By Crisu March 6th, 2010, under Preseason
With the close of Phase III, we are finished with the Preliminaries! Congratulations to our final six Contestants. Our 50-character roster is now full, and the Regular Season is ahead.
We’ll be taking a break for two weeks to [recuperate and] get everything set up for the kickoff on March 21. It shall be an exciting year, full of great matches and races for the necklaces and then the 16 spots for the postseason double-elimination tournament.
While you wait, please visit our forums and join in the Fantasy league among other discussions. Our IRC chatroom needs some new life, too…
More website updates to come throughout the break, too.
Tags: candidates, contestants, preliminaries
No Comments
By Crisu March 4th, 2010, under Preseason
First off, a thank you to zmjhgvn for his fourth donation of the year!
Round 1 is now over in Phase III; we’ve had to say farewell to several (56) Candidates. We wish them luck next year, and perhaps some of them may make an appearance in exhibition matches throughout the season.
In the final round tomorrow, we’ve grouped the remaining 42 Candidates into groups of 7 again. Except this time you may select only one (1) character from each group. The winner of each group will continue into the Regular Season while the rest will be sent home. This may be one of the most challenging matches yet!
Also we hope you have enjoyed the extra Seeding rounds this week. We discovered that we don’t quite have enough data yet on our current Contestants, so these extra matches have been a great help to us. The final round tomorrow will feature two Seeding arenas instead of one; we appreciate your help!
Tags: candidates, contestants, donations, elimination, preliminaries, seeding
No Comments
By Crisu February 27th, 2010, under Preseason
Congratulations to our 14 new Contestants! Our roster is nearly complete — only six more slots are left.
Phase III will begin on Sunday. The remaining Candidates have been placed into 14 groups of 7. Sunday will feature Groups 1-7 and Tuesday will feature Groups 8-14. You will be able to vote for up to two Candidates per group.
The top 3 winners in each group will advance to the second (and final) round on Thursday. Everybody else will be eliminated. Thursday’s round will consist of 6 groups of 7, and you will vote for just one Candidate in each group. The winners will be our final set of Contestants.
In addition to Phase III we need a little more seeding data for our 14 new Contestants. So the third and fourth round of Seeding will take place on Sunday and Tuesday in the form of an 8th arena on the ballot. Please vote for up to two Contestants in this arena as well. The data will help us write the schedule for the Regular Season.
Thanks for voting in ISML!
Tags: contestants, preliminaries, seeding
No Comments
By Crisu February 21st, 2010, under Administrative
If you voted for the first time in ISML today, you may have gotten this error:
“Insert error (IPVoteCount)”
This issue has been resolved. Your ballot was still recorded, but a typo in the script caused this message to show up in place of the “Thank you for voting” message. This is why you may have gotten the “This IP has already submitted a vote” message if you tried to submit your ballot a second time, because it was already recorded on the first try.
A different error that caused the voting form not to load in the first 4 minutes of the polling period was also fixed. It was a short enough period of time that we will not need to extend voting hours.
Thanks everyone for helping out and for your patience with the issue. 
Tags: errors, fixes, voting
No Comments
By Crisu February 18th, 2010, under Preseason
And that concludes the seeding tournament; thank you to everyone who voted and helped us collect data.
There are no winners or losers in this event, necessarily; the final rankings on the front page simply provide a good estimate of Contestant strength, and we will use this to set up the Regular Season schedule for all our Contestants once the Preliminary Period concludes.
Preliminaries Phase II begins tomorrow, so more ISML action is ahead.
This week, we also thank our latest donor from Russia, who would like to be known as |/◕‿‿◕|x/.
Tags: donations, scheduling, seeding
No Comments
By Crisu February 17th, 2010, under Site-related
Between matches, the voting arena now shows a preview for the next upcoming match.
Tags: layout, preview
No Comments
By Crisu February 16th, 2010, under Administrative, Site-related
Voters in the first 20 minutes or so of Seeding 2 experienced an error in the confirmation screen, which lit up the wrong character portraits after a ballot was submitted.
This was an error in the display only; your ballot was still recorded correctly as you intended on the voting screen. The code provided in the text boxes was still consistent with your votes.
Sorry for the confusion!
…And while I’m on the topic, Shana and Hinagiku will receive points equal to the highest % of votes received in this round by any one Contestant. Don’t worry too much if the final seeding results are not what you may have wanted; the purpose of this tournament is to give us a recent measure of relative Contestant strength, so we are able to build a balanced Regular Season schedule. The difference between, say, 1st and 5th place won’t be very large.
Thanks, everyone, for sticking with us through this. 
Tags: corrections, errors, seeding
No Comments
By Crisu February 14th, 2010, under Site-related
Third post of the night! 
Make sure you read all three news posts.
Some initial Phase II information is available on the preliminaries homepage. What you can view are the brackets (courtesy of melange) for Phase II’s single-elimination tournament starting Thursday. More tables will be available later in the week.
Despite the tournament being called “elimination,” the Candidates who do not win Phase II still get one last chance in Phase III.
All Phase I results have been moved to this page in the Statistics realm.
Finally we take a moment to recognize and thank our latest donors — Vincent Valentine Chang (a.k.a. Newgunden) from Taiwan, zmjhgvn from Germany (repeat donor), and shinz_zhu from Canada (repeat donor). Your generosity is amazing, and our appreciation shall grow to match it.
Tags: donations, layout, preliminaries, statistics
No Comments
By Crisu February 14th, 2010, under Administrative, Preseason
In addition to the seeding tournament mentioned in the previous news entry, the other changes to the Charter this weekend include a rewrite of Phase III and the resulting delay of the Regular Season by one week.
Some difficulty in programming the original Phase III proposal had arisen (though its organization was perhaps a little confusing or even overly ambitious), so we have devised an alternate plan for the final preliminary phase — one that still retains balance and gives our less fortunate Candidates a few final shots at making it into the Regular Season.
Instead of a free-for-all pool, we will organize the remaining (98) Candidates into groups again for Round 1, but it will be just one match in which you can vote for up to two girls per group/arena. The top 3 winners from each group (total of 42) advance to Round 2 where they are grouped again for a single match. Here is where we decide our final 6 Contestant slots.
The Phase III revision requires two extra days on the Preliminary schedule. And because we still need some preparation time for Regular Season, Aquamarine will be pushed back one week. The Regular Season will start on 21 March instead of 14 March. (Also, the last round of Phase II and the first round of Phase III won’t occur on the same day like on the old plan. Things will be much better separated.)
Thank you, everyone, for your understanding. There’s still a lot more excitement to come.
Tags: aquamarine, changes, charter, preliminaries, schedule
No Comments
