The results for ECTOCOMP 2024 are available

Competitions
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The official results are in!

You can also read the table at the itchio webpage, but keep in mind that the automatic ranking is provided for information, the proper ranking is the tabulated one at IFDB. Thanks!

Note: The results for languages other than English are tabulated taking only the raw score. The median produces a high deviation because of the differences in the number of votes for the communities with fewer members.

This has been a great year. I’m speechless right now. So please, enjoy, send accolades, plan to finish your reviews for ectocomp participants and I hope to see you next year!

Note: Please, use this thread to congratulate each other!

What a year, friends, what a year!

You can get the whole info and scores at the itchio’s webpage:

https://itch.io/jam/ectocomp-2024

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Congratulations and thanks to authors, organizers, and judges for making this event such a great time. Ectocomp is awesome!

Special shoutout to all of the La Petite Mort entrants, I have tried and failed to make a LPM game two years in a row. I have a lot of respect for what you were able to do in four hours!

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Congrats to @draconis! And thanks to everyone who played my awful little game. I didn’t expect to place so high.

I’m absolutely shocked to see Last Minute Magic placing so low. I was predicting that it and Familiar Problems would take 1st and 2nd. Usually I’m not that far off in my predictions.

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First of all, thank you to the organizers, congratulations to the winners and congrats to everyone who entered! Also big thank you to reviewers and everyone who played and rated games. With that being said.

FOURTH. PLACE. FOURTH PLACE??? FOURTH PLACE.

I’m honestly blown away and I can’t deny, I got a little dizzy when I read it. Fourth place! Not only out of 19 LGG games, but also out of 48 games total. If anyone needs me, I’ll be staring at the wall blankly because this isn’t real.

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I don’t know what ‘score’ and ‘rawscore’ are, but two of Ryan’s games have a ‘rawscore’ a full point higher than the ‘score’, which most of the entries don’t have. It looks like the last entries in the list also have ‘scores’ half the size of ‘rawscore’, so I wonder if games with lower numbers of votes had their scores automatically discounted.

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Oh wow! We are incredibly flattered by this; thank you so much!

And thank you to everyone who participated; I’m sad I didn’t get to play many of the games within the judging period this year, but I have a crop of them lined up for as soon as the semester ends!

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Thank you so much to everyone who makes ECTOCOMP possible! Big congratulations to all the winners and entrants. This was such a strong crop of games. I’m still absolutely in awe at what people can pull off in four hours.

I’m absolutely shocked to see Last Minute Magic placing so low. I was predicting that it and Familiar Problems would take 1st and 2nd. Usually I’m not that far off in my predictions.

Yes, I loved LMM and rated it highly! Also, well, gutted about SPILL YOUR GUT, which hit just the right way for me at least.

I’m honestly blown away and I can’t deny, I got a little dizzy when I read it. Fourth place! Not only out of 19 LGG games, but also out of 48 games total. If anyone needs me, I’ll be staring at the wall blankly because this isn’t real.

do not let your left hand know is fantastic. No surprises about that!

This disbelief is how I’m feeling about your life, and nothing else, though. If you’d told me a couple days ago I’d somehow crack the top ten overall (and seventh place in LGG, WHAT), I would have laughed in your face.

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Congrats all! I played almost all the English games and quite enjoyed them. I didn’t have time to write all the reviews I wanted to, but hopefully can still get a few more done.

I was curious about what the LGG rankings would be based on raw scores—placing below in case anyone else is interested!

LGG raw score rankings
Title Raw score
Dark and Deep 4.667
The Little Match Girl in the Court of Maal Dweb 4.6
Familiar Problems 4.529
Sundown 4.429
Last-Minute Magic 4.2
do not let your left hand know 4.13
Like a Sky Full of Locusts 4
how to fly a kite 3.952
No More 3.857
Resurrection Gate 3.857
Mathphobia 3.833
your life, and nothing else 3.778
Boo. 3.333
A Puzzled Soul 3.1
Dark Waters on the Night Shift 3.067
Museum of Paranormal Phenomena 3
Nick Neat-Trick-Treat 2.818
Hotel Halloween 2.714
Fireboat 2.545
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A warm congratulations, Edmund! I told you I had a feeling that you’d place high, darling. Thrilled that you had a wonderful result and placement in the competition- and extra exciting because it’s your first foray into one of the larger community competitions. And all of the buzz in the reviews about your game! It was wonderful to play it, and very special to get a look behind the scenes in your pre-post mortem document you’d sent over my way.

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Yeah, I can’t find exact details but it does look like Itch’s competition algorithm will derate entries with fewer votes than average (to prevent the possibility of someone with one five star vote winning over a field with a more diverse set of votes, for the most extreme example.) My best guess is that Ryan ran afoul of this by submitting three high quality games, with everyone in his audience picking one to play more or less at random, giving the rest of the field a shot, and then not getting around to one or both of the others.

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The score/raw score drift is a side-effect of combining the languages. There seems to be an adjustment calculated from the median number of votes, so as a workaround raw scores were used for the non-English categories.

