Thresholder, World 4 Voting, Results!

The voting is concluded!

Some fun stats pulled from the spreadsheet:

• 273 voters!
• 711 votes cast!
• Most people cast only a single vote for their preferred option
• The most number of votes cast was eight (out of ten), which with approval voting means that people were essentially voting for "anything but those"
• Weighting the vote by patron tier didn't actually end up changing the outcome, though it did earn me money

Here's a graph of how many options people selected:

With some more time and a better grip on data analysis, I think it would have been possible to get a better idea of how these different groups of voters voted to see least-preferred and most-preferred options. As an example, we could see what the outcome would be if only single votes were counted. But then, if it was single votes only and not approval voting, the data would probably come out differently, so it's kind of a moot exercise.

Note: If you want to go into the next volume of Thresholder totally blind, probably don't read the rest of this post. As some people prefer to go in completely blind, it might be better that the winner is considered a spoiler, but that's a long time to keep something a spoiler for a pretty marginal reveal that will be spoiled by the cover anyway.

Alright, onto the winners and losers!

There were some clear losers here, especially in terms of unweighted numbers. The least popular by far was "Mad Max", which was voted for by 22 voters. Given that this was approval voting, that represents a spectacularly bad performance. The other big loser was "Tournament Arc", which is fair, because I think a tournament arc is usually something that's embedded within a different narrative structure. I think I could write an impassioned defense of both of these, but won't, and the ideas I have percolating will go into a notebook for later.

For most of the voting period, the frontrunners were "Weird West" and "Fantasy Solarpunk", and I don't think that changed even once after the first hour of voting. As early as this morning, they were separated by a single Early Birds voter, meaning that someone could have swayed the vote pretty easily.

Here's the unweighted voting results, before applying the multiplier for tiers:

And here it is after the weighting is applied:

You can see that a few of these options got a big boost from people who voted with their wallet, though I'm fairly sure that whoever was voting for Mad Max was doing it as a lark.

I think the thing that surprises me most is how close the top three are, which is so close that it's actually a little hard to tell looking at that graph who actually won. Maybe I just need new glasses.

The top three, ranked:

1. Fantasy Solarpunk (128 votes, 716 weighted)

2. Weird West (119 votes, 697 weighted)

3. Isekai (94 votes, 682 weighted)

The winner is Fantasy Solarpunk! Hooray!

Retrospective

Was this fun?

I found it interesting, particularly discussion on the discord where people expressed what they liked and disliked about the various ideas. It was also pretty valuable as market research, and I think helps to dissuade me from pursuing certain ideas in the future. There are lots of things that I want to write, but ideally I would also be writing things that people actually want to read. (These votes were specifically for a fourth volume of Thresholder, so I don't put that much stock in them overall, given how tied they are to a specific concept and characters. Still interesting to me though.)

Would I do it again?

That's trickier to say. I think that Thresholder was uniquely positioned for it, and there were lots of directions that I was equally capable of going in. I used to do a lot of DMing, though I do less now, and one of the things I found fun and exciting about it was that I would get to figure out how to drive the story in a direction the players chose. This was more than that, since it's the direction of an entire book that I'll spend at least two months writing. I'm not averse to it though, it would just take some special circumstances.

(Unless Thresholder explodes in popularity, it's unlikely that it'll get more than four volumes. It's on a pretty steady upward trend, but any piece of webfic can do that. I have Glimwarden waiting for me, and an experiment in writing something more marketable while still writing something that appeals to my sensibilities and doesn't have too many of my quirks sanded off.)