UPDATE! Future Polls and Balance! (Patreon)

Honestly polls are getting harder to "balance." Obviously a poll is all about popularity, and in the end the MOST popular choice SHOULD win. That's just... how it goes... but I don't want it to be a landslide victory / loss where possible. But it's PRETTY hard to make an "unpopular characters poll." It's even harder to make a "sort of popular characters" poll.

Still... I feel like polls are good. But more and more I see artists moving towards just curating content on their own from suggestions, ensuring a wider variety of characters, time periods, sources, etc etc etc... That's something I might have to move towards in the future, especially if it means I'll be doing a better job on each image. Not that I don't try my best now, but obviously you do better when you love the character.

So... yeah... I don't know... We're getting a little big for polls... And statistically, MOST people DON'T see their favorites win, since the four losers each week add up to more votes than the one winner. That alone is reason to give the polls a second look.

People clamor for /character/ for months but they'll NEVER see them because there's NO WAY they'll EVER win a poll, yet EVERYONE would still ENJOY seeing them ultimately. But the polls prevent that.

Obviously the tiers still stay the same and on the same schedule, but with ensured variety. And it's not just like the variety of chest or butt size. You gotta think time period, character theme, colors, cultural relevance, etc etc.

As an example, and I don't know if you guys ever thought about this, but the fact that EVERYONE is a LITTLE FURRY means that usually any furry will win a poll, against anyone. So I usually keep all the furries together. But that means that I have to be careful about including like a Renamon level character, because they'll crush all other furry options... So now I'm forced to find equally renowned furries. Or equally unknown ones. And that's just ONE factor. You see the problems here...

Right now? I could just end the current Tier 3 Poll early and start drawing. It JUST went live and it's CLEAR Stocking is going to win, despite my best efforts to find competition for her. So in that case, when will these other four characters ever see a chance? If the next time they go up against another fifth option who is in the same "tier" as them, they'll just lose again. Maybe it's because Stocking is "Goth." Maybe I should have had a goth poll. But now we're going further and further down a hole of impossible balance, when I could have just said we're gonna satisfy almost EVERYONE this week by drawing Stocking in the sailer outfit, with a glasses edit, and then some upbeat girl from some slice of life anime.

Picking manually is looking to be a fairer option more and more, especially as we grow!

The higher tiers have gone over really well with me just picking from EVERYONE'S suggestions, ensuring I can get a good variety of content levels and source material week to week, while balancing several requests for content into one image. I'm really thinking that's the BEST way to go in the future!

But I didn't want to potentially drop this on you guys.