Hair contest: petitioning

[Adire]

If we are discussing better way to handle the contest, how can SE possibly satisfy everyone?

Tournament voting. Start it considerably earlier than when you plan to implement the winner into the game, every so often and in sequence have a thread of 15 entries or whatever random number you need being voted on, the winners of the first bracket compete in the 2nd bracket against each other and so on.

Not time consuming for SE to do work wise, not resource consuming. It could be done the same way they did it this time, using threads and the like system. The contest would only need to be conducted over a longer period of time, but if other tournaments can be done this way, I'm pretty sure SE could manage. All it takes is some planning ahead. It wouldn't require much more effort or working time on SE's part than this contest did. And if it was conducted ahead of time, such as right after a major patch when there are months between it and the next patch, the extra time it took for the process to complete wouldn't matter anyways.

Many other contests are held with this method because of its efficiency and fairness. Don't see why it couldn't be done here.

[DawnSolaria]

....

This solution is very time consuming. If the current hair contest is open for vote for a week, then a tournament can possibly take months based on numbers of entries. I highly doubt SE wants a trivial community event that is mostly only visible on the forum to last that long. Again, this contest was suppose to be a simple "get community involved" type of event.
I am not saying the contest should not be taken seriously, but SE would not do month long event to implement one hairstyle.

[Adire]

snip

Why wouldn't they? Surely they should care about all their community's opinions at least that much.

It's only time consuming in how long the process takes. It's not time consuming in how much time SE has to spend working on it. And it really doesn't even have to be that time consuming. Make each bracket bigger if you have to. Many larger, more complicated tournaments are conducted in a much shorter time than one month. And between patches, SE has a few months.

This would have been far better to do that SE just picking a few random ones and pigeon holing the community into voting for what we like most out of what they like most. We were given very limited choices that were still strongly dictated by SE, that's a poor attempt at getting the community involved.

Honestly, even letting the community pick the finalists and SE pick the winner would have been more fair...