Quote:
|
The "Nect-" debacle is a key example - sorry capefeather, you did fine throughout most of the process, but that Necturine name slate will always seem totally mystifying and alienating - and in a way it ties in with the sense of an "old boys network". The only justification I see for that slate was Rising Dusk's repeated and baseless assertion that pre-evos had to have their evo's prefixes, and the only reason why that opinion might gain such all-consuming traction seems to be that RD is a talented old hand at CAP.
|
I will admit that I probably should have had a bit of a larger slate, and coincidentally, the names that I think I could have slated for that purpose do not start with "Nect-". I could certainly see why my slate would have looked rigged. However, the slate did not turn out that way because of some opinion of mine or someone else that the pre-evo should have a "Nect-" prefix. I just went through and read names, rejecting names that I thought didn't sound good or didn't make sense. The slate was my doing and no one else's, and I take full responsibility for it.
I realize in hindsight that many people have similarly strong opinions on how names sound to them in general. Some of the strong opinions expressed against the names I slated are evidence of this, but I know that this would have been inevitable, whether I slated six names or I slated a bigger poll that got reduced to six names. I may have had some kind of bias similar to the biases of some of the voters. Although I will admit to being picky on my aesthetic and "logical" criteria (this was why I made sure to participate more in the dex entry submissions), I made sure (at least, as much as I was able) to invoke a general aesthetic that I thought would be universal enough, as well as a certain amount of common sense on the logic of a name. Does this name or that name sound decent enough to bother with polling people on? It's actually kind of ironic that my first CAP name submission was shut down on the basis of awkward logic, and here I was shutting names down in the same way.
I will insist that claims of slate-rigging based on the proportion of "Nect-" names are rather exaggerated. It is not a given that Whisberry was severely advantaged or disadvantaged in having to face five "similar" opponents. As far as I know, the voting systems in use aren't immune to severely impacting the performance of some candidates, based on the presence or absence of others. In the end, Whisberry made it to the final poll.
When I slated these names, I asked myself whether the result would be more or less the same whether or not some other names were slated. The voters seemed to create a sort of contest for which "Nect-" name should face Whisberry, and perhaps that behaviour could have been "exploited" on the non-"Nect-" names to see whether Whisberry truly would have won out to face Necturine. In any case, there was no intention on my part to rig the slate based on anyone's general opinions on names. I just thought that Whisberry would inevitably have won on the non-"Nect-" side. Maybe that was a misjudgment, but if there is a discrepancy between general opinions and specific opinions on names, that's just how it is.