Ladle Fortress 2014 (Discussion)

[Titanoboa]

So, the vote has been opened and the choices are 4, 2, 1 or 0 seeds. I just want to make a quick note to you if you're deciding between 1 and 0 seeds: having 1 seed prevents any team to get knocked out by the former champions in the opening round, as the previous winner will have a bye. The only time the winners won't have a bye is when there are 16 (or 32) teams exactly, as there wouldn't be any byes. Also, it looks cool to always have the champions on the top of the brackets.

Follow your brain; your heart is a muscular organ that pumps blood throughout your body - don't expect it to give you any solid advice unrelated to blood.

[owned]

Here are the choices:

Seeding: 4 Seeds (current) | 2 Seeds | 1 Seed* | No Seeds

* The 1 Seed rule would guarantee a bye to the previous Ladle winner when a bye is available.

Highest number of votes wins. In case of a tie, no changes will be made. Note: changes to seeding will not take place until Ladle 78.

This is your post from the voting thread.

I may be misreading it, but it seems like you're saying that the the choice with the higher number of votes wins, even if the other ones outnumber that choice.
For example, if the votes are as follows:
4 seeds: 4
2 seeds: 3
1 seed: 3
No seeds: 3

Then 4 seeds would win, despite the fact that a majority of people want less than 4 seeds. I believe we had the same sort of discussion with the holing size votes, and the fair thing to do is to find the median among all votes and then let the final winner be on that median (that is, unless the median lies in between two choices, in that case I think the fairest thing to do would be to randomly choose one of the two choices). So for the example I gave, the median choice would be on 2 seeds so 2 seeds would be the winner.

However, I may be misunderstanding you and that's what you wanted to do from the start.

[sinewav]

Ok we will do the median if it looks like that situation will arise. I'll have to dig up the thread where we did this for a guideline.

[Jonathan]

Median, definitely. The mode will make some people ecstatic, but might well screw the majority over. Very sensitive to the distribution and noise as well. The average is sensitive to the distribution and outliers. In the most extreme case where voters aren't limited to a few choices, someone could vote for Graham's number and mess everything up. The median averts all of these problems by picking the center of the population, which is likely to satisfy a majority. If it doesn't, the best option is to split the tournament to satisfy different niches.