The Voting Game: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 18:29, 20 February 2025

In February of 2021, Joe held a vote for which games he should play on stream next. The initial idea was that anyone could DM him on Discord with games which they wanted to be added to the vote, and then Joe would take a week-long break from streaming, over the course of which his Twitch subscribers and Patrons would be able to vote on these games in JADS. Joe had held votes like this before, but the last one he had done before this was in 2018. His streams had gained many more viewers by 2021 than they had in 2018, so 435 games got reccommended to him via Discord DMs. And this also meant that lots of people were active in JADS and eagerly participating in the voting. Seeing how entertaining this was, Joe quickly turned the voting into a large-scale interactive event which took over the entire server. He added lots of complicated rules and challenges, and fierce competitons broke out between different factions of users supporting different games. Then everyone who hadn't been following what was going on tuned in to the next stream 9 days later to see Joe playing a marble game and incoherently rambling about what had been happening while he'd been gone.

The Voting Game concluded after 12 days, over the course of which Joe streamed twice in order to resolve some of the challenges and to generally explain and discuss what had been happening on JADS. The outcome of The Voting Game was that 22 games or series of games were selected for Joe to play next on stream, which is a list that he is still working through to this day. A webpage exists for tracking his progress through these games.^[1] The Voting Game also spawned several inside jokes which are still referenced occasionally in Joe's streams, like "I got two fives", "This was it", "Finally Leon has his reverse", "Here's how Ace Combat 7 can still win", and "I am not a man satisfied with mere victory. Others must fail." There's an Imgur album created by Weeby which contains all of the fanart and the best memes that were made during The Voting Game.^[2]

The rest of this webpage details the events which transpired on each of these 12 days.

Day 1 - Friday 5th

On the first day of The Voting Game, Joe created the channel #the-voting-channel in JADS. Using this channel was how users would be able to vote for games. He configured the channel so that only people with the "Lili and Some Guy" role on the server (the role which only Joe and his ex-wife Lili had) could type in the channel or add new reactions to messages. Then in that channel, he typed one message for each game that was being voted on. He also added one reaction to each of these messages. A reaction is an emote attached to a message. If someone chooses to add a reaction to a message using a certain emote, it makes that emote appear below the message with the number 1 next to it. Then another user can click on that emote to add the same reaction to the message, increasing the number next to it by 1. They can also click on it again to remove their reaction, decreasing the number by 1. And because of the permissions Joe set for the channel, only he and Lili could add new reactions to the messages, but everyone else could still click on them to increase or decrease the number. This is what Joe used as a system to let people vote on the games: To vote for a game, you would click on the reaction beneath it. He gave most of the games a jphPog reaction, apart from some which he gave other emotes. He also added some fake games as jokes, like "I'm a Witcher" and "Touhou 21 ~ The Revenge of David Cage". Also, only people with the roles "Twitch Subscriber" or "Patron" could view the channel in the first place, which limited only those people to be able to vote.

Underneath all of the game messages, Joe wrote the following message:

#the-voting-channel 17:58 UTC
Rules:
- scroll up. click the emote to add a vote to a game. you can vote on as many games as you like. - I will do a culling every so often to remove low voted games. you may change your votes after this happens by clicking the emote to remove your vote. you can add to other games after that too. - please do not add any other emotes to the games. you shouldn't be able to but just in case it doesn't work: DO NOT ADD NEW EMOTES TO THE GAME, please! - there may be duplicates that I missed. I will remove them as they're caught - some games may be veto'd if they make it to the final rounds: if they are too hard to acquire to play legally, or they end up being way too much reading for me, or if they're possibly against twitch ToS - I think that's it. I may update the rules if I forgot anything.
TOP FIVE GAMES WIN. I might extend that to more if some of them are short.
Good luck. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwGHiicMNvA
@everyone

When Joe says "rounds", he is referring to the periodic culling of games with low votes. He arbitrarily decided when this would happen, and the time in-between each culling was a round. Throughout the rest of The Voting Game, Joe would post messages in this channel to make official rule updates and announcements. These messages will be interspersed with the rest of the text of this webpage in quote boxes, each beginning with "#the-voting-channel" and a time as above. Another rule which was active from day 1 but wasn't written in the channel was that at the end of the vote, if two games are in the top 5 and they have the same number of votes, then neither of them win. If this happened then it would make the remaining top 5 games win instead. This was because the last time there was a game vote in 2018, people intentionally made it so that the top two games tied on votes, meaning one more game won than should have been possible.

These were the only developments on the first day. But one important thing had happened a few days before this: The JADS user Nodja created a website to host an unofficial vote prior to the real vote, to see which games people were most interested in. The website let users add games and vote on them, and it displayed the current votes of each game in an ordered bar chart which updated in real time. Each game also had its own page on which users could submit pitches to encourage other users to vote for the game. Then when the official vote started on the 5th, Nodja made it so that the website could also be used to track the official votes on a separate page. The website used Discord's API to update the current votes of each game in real time in an ordered bar chart, just like with the unofficial votes. And it also let users add pitches to the games, again like with the unofficial votes. This made it so that the website was a more coherent way of seeing the current state of the vote, so everyone kept track of things through it. The website continued to be updated over the course of the rest of The Voting Game, making it essential for how complicated the event ended up being. This website no longer exists today unfortunately.

