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Which planet should we turn into a mission?

Cheron
17
33%
Excalbia
34
67%
User avatar
Director of First Edition
By MidnightLich (Charlie Plaine)
 - Director of First Edition
 -  
Prophet
#449687
Hi folks,

We had a tie for the winner, two entries with fifteen (15) votes each: Charon, from "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", and Excalbia from "The Savage Curtain." Here are the summaries of each option I posted in the previous thread:
Cheron ("Let That Be Your Last Battlefield")
Notable features: RACISM IS BAD, MKAY?
Likely personnel affiliations: [Fed] [NA]
There are no First Edition cards from this episode.
Excalbia ("The Savage Curtain")
Notable features: Excalbians, Battle of Good vs. Evil
Likely personnel affiliations: [Fed] [Kli] [NA] [Vul]
There are no First Edition cards from this episode.
Now it's time to crown a winner. Each of you may vote in this poll one time, and the option with the most votes will proceed to the next step. In the unlikely event of another tie, I will randomly determine a winner.

Voting is open for 24 hours, and then we'll continue with Step 3 (Special Abilities) on Tuesday.

-crp
User avatar
 
By Armus (Brian Sykes)
 - The Center of the Galaxy
 -  
Regent
Community Contributor
#449690
I'm confused. I thought the runoff would encompass 50% of the vote, which would have been a 4-way between Excalbia, Cheron, Neural, and Omega IV.

Otherwise I would have changed my second vote to Neural because it would have been a better choice than either of the above in my book and it was only one vote behind...

:?
User avatar
Director of First Edition
By MidnightLich (Charlie Plaine)
 - Director of First Edition
 -  
Prophet
#449692
Armus wrote:I'm confused. I thought the runoff would encompass 50% of the vote, which would have been a 4-way between Excalbia, Cheron, Neural, and Omega IV.

Otherwise I would have changed my second vote to Neural because it would have been a better choice than either of ther above in my book and it was only one vote behind...

:?
It was my understanding a runoff is between the top two options, if they are tied and not equal to at least 50.1%. Is it typical to have a runoff with more than two options? I'm happy to change it if I'm in the wrong.

-crp
User avatar
 
By Armus (Brian Sykes)
 - The Center of the Galaxy
 -  
Regent
Community Contributor
#449693
edgeofhearing wrote:
Armus wrote:Otherwise I would have changed my second vote to Neural because it would have been a better choice than either of ther above in my book and it was only one vote behind...
So, you're saying racism is good?
I'm saying Klingons in smithys are more fun than racism is bad.

Are you saying you don't like fun?

Why don't you like fun, Lucas?
User avatar
 
By Armus (Brian Sykes)
 - The Center of the Galaxy
 -  
Regent
Community Contributor
#449694
MidnightLich wrote:
Armus wrote:I'm confused. I thought the runoff would encompass 50% of the vote, which would have been a 4-way between Excalbia, Cheron, Neural, and Omega IV.

Otherwise I would have changed my second vote to Neural because it would have been a better choice than either of ther above in my book and it was only one vote behind...

:?
It was my understanding a runoff is between the top two options, if they are tied and not equal to at least 50.1%. Is it typical to have a runoff with more than two options? I'm happy to change it if I'm in the wrong.

-crp
No, rereading your post it's consistent with this result. I guess that's on me for not reading it right in the first place.

:(
User avatar
First Edition Rules Master
By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
 - First Edition Rules Master
 -  
Community Contributor
#449702
MidnightLich wrote:It was my understanding a runoff is between the top two options, if they are tied and not equal to at least 50.1%. Is it typical to have a runoff with more than two options? I'm happy to change it if I'm in the wrong.

-crp
*paging nobthehobbit paging nobthehobbit will nobthehobbit please report to the 1E Gameplay forum?*

There are lots of ways to run a multiballot election. Top-two runoffs are fairly good at reaching conclusions in a timely fashion, but fairly bad at ensuring that those conclusions reflect the true community consensus. In some cases, that's an acceptable tradeoff.

One thing I will suggest is that the 1E Department should consider adopting the approval ballot for Will of the Collective. I personally think approval voting is too vulnerable to tactical voting for use in elections to, say, government posts in contested partisan elections, but I think it would work really nicely in discerning community consensus (and compromise) in WOTC. And our current system, with a zillion candidates, no clear leaders, and a single top-two runoff, is even more vulnerable to tactical voting (see Armus's first comment in this thread), so it'd be no loss to move to the approval method.

I have more to say about runoffs, but it's off-topic so I've hidden it at the bottom.

Usually, the goal of a second (or third) ballot is to get a step closer to the Condorcet winner -- the candidate that would win the election if every candidate faced every other candidate in isolated head-to-head elections. In other words, you have subsequent ballots in order to ensure that the eventual winner is as close to the community's overall preference as possible.

