GNamer Forum Awards 2018

Contributor of the Year (two votes, weighted equally) - The main vote this year, taking over from Forumite.  We want the people who have made not only the biggest, but also the best contributions to GNamer.  Quality and quantity go hand in hand.  Who has made the GNamer Forum (not Twitter, not Nintendo Online, but this messageboard here) a great place to be in 2018?
Funniest Member of the Year - The old classic.  Vote for the funniest fellow on the forum.
Signature of the Year - The Funniest Member award's for the wit in the posts - this award is about the wit below them.  Which signature left you giggling, surprised you, or just grabbed your attention and didn't let go?

Post of the Year (two votes, weighted equally) - The best posts you've seen all year, best and second-best anyway.  This is a good place to start: if you feel that thread's lacking one of 2018's finest, stick it up there so other people remember it too.
Topic of the Year - The best thread, with the best OP and/or the best content, that you've seen all year.  It could be a gaming thread, an off-topic thread, or an event thread, since those no longer have their own category.  It just had to be good!
Tagline of the Year (three votes, weighted equally) - The forum's most splendid subtitles.  Vote for ones that made you laugh, vote for the few serious ones, vote for ones you barely understood.  Here's 2018's selection in case you can't remember every one (AND WHY NOT).

Nintendo Game of the Year (five votes, in order of preference) - Be it Switch, 3DS, or even Nintendo-stamped mobile (remember Pokémon Quest?): vote for your five faves, released this year.  Or fewer if you didn't like five Ninty games this year, you heartless person.
Nontendo Game of the Year (five votes, in order of preference) - Did cowboys make your west wild this year?  Or maybe your spider senses were sent tingling?  If it didn't appear on a Nintendo console, and didn't have Nintendo's sticky hands near it, then vote for it here!  (Multiplats that appeared on Switch go in the category above... unless they were really bobbins on Switch.)

Honourable and Dishonourable Mentions - Anything, or anyone, else you wanted to mention?  They needn't be games, just mention as many things or people as you like down here and we'll let the populace know you loved/loathed them!
Your GNew Year's Resolution(s) - Finally, what are you going to do in 2019 that you didn't do, or did do, in 2018?  On the forum, in games, or even in the wider world?  Another bit of fun for the end of the year: no points, just comments and (maybe) laughs.

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Please send your votes to me, Balladeer, via an MP (or PM, if you prefer your forum terminology to make sense) by Sunday 13th January 2019.  If you have any questions, do ask, but you might want to check below before asking: I might have answered them already!  (I don't particular encourage you to read below otherwise, it's not funny and it's not interesting.)

'I don't like vote threads.'  'I don't feel I've posted enough this year.'  'I don't know y'all well enough.'  Fair enough, chaps.  But.

I poked fun at it at the start of the post, but this is the biggest forum event we do that everybody can take part in.  Our Australian, or Japanese-by-location, forumites can't take part in Secret Santa or the meet-ups.  This is one thing we as a community can all do together.  And you must have some kind of soft spot for the community, else you wouldn't be here.  It's the community that makes this forum possible.

As for not posting enough, or not knowing us well enough?  If you're reading this post, you probably do.  If you want a metric, have you made ten posts this year?  Have you logged on in three different months of 2018?  That's enough for me, you're a GNamerian.  Get yer votes and comments in, we do want to see them!

One last thing: as mentioned up top, if you really don't feel up to talking about the community, can't think of a single good signature, or don't feel you've played enough Nontendo/Nintendo games, it'd be great to get your votes for the categories you think you can vote for.  The vote limits are maxima too.  Some votes > none votes.

Why did you get rid of award x?
It was my aim, going into this, to try and cut the awards down a bit.  Too many awards can make submitting votes a bit of a chore.

Some of the choices are hopefully fairly self-explanatory.  People don't really change their avatars enough to merit voting for the best one.  There's not much fun voting for Board and Event of the Year when those are all but predetermined (Switch and meet-up respectively).  Given that some awards were going to go, Jay and I agreed that these were no-brainers.

Forumite of the Year is trickier to explain.  We discussed it here.  Basically we're a small group and it ended up with us feeling awkward, like voting for who's our best mate.  So it got dinghied.

Didn't you just replace it by expanding Contributor?
I hope not.  Contributor focusses on contributions to the forum, not on how nice a bloke the person is.  So hopefully it's not a friendship competition.

So what doesn't count towards Contributor then?
Anything off the forum.  Great tweets, great podcasts, great online gaming, being a stand-up bloke, paying for your pet's funeral: none of these should matter.  Many posts, great posts, great topics, great signatures, great tagline suggestions: these do.

What if, through said off-forum content, contributions on the forum were encouraged?  e.g. posts linking to podcasts, YouTube videos?
If it's linked to the forum and got some chat, by all means, give it a vote.  Ultimately it's up to you how you define forum contributions, I'm not laying down a law!  The folk 'round these parts don't take kindly to that...