Day 2 - Saturday 6th

On Saturday, Joe saw people on Discord talking about how it's unfair that the games with the most votes (many of which he had been meaning to play for a long time, like Zero Escape: 999) were clear outliers and were filling up the top 5 slots, while everything else had no chance of being chosen, even though the whole point of Joe's audience choosing games for him to stream was so that he could play games that he wouldn't have chosen to play otherwise. Joe agreed with this point, so he decided to post a rule update in the voting channel:

#the-voting-channel 15:01 UTC
- a new win condition has been added to the game: a lose condition! Puhuhuhu! The three games that receive the LEAST amount of votes will also be played. Happy voting! Remember, you can remove votes you previously cast! (when I cull I will remove all games in a mid-range to keep low vote games and high vote games)
- I will be removing any clear outlier winner at each stage of the culling and proclaiming it a victor. The first culling is in ~24 hours and 999 would take that spot. It will be removed, added to the To-Be-Played list, and not count as the Top Five Winners at the end of the vote. If there is no clear outlier then this will not happen.

This abrupt rule change caused chaos among the voters as they all had to change their strategies quickly if they wanted to maximise their chances of getting their favourite games to win. This happened as a result of the high level of investment they all already had in wanting to get Joe to stream their favourite games. This level of investment gave The Voting Game real legitimacy and stakes for them. There were probably about 400 people who were invested like this throughout the entire ordeal.

In one of the streams Joe did near the end of The Voting Game, he said in reference to this:

Recap Stream
"I didn't realise what I'd done at this point. This was the catalyst that set things off. [...] When I introduced this low vote rule, Dragon's Den went nuts. And this was very inspiring. [...] So then I was like 'Okay well how can I top this?'"

Day 3 - Sunday 7th

#the-voting-channel 14:15 UTC
First culling soon.

#the-voting-channel 15:38 UTC
Halls of Ascension
Zero Escape Series (999, Virtue's Last Reward, and Zero Time Dilemma)
First culling has occurred. I removed every game that has 63 votes or more, up to a limit of 100 votes. So 63-100. But I let a few games live in that range because I am corrupt. And... reasons.
Some games were vetoed. The ✂️ emote on a game means I am considering a future veto on that game. Some others may get ✂️ if they get far enough that I find out through research that they will be too tough to play.
And that's it for today.
Unless...

This first culling marks the end of round 1, and the beginning of round 2.

Recap Stream
"On February 6th, late at night, Joe was trying to sleep. And Joe had an idea. And Joe started laughing and almost woke up Lili. Because I thought, what if..."

When Joe removed the culled games, he was supposed to delete the messages representing them from #the-voting-channel, including their reactions with them. But it was also possible for him to instead edit the text of those messages, to make them represent different things, while maintaining their reaction counts, and thus their numbers of votes.

#the-voting-channel 15:51 UTC
For some reason I can't delete these two.
Deus Ex
Kingdom Hearts 3
Weird.
OH NO! A BOMB!
-----
----
---
--
-
Oh no! A game has turned into a BOMB! What does that mean?
A bomb remains in the list until the next culling, at which point it goes off culling ITSELF and the game directly above it and the game directly below it. Make sure you vote it into a good spot!
But Kingdom Hearts 3 has turned into... Oh yes! A game has turned into a DRAGON ANGEL. What does that mean?
A dragon angel remains in the list until the next culling. Then it ascends the game directly above it and directly below it. This removes them from the list and guarantees they will be played. Make sure you vote it into a good spot!
HAPPY VOTING. @everyone
Next culling is Wednesday around 11 AM EST.

Recap Stream
"At almost every step of the way, chat has been very, like, 'What the fuck', and then in a little while they completely get it and they start gaming it. [...] So then Marik started asking questions. 'Joe? There's a clear outlier spot. What would happen if The Bomb got into the clear outlier spot? Would The Bomb go up to Outer Heaven? Does The Bomb explode before the outliers happen at the end of the round? Like, what's the order of operations here?' [...] And then Marik said 'So you're telling me if we get The Dragon Angel and The Bomb next to each other, that The Dragon Angel will ascend The Bomb, and then The Bomb will explode?'"

This moment marks the first point in The Voting Game where the investment which voters had in it started to go beyond just wanting to see Joe stream their favourite games. The legitimacy which The Voting Game held for them started causing them to be invested in achieving other feats within the game's workings. So this required Joe to expand on how the rules should work in these unusual cases which he hadn't planned for:

#the-voting-channel 19:44 UTC
Here's how the game resolves interactions -
Ascensions happen before Cullings. So if the A Bomb and Dragon Angel are next to each other:
the Dragon Angel ascends what is above it and below it to The Hall of Ascension. The votes they have carry over into the Ascension Hall list.
Then the A Bomb goes off Culling whatever is above it and below it in the Hall.
Right now only Zero Escape is in The Hall of Ascension with 306 votes. So if the A Bomb ascends with enough votes to put it directly below it, then Zero Escape would be culled.
Do what you will with this information.

Just from seeing that it was possible to do something to the game that was unintended, many voters decided to make this their new mission. After further questions concerning how outliers work with respect to the low vote win condition, Joe also decided to add the rule that something can be a low outlier as well as a high outlier:

#dragons-den 2:35 UTC
I will make this unequivocally clear: if you want to "save" the line of text "A Bomb" from culling itself, you must get both the A Bomb and Dragon Angel into states of Clear Outlier at the same time in the same round. So example: by Wednesday 11 AM EST, the A Bomb must be the clear winner of the the high vote (but not higher than what Zero Escape had), and the Angel must be the clear lowest candidate.

