Poll Results! (Patreon)
Content
Alright, folks! Sorry I didn't get these out a bit sooner, but tallying up the weighted votes for the monthly story poll always takes a bit of time. Time which I haven't had to spare for the last few days. Anyway, we actually have two polls to deal with here. I'm going to tackle the Poll About Polls first, as the results will influence the Monthly Poll...sort of. It didn't actually change the result this time, but it will show you how it will work going forward, at least!
The Polls About Polls
Thankfully, this poll had a solid enough turn out that I'm comfortable with making a final decision without any farther debate. For those of you who haven't been paying attention. The Poll About Polls was, well, about polls. Specifically, it was about how to handle the fact that one story keeps dominating every poll and not giving the chance for others to be updated.
No, I'm not just talking about One Piece - Halfway Broken.
While that story is the current dominant power in the polls, the same issue happened before Halfway Broken even existed with Can One Displaced Hero Save the Galaxy?. When Displaced Hero was still a poll story, it similarly dominated the polls, shutting out Eridium Dreams and Pandora's Box, despite both of those stories being around the same age. The Poll About Polls provided multiple options to try and balance things a bit better (or not!) and let people vote on what their preferred solution would be. You can read more details about what the possible solutions were in that poll's post. For now...
The exact numbers of the poll results are:
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Progressive Weighing: 47%
Switch Out an Automata Update: 30%
Keep them as they are: 22%
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Thanks to everyone who voted! The results told me quite a lot. First and foremost is that by far the majority of people (77%) want to see some sort of balancing system to give other stories a chance. That makes me confident that I won't see too much backlash for providing said balancing system :-p.
Secondly, of course, is the actual winner. The Progressive Weighing System means that any story not updated for at least 2 months will start getting bonuses to the vote totals. The first month (so month three after not getting an update) will be a +20% worth of votes. Each subsequent month it doesn't win will increase that by +10%. So, if a story loses despite the +20% boost, the next month it will get +30%. Then +40%, and so on, until it wins and resets. This doesn't make it certain that a story will win often. But it does make it virtually inevitable that it will win eventually if it has any support at all.
On that note, this month's poll will be the first time it's applied. I decided to go ahead and back-date the bonus, since Pandora's Box was updated in June. As such, it got a +30% to the October Poll. Which...didn't make it win. But I think you will see how it will help with closing the gap over time, without disrespecting the majority vote. Which was sort of the point ;-). Note that, as A Very Confuse Pokemon Adventure was updated this month, it won't get a bonus just yet. However, it did do well enough (nearly tying with Pandora's Box before the boost) that it will be getting a permanent slot in the voting poll. With this new system in place, I'm more willing to add stories permanently to the monthly voting, assuming they are popular.
October's Story Poll
Okay! Back to our regularly scheduled poll! As this is the first time the boost from the new Progressive Weighing System is in use, I'm still playing around with how to represent that. For now, it's represented with the extra percetage being in (+40%) like so. With a before and after with it. So Harry Potter: Pandora's Box becomes:
50(+30%)=65.
With the bolded total the effect vote count. Hopefully that makes sense...
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One Piece: Halfway Broken - 134
Harry Potter: Pandora's Box - 50(+30%) = 65
A Very Confused Pokemon Adventure - 48
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As you can see, One Piece: Halfway Broken still won by...well...a fair bit, honestly. However, I think you can also see by the fairly decent vote boost Pandora's Box got that the new weighing system should make it possible for the less popular stories to get updates. Given that even the boosted numbers were only half of Halfway Broken's votes, I'm unsure if my initial thoughts on boost numbers are sufficient. I may increase the size of the boost if the gap doesn't close. But for now, the initial 20% boost, followed by 10% increases is what I'm going with. We'll let a few months at those numbers go and see if it works out. If it doesn't, I might end up boosting it to an initial 30% then 15% more for each month. Or even 40/20. I'm determined to get this right, it's just going to take a bit of experimenting :-).
All of that said, One Piece - Halfway Broken will still be getting the update in October :-). We'll see how long it can hold off the other stories now that the new system is in place!