Posts Tagged ‘schedule’

Preliminaries to begin sooner

Monday, February 21st, 2011

Phase I of the Preliminary Period will now begin on Sunday, 27 February.

We extended the number of voting days from 6 to 8 in order to organize the arenas a little better. Our pool of Candidates this year is larger than in 2010 as well, so adding more days makes for better pacing of the 4 Rounds in Phase I. So Sunday will feature Groups 1 through 8. Tuesday will be Groups 9 through 16. And then on Thursday will be Round 2, beginning again with Groups 1 through 8.

The Charter will be appended, and our event calendar on the Rules FAQ has been updated.

We have not completed all of our character portraits (avatars), so they will be missing for the time being. They should be ready by this weekend and definitely by Sunday when the voting round begins.

The groupings for Phase I are also released. Candidates in each group will participate in a round-robin tournament of 1vs1vs1 matches. Points are earned for first and second place in each match. Group winners advance to the Regular Season while the remaining girls enter Phase II.

http://www.internationalsaimoe.com/contestants/preliminary.php

Voting rounds are now less than a week away!

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Posted in Administrative, Preseason | No Comments »

Winners’ Bracket 1 on Tuesday

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

Apologies for my last statement in the previous news entry. We do have matches on Tuesdays. I was still thinking of last year’s schedule when I wrote that we didn’t. So the next match starts at the usual time on Tuesday just like in Regular Season. We have three matches per week until the last week, which does have Tuesday off while we prepare for the Championship match.

Results of the Preliminary Round are out tonight! Congratulations to the 8 who advance. For the other 8, hope is not yet lost, for there is still a path to the Championship Round at the end of the Losers’ Bracket. The results page also has a new addition: by clicking on the globe icons next to each arena result, you can view a map of the world listing the vote distributions for each character by country.

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Posted in Postseason | No Comments »

Timer issues

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

For some reason this week, the timers on the website are not operating as they should be. Apologies for not discovering that the voting page for Sapphire 2 was left open until just recently. This won’t affect match results, since all ballots are timestamped, and we can easily crop all votes that came in after 1500 GMT.

I will work on resolving the timer issue so everything begins and ends at the proper time as they had been.

All events will stay on schedule.

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Posted in Administrative | No Comments »

Schedule Release

Friday, May 21st, 2010

Today we are releasing the regular season schedule for ISML 2010. It is currently available only in English; translations and other improvements are on the way.

We withheld the schedule at first in order to give more focus to each present match as it occurred. Last year we observed that some of our voting community were too focused on future matches, voting for reasons other than a Contestant being more moe than her opponent in a particular arena. Saimoe is still the top priority and goal of the tournament, and we try to preserve that every day.

After three Periods of releasing the schedule one match at a time, we came to additional observations. We took a lot of care devising our schedule for fairness, and as a result, it had a formulaic construction that some of our community were soon able to decipher. Fortunately, even with that knowledge available, we did not discover the same voting patterns that had impacted certain Rounds in ISML 2009.

We want to keep things exciting and fun for our community as a whole. We believe the schedule release will generate more interest and discussion in ISML without sacrificing match integrity. This is mostly thanks to our large and diverse (and still growing) community! Everybody’s participation keeps ISML balanced, and we couldn’t ask for more.

Reading the schedule is optional; if you would prefer to view matches one-by-one, continue watching the main page and voting page, as the “next match preview” will still be available. In addition to the schedule page, Contestant biographies will feature a schedule, but this will be hidden until you click on the link to view it.

If you lurked our forums, you may have noticed a sneak preview of the regular season schedule. A small discussion is available there if you want more information on this release or if you want to contribute your own comment or question. Visit http://www.internationalsaimoe.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=987.

We hope you enjoy the second half of the regular season; it has been exciting for me, and I look forward to more interesting results. Sapphire will start on Sunday!

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Posted in Administrative, Regular Season, Site-related | 1 Comment »

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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Posted in Administrative, Preseason | No Comments »

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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Posted in Administrative, Preseason, Site-related | No Comments »

Schedule calendar

Friday, January 1st, 2010

A calendar has been designed and placed on the Rules FAQ page. This should give you an outlook of future ISML matches this year. Starting from Preliminaries, we’ll have matches on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. They will begin at 1500 GMT and last for 24 hours.

Match results should be available 12 hours after the end of the match, which should be 0300 GMT on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Results will be posted on the front page.

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Posted in Site-related | No Comments »