And it was this rule change that allowed for the formation of the full plan to save The Bomb.

#dragons-den 02:52 UTC
Hokay, so:
There exists 5 planes of existence in the JADS Voting Universe
Outer Heaven
The Hall of Ascension --- where Zero Escape is.
The Voting Veldt --- where the games you're voting on are now.
The Hell of Culled Things --- where all the culled games from the last round are now.
Double Hell
So when an Angel ends a round it ascends whatever is above or below it, meaning it sends it up when layer. When a bomb goes off it makes anything above it or below it go down a layer, but it also does that to itself.
The only ways to move up and down are to be culled via the chosen vote range (by me), or to be a clear outlier and ascend.
This means if you were to get an Angel into a state of Clear Outlier it would ascend at the end of the round and enter The Hall of Ascension. Then it would trigger its Above/Below ascension on those around it, moving it up again.
So if you were to get both the A Bomb and Angel into Clear Outliers, they would both enter the Halls of Ascension at the end of the round. Then the Angel would trigger her Ascension before the A Bomb explodes meaning it gets sent to Outer Heaven. Where I have arbitrarily decided cullings can't happen.
Just like ascensions can't happen from Double Hell either.

Recap Stream
"So here's the issue that they found: I can't put votes back on the board, because I delete the games when they ascend. So that means if they got a bomb into The Halls of Ascention and killed Zero Escape, the game would break."

JADS user Marik Bentusi had single-handedly started a movement to either stop The Bomb from exploding, or to break the game trying. And he started making fanart explaining his plan of action, featuring his character Bomb-chan. But this arc wouldn't be resolved yet, as round 2 wouldn't end until day 6. The fates of The Bomb and The Dragon Angel would remain undecided for now. Nonetheless, this was when The Voting Game first reached the level of complexity and investment which it would maintain for the next 9 days. Joe hadn't planned out any of these twists at the start. It's unclear exactly when he came up with the other ideas which you will see throughout the rest of The Voting Game, but it's likely that he began thinking of what else he could do in the game after this reaction to the introduction of The Bomb and The Dragon Angel.

Day 4 - Monday 8th

#the-voting-channel 13:55 UTC
Hello everyone. One minor change today.
The Bomb and Angel now have a downvote emote. Click the ⬇️ to push them down the list. You can also remove your ⬇️ to make it go back up later. Exactly the same as a normal vote.
.....
....
...
!
Metal Gear Solid V
What? Metal Gear Solid V is evolving!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDHq7enLNWo
Not pressing B, huh?
Well okay then.
...
Congratulations! Your Metal Gear Solid V evolved into... Metal Gear Solid 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
Happy voting!

It was during this day that Joe would respond to the new high level of investment in The Voting Game by announcnig not a rule change, but a challenge:

#the-voting-channel 19:13 UTC
Ahem. Is this thing still on? Something has happened. The first of the three Radiant Angels has appeared! The... Radiant Angel of Resurrection! 15 people are about to receive a letter from me. If arranged properly, they make TWO specific words. The first person to DM me these two words gets to ascend a game of their choosing to the Halls. Even if it's been culled. If you received a letter, share it at your own risk! And if you didn't receive a letter, who's going to doubt you if you still say you got one? You'll need to cooperate a little to share... but not too much to give away the answer. And those perceptive among you might be able to fill in the gaps without your own letter at all. Puhuhu. Happy Hunting.

Recap Stream
"I didn't tell people they were getting this. I just went through chat and saw who was active, and I DMed 15 people out of the blue and gave them a letter to see what would happen."

The voters had once again been abruptly thrust into chaos, in what came to be known as The Word Game. For the entire duration of the game, dozens of users communicated in #dragons-den and via DMs to try and figure out who the letter carriers were and what the secret phrase was. The text of the DM given out to the 15 people was as follows, where "X" is the letter:

Word Game DM
Hello. You have been given one of the fifteen letters of resurrection. Your letter is: (X). All fifteen of you have been given this exact same message. If you do not wish to take part in this game, please say in Dragons Den: "I was chosen but I do not wish to play. My letter was ()." I will then confirm that you were truthfully part of the game and confirm your letter. This is the only way I will confirm the authenticity of a letter. If you do wish to play, please confirm so in reasponse to this DM. Consider carefully whether you want to share your letter. Thank you.

#dragons-den 19:29 UTC
No, anyone can participate. You can even fake getting a letter. Which is really easy now since so many people leaked the DM message immediately. That was like, your only lifeline for authenticity and it's instantly been destroyed. :Valle:

The intricacies of exactly what unfolded over the three hours which the game lasted for would not only take up too much of this page, but these details are also incomplete since a large part of the communication happened via DMs, where players would trade information. At some point, Joe revealed that two of the letters were uppercase, and the rest of them were lowercase, signifying the first letters of each of the two words. These two letters were M and F. Some users created their own scripts to generate all possible guesses of what the two words could be, based off which letters had been fully or partially confirmed at the time. After several of the letters had been revealed, JADS user Latty posted a text file of all the guesses which his script had generated. A matter of minutes after this happened, someone won the game. JADS user Haklen, who wasn't a letter carrier, and who hadn't even talked in the server for several months, picked one of the guesses from Latty's list, and DMed it to Joe as their first guess in the game, and they got it right.

