Anthology series [Batman, Animatrix, etc]

Kurisu86 said:
Does anyone know whether or not the staff has come to any sort of decision on this yet? I really wouldn't mind it if it went either way, it would just be really nice to have the consistency.

Iri said:

Not that I'm disagreeing that it should be under one umbrella listing, but Animatrix is a little bit unique in that it was originally released somewhat differently than the other anthologies you've mentioned, which were released all together at the same time. Technically, of the nine parts of Animatrix, one is an original film release, four are OVAs, and four are ONAs. They were only consolidated onto one DVD later.

asandari said:
11/55000 (guesstimated) active, individual, users = 0.2%, this certainly doesn't obligate a response from busy people with varying levels of authority on a somewhat (objectively) controversial change. 1% or around 55 users would do. That's just my assessment, though.

asandari said:
From your sentence it appeared that you were complaining about the fact that there was no official replies. And though it has a number of replies, there's also a number of threads and other movements that have far surpassed this one in support. They took a while to get official replies back (Even with hundreds of members in support of it, in some cases)

It's controversial because of some of the points that Cyruz already raised, and some of the points that supporters of this change have made. Controversy is defined, at least here, as "Open to disagreement or argument".

In terms of consistency, looking at the anime in question, you're probably right. However, there's other logical vectors that you could consider as well. But like I said, I don't really have that much knowledge of the anime at hand.

To summarize the point I'm sloppily and hurriedly trying to get across here; The suggestions board is not about the staff full-filling its obligations to the community's demands or to qualm their concerns. Rather it is about the staff, as a part of the community, sharing information with everyone and gathering input to consider when they are around improving the site. Just keep in mind that this is a suggestions board, not a customer service board... was my primary concern on the initial post I was replying to.

animedreamer said:
I just wanted to make the comment that the People db would be unable to distinguish between different directors for different episodes if all episodes were merged under the same title. You could only link many directors to the one overall title.

windy said:
It's being discussed and it hasn't been forgotten.

Cihan said:


I'm glad its being discussed, but I really think this is an urgent topic because whatever decision you guys come to, you're going to have some work cut out for you. The sooner you decide one way or the other, whether having these anthology anime classed as seperate episodes or grouped together like they are in the real world on DVDs, ANN, IMDB, and such, the less work it is for MAL staff. (can you tell what I would prefer you guys decide? :P )

Plus I'm about to watch another anthology all seperated up annoyingly and thought I'd bump the thread. :D

Torisunanohokori said:
Maybe I framed it wrong in my last post, but I didn't mean for the "why not" of continuing with the current system to be about flamewars, which are a minor (but not negligible) inconvenience. My original post was about how the sequels on the toplist are overcrowding it, especially when some of these sequels rise largely through sequel droppage.

Torisunanohokori said:
Are you categorizing all negative comments made about a show as "bitching"? Because a)a lot of negative comments are more than just sour grapes, b)many criticisms of these shows in the flamewar threads have as much to do with the flaws in the ratings system which allowed the show to rise so fast as they do with the show itself - criticisms which my stats from the original post strongly support. Hence, all the more reason to address the ratings system problems.

Torisunanohokori said:
HNI:NC actually hasn't taken much of that flak at all, if any. It doesn't happen to every show. I'm going to avoid the topic of why certain shows do.

Torisunanohokori said:
No one person can be a representative sample for the MALmass.

kuroshiroi said:
Understood but irrelevant if you just ignore the top anime list. I never look at it, I may look at the rating of the first entry to decide if I want to watch it and if I like it after watching it I will probably watch the sequel. So if the changes implemented to counter the sequels overcrowding the top list will influence the first entry's score then I vote we do nothing. Anything else is perfectly fine by me, others may not share this opinion. Better sequels should not be influenced by these changes either.

kuroshiroi said:
The last time I looked at one of those threads was for CGR2 and at that time most of the criticism, and my memory may be fuzzy, was that it sucked and didn't deserve its place on the top list. After watching the entire series I think it does deserve its praise. I just assumed the content of the criticism hadn't changed but if the main concern is now the rating system then I apologize.

*I just looked at the KnK5 thread and it seems you're right. I guess nobody has any valid criticism of the movie and so they have to find some other excuse, valid or not.

Well, the easy answer to that would be 'elitism', when people think their opinion on a certain show is in some way the correct opinion and can't accept that not everybody shares it. It doesn't really matter though.

*No, but the MALmass does seem to agree with me :P
I was merely trying to play devil's advocate since nobody else seemed willing to.

kuroshiroi said:
Anyway, I think the focus for this discussion should turn back to how this sequel overcrowding can be fixed without destroying the ranking system or lowering the scores of perfectly good sequels.
You talk about analyzing franchise interconnectedness but do you have any ideas on how to actually implement that? Give less or more creedence to people who haven't seen all the sequels or maybe to the people who have seen all the sequels? Make sequels start with a lower score?

At this moment this is the best option I can think of: The highest score in a franchise will decide its place in the top anime list and all the other entries can be accessed by a dropdown list.
This will eliminate the sequel overcrowding in the top list but won't address the sequel syndrome most people have. This also won't affect any show's score.