Found this:

The formula for jam ratings is adjustment = sqrt(min(median, votes_received) / median)

The adjustment for game that got 19 votes in a jam with median of 20 is = 0.97467, about a 2.5% reduction in average score, eg. a 4.5 rating would go to 4.386 for the purpose of comparison during ranking.
(https://itch.io/t/644401/calculated-ratings-for-jams-vs-raw-scores)

This said, I loved the combined jam format, so my vote would be to maintain it in future editions.

Edit: Congrats to the winners, it’s been an amazing comp!

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Congratulations to all of the entrants- making a Petite Mort game is no small feat- I remember what it was like to grapple with the time limit. Very pleased to see that a handful of the names I had expected to do well did so- and that a bunch of games I enjoyed were pleasantly received by the community.

Die Another Day was a very poignant game from someone who I keep an eye out for in competitions, I adored the fear factor in An Admirer, and Forever More: A Game of Writing Horror and The Column were games that I enjoyed reviewing. Can’t go wrong with Gothic Horror or New-Weird-esque energy in the Halloween competition. I had also anticipated Amanda as ranking up near the top, so that was a fun surprise to see.

Dark and Deep and Sundown were an oddly serendipitous pairing, and both were among my favourites from the competition that I played this year. I’m not normally one to be taken by parser games, but I really enjoyed the narrative driven focus in Dark and Deep- even if I was battling the attic, haha. Some really gorgeous writing in that- and I loved how the PC’s role as a priest provided great characterization for limits around player activities- like, no, the priest is not here to rob this old woman blind of her buttons and tools. Sundown made especially great use of formatting and mechanics to enhance gameplay.

And of course- do not let your left hand know was a wonderful game made by someone that I’m fond of, using a friend’s template. So cool to see it put to good use, and any story about changelings inherently has me perking up to peer over at it. I’m very interested in seeing Edmund’s post-mortem when he finishes writing it up, and also seeing how his expectations of how players would choose diverge from the actual shakeout of those statistics.

Fireboat was also fun- I felt very accomplished in solving the puzzles in universe, even if fighting the directionality on board a boat was difficult, and there was a bit of a clarity issue towards a final action at the end. It felt very ‘action movie’ like to me, and was satisfying to play through as someone with little experience in solving more puzzle forward games.

Overall- Ectocomp is one of my favourite events of the year when it comes to all of the wonderful games that come together for it. Amanda’s games in particular are always something I look forward to seeing. Very happy with this year’s smorgsabord of games. Congratulations again to the participants- even finishing up a game is a feat, especially in the limited time category- and a thank you to those who took the time to review and rate entries as well.

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Thank you for the great comp. Ectocomp is my favorite of the year!

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Exactly.

@mathbrush this year we’ll take the results as is, but this definitively must change for the next year.

The itchio’s formula is too radical, that with a difference of 2 or 3 votes could swap the places of two games. And even, this happened for the two first places of Le Grand Guignol.

With the raw scores, without the deviation applied (raw score) Dark and Deep would win the competition in her category, but Familiar Problems got 2 more votes.

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At first, I thought that the formula would just interfere in judging the non-English categories, like the Spanish one, which had a messed up ranking. I judged that 7 votes should be sufficient enough for a game to be considered “impartially judged”. But now I see it is messing even in the very first places of the ranking for English games!

As I said in other years, it doesn’t matter, the competitiveness is just an excuse for the community to be at it, playing, judging, and giving feedback. We all know that Dark and Deep and First Problems are BOTH winners, and so are all those great games we have played this year.

It seems that the formula at Itchio is designed for ranked jams that have massive participation, but the reality is that most jams there are as niche as our community. So, definitively, for next year we’ll have to prepare a proper Excel and do our math.

As I always said, itchio is not perfect, but it is convenient. I’m quite happy with the overall performance of the competition, but this aspect has to improve.

I understand that this kind of formula is needed to ensure that games are judged with a proper amount of votes and that someone with very few votes would not overpass a properly voted one. I think IF Comp has another formula for this, but at the moment of writing this I cannot find that information in the rules or website.

If this year I had more time, and more eyes, to judge all these problems, I could make better decisions, but these days Itchio was down, so it was not possible. All this happened in the course of this morning.

Thanks!

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Congratulations everybody, and thanks to everyone who played, reviewed and voted!

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IFcomp doesn’t have that formula but ifdb does, it uses a thing called Starsort that works pretty good (and there are some other similar formulas).

I agree that this year it doesn’t really matter, it’s all just for fun and we all know the top few games are equally worthy of winning!

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yeah, I meant, that IF Comp has its own formula, but I cannot find the information about it.

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Congratulation to the winners, big thanks to the organizer and respect to the hardworking reviewers for all the valuable feedback. One-boat-crew is proud of having taken part in the feast. Wow. Well done!

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There were a lot of games I could see winning this. I couldn’t care less about placement-- I’ve won some stuff and it gave me a little high for a couple of days and I was still me at the end of that. I care that some people played it and took the time to give me feedback, encouragement, and constructive criticism. And that I got to be a part of this at all. It’s just really a really nice thing, and the experience of putting something out there with other people is the real high.

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Congratulations to all, and thank you Ruber for all the effort you put into making this happen! I’m very flattered that people appreciated Die Another Day so much.

I didn’t manage to play all the games in the comp this year, but there were many that I enjoyed, and I did play the top three GG games and thought they were all excellent.

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