#the-voting-channel 00:25 UTC
The event is over and the winner is deciding on what they would like to ascend. Please do not DM them with suggestions.
The words were: Mastermind Farce.

Day 5 - Tuesday 9th

#the-voting-channel 15:43 UTC
Officially announcing the winner of this word game now: Haklen! They chose to ascend the game Dujanah, which will now rise to Outer Heaven and by safe from all bombs and cullings. Congrats!

When Joe gave out free game picks like this from now on, he would always send them straight to Outer Heaven rather than The Halls of Ascension.

#the-voting-channel 19:31 UTC
----
!
What? Shin Megami Tensei: How Many Games Can We Veto; Gaiden is evolving!
Congratulations! Your Shin Megami Tensei evolved into...
PERSONA 4 GOLDEN.
Happy voting!

#the-voting-channel 19:57 UTC
@everyone for the new entry, and for a reminder that there is less than a day left on this voting round. It ends tomorrow at 11 AM EST. I may temporarily block you from viewing this channel so new votes cannot interfere with the resolves during that time.

Recap Stream
"I had already planned that, at some point, I was going to take Shin Megami Tensei V and, during the day before the next round culling, evolve it into Persona 4 Golden. Just to upset everyone. That's why I didn't let it on the list. Because I wanted that twist to happen. That was the only thing I legitimately planned ahead of time."

And indeed, Persona 4 Golden immediately gained lots of votes, quickly rising to threaten the position of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, which was the clear outlier game prior to this. Persona 4 Golden was such a popular choice with everyone because of the infamy of Joe's Persona 5 streams. Joe had planned this so that whichever game was in that outlier spot would be replaced with Persona 4 Golden at the last minute before the end of the round. But also, notice how the top outlier position wasn't held by The Bomb. The voters who were so inclined hadn't managed to vote it up high enough. By this point, they were instead trying to vote it as low as possible to make it be the low outlier.

Day 6 - Wednesday 10th

On day 5, Marik had made another piece of fanart where he explained his mission to save The Bomb, in which he had accidentally predicted what Joe had planned for day 6:

#the-voting-channel 15:02 UTC
*monotone excitement*
Hello. It is the final hour of Round Two (of Four), and we have a last hour change.
--Touhou 23 ~ I Accidentally Married a Flea But Now I'm Falling In Love With Him; Help! Featuring Music by Hans Zimmer and Voice Acting by Christopher Walken (As The Flea)--
has turned into a Bomb Defusal Fairy with a Magic Wrench Wand.
Surely no one predicted this twist and this is an entirely upsetting revelation for you all.
Ha ha, ha ha ha, ha ha -- ha ha.
The Bomb Defusal Fairy has the power to stop any bomb on the board from exploding, but only if they are voted to within 2 places of it. Her wand doesn't have much reach but still better than most.
But be careful. If the Fairy doesn't have a bomb to defuse at the end of the round she will become irate and begin throwing her Wrench Wands at everyone. She will hit two games above her and two games below her, giving them Downvote buttons for the rest of the game.
Happy voting.
Round ends one hour from this post. The room will be temporarily unviewable during this time while I sort out the interactions and cullings.
Also remember that The Voting Veldt is a donut. If the angel doesn't ascend, its power still has to go somewhere...

At the time of this post, The Bomb Defusal Fairy was in the top half of the list, and The Bomb was very close to the bottom. And the voters had one hour to vote them directly next to each other.

Recap Stream
"Okay, I need you to understand something. There was so much voting at the end of this, and dragon's den was moving so fast, that they broke Discord. So we had to close the voting room, I think maybe a minute before it was scheduled to. Because there were so many emotes moving and so many chat messages in dragon's den that the votes were vanishing on the server side. I thought the game was over. All of a sudden, the top voted games had 1 vote. [...] We had to let it settle, and it took a while for the votes to come back. [...] And then I go through it, and The Bomb and the bomb defusal fairy were 3 votes away from each other."

#the-voting-channel 16:56 UTC
The Dragon Angel ascends as a low vote outlier.
Persona 4 Golden ascends as a high vote outlier.
Within The Halls of Ascension there is then:
Persona 4 Golden - 330 Votes
Zero Escape - 306 Votes
Dragon Angel - (Net) 29 Votes
The Dragon Angel then activates her powers, ascending the games directly above her and below her. In The Voting Veldt this power would have looped around to the top of the list but The Halls of Ascension are not donut shaped.
Zero Escape ascends to Outer Heaven.
Persona 4 Golden and Dragon Angel remain in The Halls of Ascension.
Bomb Defusal Fairy was directly next to A Bomb on the voting list. No game was between them.
The Fairy defuses the Bomb. The Bomb has become A Defused Bomb and remains on the board with no active effect. The Fairy is not sated by this however, and remains on the board to repeat her effects for the next round.
---
--
-

As one round ended, another begun. Day 6, being the transition between these two rounds, was the first day in a streak of particularly eventful days at the heart of The Voting Game.

#the-voting-channel 17:34 UTC
There are 44 entries left in The Voting Veldt
40 of them are legitimate games. I culled everything from a mid-range spread but graciously spared two.
2 of them are memes - I'm A Witcher and Atelier Ryza 3.
2 of them are entities - Defused Bomb, and Bomb Defusal Fairy.