Can I vote for ZeroJones?
If you think that Zero's contributions while he was here in 2018 outweigh the contributions of those who are still here, you absolutely can.  Same goes for other fleeting forumites.

Same's true for Funniest Forumite?
Yup.  The above three answers apply.  Funny forum contributions are what we want to see acknowledged!

Isn't there going to be a fair amount of overlap in those two votes then?
Maybe!  You can vote for the same person in both if you like.

In the signature award, are we voting for the person or the signature?
The signature.  If you preferred somebody's signature from earlier this year (even if it carried over from 2017, I suppose), you can vote for that instead.  If two similar sigs get votes, I'll probably group them together anyway.

Does my Topic of the Year have to have been started in 2018?
Like the signature award, we'd encourage topics that started life in 2018; but anything that's got a single post in it from this year is valid.

Can I vote for a sig/post/topic/tagline that I made myself?
No.

What's the point of GNew Year's Resolutions and Mentions if there aren't going to be any points awarded?
Fun!  And quite possibly good conversation-starters.  These are the cracker-presents of the GNamer Annual Awards: they're not the reason you're here, but you might get some fun out of pinging a plastic frog/resolution over the kitchen table/thread for a few minutes/posts.

Why did you get rid of award x?
What I said up top about the forum-focussed awards still applies to the gaming ones, but more so.  Last year, there wasn't particular enthusiasm for the gaming categories (according to the words of Zero, who ran that vote).  A couple of options were discussed, including scrapping them altogether.  Shrinking them down to two is the option we landed on.  

Yes, but - no separate multiplat/Nontendo-exclusive votes?
Whereas Nintendo live and die, a lot of the time, on their exclusives, the BBoPs don't so much.  It made more sense to us to have Spider-Man and Red Dead 2 facing off than not.  On the flipside, it doesn't seem infeasible that games like Celeste and Hollow Knight could go toe-to-toe with Pokémon and Smash.  

Instead, we expanded the number of points to five for each, which gives people more votes (should they want them) but also provides more focus.  Some quick maths: 5 x 2 > 3 x 3!  (Also, hopefully less chance of only one multiplat game getting more than one vote.  More points per person = more chances for overlap... I hope!)

And if all that doesn't convince you, go and look at the hot mess that was last year's multiplat award.

Are the NES games from Switch Online eligible for the Nintendo vote?
...you know, why not.  We allow the Classics ranges to be voted for, after all.  I won't encourage it, but if you feel an NES game, tweaked for online or no, is better than Nintendo's other 2018 offerings you're welcome to say so here.

What about other remakes?  Other ports?  (Asked by Mas.)
If the remake and/or port came out on the current bunch of Nintendo consoles, or indeed the current bunch of Nontendo consoles/machines (inc. PC), in 2018, then yes absolutely.  If it's e.g. new to the PS4 in 2018 but came out on Steam in 2016... eh, use your judgement.

I've got this game that's technically available on Switch/3DS, but I played it on another platform, and now I don't know which category it should go into...
The main answer is: if a thread for the game wouldn’t go in the Nontendo forum, don’t put the game in the Nontendo vote.  The other main answer is: up to you!  The following tips are to avoid splitting the vote for a game you love only.

Generally, if it was launched on Switch or 3DS in more or less the same shape, either this year or in a previous year, it's eligible for Nintendo and not eligible for Nontendo.  If it's got some substantial extra content in its Nontendo shape, fair enough if you want to vote for that version in Nontendo.  If the frame rate/resolution's better in Nontendo, then unless the Nintendo version is widely felt to be unplayable, you might want to put it in Nintendo.  Most people around here probably won't care enough about small differences, I'd warrant.

That said, if you've only got a Nontendo machine and not a Nintendo one, and don't want to bother looking up whether every indie game you played in 2018's available on Switch, that's your call and I won't stop you!  Better yet: just ask me and I'll do the research myself.

Can I vote for the same game in Nintendo and Nontendo if I think it's got enough differences?
Afraid not.  If it's good enough to make your Nintendo vote, it goes in your Nintendo vote only.

Mas, you're clearly much more enthusiastic regarding the gaming section than most, and that's undoubtedly a good thing.  I'm sorry that the shifting things around hasn't worked out for you.

Unfortunately it means that your view differs from most of the voters.  I'm not kidding when I say that Zero said the gaming awards last year got a lousy turnout.  It's also true that the multiplat awards have historically been a bit of a mess.  I know it's not what you wanted, but I'm hoping you can see that from our perspective, something needed to give; and that this was the best, or possibly least bad, option.

If you don't want to vote in the gaming awards because of the changes, then fair enough, you've put your case out for all to see and that's your call.  However I do hope you change your mind on the rest of the votes.  Getting our most active forumites to take part in the one celebration of the community we can all take part in is more important than ever, given that we've lost people like Zero this year.  Also, we've tilted things around so hopefully it's not as much 'I prefer person X over person Y'.  

So I do hope you'll reconsider on that. Basically: we need your votes.