You can do this like the U.S. political parties did before 1968, without artificially removing any candidates from the second ballot, and you just keep on voting and voting until somebody gets a majority of the vote. The benefit is that you know that the winner really is something quite close to the Condorcet winner. The cost is that you might go to four or five ballots... or you might deadlock and end up voting 103 times, as at the infamous Klanbake (or at a few hotly contested medieval papal conclaves).

Assuming simple majority rule (which was not in place at the Klanbake), you can force the voting to end after a certain number of rounds by eliminating candidates after each round. If you drop the bottom candidate after each round, you are guaranteed to have a result within n rounds, where n=the total number of candidates.

The problem is, if you drop too many candidates at a time (to reduce the number of rounds of voting), you may distort the result. For example, if the top two finishers are popular but polarizing, while the third-place finisher is not especially popular but is generally considered an acceptable compromise, dropping every option but the top-two finishers ensures that the extreme camps will battle it out for 50%+1 instead of settling on a broad compromise. But keeping the top three might have allowed the community to reach a solution satisfactory to the 80% not firmly committed to one of the two extremes. This is especially true in multi-candidate races without clear leaders or coalitions, like the election we just had -- sure, there's two leaders at the end, but no single candidate had more than 14% of the vote. Making those two (which, combined, had barely a quarter of the vote) the sole options in the runoff is highly likely to distort the outcome and produce a winner who would not have won under a more painstaking voting process.

But, of course, many communities don't have the time or resources to vote again and again until reaching a clear consensus winner. Voters themselves lose patience with endless balloting and reballoting, meaning less turnout in subsequent elections, which itself distorts the outcome. That's life. Even if you do vote again and again, the truth is that some elections don't have Condorcet winners, and Arrow's Impossibility Theorem proves it's literally impossible to divine the "true" community preference from any number of ballots in any form anyway. You've got to cut it off at some point.

You decided to cut it off at two ballots, with the second ballot a simple-majority runoff between the top two finishers of the first ballot. It's a perfectly reasonable decision. But it does mean the vote is less likely to reflect the truest version of the collective will.
User avatar
First Edition Rules Master
By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
 - First Edition Rules Master
 -  
Community Contributor
#449703
On-topic:
Armus wrote:Tell me again why Excalbia is losing?
Because I foresee a big dispute ten ballots from now about whether our personnel should have [Holo] or not and I dread it.

Cheron will give us a big dispute about Nemesis icons, I guess, but that seems easier.
User avatar
 
By winterflames (Derek Marlar)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#449717
BCSWowbagger wrote:On-topic:
Armus wrote:Tell me again why Excalbia is losing?
Because I foresee a big dispute ten ballots from now about whether our personnel should have [Holo] or not and I dread it.

Cheron will give us a big dispute about Nemesis icons, I guess, but that seems easier.
They are not holograms. They are excalbians in disguise. Or at least, that was my understanding of the episode.
User avatar
 
By Orbin (James Monsebroten)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#449724
winterflames wrote:
BCSWowbagger wrote:On-topic:
Armus wrote:Tell me again why Excalbia is losing?
Because I foresee a big dispute ten ballots from now about whether our personnel should have [Holo] or not and I dread it.

Cheron will give us a big dispute about Nemesis icons, I guess, but that seems easier.
They are not holograms. They are excalbians in disguise. Or at least, that was my understanding of the episode.
My understanding was they were 'recreations' which could mean a number of things (were they actual flesh and blood beings, robots in disguise, hard light holographic recreations, only appearing in the minds of the landing party, other...)

[Holo] would be a bit limiting for these guys since [OS] ships do not have that technology, but there are ways around that. And if it was decided to make them [Holo] it's possible the planet could allow [Holo] personnel to be activated on the planet...

- James M
User avatar
 
By winterflames (Derek Marlar)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#449725
Orbin wrote: My understanding was they were 'recreations' which could mean a number of things (were they actual flesh and blood beings, robots in disguise, hard light holographic recreations, only appearing in the minds of the landing party, other...)

[Holo] would be a bit limiting for these guys since [OS] ships do not have that technology, but there are ways around that. And if it was decided to make them [Holo] it's possible the planet could allow [Holo] personnel to be activated on the planet...

- James M
Except, in the episode Spock says that Lincoln appeared "almost mineral, like living rock with heavy fore claws" right before he was beamed up, much as the excalbians appear out of the flesh.
User avatar
 
By Orbin (James Monsebroten)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#449729
winterflames wrote:
Orbin wrote: My understanding was they were 'recreations' which could mean a number of things (were they actual flesh and blood beings, robots in disguise, hard light holographic recreations, only appearing in the minds of the landing party, other...)

[Holo] would be a bit limiting for these guys since [OS] ships do not have that technology, but there are ways around that. And if it was decided to make them [Holo] it's possible the planet could allow [Holo] personnel to be activated on the planet...

- James M
Except, in the episode Spock says that Lincoln appeared "almost mineral, like living rock with heavy fore claws" right before he was beamed up, much as the excalbians appear out of the flesh.
Well... you have a very good point there. Guess I should have done a bit more digging before replying. Ya, [Holo] does not seem appropriate in that context.

- James M
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