Posts Tagged ‘changes’

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.

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!