June Poll Results!
The results are in, and the winner for June's poll was Scene 13! So when we get to the weekend of week 2, you can look forward to an opportunity to take Mina into town on a trip to catch her a meal more suitable for her skill level. But this leads us to...
The Mina Problem!
Some of you may have noticed, but this is the third time in a row that Mina has immediately won after being taken off the bench, and given that this time she kind of dominated with 2/3 of the finalist scenes being focused on her, she's likely poised to increase that win streak to 4 if/when that scene that didn't win this month gets added back to the poll. This win also makes her almost tied for the most poll winning scenes of any character at 7 (Emma technically has 8 by my count, however most of those are from very early polls and she's only had 1 win in the last year or so, so I'm not as worried about her). According to the running poll on the ekas thread--and just generally looking at discussions of the game/characters--Mina is clearly the most popular character overall in the community so her strong showing in these polls does make sense, but I find myself a little worried that she's going to end up oversaturated with extra content from poll winning scenes at this rate, and/or that patrons that aren't all that interested in the character will get frustrated by her constantly dominating the polls when she's available for suggestions. In fact, after June's poll went up I even noticed some folks in the discord joking about it being "Mina month" and pointing out how many suggestions in the poll involved her.
So! The point of that long rambling paragraph is that I'm considering giving Mina a longer timeout from being available for the polls than the usual temp bans, probably at least keeping her out for the rest of this year. But I would of course like your input on that idea before making any decisions!
Do you think putting her on a longer hiatus would be beneficial/fair? Or do you feel that the current three month temp ban is already enough to give other characters a chance? Let me know!
Regardless of how that shakes out, Mina is still banned for at least the next few months, joining Leah and Cassidy on the bench!
Comments (11)
I want to say ban her from the polls which solves the other characters not having a fair shot but mina is clearly the most beloved so maybe do one big thing for mina in exchange for a complete poll ban
I think part of the problem of Mina dominating isn't just that people vote for her because she's their favorite character, but that with 1 suggestion a month people with a good scene idea are often going to suggest their favorite character. The goal as I see it isn't just to increase diversity for its own sake but to get higher quality suggestions for the other characters so that there are scenes people will want over another Mina scene. If we already have a de facto “Mina month” let’s have a month for other characters/theme. I think having a bit of direction would go a long way to balancing out the scenes and getting good scenes for other characters, while also making them easier to fit into the story for you. You could say next month is “Alice and Emma month” suggestions need to include 1 or the other, bonus points if you include both. Planning a trip into town for the MC? Next month’s theme is “Off campus” and you can get some scene ideas for the trip. You can still have free months where people can pitch anything but I think a bit of direction would solve the issue in a cool way that inspires people to suggest something other than just another Mina scene. TL;DR. Themed months would solve the problem of 1 character dominating and help people come up with cool ideas.
The problem with this premise is that I think it kinda got disproven already - IIRC, there was an Alice double-vore scene in the polls and it never made the finals... but then an Alice double-vore scene featuring Mina got in and it immediately won. It feels like it's not just a matter of suggestion-quality or the like - there's just a straight-up overwhelming number who wanna keep pushing for mina content, IMHO ^_^;
If we are talking about restructuring the polls we could also just flat out say that X month is Y character's poll and focus on scenes around or including that character. A radical change that would certainly bring its own issues but could be an interesting change of pace.
I'd be very in favor of at least trying something like this too. If the goal is diversifying the number of characters getting extra scenes, this would be a great way to do it.
almost feels like the polls should be restructured. Maybe limit the amount of scenes per character so we dont have Oops! All Mina again because I already dont want to wait 3 months to vote for the mina scene that I much preferred to the winner this time. Could consider just adding top cut to the list too(with a duplicate clause so we dont have three mina scenes added every three months) instead of having a second vote since it also feels like the poll itself is suffering from content bloat.
I agree, honestly - something like a hard limit for the amount of scenes per-week a character can have or win would also help preventing a repeat of this with any other character down the line, too. The big problem is it might ruffle feathers to have a hard "no" in place like that, but I guess it just comes down to what's the "lesser evil", for lack of a better term
Honestly I can't think of a fair solution beyond giving up the ghost and just having a "Mina only poll" every six months which sounds ridiculous. Maybe not too ridiculous at this point? Hard to judge. Shutting her out the rest of 2022 seems steep but -given that I am absolutely part of the problem- There's really no guarantee she won't steamroll her competition every chance she gets. TL;DR, I think a 4-5 month benching for her is relatively fair, but it is getting pretty brutal I assume for those less enthused for her.
I agree that an extra month or two would be good I do like Mina as well but def agree that this kind of blowout showing does make me worried that every 3rd/4th poll is basically Mina's poll
I think adding an extra month onto Mina's ban is perhaps a sensible solution. That way she's not out of the running for too long but it also gives us a chance to have a larger rotation of characters going through the polls before she comes back around again.
After reading through all the ideas here and on discord I think I'll be doing this as a start! Add an extra month to her bans compared to other characters, and then see from there if anything more drastic needs to be done