The following rules are still in play:
Top 5 games win. Bottom 3 games win.
A Clear Outlier on the top AND bottom of the list at the end of the round ascends to The Halls of Ascension and will be played. These do not take spots away from the Top 5 / Bottom 3.
If the Bomb Defusal Fairy is not in range of an active bomb at the end of the round, she will throw her wand wrenches at two games above her and two games below her, giving them downvote buttons for the rest of the game.
If I have forgotten anything I will update here.
----
This is Round 3. It will end on Saturday at 11 AM EST unless something... happens.
New rule going forward: the game in the middle of the Voting Veldt will also be chosen to play at the end of game. Not the end of the round. So keep this in mind for voting in Round 4.
The Second Radiant Angel descends in one hour.

The Dragon Angel waiting in The Halls of Ascention, receiving a message from The Bomb, only for it to be intercepted by Votos, provoking her wrath. by Marik Bentusi

#the-voting-channel 18:29 UTC
----
The sky darkens.
The second of the three Radiant Angels has appeared! The...
Radiant Angel of Reckoning! Votos the Merciful. You have provoked her wrath after breaking destiny and saving The Bomb That Was Meant to Explode, and ascending The Angel That Was Meant To Ascend Only Others. Votos arrives onto The Voting Veldt in a dormant state. She requires votes to awaken her powers.
At the end of the current round, she will cause the following GAMEQUAKE depending on her power level:
0 - 50 Votes = No effect. She remains dormant.
51 - 150 Votes = She will cull the bottom 10 entries on the list.
151 - 250 Votes = She will cull the middle 10.
251 - 400 Votes = She will cull the top 10.
401+ Votes = She reaches full power, unleashing a reckoning through every game and culling half the list in alternating order STARTING with the Number 1 spot. So 1 -> 3 -> 5 -> 7, and so on. This ends the round immediately.
The Radiant Angel must remain above 401+ for ten consecutive minutes to unleash her charged power.
Votos is merciful however, and brings with her five Training Dummies that can tank some of these hits. The Fairy and Defused Bomb can also be hit by her powers.
----
Votos, The Merciful Angel of Reckoning <----- for voting
🙏
Blue Training Dummy - Just A Dummy
💙 ⬇️
Red Training Dummy - Is Sentient
🔺 ⬇️
Purple Training Dummy - The Cute One
🟣 ⬇️
Yellow Training Dummy - The Largest Dummy
🟨 ⬇️
Green Training Dummy - Has Come to Bargain
📗 ⬇️
@everyone
Happy voting!
(If I am asleep I obviously cannot end the round. So if Votos maintains 401+ for 10 minutes I will end the round when I wake up. Human limitations of an inhuman game)

The emojis beneath Votos and each of the training dummies represent the reacts which Joe added to them. The down arrows are the downvote buttons, and the other emojis are the upvote buttons. Note that Votos doesn't have a downvote button.

Recap Stream
"I thought Votos' implementation - if I can toot my own horn - was pretty genius. Because I knew for sure she was gonna get above 50, because who's not gonna vote for The Radiant Angel of Reckoning, okay? And as soon as she gets to 50 votes, all the people that have their outliers in the bottom have a really big incentive to vote her up. At that point, she's in the middle, where the least amount of people care probably, because the outliers have already been set. And she will creep, slowly and steadily up, while the people who want games in the top 10 look on in horror. 'There's no way she's gonna get to 251. We don't even have to worry about Votos.' And then, as soon as she gets to 251, the panic sets in. And I was hoping that all these heavy-duty voters would be like 'Let's vote her up to 401. Let's take the 50/50, and let's see what happens.'"

#dragons-den 20:33 UTC
votos does the culling for me this round

Recap Stream
"So, my idea for this was that I wanted it to be chaos, but controlled chaos. I never wanted anything to be so unfair that you all felt that you didn't have any control. [...] She's gonna cull 10 games, or you can roll the dice and cull half of the games, and position the dummies and The Bomb and the fairy in such a way that they'll take some of those hits."

Votos surpassed 251 votes within about 12 hours, meaning the top 10 games were set to be culled. As Votos gained votes, Joe inserted new lines of text into #the-voting-channel describing the changes, by editing one of the messages.

#the-voting-channel
50 votes reached. Votos has opened her eyes. 151 votes reached. Votos stands up. 251 votes reached. Votos spreads her wings.

Day 7 - Thursday 11th

Recap Stream
"After a day, Votos wasn't doing too well, because she wasn't getting to 401. Not only that, there was a conspiracy starting to form that because I had added Persona 4 as a surprise game and robbed Fire Emblem, they were like 'Joe clearly doesn't want to play Fire Emblem, and now look, he's added this thing that's clearly going to cull the top 10 games, where Fire Emblem is.' Meanwhile, the chads that wanted stuff like Deadly Premonition and 13 Sentinels were unvoting their games out of the top 10. [...] I realised that this was a problem, and I was like 'Okay, I can kill two birds with one stone here. So I want to quell this Fire Emblem conspiracy, and I also want to give Votos a chance and lower the threashold of what she can do.' So I did this."

