I was searching and think with this thread I found an at least somewhat suitable already existing thread for what I wanted to point out in relation to the yearly awards, which would be a suggestion and a generalized concern related to it.
The suggestion:
Turning (in future) the eligible poll entries presenting statement (in the 1st post of a poll, usually made by Mothrayas representing the site staff with it, I think) which currently is in the form
''[platform or other award category] TASer/TASes of [year] candidates:'' (followed by a corresponding list of links),
and embedding it into a suitable statement or appeal (in a similar spirit as it already exists for when the audience is meant to watch a movie before giving it a yes/meh/no) alongside the lines of a statement like this:
''[platform or other award category] TASer/TASes of [year] candidates ([Please] [at least] [T]ake a look into the following eligible TASers/TASes below before voting!):'' (also followed by a corresponding list of links, of course).
I did at least talk with moozooh about this suggestion and he thinks placing such appeal would be a good idea, but is sceptical about it causing much of a change.
The hoped for effect:
People may be inclined to follow the appeal, expectedly resulting in fairer, open-minded and in this sense improved voting results.
Furthermore the hope would be that potential voters are directed in a more clear and visible manner to the actual body of work relevant for a given award category (and at least I don't think that this is pointed out well enough in the current formal poll statements), which may help avoiding potentially beforehand existing preconceptions on the side of voters from overriding or ignoring that body of work.
For example, such a preconception may consist in thinking or knowing that a given candidate (in the case of eligible TASers rather than TASes) generally throughout the year did a lot of TAS work, and a voter may be inclined to think or conclude from there that consequentially the TASer must have also done well and or a lot of TAS work for games of a given platform, despite these two things potentially being entirely disconnected, as e.g. a ''TASer of a given year award'' winner may at the same time not have made a single TAS for a given platform, which should be reason enough to understand that being TASer of a given year doesn't necessarily make one at the same time the [platform] TASer of the given year for every platform, nor is the latter question reducable to the former.
The generalized concern:
Voters may overlook (or even not care about) the list of corresponding linked TASers/TASes otherwise or see it just as plain repetition of the list of entries in the poll above, or (in the case of links to TASers, rather than TASes where the target page of the links should be unambiguous) might see and misinterpret it as just being links to User pages of the TASers on the site, rather than it being a list of specifically for the given award category tailored links that are meant to provide insightful material that constitutes the content of what the poll is about.
The concrete example concern that inspired the thought process:
I was checking out the SNES TASer of 2019 thread (
http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21502 ), looked through the corresponding TASes and submission texts, and was irritated about how it could be that the ratio of votes for and between nymx & EZGames69 was about 1:1 with a good amount of votes each. The reason for this is that for the given award category they share 1 TAS (Disney's Bonkers) and each have 1 own separate TAS relevant to the award category. In nymx's case that would be a TAS of Krusty's Super Fun House (
http://tasvideos.org/6173S.html ) which is roughly a 3 minutes improvement of a former TAS of the same game and author (
http://tasvideos.org/5863S.html ). And on EZGames69's side that is a TAS of The Incredible Hulk (
http://tasvideos.org/6441S.html ) that is a 14 frames improvement over a former TAS of the same game by Dooty (
http://tasvideos.org/3958S.html ) together with the almost 1-liner submission text stating the following with regards to the associated difficulty (from the submitter's perspective) of making these improvements:
[quote EZGames69]This is a 14 frame improvement to the previous publication, the improvements simply come from optimizing small sections that could easily be fixed.[/quote]
With that in mind - ''putting one and one together'' - my thought process was as follows. Provided the successful effective amount of work that was put into their shared TAS (that is the TAS of Disney's Bonkers) was not too far off from being balanced out between nymx and EZGames69 by being strongly on favour of EZGames69's side, then under this assumption together with an already rather leniently reduced assumption that I was putting on the side of potential voters, namely that voters may not check out all candidates, but would at least also look into candidates that share some TAS work with a given reference candidate from where a voter may start a comparison between the eligible candidates, that then any vote that EZGames69 got should have (from my perspective) possibly been a vote for nymx at least aswell (which could be the case since one can vote for multiple candidates at once), but even rather solely for nymx, which doesn't seem to correspond to the reality of this particular voting process.
Now, an alternative explanation that I can think of could be that voters may have checked out another initial reference candidate and then compared that to EZGames69's work within the award category and come to the conclusion that both candidates did about equally well and voted for both (and or more), but stopped a comparison at that point without or before nymx's work.
Separately from that, I could think of there being information about how much EZGames69 in comparison to nymx worked on their shared TAS which could explain how that situation came to be, but at least what I have heard during a discussion with nymx about this was:
[quote nymx]
NYMXToday at 6:29 AM
well, I can say this about bonkers. he wanted to submit before i was finished looking at everything. I had to stop him. and guess what???I found a skip that he didn't look into. So yeah.[/quote]
So, what do other TASVideos members think about this? I'd be curious about that.
