Awesome packaging of Rally Racer homebrew

[+Karl G]

41 minutes ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

I hope the organizers make transparent which measure have been taken.

Yeah; me too. I know it's probably not a fun topic to address, but the cat is already out of the bag with what has already been revealed. I don't envy them the difficult choice they had to make, but would still ideally like to know how they decided to handle the situation. 

[Randolph Laterca]

2 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

 

What you are missing is, that the awards are not meant to be for the best advertising, most private friends and followers, most popular F***book and YouTube channels etc., but for the best GAMES. 

 

BTW: Nice collection you have there.

Thank you! ?

In fact, i agree with you Thomas, but the problem is that most of the candidates were distribuited by AtariAge wich is huge compared to other small producers.

Most of these games (or packages) had their quality well known among the collectors around the world, so whats the chance that a small company to compete in equality of conditions? Most of the people complaining about the result doesn't even known that this game or the game developer existed before the prize, so how could anyone to judge imparcially all the candidates?

Since most of this games came from this forum and most of the votes too, how can we "equalize" the situation? There's people making good games and boxes with small distribution around the world, so how could we be fair with everyone?

Unfortunatelly there's no easy soluction or even right or wrong answer to this question...
 

[Thomas Jentzsch]

You may have a point here. But what happened this year cannot be the solution.

 

Also, people had the same material (or even more) for Rally Racer available than for the other entries. So why would the popularity make a difference? Unless you assume that people in general do what many did for Rally Racer and vote with a mission. Looking at the results I strongly doubt this is the case.

 

So IMO Rally Racer had a fair chance from the beginning and did not need any extra measures to counter a non-existing disadvantage.

[+Karl G]

I'll note that the winner of the best 7800 game was one not published by AtariAge (Rikki and Vikki).

[+ZeroPage Homebrew]

Hi All!

 

After eliminating the votes cast by the accounts created by the same IP address, it did not change the rankings we announced yesterday in the 'Atari 2600: Best Packaging' category. There was also no indication found that any developer encouraged signups of multiple accounts or asked people for voting directly for their entry. The only AtariAge forum post found asking for direct votes for a game was this thread.

 

Changes for next year:

- There are already plans in the work to not allow 'new' accounts to participate in the voting process. What constitutes 'new' is still to be determined but the cutoff will be at minimum before the nominees are announced.

- There will be an explicit rule added that the creation of multiple accounts from the same IP address will not be counted.

- There will be a rule added that a post anywhere on the Internet from a developer asking for direct votes for their entry will disqualify their game.

- There will be a rule added that a post in the AtariAge forum asking for a direct vote for an entry will be deleted. Begging for votes is not necessary and the merits of each game should already be apparent from the entry itself. While I understand the enthusiasm fans of the game have, it's not desirable to have a flood of posts, the equivalent to lawn signs everywhere, each asking for people to vote for their game.

 

More rules beyond this may be added to mitigate ballot stuffing and e-begging for votes.

 

But beyond this minor hiccup in the process I hope everyone enjoyed the awards yesterday!

 

- James

[Albert]

10 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

There sure has to be some limitation for new accounts next year (e.g. age of account, number of posts, reputation points). But I doubt the poll plugin supports this out of the box. Then either the plugin will have to be

updated or exchanged which for sure would cost quite some money. Or there will be a lot of extra work for the organizers to sort out the non-eligible votes manually. And I am not sure if that is even possible.

Anything is possible given enough time and money.  I did pay someone to update the polls this year so the results would be hidden while the polls were still open.  I will pay that same someone to modify the poll system to allow that only members registered before the poll was created can vote (or better still, include the ability to set an arbitrary cutoff date that's a bit before the polling opens).  Further restrictions could be applied, but I don't want to be draconian as far as this goes.

 

I did validate everyone who registered where the accounts weren't obviously duplicate accounts or coming in through a VPN/proxy.  There are surely shill votes that were cast before I caught on to what was going on.  As I was on vacation, I really didn't have a lot of time to fidget with this at the time, and I'm quite unhappy that people took it upon themselves to bolster the votes for a game that likely didn't need the additional help to win the category.  ZeroPage Homebrew and I will discuss what measures we feel we need to put into place for next year's voting to try and mitigate behavior of this nature.

 

 ..Al

[+ZeroPage Homebrew]

4 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

IMO one should not change the rules in hindsight. And since Leandro didn't want to manipulate the voting, disqualifying him seems not fair. I hope the organizers make transparent which measure have been taken. It seems like only the most obvious votes from multiple accounts have been removed.

I agree, changing the rules midstream is never a good thing and should be avoided at all costs. Disqualifying an entry for reasons outside of the control of the developer is also not an option because it could lead to the weaponization of a rule to eliminate the competition.

 

- James

[ZilchSr]

Just my personal opinion ... from an avid fan of all things Atari 2600, and particularly for homebrew and homebrew developers ...

 

No negative manifestations = no disincentive to engage in bad behavior. The entire community suffer, including and especially the developer that received the benefit who will now suffer a reduced reputation (deserved or not) whose award is now and will forever be tainted in the eyes of any objective observer.

 

Negative manifestations = only the developer that received the benefit suffers, but they actually suffer less than they would with a tainted award that now means something close to nothing to the objective observer. I own a couple of dozen Atari 2600 homebrews, and can say for a fact that because of this situation, if the entry isn't DQ'ed or voluntarily forfeited by the developer, I will never spend my money on any title released by anyone from that entity and will go out of my way to persuade others not to as well. Their name will become the stain. Something tells me that I'm not the only one with this philosophy.

 

As far as I can see it, the only way for this developer to salvage any semblance of dignity would be to voluntarily rescind their award, whether the portion of the ballot stuffing that was actually caught had an effect on the result or not. Should that happen, I may just consider buying a copy of their games.

Edited February 5, 2020 by ZilchSr

[+KaeruYojimbo]

18 hours ago, ZilchSr said:

whether the portion of the ballot stuffing that was actually caught had an effect on the result or not

Looking at the results, it seems like there's a pretty good chance Rally Racer would have won even without the ballot stuffing. If that is the case, it means the people responsible tainted More Work's win for no reason which, in my mind anyway, makes it even worse.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

41 minutes ago, KaeruYojimbo said:

Looking at the results, it seems like there's a pretty good chance Rally Racer would have won even without the ballot stuffing. If that is the case, it means the people responsible tainted More Work's win for no reason which, in my mind anyway, makes it even worse.

It could be that the current number represents the real result or is e.g. 10 times higher than that. I guess we will never find out.

[karakenio]

On 1/27/2020 at 9:23 PM, ZeroPage Homebrew said:

 

I hope you will vote in all of the categories, there are various ways you can find out about all the games nominated.

1) We have provided binaries for every game that had one publicly available (about 95%+ of them) that you can play on an emulator. These links are below each of the polls, on the same line as the link to pictures. Here they are again for you:

 

Nominations Downloads:

Atari 2600 Completed, Atari 2600 WIP, Atari 2600 Packaging, Atari 7800 Completed, Atari 8bit/5200 Completed

2) You can watch the four part series of videos that we streamed on ZeroPage Homebrew, where we play through every single game on the nomination list.

or

3) You can watch videos of other people playing each of the games on YouTube.

 

You still have about 18 hours left to vote, get out there and play some games and have fun!

 

- James

Hey man, thanks for the feedback. I'm just seeing this now... =/