 2013 now!), you have to live with your time.

How is mailing in any way better ?

Except my concern is making the poll fair for the developers. Anyone in the community can put together a mailing list to let people know about the game. Only devs can actually code a feature to put a message in the game.

And in my opinion, there is a world of difference between reaching people who are actively engaged in the community enough to give you their email vs. anyone who happens to download the latest version of the game.

Can't they ? In 3 years I made ToME from scratch, along with a complete engine not tied to it, along with the server, along with the website and quite a few other side-things. And for 95% of it I was all alone on it. So either my nickname is true and I am a god, or, more realistically, you think lower than they are really worth of other devs. Hell quite a few RLs have devteams, DCSS, ADOM to name a few. Do not come telling me they can not implement such things.

Except (around) 62 of the games on the list have been developed in 7 days, not 3 years.

Take another example. Suppose libtcod ended up including a MotD and/or chat server function. I don't want to risk biasing developers towards choosing libtcod as a library just because of those features.

To finish, if you do not exclude previous winners next years but keep on a specific rule that is very obviously targeted at one game in particular, I would kindly ask you to not include ToME in the list. As for myself I would make a post making it clear why I requested as such.
Because, once again, my deepest belief is in transparency.

It is not very obviously targeted at one game. It is targeted at every other game on the list which doesn't have those features.

[andrewdoull]

Anyway, I've hopefully made my position pretty clear. I don't especially want to convince you of the merits of my argument, since that is pretty much impossible over electronic communication mechanisms, and just leads to massive ongoing flame wars.

There's a good 11 month gap between now and next year for this to cool down a little. As far as I see things there are three possible outcomes for next year (repeating what I've just said to Darren on Skype):

a) exclude all previous winners
b) ban me from the Internet for the duration of the poll
c) do nothing

I'm inclined to go with option b or c.

[Darren Grey]

Take another example. Suppose libtcod ended up including a MotD and/or chat server function. I don't want to risk biasing developers towards choosing libtcod as a library just because of those features.

Madness!  No one sets their features up because of the poll.  And hell, we've had server messages since Rogue itself!  DarkGod's the first one to actually utilise for promotion, but there's nothing to stop DCSS or Cataclysm or a range of others from doing the same via ssh.  Hell, you don't know if they did so already this year, or in previous years, and have no way of policing this.

Besides, if people modernise their roguelikes to win your poll that's a good thing.  The reason ToME won is because it has a big community, and the reason it has a big community is that it's a great game with modern features and well-designed gameplay.  Do you want to ban great gameplay because that makes games wins the polls and other games might feel forced to include such features as great gameplay?  Like I said, madness! 

It is not very obviously targeted at one game. It is targeted at every other game on the list which doesn't have those features.

Well that's not how it looks!  Interfering with the rules to get different results makes it look very much like you're trying to change the outcome of the poll.  And really, if you're going to ban promotion of the poll in-game you should really ban mass e-mails, because that's way worse in my opinion.  At least in-game you know the people are actually playing the game.  I severely doubt many of the 730 ADOM II votes are really from regular players (I moderate the ADOM and ADOM II forums and I can tell you it's very quiet on the ADOM II side).

But in my view any sort of promotion of the poll is good.  There's bound to be a few people looking down that list and wondering what's the fuss about Brogue or Dredmor or others and giving them a try.  This year's poll has been a remarkable success in terms of numbers, and that's not just for the top 2 - every game in the top 10 has gotten more votes than the winner 3 years ago.  A fantastic result for the roguelike community, in my opinion!  And a great turn-out for a clearly very popular poll - that's not something that you should be pulling any sort of negative spin from 

[kraflab]

Just saying,

I don't have a server and I've never really written any network code, but it would take me 5 minutes to implement a MoTD in-game.  This isn't the type of thing where someone would feel they have to take a week off of development to set it up.

[Krice]

it's a great game with modern features and well-designed gameplay.

Seriously? When did ToME become that? (well, it is updated rather frequently..)

[Ancient]

I like one thing very much about Ascii Dreams poll. The fact that it shows how large community it has. By community I am active folks who go out of their way to participate in the life of the game one way or another. Be it by joining a forum, giving praise by email, submitting YANIs, bug reports and whatnot or participating in development somehow. The blog post "The power of you" is still one of my favorites. It explains why it is viable to refer to 'community' as such subset.

For the largest games there is this mobilization of player which is neither bad nor unfair. Far from it! But this has an unfortunate side casualty. Other developers might get the idea they should also make a release close to beginning of the poll to carry a message to players effectively. I actually considered that carefully for a moment. However, PRIME is undergoing some bold changes at the moment and releasing it now would subject players to unusually high concentration of bugs. Hardly fun. Also, getting ten votes (placed one myself, so not eleven) without explicitly asking for it means a lot to me.

Andrew, kudos to you for taking a stab at preserving above cool quality of the poll. I suggest you go with the option c) and let ADOM and ToME compete as fiercely next year. That was fun to watch. Thomas Biskup has just started fulfilling his pledges and development promises so he can reasonably expect more voters in future. When ADOM finally fuses with NotEye, be afraid DarkGod! It has done wonders for PRIME. Imagine what it may give to ADOM. Most developers like me will probably not make special releases for December. It's not ARRP. So the effect you fear might not happen at all. I sincerely hope so!

[Darren Grey]

More release targets during the year for roguelike is always a good thing.  Most developers (you and me included) don't release often enough 

[Holsety]

I however also don't understand why DarkGod feels the need to continue to try to get the ToME community worked up about this poll. He's already won it twice. What does winning it again prove?

It proves that the winner for previous years is still a contestant?
To be honest, with all the updates and work that's gone into ToME...
I'm not huge fan of the entire package, but even I think it's RotY.
NOT my personal favorite, but certainly the most impressive regarding updates; bugfixes, balancing, a very nice set of features.

