RPG Codex Game of the Year 2015 - VOTING HAS BEGUN [AUTISM ALERT]

[The Nameless Pun]

Are votes being collected in this thread? If so, my top 5:
RPG Codex 2015 GOTY
1. Age of Decadence
2. Underrail
3. N/A
4. Serpent in the Staglands
5. PoE

Top Tacticool
N/A

Best Remaster / Translation / Console Port
Divinity: Original Sin - Enhanced Editon

N/A was a very good game indeed, well deserved third spot on the list.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Neither 4 nor 5 deserve the 3 points.

 

[The Nameless Pun]

Neither 4 nor 5 deserve the 3 points.

O_o how dare you? Anyway, how does it work? 3 points for every game in the list?

 

[Cowboy Moment]

toro

Limiting votes by reg date would require us to make people vote by posting on a thread, then manually input the results into excel. This is absolutely impractical - for reference, last year we had almost 1300 votes.
And I do think it's nice to have such a large number of voters, including our armies of lurkers, instead of just the ~100 characters of our little RPG sitcom.

Vote extraction from a thread could be automated, though it can still be a headache, mainly due to typos and and other syntactic issues. Simplest way to enforce the account requirement would be to run the poll through XenForo's built-in polling functionality, and then have Taluntain send you the results after dumping them directly from the database.

Also, if lurkers want to vote, they should create accounts in order to do so. I'd prefer votes to be public in general, not being able to ridicule others for their shitty taste runs against the core values of Codexia in my humble opinion.

 

[felipepepe]

I tried automatic vote extraction in the Top 72 RPGs vote thread, didn't work at all. There's so many ways to write games like Baldur's Gate II - bg2, BGII, Baldur's Gate 2, Baldur Gate 2, etc...

 

[V_K]

Well, you could always put a disclaimer that the title should be spelled exactly as in the voting list and whoever does not is the only one to blame his vote won't be counted.
Anyone who's too stupid to follow simple instructions doesn't deserve to vote anyway.

 

[Xzylvador]

Anyone who's too stupid to follow simple instructions doesn't deserve to vote anyway.

Judging by the massive butthurt from people not being able to follow simple instructions (womun teld me furst right an den at crosroad straight an den I lose my way, game is too hard with no map! duuurh). Excluding said people from voting would catapult UnderRail to the best RPG in codex history.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

I tried automatic vote extraction in the Top 72 RPGs vote thread, didn't work at all. There's so many ways to write games like Baldur's Gate II - bg2, BGII, Baldur's Gate 2, Baldur Gate 2, etc...

That's actually not that big of a problem. First, a lot of variation can be removed by applying some simple input sanitation - removing anything that's not a letter or number, converting to lowercase, and so on. Then, what you do is, after the voting is closed, you run your script over the results, but have it print out all the unique game identifiers instead of counting votes, and then manually include every option you're missing. It's not that much work to do this, certainly less than inputting votes manually, and you can probably cover more than half of the spectrum through common sense guesses before you even start.

 

[cvv]

So no Director's Cuts or Enhanced Editions in the main cathegory huh? I get it, I guess.

On the other hand it makes you wonder what's the point of voting for the "da best gaim of the year" in this day and age. The traditional lines between a game in development and a Gold release got so blurred by now there are hardly any left. Games like Darkest Dungeon are in virtually continuous development - version 0.9 yesterday, 1.0 today, 1.1 tomorrow and 1.2 the day after that. It was officially "released" on the 19th January but technically speaking nothing particularly noteworthy happened on that day and the development goes on - 6 new builds since the "release" day, not counting hotfixes.

Far as I see it we need a brilliant new ranking system for our brave new world.

 

[Perkel]

So no Director's Cuts or Enhanced Editions in the main cathegory huh? I get it, I guess.

On the other hand it makes you wonder what's the point of voting for the "da best gaim of the year" in this day and age. The traditional lines between a game in development and a Gold release got so blurred by now there are hardly any left. Games like Darkest Dungeon are in virtually continuous development - version 0.9 yesterday, 1.0 today, 1.1 tomorrow and 1.2 the day after that. It was officially "released" on the 19th January but technically speaking nothing particularly noteworthy happened on that day and the development goes on - 6 new builds since the "release" day, not counting hotfixes.

Far as I see it we need a brilliant new ranking system for our brave new world.

Release is release. No one cares if game will be patched or upgraded with content later on.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

I care, playing an unfinished feature-incomplete bug ridden game on release date when its almost guaranteed that you can get a much superior version later - and probably at a huge discount at that - seems silly. I usually play games with several months, often years of delay.

 

[Perkel]

I care, playing an unfinished feature-incomplete bug ridden game on release date when its almost guaranteed that you can get a much superior version later - and probably at a huge discount at that - seems silly. I usually play games with several months, often years of delay.

So which version you should review ? 1.01 ? 1.30 ? 1.60 ? 2.0 ? 3.0 ? With expansion ? With second one ?

 

[jagged-jimmy]

So will there be an official vote thread? Or is this already it? It's february already. Or did i miss it?

 

[felipepepe]

I'll organize the appropriate voting method & begin this on Tuesday, most likely. Run it for 2 weeks, see how it goes.

 

[SquidLord]

Don't we need to have a vote on how to count the vote?