#the-voting-channel 13:07 UTC
You hear a hopping behind you.
"G-Greetings fellow w-weeb."
It's the Purple Training Dummy! She's having trouble maintaining eye contact with you. Somehow, she can blink.
"I-I... uhm... well..." she lowers her head. Her hands are kneading into each other.
"I've come with a d-deal," she lifts her head suddenly. "You'd think it would be Green! B-but no..." she looks down. "You have to d-deal with Purple-chan instead. I hope that's okay..."
She hops in place for a moment.
"S-So the thing is, Mommy Votos has a lot of trouble staying in the Veldt. S-She's so powerful that it's taxing for her not to d-destroy all of reality by being h-here. So I thought. I thought! We could make a deal and we could all win."
Purple-chan looks at you directly in the eyes.
"I want you to kill me."
Her eyes widen at your expression.
"N-No! It's okay!" She hops forward suddenly. "Votos wouldn't have to s-suffer as much, using her power to m-maintain me. And y-you get something out of it too! I've made an a-arrangement with the mastermind. If you k-kill me then Fire Emblem Three Houses g-gets to ascend. Right away. S-Straight to Outer Heaven where it will be safe."
She looks away.
"All you have to do is kill me. But that's f-fine right? I'm not even s-sentient."
She whispers: "Because I'm not Red."
----
Do you kill Purple-chan?

Beneath this message were two react emotes for voting: one of a shotgun for yes, and one of a person holding up a sign with "no" written on it, for no. The purple dummy had already cemented itself as the new main character before the day 7 update, similar to The Bomb, and it had gained enough votes to put it near the top. People had already started channifying it as Purple-chan, although the character wasn't drawn by anyone until the day 7 update.

Recap Stream
"I thought that Red was gonna be the fan-favourite, because I thought that chat would value sentience. But no, chat values cuteness, so Purple was the fan-favourite, because Purple was "the cute one". So that just goes to show that weebs value cuteness over sentience, which is probably why they love anime girls over real girls. [...] Now, as you can see in this text, the way that she presents herself is leading you toward a very strong conclusion. Look how thick I'm laying it on: not sentient, is cute, doesn't want you to kill her. [...] I was playing mind games here. I thought that, by putting this forward, you would all go 'We really shouldn't kill her. Look how cute she is. You know what? Let's kill her.' [...] Now I don't know if this was Marik's fault, but he was like 'This is a bit sus. I think Joe wants us to kill her.'"

The no votes immediately dwarfed the yes votes. The results stagnating like this prompted Joe to make further updates.

#the-voting-channel 13:33 UTC > "W-Why won't you k-kill me senpai? Am I not w-worthy enough to t-trade for one game? Am I s-so pathetic you're h-holding out for more?"
Purple-chan begins to cry.

#the-voting-channel 14:09 UTC
"F-Fine you win, onii-chan. I'm not w-worth one game. So you get two. Fire Emblem and w-whatever is at the top spot when you k-kill me."
She turns away.
"I-I never want to see you again."

#the-voting-channel 14:29 UTC
----
Purple-Chan dies if the Kill Votes are ever five votes higher than the No votes, representing your 5 seconds of hesitation as you squeeze the trigger. It's symbolism like Silent Hill 2.
Happy voting!

#the-voting-channel 16:03 UTC
@everyone Today's changes are above. Vote your conscience.
Votos is at 317 at the time of writing.

This did not affect the votes.

Recap Stream
"And they didn't kill her. All Fire Emblem fans had to do was vote on the shotgun. And they didn't do it. Couldn't bring themselves to kill a line of text."

At this point, Joe changed his Discord profile picture to Shimano, because everyone was starting to see that he really did want them to kill Purple-chan, so him changing to Shimano was his way of pretending that this was still part of his plan. At some point, a Fire Emblem fan pinged Joe and said "Please Joe, please give us an 11th hour twist to save Fire Emblem, I'LL DO ANYTHING!!", to which Joe responded with:

#dragons-den 16:43
THIS WAS IT
AND YOU CHOSE NOT TO TAKE IT

This interaction is still quoted to this day.

#the-voting-channel 21:22
Do you hug Purple-chan?

Beneath this message were two react emotes for voing: one of two people hugging for yes, and one of a person holding up a sign with "no" written on it, for no.

#the-voting-channel 21:32
Five votes higher!
You hug Purple-chan.
It's a nice hug.

Recap Stream
"I thought that if you guys hugged her you'd be like 'Okay you got to interact with your waifu. And the hug was fine, there was no trap here. So maybe there's no trap with killing her either.'"

#the-voting-channel 23:14
You have two hours left to kill Purple-chan. If you do not then the opportunity is gone forever@<-->@her offer will be withdrawn.
Happy voting!

Remember that this entire time, everybody was still using Nodja's website to track the increasingly-complex state of the game. As thanks for doing this, Joe paid Nodja for his work and offered him one free game ascention. Nodja chose Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver.

Day 8 - Friday 12th

Recap Stream
"If you guys killed Purple-chan, the Votos vote threashold was gonna drop down to 375. Because I wanted Votos to go off, or I wanted Votos going off to be actually possible, because I was starting to think it wasn't actually possible. [...] And then after Purple-chan died, a roulette rake was gonna fall from the sky and push Blue out to you, and it was gonna say in all caps like God is speaking 'KILL THIS ONE AND 13 SENTINELS ASCENDS'. And if you kill another one, she drops down to 350. [...] So Purple-chan lived, and I had to think of a new story."