Torisunanohokori said:
I like the general idea you have there, but I wouldn't go with the highest ranked show in the franchise. I would go with the original, and maybe do something to the name (like change from red to blue color) to indicate wheter the sequels are ranked significantly higher.

Torisunanohokori said:
Alternatively, we could do more in-depth analyses of the sequel drop effect and precisely how much it effects the ratings of sequels (and threequels, for good measure). Full analysis, though would require a user-by-user breakdown of how it effects the individual scores of at least the top 1000. We'd need to know how each individual user who gave high/medium/low scores to the original treated the sequel on his list. Did they not watch it? Did they put it on plan to watch? Did they watch it and give a similar score?

Given that, we could institute a pretty fair system of sequel ratings handicaps, minus adjustment for possible counteraction caused by serious difference in quality. That could be done by a committee of at least 50 or so experienced (seen a lot) users - kept blind from the user data analysis to avoid skewed results. Preferably ones who aren't fierce partisans or snobbish elitists to avoid biasing the system towards either group. They could rate each sequel as equal, greater, or lesser quality, and we could compare the aggregate of their ratings of each show with where the MAL rating puts it relative to the original.

^Unfortunately, the effort involved in such a stat breakdown is enormous. The mods may have access to that kind of user data correlation, but I don't. Though it could be done if we had a google/excel type spreadsheet of ratings data by user and show grouped according to franchises. The adavantage of this system is significant, though. While it would take a ginormous effort to get underway it would end up simple enough - just a dink in the starter scores of sequels - once completed. The better sequels will beat the average and be ranked higher as they deserve to be, but by an amount more proportional to their improvement relative to the original.

windy said:
sorry to double-post, but continued talk about this would probably help the topic stay relevant, so it doesn't get forgotten again.

we hope to be making some decisions regarding some of the entries very soon, though.

kuroshiroi said:
There's no need for a color change, everybody (well, almost) starts a franchise at the beginning and therefore the original should be used. However, I think having a few exceptions might not be such a bad idea, like if the sequel is released years later with almost a completely different staff and cast. Off the top of my head I can't think of any, but still.
This suggestion does however raise an interesting question, are franchises even defined in the MAL database, besides the relations which are frequently incomplete or incorrect? And if they are, how are they defined? Anybody reading this that knows?

I wouldn't mind eliminating the ranking system but I'm not most people, as you have clearly established ^^

kuroshiroi said:
Sounds simple enough, minus the committee part; those never end well. The only alternative I can come up with is to use the Top 500 most experienced users and see how they rank the sequel compared to the prequel and build the handicap from that. Both options have their problems, IMO.
The main problem with a committee is that even if you try to choose a non-biased or non-elitist one it's never going to be completely fair and will probably become less fair as time passes. A committee will also require people to actually watch said shows and rate them.
The problem with a larger sample is that the insanies might actually create false accounts with massive quantities of anime and use those to try and influence the system. Random people might not be considered fair or impartial either but a larger group will hopefully result in a fairer score. This would also mean that nobody would be required to actually vote, since only those users out of the top 500 that have seen a show will be used. The beauty of this is that the list of these top users already exists and inactive accounts are even filtered out so hopefully most of the insanies will be discouraged.
For both ideas the actual method to create a baseline rating poses the most significant problems since impartiality can never be guaranteed.

Then there's the ginormous effort involved in coding this and deciding on all the rules, meaning this discussion is kind of pointless if the man upstairs doesn't share these concerns.

Torisunanohokori said:
So yeah, having some way of ferreting out sequels made after significant time lapses would be good. Something a good committee would theoretically be able to do (though the design of said committee is a sticking point in the process).

I had another thought about this, for sequels that don't drastically jump the shark or grow the beard, we could just rely on written recommendations to tell which anime (original or sequel) is better. I'm growing more attached to this idea as we hash it out.

Torisunanohokori said:

The fact that windy bumped this topic does give me a glimmer of hope, which is why I bothered to post my elaborate plan. And who knows, the simpler solution up above may be a better one.

This discussion actually feels 100% productive now. Which is kewl.

kuroshiroi said:
The best way to make sure that committee as noncontroversial as possible would be to use MAL's staff or at least employ them in an administrative fashion. They should be trustworthy enough. I think the committee, if one is created, should be completely unaware of the other members' identity and that all decisions should be made anonymously (to everybody except MAL's staff, maybe). It might even be possible to randomize the committee that way, just send out 'ballots' in the form of PMs.

kuroshiroi said:
I think I used most of your ideas in the spoiler and incorporated them into the simpler idea and I'm beginning to think that this simpler idea is just that, simpler. There's no fancy coding/math required, no artificial score tampering and I believe more people would agree with the pruning of the top list instead of the alternative. It also feels more fair and less elitist.

Cihan said:
Does what you two have been discussing have anything to do with this thread's topic? It seems like to me you have derailed the thread epicly and no matter how productive your debate may be it will be ignored by the people who have the power to carry out your suggestions. Maybe its worth making a new thread with your proposals?

Torisunanohokori said:
A new thread might help once we do have a solid proposal.