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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 2944705" data-attributes="member: 10201">I'm not convinced of that. At least, if people are really nominating and voting based on what they perceive as the best quality. Off the top of my head, i can't think of any 'best' products out of WotC in the last year. 'Good'? Yes, lots. 'Great'? a few. But nothing that just blows me away, or is clearly best-in-class. Now, given that the ENnies, from this stage forward (that is, after the nominations) is basically a popularity contest, i suspect any WotC products that got through the nominations process would win disproportionately. But i'm not sure all that many would have gotten nominated--certainly, if i were one of the judges, none of them would've [by me]. Not that i think my tastes are automatically representative. There is a better way. IMHO, the same thing applies to the ENnies that i've been espousing for the Origins Awards for around 3 years now: popular voting for the nominations, judge voting for the winners (i.e., the exact opposite of the current ENnies procedure). Popular voting to get things on the ballot assures that obscure games don't get missed--they all have *some* fans, *somewhere*. Empaneled judges determining the winners assures that it isn't just a popularity contest--if we want to know what's the most popular, we already know, more or less--it's the thing that sold the most. But if we want to know what's best, we need a process that tries to weed out the influence of popularity. And, it seems to me, the whole point of awards is precisely to do this--to measure something *other* than popularity.Now, just to be clear, i'm not wholly upset with the current process. The fact that a select group of judges decides the nominations is almost as good as doing it the other way 'round, IMHO. It still means that the winner will be the most popular, vice the best, of the nominated products, but at least we know all of the nominees will be the best of their class, even if the voting won't necessarily rank them accurately within that best-ness. All of this speaking in the ideal case, of course--i'm speaking to what happens if the model works optimally, which may or may not happen in the real world.Also, in the interest of clarity, i'm not saying that best and most popular are mutually exclusive. Rather, it's just that neither are they necessarily identical. The most-popular product *can be* the best, but you can't count on it.</blockquote>

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