Karmaka Art-Print Poll Results

On Saturday we posted an online poll to Karmaka’s Kickstarter asking people to pick the top three Karmaka cards they’d like to see converted into art prints. (These will be available for purchase on Society6, alongside the box art and the Karmic Ladder sometime in February.) I didn’t intend to write a blog post about this, but I found the results interesting, so here they are.

First a little hacking story: about 5 hours into the poll, I noticed a BIG spike in how Crisis was faring in the results. So I took a look at the data, and found someone had spammed the poll with [Crisis, Crisis, Crisis] as their 3 picks, over 30 times. Sigh. A couple other minor blips appeared as well. (eg. Swindle got boosted a bit.) Here’s a view of the data for the first 8 hours or so.

I proceeded to change the poll’s settings to require Google login so as to stop this unsportsmanlike behaviour. (I would have preferred to allow anonymous voting, but…) Sadly it’s not possible to remove specific data from a Google form, so the false votes remained, giving a skewed view of the results. But I cleaned it up for my final analysis.

We let the poll run another 3 days, shut it down today, and here are the cleaned results. (I also got tired of how ugly Excel’s graphs look. Google Sheets graphs aren’t beautiful, but they’re better.)

Embody and Swindle came out as the two favorites! I’m glad we let the poll run for a few days, because at first it wasn’t clear which were the top two, with Destiny clearly in the running. In any case, Marco will polish these up (some of the areas didn’t get as much attention since they’re covered up by graphics on the cards), and they should be available in February.

Before commenting on the results, I should explain my process. I exported the results as a .tsv file (which you can download, uncleaned, from here), wrote a perl script to convert the votes into score-versus-time data, and plotted it. I tried a few different scoring schemes. The first was to assign 3 points to people’s first pick, 2 for their second, and 1 for their third. This gives the graph above.

But I also tried alternate scoring schemes to see if it’d make much difference. Instead of 3-2-1, I tried 1-1-1 (equal weight for first, second, and third picks), and a 5-3-1 scheme. They all gave the same ordering, so the results seem quite clear and not very sensitive to method of analysis.

Finally, our impressions. First of all it was super interesting for us to see “empirically” what art/cards people like best. Dave and I found it fascinating, and so did Marco! I actually expected Thievery and Crisis to score higher. Vengeance as well. Then again, we love them all, and the question wasn’t “what art do you like best”, but “which would you most want on your wall” – which isn’t the same thing. I guess I wouldn’t really want that Vengeance dude staring over my shoulder all the time either. ;-)