#TIBA Judging Update (Patreon)

Ben "hbi2k" Creighton back with a progress report on the #TIBA contest judging.

If it seems like we're taking our sweet-ass time judging these hot mama-jamas, you're sort of not wrong.  With folks like KaiserNeko, Takahata101, and LittleKuriboh taking part in the judging plus Something Witty Entertainment's Yamato and Hayabusa, we've been very careful to schedule things so as not to take time away from making stuff we know you all want to see, like TFS' DBZA and Hellsing Abridged, all of LK's projects, and Something Witty's SAO Abridged.  Have we mentioned Something Witty's SAO Abridged lately?  Hot damn that's good stuff.  Check it out.

Our original internal goal was to count down the finalists during the month of September, but we ran into another wrinkle: our web site is old as balls and we're planning to give it a major overhaul very soon, and trying to do that in the middle of #TIBA month would put a strain on both projects.  So we're pushing that target date back a month to (hopefully!) coincide with the site redesign: rain or shine, we'll be counting down the top thirty #TIBA finalists during the month of October, leading up to the announcement of the first-place winner on October 30th.

All that scheduling nonsense out of the way, what about the judging itself?  Well, it's proceeding nicely.  The first pass, a single-elimination round in which our beleaguered judges were allowed to turn entrants off after thirty seconds if it became clear that they were definitely not finalist material, has been done for a while.

A note on that: some folks have asked if we'll be announcing who made it past that first round.  The answer is no, simply because it's the most subjective part of the whole process.  We were very generous with what was let through that first pass; some stuff got let through that probably shouldn't have, to be perfectly honest.  We're confident that nothing that got eliminated in the first pass would have made the finals, but beyond that, the fact that something made it to the second round doesn't necessarily mean it's any better than something that got eliminated in the first.  So making that information public would only make some people feel bad for no reason.

The second round is where we got into the nitty-gritty, watching each entry all the way through and scoring on Visuals, Audio, Writing, and Judge's Tilt.  That round just wrapped up, and we've locked in our Top 32 finalists.  Wait... 32?  That's right; through sheer numerical coincidence, we wound up with a three-way tie for 30th place.  We're hoping that the third-round judges' scores will break the tie and allow us to whittle it back down to 30; otherwise we'll have a couple more shirts to order.

And that's where we're at right now: we've got a mostly-but-not-completely-final list of finalists and we've turned the third-round judges loose on them.  It's an interesting group of entries, too.  I'm very happy to say that no entry had to be dropped from the finals for using the same source as another entrant.  I was sort of worried about that possibility, but it was a necessary evil to keep us from having to watch hundreds of different versions of One-Punch Man and My Hero Academia Abridged.

Of the three second-round judges-- that's me, Yamato, and Hayabusa-- there are finalists that one of us disliked and the other two liked, but none that one of us loved and the other two hated.  (We'll have an Honorable Mentions video for those, so the judges can each recognize an entry that the others just didn't get, the Philistines.)  There's also at least one that each of us assumed would never make it to the finals, one of those "well, *I* think this hilarious, but nobody else will get it" situations.  Turned out all three of us thought it was hilarious despite some glaring technical problems; we'll see what the third-pass judges think.

Speaking of the first-pass judges, by the numbers it turns out that I'm the most generous with an average score of 26/50, followed by Yamato at 25, and Hayabusa is the harshest with an average score of 22.  The difference was mostly in the Audio category (I was more generous by a full point, giving an average of 6.7/10 vs. 5.7 from the other two judges) and Writing, with Yamato and I giving an average of 10 points of 20 vs. Hayabusa giving an average of 8.  If anyone reading this is as big a statistics nerd as I am, there's your fix for the day.  Expect Hayabusa to look like Santa Claus when Kaiser's scores come in, ha ha.

A few enterprising fans have made unofficial playlists of #TIBA entries to make it easier for folks who want to peruse them while waiting for the official results.  Here's one that purports to the collect the top 30 entrants according to YouTube views: https://www.reddit.com/r/radditplaylists/comments/4uc8v5/teamfourstar_in_case_youre_wondering_here_are_the/

I can't speak to that list's accuracy, not having double-checked their math myself, but if accurate, I'm pleased to notice that there's not as much overlap with our official list of finalists as you might expect.  While we were excited to see what established and experienced YouTubers would come up with, of course, a big reason we decided to take on the work of organizing and judging this contest was to showcase new talent that hasn't amassed an audience yet, and it's looking like we'll be successful at that.

So there's your #TIBA info-dump for the day.  See you in October!