Archive for the ‘Preseason’ Category

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Preliminary Period over

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

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.

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Phase III under way

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

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!

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Phase II over

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

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!

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Archived featured matches, timer change

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

Older featured match previews and teasers can now be viewed at this page. Thanks to all those who contributed and continue to write for us!

Everyone in the ISML Community is invited to submit match descriptions for upcoming matches (in multiple languages as well). Selected writeups (which are usually all of them) get posted on the front page while voting takes place.

Want to write for us? Visit the forums to share what you have. During the Preliminary Period, we are accepting submissions on this thread.

In other news, today we have reduced the voting timer to 4 minutes (240 seconds). We hope for everyone’s continuing cooperation with the timer in our effort to collect legitimate ballots and to help ensure the accuracy of voting results.

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End of seeding

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

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/.

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Revised Phase III, Aquamarine delayed

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

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.

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Phase I concludes; seeding tournament next

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

Congratulations to Holo, Nadeko, Mei, Konata, Minatsu, Rika, Ami, Ruiko, and Mikoto for advancing to the Regular Season!

Now they join the rest of the Phase I winners in a game with our 16 auto-qualified Contestants — the seeding tournament is coming up next. We need some pre-ranking data prior to the Regular Season, so this two-day event will help us figure that out. In Round 1, you will see the 30 Contestants split into five groups. Your job is to vote for up to 2 of them. Yes, two.

Round 2 will be the same way but with some of the girls shuffled around — and still two votes maximum per group/arena. The data we get will help us build a fair and balanced Regular Season schedule.

Our charter has been amended to include information about the seeding tournament. There are also extra things to be noted in the next news post.

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First winners

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Congratulations to Mio, Nagi, Mafuyu, Kurimu, and Saber on their advancing to the Regular Season!

The Contestants page has been updated. The Phase I graph section of the preliminaries page has been updated, too, with a menu to view one group at a time (saving bandwidth as well as the length of the page).

Tomorrow is the last day of Phase I, where we will advance 9 more Candidates to the Regular Season.

The Seeding Tournament will start on Sunday. Rules will be properly added to the FAQ and Charter, soon, but I’ll give you an early heads-up of the process: the 14 Phase I winners plus the 16 auto-entrants will be organized into various groups. You will then vote for two (2) characters out of each group. Contestants gain points based on the results and then are shuffled again for the second (and last) day of the tournament. The important thing is that you vote for two girls instead of one; we’ll post another reminder as the event gets closer.

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Seeding tournament plus Updated voting form

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

We are announcing a seeding tournament to take place during the two previously blank days in our schedule this month. On 14 Feb and 16 Feb, we will have special matches involving our 16 automatically-qualified Contestants in order to determine seeding for the Regular Season.

The purpose of seeding is to balance and optimize the schedules of all our Contestants. Ranking the 34 that will make it via the preliminaries is easy, because we have a lot of recent match data. But the data is less clear for our 16 automatic entrants.

More details will be available next week. The FAQ page has been updated. The two matches will be used for seeding only; the results won’t impact the rest of prelims or any part of the Regular Season other than scheduling.

The second announcement is about some changes to the voting form. First, a 5-minute timer is now in place, meaning you are unable to submit your vote until 5 minutes have elapsed since you loaded the page. We have had a lot of issues with illegal, automated voting last week, so we are implementing this timer to curb such activity. The timer serves another positive purpose in keeping honest voters from accidentally rushing. Some of you have shared that you might have missed an arena while scrolling down the page too quickly … or forgetting to go back to an arena you skipped at first. The timer can help slow things down a bit to encourage you to review your ballot before submitting. While you can always send us an email to change your ballot if there are errors, making sure it’s correct the first time will help everyone. :)

Some people have also reported bugs with the abstain counter (i.e. it showing a negative number); I have adjusted the code, and the counter should be accurate now. Thanks for all the feedback on this issue.

And thank you, everyone, for your patience and cooperation overall! We’re committed to making sure that everybody plays fair in this tournament and that we have the most accurate results.

One last thing — we are grateful for SirWence, who is our most recent donor. Thank you!

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Round results, donation, voting notice

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

Day 2 results are now out. Points and graphs are updated. You can still view Day 1 results on the preliminaries page.

Today we received a second donation from zmjhgvn. Thanks so much for your continued generosity! Our annual fees are roughly $350 per year, so we’re making great progress.

We’re very glad that so many people are participating in our tournament, but we must remind everyone about the rules — most importantly: no cheating.

Specifically, you are allowed only one vote. But we have noticed cases like the above where the rules are clearly not being followed. Multivoting is very obvious and will never be tolerated. Voters will be banned for such abuse. It really doesn’t help your Candidate either.

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