#the-voting-channel 01:08 UTC
Calling it.
You have chosen to spare Purple-chan.
In her anger she culls both Fire Emblem Three Houses and Metal Gear Solid, directly to Double Hell...
... is what should happen.
But instead...
-----
"M-Mommy Votos would never allow it," Purple-chan finally speaks. She pushes you away from hugging her.
Over the range and far away, you hear a crackle of energy coming from Votos. Then it passes.
"Never have I..." Purple-chan stops herself. She hops away once. Twice. She mutters.
Other than that the Veldt is strangely silent. There's a hole where Umineko used to be.
"Can't you see this is what I wanted?" Purple-chan shouts as she suddenly turns to you, hopping madly.
"Only you could have f-freed me from this torment!
I thought I could trust you. I-I'm doomed now!
N-Never have I doubted what I am. I know I'm a Dummy. But t-this... is the first t-time I've felt like one."
-
Both of you walk away from each other. Well, Purple-chan hops. You know.
On her one pole Training Dummy Leg.
Now what? Fire Emblem and Metal Gear Solid do not ascend.
Ultimately every game in the Veldt remains as they were.
Suddenly, you hope you know what you're doing...
-----
What? Purple Training Dummy - The Cute One is evolving!
The sky darkens.
Congratulations! Your Purple Training Dummy - The Cute One evolved into...
Kawaiinamite: A Weeb Bomb's Tale. At the end of the round it culls the first weeb game above it and the first weeb below it. Will skip every other non-weeb game until it finds one. If the weeb games are tied then the power of friendship makes them die together.
IMMUNE FROM THE FAIRY'S DEFUSAL. IMMUNE FROM ASCENDING. IMMUNE FROM CULLING. THIS WILL EXPLODE SOMEWHERE ON THE VELDT AND THE VELDT IS A DONUT. IT IS CULLING TWO GAMES.
Happy voting! ^_^

After making this announcement, Joe made official rulings about which games in the vote counted as weeb games. He listed them all out in a separate channel with his verdicts alongside each of them.

Recap Stream
"Kawaiinamite was gonna be what 'I'm A Witcher' was gonna evolve into in the last round, so you guys would have a mad scramble at the end of the round to figure out a way to get rid of this bomb that's gonna explode at the top of the list where all the best games are. But I had to move it forward because my plans changed. [...] I was trying to think of mechanics that would thin the herd of weeb games a little bit. So The Dragon Angel was gonna evolve later into a normie angel, and the normie angel was going to ascend non-weeb games, and it would go up and down the list until it found one. But you guys ascended The Dragon Angel into The Halls of Ascension, so I couldn't do it, so I had to do different mechanics. But that's part of the fun."

Joe had hidden a secret code in this most recent message in #the-voting-channel: The first letters of each of the lines in the scene with Purple-chan spelled out "Monocoin Bonus". However, nobody spotted it until he hinted at it himself.

#the-voting-channel 14:22 UTC
The fifth free ascension... hiding in plain sight on JADS... watch out for it. Find it. And you get to pick a game.

#the-voting-channel 14:45 UTC
It has been found.
The winner of this ascension was @fenixfurion and he chose to ascend this culled game into Outer Heaven...

Following this message was an embedded video which fenixfurion had asked for Joe to put in #the-voting-channel as the way of announcing the game he'd chosen. It was a video of Doctor Breen's speech from the opening of Half-Life 2, the game he had chosen. At the end of the clip, Doctor Breen turns into Shimano.

#the-voting-channel 19:34
@everyone I have no more twists planned for this round of the game. The round ends tomorrow at 11 AM EST and will follow all of the really easy to understand rules above.
After the next round starts I will be doing another "word game" like the previous one we did the other day. If you would like to be a candidate to be given a letter for the game please DM after reading the following:
1) you must be online for a few hours around 1 PM EST onward tomorrow. And agree to be as active as possible in the game following that time if it doesn't end in those first few hours. If something comes up and you cannot do that, you agree to bow out of the game and reveal your letter to the other players.
2) you must be comfortable talking in dragons-den and "playing the game" however you see fit with those chat interactions.
3) prior involvement in the chat is a boon but not required
The contest will follow the same format as last time. An assortment of people will be given a letter. And it's up to you how you reveal that letter to others and collect other letters to work out the winning combination. More details will be stated at the start of the game tomorrow. I am going to try to make it harder this time but some of you also know what to expect. So this game could last 10 minutes or it could last until the following day. I have no idea. That's the fun!
Prizes:
1) First place gets to ascend any game that hasn't been vetoed.
2) Second place gets to ascend any game from Culled Hell back onto the Veldt.
3) Third place gets to tell everyone they came in third place.
DM me if you would like to be considered to play. If you change your mind DM me again that you withdraw. Thanks.
Oh! If you do not get chosen to have a letter you can still play and guess. These are just the spots for the Letter Carrier. I believe last game someone who wasn't a Letter Carrier guessed correctly and was the winner. So if you do not want to be involved in the letter stuff, you can still play the game and guess along.

Joe announcing the second word game ahead of time meant that the voters could prepare for it this time. Several private group chats formed of voters who all agreed to work together and to choose a certain game if any of them won.

Day 9 - Saturday 13th

#the-voting-channel 15:27 UTC
Round ends in 40 minutes. Current outliers are MGS and Defused Bomb, because of course it is.
Votos is set to destroy the top 10 entries on the board after that meaning: UDG, Fire Emblem Three Houses, Pathologic 2, Kawaiinamite (who will survive the hit), Xenoblade Chronicles 1, Hatoful Boyfriend, Green Training Dummy, Yakuza Kiwami, Yellow Training Dummy, and Divinity Original Sin 2.
Then Kawaiinamite will explode, culling Sakuya Cucumber Game, and Dark Chronicle.
If any of this sounds disagreeable to you then... vote.