I've said it before on your site, but a lot of problems are with the concept of the poll itself.
Big communities are going to vote for 'their' game, major roguelikes are going to keep dominating (and if you keep winners in the pool, they're going to keep winning).

I never thought about ToME while compiling this years poll. Because I had bigger issues to worry about, like compiling a comprehensive list and getting the Roguelike Radio episode recorded. And because I don't want to go down the path of excluding previous winners. And because, as I have said multiple times, I don't understand why you continue to push your community towards voting in a poll which you've already won twice.

You've still not answered that question.

Now you're just being incomprehensible.
If a game had that many fans that it won a previous year, what in gods name would make the fans NOT vote for the  SAME game a following year?

ToME won the previous TWO YEARS, and "you never thought about it", but you did ooh and aah about whether or not Diablo 3 deserved to be on the list?
YOU EVEN PUT GOBLET GROTTO ON THE LIST.
You took all this time to debate and think about which not-even-close-to-a-fucking-roguelike you wanted to put on the list, but you didn't want to consider if maybe the structure of the poll was inherently flawed and the same game is going to keep winning it for the next 3 years unless you change something.

Or just accept it. That's fine too.

To put it bluntly, your poll is not fair. Why? because it happens on your blog, which is only visited by a small subset of RL players, which is made of for a good part of "hardcore" ones. So if none of the participating games would ask their players to come over it would not be a poll on RLs but a poll on RLs as seen by a small minority. How is that fair to games that try to bring in new players ?

Nothing in life is fair if you consider that criteria. As explained in the FAQ, the poll is not intended to be fair. It is intended to be interesting.

I have to agree fully with everything said by DarkGod in that tiny little quote.
I've talked about how communities affect the poll, and how it will always be heavily skewed towards games that have a dedicated forum. You have to take measures and change the structure of the poll, or just deal with it.
(Not that changing the structure to allow a special category for roguelikes with a dedicated community forum would fix anything; I believe it would turn into a forum population dickwaving contest, however that is very amusing to me nonetheless.)

"The poll is not intended to be fair" AND YET you raise a ruckus over something being...
not fair.

Because making it a "new roguelike of the year" completely ignores the multi-year release early development cycle of most roguelikes. And ignoring commercial games misses out one of the most interesting trends in roguelikes of recent times - since most hybrid roguelikes have also been commercial.

Huh? What? "multi-year release early development cycle of most roguelikes."?
Like what? The small updates most roguelikes add now and again (I'm so sorry, but I can't word this in a way that doesn't make me sound like a douche, devs.)?
Brogue, ToME, SIL and Halls of Mist are roguelikes where I've seen updates during the year adding major changes.
(Not sure if HoM and SIL actually count since their biggest impact is branching off of Angband and being a major variant upon release. Ie. their 'birth' is the biggest major impact.)
ADOM doesn't count. I'm not bending over backwards for a bugfix after a decade of silence.

[andrewdoull]

ToME won the previous TWO YEARS, and "you never thought about it", but you did ooh and aah about whether or not Diablo 3 deserved to be on the list?
YOU EVEN PUT GOBLET GROTTO ON THE LIST.
You took all this time to debate and think about which not-even-close-to-a-fucking-roguelike you wanted to put on the list, but you didn't want to consider if maybe the structure of the poll was inherently flawed and the same game is going to keep winning it for the next 3 years unless you change something.

If you could point to any statement by anyone involved in the weeks long thread that we had discussing the poll candidate list or the hour and a half Roguelike Radio episode with myself, Darren Grey and John Harris discussing the poll made where it would be 'obvious' that e.g. ToME 4 would have more than 3 times as many votes as any other game a day into the poll or get more than twice as many votes as it did last year, I'm all ears. (Darren edited this episode btw).

To put this into perspective, approximately 43% of all new voters this year in the poll voted for ToME4 (assuming everyone who voted last year voted this year). This may be a rebound from a lower percentage vote last year for ToME (23%, versus 32% this year, 39% the first year it won), but it is a huge swing.

I know the structure of the poll is inherently flawed. It's in the FAQ. There is no practical way to fix this short of removing games from consideration and you are delusional if you think there is.

To put it bluntly, your poll is not fair. Why? because it happens on your blog, which is only visited by a small subset of RL players, which is made of for a good part of "hardcore" ones. So if none of the participating games would ask their players to come over it would not be a poll on RLs but a poll on RLs as seen by a small minority. How is that fair to games that try to bring in new players ?

Nothing in life is fair if you consider that criteria. As explained in the FAQ, the poll is not intended to be fair. It is intended to be interesting.

I have to agree fully with everything said by DarkGod in that tiny little quote.
I've talked about how communities affect the poll, and how it will always be heavily skewed towards games that have a dedicated forum. You have to take measures and change the structure of the poll, or just deal with it.
(Not that changing the structure to allow a special category for roguelikes with a dedicated community forum would fix anything; I believe it would turn into a forum population dickwaving contest, however that is very amusing to me nonetheless.)

"The poll is not intended to be fair" AND YET you raise a ruckus over something being...
not fair.

You're missing the distinction between being not fair in general, and being an unfair distraction to development time.

[andrewdoull]

The blog post "The power of you" is still one of my favorites. It explains why it is viable to refer to 'community' as such subset.

Thanks for reminding me about this. Rereading it was a great blast from the past to a time when digg was relevant.

[tootboot]

I don't get what the big deal is, but on the other hand the results are less interesting if the same game wins every year.

That said, ToME does see quite a lot of development and polishing.  ADOM garnered quite a few votes and could possibly win next year if the tiles and music are finished by then.