ElloCoaster Poll is live again, this time including STEEL

The third annual ElloCoaster wood poll and the first annual steel poll(!) is live from now thru Dec 31.
Get your ballots here: http://www.ellocoaster.com/the-ellocoaster-coaster-poll

Good news for those who have long lists: the ballots are now spreadsheet-based, so no more slogging through text ballots! Deleting stuff you haven't ridden and re-sorting as you go makes things much easier.

If you've got a really long list - especially on the steel poll - Group Ranking is going to be the way to go. Check out how to do that here: http://www.ellocoaster.com/group-ranking

Happy voting, everyone. Let's see how Wicker Man slots into the wood results now that it's had some time to break in (it ranked #52 last year). And how about Nemesis? It's consistently called one of the best coasters in the world by a lot of "best of" websites, but how will it fare against newer coasters?

 

Great, something to keep me busy, although the thought of doing my steel poll fills me with dread....Will see if I can come up with something though. Will definitely be submitting a wood poll.

Thanks for running this!

 

Definitely look at the group ranking instructions. I filled out my rankings up to around 40 or so on the steel ballot and then just went line-by-line down the rest and ranked everything else 100, 200, 300 etc down to 600. Those rankings were basically:
100: I'd ride this every visit to the park, for sure.
200: I'd ride this if the queue wasn't too long.
300: Maybe I'd ride this, maybe not. Depends on my mood that day.
400: I'm not riding this unless someone I'm with wants to.
500: I'm not riding this even if someone I'm with wants to.
600: Screw this ride, seriously. Never again.
That put rides into big groups and everything got a ranking. Easy peasy.

 

Great to see this returning. My wooden ballot is approaching 100 lines this year so even that is a fairly daunting prospect (though at least I don't have much to add compared with last year). The steel ballot is another thing altogether, even with grouping I'm not entirely sure I can come up with something I'd be happy with. Hopefully I'll be able to put something together, even if it's just Steel Vengence 1, Maverick 2, [several hundred rides = 100], Furius Baco 999

 

[QUOTE="Steel Vengence 1, Maverick 2, [several hundred rides = 100], Furius Baco 999[/QUOTE]

That's completely valid. The way the tabulation program will see this is:

"This voter preferred Steel Vengeance over every other steel coaster that he rode."
"This voter preferred Maverick to every coaster he rode with the exception of Steel Vengeance."
"This voter rode a bunch of other coasters, all of which would lose to both Steel Vengeance and Maverick, but they would all be preferred to Furious Baco"
"This voter rode all of these coasters and every single one of them was preferable to Furious Baco."

That's the nice thing about the ranked-pairs algorithm. You can throw a bunch of coasters into a group and it's completely OK. The main thing is that it looks at which coasters you liked better than the ones in that group and which ones you liked less than the ones in that group.

 

Is there any way I can fill this out without using Excel? My computer won't seem to let me edit the file unless I buy Microsoft Office, which I definitely don't want to do. My own personal coaster ranking spreadsheet is stored in Google Drive; could I potentially use Google Sheets?

 

YES, you can use any spreadsheet program. There are specific instructions on the site for folks using Google Sheets (either desktop or mobile). You can also use Open Office (free) or Numbers (if you're on a Mac).

Just download the ballot, put it in your Google Drive, and open it in Google Sheets. Then follow these instructions:
http://www.ellocoaster.com/ballot-with-google-sheets

When you're done, be sure to save it as a Google Sheets file and email that file to submit your ballot. If you choose "send as email attachment" it will convert the file to a PDF, which can't be read by the tabulation program.

 

Ah right. Thanks for the clarification @moosecoaster; you should find both my wood ballot and my steel ballot emailed to you!

 

Ballots are coming in... half of the voters so far live outside the USA.
Of the coasters that operated in 2019, the average voter so far has ridden 35 wood and 147 steel.

 

Careful... you know how crazy busy things can get in December, what with the holidaze and all of the end-of-the-year things that need to be done. I can't tell you how many emails I get in January when the results come out that amount to "OH NO!!! I put this off, then I forgot to do it" or "I put this off and then ran out of time" or "I was waiting to ride that last new coaster and then life happened and I couldn't get around to it."
Knock out a quick and dirty ballot, send it in, then if you have time to revisit it and make changes or tidy it up some, you can always send in an updated one to replace it before the deadline.

 

Interesting that you don't count things like Powered Coasters or Big Apples in your steel coaster poll and that Tyrolean Tubtwist at Joyland in Great Yarmouth isn't in the wood poll this year despite being included in the past.