 

[toro]

However if you decide to go with the solution above then a slight improvement looks like this:
Step 1. m = minimum number of votes, compute game scores.
Step 2. m = minimum number of votes for the 25th game from the previous calculation, compute new game scores.
Step 3. codex drama

Ok, this sounds autistic yet doable.

I thought about it a little bit more and I have to say that my proposal is retarded - the thing is: the 25th game can have any number of votes (from 7 or 906).

However your proposal has the same problem (think about it) which makes both of them quite unusable. I'm referring to this:

The m issue is more complicated. I'd rather have a system that's simple & declared upfront. This year we'll also have +50 games being voted, so I'd say something like m = minimum number of votes in the top most voted 25 games. For reference, in the last edition that would have been 133.

I think the algorithm works like this:
- If m is the minimal number of votes then the games with lower number of votes will be heavily favored because the algorithm will equate a vote for a low voted game with multiple votes for a high voted game. Therefore many votes for a highly voted game will simply be lost.
- Increasing m until it will reach the hypothetical real m will decrease the advantage for the low voted games and it would increase the score accuracy for the high voted game.
- Increasing m over the hypothetical real m will start favoring the high voted games because for low voted games the algorithm will consider the average score as default for the non-existing votes therefore pulling the overall game score towards the average score.

The most simple solution would be to select m so that an equal number of games are favored and disfavored. It basically means that m is equal to the number of votes for the game found exactly in the middle of the game list sorted by the number of votes.
For example: For 2014, that number would be 118 and it would belong to Final Fantasy XIII-2. I would prefer the results for m=119 but many of the codex would complain.

This will provide some results however they will not be correct because we cannot say how much a game is favored or disfavored therefore we cannot say anything qualitatively about the final ranking.
Perhaps there are more low voted games in the sample therefore the algorithm will favor low voted games, perhaps there are more high voted games in the sample and then the algorithm will favor high voted games.

 

[toro]

Don't we need to have a vote on how to count the vote?

That was a joke.

 

[toro]

felipepepe

As I said in my previous post: if you want to have a somewhat accurate ranking therefore you need a way to measure how distorted the results are.

You will probably not like this but here is my proposal.

For example: For 2014 we know that DOS has the most votes (906) but we also know that the ranking for DOS is the most skewed for m=7 therefore we have the distortion reference factor r = 906/7 = 129.4285714285714 which represents 100% of distortion.

Now, for each m we compute the distortion percentage for each game in relation to the reference described above: (number of votes / m) / r . This will produce a distortion percentage between 0 and 1 (or 0-100% versus the maximum distortion possible).

As you can see above: distortion percentage will decrease while m is increasing.

Anyway the next step was to compute the average distortion percentage for the entire sample (look below).

All these computations will not give us the correct m but they could help up identify an adequate m.

And based on the data above and considering that we cannot increase m forever (it will skew the rating for low voted games): I can say that any m value between 27 and 39 would bring results more accurate than m = 7.

In other words, if you want an easy and upfront defined criteria then you can say: m will be equal to the number of votes which will provide average distortion under 5% (m=30) or m will be equal to the number of votes which will provide average distortion gain under 3 decimals (m=39).




Just to be clear: I don't assume that my method is perfect or the only one. In fact I know that for a complete solution you have to use two distortion factors: one for low voted games and one for high voted game. But I cannot be bothered to design one method because I have doubts you will accept even this one (which is much simpler).
However considering that there is no way to obtain perfect results (some distortion will always be present) I think is acceptable if you use one the criteria defined above. It might not be the perfect solution but they really can help you decide on selecting an adequate m.

Anyway, this is my last input on this topic. Maybe I used the wrong tone several times and I apologize.
Wasteland 2 and Legend of Grimrock 2 were clearly disadvantaged last year. Shouldn't we try to avoid the same situation? *Some morons only see my sublime butthurt but the fact it: it happened not because I did not vote for them but because of the methodology.
I don't think I'm unreasonable about this considering that you do have the means to improve the methodology. Use them.

 

[Goral]

I'll organize the appropriate voting method & begin this on Tuesday, most likely. Run it for 2 weeks, see how it goes.

Go with Cowboy Moment 's suggestion please, I'm sure he will be willing to help you out. Votes should be public and available to registered users only, this is RPG Codex Game of The Year after all. There are other polls for everyone and thanks to that things like Fallout 4 are high on such lists.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

There are other polls for everyone and thanks to that things like Fallout 4 are high on such lists.

Sure. Never forget.

 

[Jaesun]

The hall of shame...

 

[Multiple Sarcasm]

Are those actually Codexers? 'Cause it'd be a fun move on the part of its haters to sign up to the group and play shitty games for trollsies.
Sure, we have decliners here by the shovelful, but fuck man, FO4? Really?

 

[Lord Andre]

I don't much care about the voting system but if the results support it, I would like to shill again for the idea that AoD and Underrail be granted joint custody of the GOTY title. It's the gentleman thing to do.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

Are those actually Codexers? 'Cause it'd be a fun move on the part of its haters to sign up to the group and play shitty games for trollsies.
Sure, we have decliners here by the shovelful, but fuck man, FO4? Really?

Unfortunately, it seem so. Even a "distinguished gentleman" on the list

 

[felipepepe]

It's always the same thing, people have this weird belief that the TR00 CODEX is extremely hardcore and monocled, and only the filth from outside taints it...