 

When the poll was done with text ballots, I was using a tabulation program that I wrote after teaching myself how to code. It was crude at best, but it worked. In the second year, Grant Barker came on board to take over the coding bit. He improved it (on our end - stuff the voter doesn't see) massively and we started talking about a steel poll. Creating and managing a text ballot for a steel poll was much too large a task for just the two of us and I seriously doubt many voters would be willing to slog through a text-based ballot with 2500 entries on it, anyway.
Several voters had asked for an easier way to vote and a few had suggested using spreadsheets so they could re-sort their ballots by ranking as they went. We opted to go that route and Grant got to work converting the tabulator into CSV-based rather than text-based. With that change, Grant came upon the idea to write a program that would use the RCDB database to auto-create a spreadsheet ballot. Just run the program, put in your filter parameters (such as only listing coasters that were open this year), and voila! There's your ballot. This made a steel poll possible.
HOORAY! Except that the steel poll had 4000+ entries. That's nuts.
So we started talking about how to reduce the size of that ballot to make it manageable enough that people would actually fill one out. We decided early on that powered coasters and alpine coasters wouldn't be included, but the ballot was still way too big. That's when decisions got harder.
We considered Mitch Hawker's option of "your fave [type of coaster]" where you simply rank your fave Batman clone, your fave boomerang, etc. I shot that down early on, because some people really struggle with knowing what particular category a coaster fits into ("Is this a Zyklon or a Galaxi?" "Vekoma corkscrew or Arrow?") and sometimes, one or two of those coaster models are substantially better than their clones. Take boomerangs, for example. I hate them. Yes, even the ones with the vests. Once and done, if at all.
Except the one at Wiener Prater. I love that one. I'll pay for re-rides. I would easily rank that in my top 50, while the others would be in the bottom tier. Do I want to have a "fave boomerang" line that would make me decide between artificially inflating the status of 20 or so crappy boomerangs just to get Prater's a solid ranking, or do I punish Prater's version to make the others' rank more accurate?
So rather than do that, we opted to eliminate some of the stuff that wouldn't factor into the rankings much. Let's face it, once you get past the top 50 or so, most people couldn't care less how something ranked. They want to see the best 50 and the worst 10 or so. Big Apples, Wacky Worms, butterflies, kiddie coasters, etc... they'd all be stuck in the middle bit that everyone would just scroll past. Out they went.
So even with those omissions, the ballot is still 2500+ lines long. It's still tedious, but not heinous. So far, most of the voters are filling it out and sending it in with their wood ballots. (sigh of relief) A few sent in the wood early, then sent in the steel a couple days later. (another sigh of relief).
So we're pretty happy with the steel ballot this year - once the results come out and we see how some kinds of coasters fare, we might decide to pare it down further for next year. We'll see.
The one part that affected the wood ballot was the omission of powered coasters and kiddie coasters. Tyrolean Tubtwist is listed on RCDB as a powered coaster and Auto Bergbahn at Prater is listed as a kiddie coaster. Both of those dropped off the ballot as a result. Neither of them affect the top 50 nor the bottom 10 rankings.

 

Reminder to get your ballots in if you haven't already!

 

Wodan under Troy and Mystic Timbers is criminal. I agree with Lightning Rod at number 1 however; very well deserved.

Shambhala over I305? Crikey. Great to see Nemesis is up there, and even more so a top ten position for Lech! Although what Hyperion is doing on this list, never mind the top five, is beyond me. Not entirely sure that Taron should have come second behind Steel Vengeance either....

 

Hyperion is the most overrated coaster ever built, seriously.

Good to see Taron, Helix and Lech getting recognition.

 

The results were quite interesting this year, especially on steel. Keep in mind that the rankings are based on more than just the head-to-head for each pair... lemme explain:
The win percentage can be summed up like this: When this coaster was pitted against every other coaster on the list, what percentage of the time was it the 'winner' against the other coaster.
So: if Taron's riders have mainly been on other European coasters and Fury's riders have mainly been on US coasters, Taron might have a slightly different playing field to work with in terms of how often it wins or loses compared to Fury. I haven't dug deep enough in to see if that's the case or not, BUT it's possible.
Having said that, have a look at those percentages. If you rounded those to the tenths place, you'd have a lot of ties. It was very, very, VERY close - especially in the top five steel.
Also: because the rankings are done with TOTAL win percentages, coaster A can win the head-to-head against coaster B, but still lose to coaster B in the final standings. That happened with Fury this year. It had a (again, VERY slight) total win percentage that ranked it below Taron, Helix, and Hyperion even though it beat all three of them in a strict head-to-head with them. This is the same algorithm used in the old Hawker polls, by the way.
So if you JUST looked at individual head-to-head for each ride, Fury would be #2... but you'd be ranking them based on a very small number of voters in each case, so that's not a great idea, ether.
Ah, statistics. You can twist them around in a hundred ways.

 

Maverick is incredible but Taron edges it for me due to the freedom of the restraints. Also for an Intamin, the launches felt a bit weak on Maverick.

Maverick with Taron's trains would be the undisputed GOAT.

Untamed deserves to be higher up the list but at least it's in there.