Recap Stream
"At the end of this round, they were trying to make it so that Metal Gear Solid was an outlier. And it needed 1 vote at the end of it. And I lost internet because Lili's dog unplugged the modem downstairs. No-one believes me, but this legitimately happened. And when the modem gets unplugged it loses wired internet, but the wi-fi stays on with the battery back-up. I know you're all picturing a dog using their paws and grabbing the plug, but really it's just that she knocked it with her big butt and the AC adapter loosened a little bit. So I was blind for a bit, and during this time, chat begged Lili to go in and give Metal Gear Solid its final vote it needed to ascend, because she was the only other one who could see the room. And she did."

#the-voting-channel 17:01 UTC
==ROUND THREE ENDS==
CHANGELOG:
Metal Gear Solid 1-5 ascends to The Halls of Ascension as an Outlier.
A Defused Bomb also ascends to The Halls of Ascension as an Outlier.
The Dragon Angel in Heaven then ascends further. Their arrangement is as so:
Metal Gear Solid - 338 votes
Persona 4 Golden - 330 votes
Dragon Angel - 29 votes
A Defused Bomb - 4 votes.
So the Dragon Angel carries Persona 4 Golden and A Defused Bomb to Outer Heaven. Metal Gear Solid 1-5 remains in the Halls.
Congratulations. You got the bomb to Outer Heaven. This means nothing.
-
Votos did not reach full power. But she still gathered enough strength to wipe out the top ten games on the list.
Her reckoning included:
Danganronpa Ultra Despair Girls
Fire Emblem: Three Houses (LOL)
Pathologic 2
Xenoblade Chronicles: Definition Edition
Kawaiinamite: A Weeb Bomb's Tale
Hatoful Boyfriend
Green Training Dummy
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (F)
Yakuza Kiwami
Divinity Original Sin 2
-
Kawaiinamite, now a cute abomination of flesh and steel (still cute AF though), barely survives the impact from Votos. Kawaiinamite then does her duty and explodes, sending a shockwave both above and below from her position. These do not stop until they found a weeb game on the Veldt and, since the Veldt is a donut, the power sent upward finds the first weeb game on the bottom of the list. Whereas the blast sent below finds a target quickly.
Sakuya Izayoi Gives You Advice And Dabs: Nitori Kawashiro Offers You Advice In Exchange For Cucumbers And Eats The Cucumbers -- culled
Dark Chronicle -- culled
The Bomb Defusal Fairy was NOT in range of active bombs and, given nothing to do, began throwing her Wrench Wands around in a fit of rage. Two games above her and two games below her are hit in this onslaught and now have downvote buttons:
Blue Training Dummy (now has two downvote buttons, sorry Nodja)
Kingdom Hearts 2
Hypnospace Outlaw
Gravity Rush
-
---
Votos leaves the Veldt without a word. The training dummies dissolve, leaving only their cross-like support stands where they once stood as a remnant. The pieces of Kawaiinamite remain, however.
All is quiet for a time. The sky remains dark.
An hour passes. A shaft of light breaks the clouds and illuminates the broken chunks of Kawaiinamite. As if the explosion is happening in reverse, her body reassembles itself and then explodes again. She screams and is then gone. Only a single shard of her is left behind. Imperceptible, unless you knew where to look.
A glowing light enters Outer Heaven. Just as the Dragon Angel is about to leave, having done her strange duty that she does not fully understand any longer.
The glowing light does not allow her to leave...

--- Current states:
- Outer Heaven -
Persona 4 Golden
Zero Escape
Dujanah
Half-Life 2
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver
A Glowing Light
Dragon Angel
A Defused Bomb

- Halls of Ascension -
Metal Gear Solid

- The Voting Veldt -
The games above (scroll up)
+
Bomb Defusal Fairy
A Blue Remnant
A Red Remnant
A Yellow Remnant
A Shard of Kawaiinamite
-
Next Radiant Angel ascends in about one hour. The word game will start about an hour after that. (OOC: I am behind on it all because of losing internet)

#the-voting-channel 17:50 UTC
The ground trembles.
The third of the three Radiant Angels has appeared! The...
Radiant Corrupted Angel of Chaos! Davina Cage the Four-Faced. She ascends from Hell, casting eight long shadows over the Veldt from each of her arms.
The four faces of Davina Cage always laugh in unison. But they never speak the same words at the same time except for their legendary greeting:
"MERRY CHRISTMAS!" the four voices echo together across the Veldt.
Then they take turns to speak.
Face One says: "We have arrived as it was ordained. What you did to Purple-chan was foretold in our Indigo Prophecy. We will switch things up."
Face Two says: "You've done okay but it's still just a tad boring here... I think I will bring a Heavy Rain!... ...of meteorites!
Face Three says: "We were not always Four, or Three, or Two. I mark the moment we went Beyond: Two Souls. I will right some of the wrongs in this mess."
Face Four says: ... nothing? It just laughs at the disorder on the Veldt. Perhaps the most Human reaction but it still disturbs you.
The other faces begin to laugh too.
-
Corrupted Angel Davina Cage won't ask you for votes. She already knows you will do so.

25 votes - The Indigo Prophecy comes true. Instead of the Top Five Games and Bottom Three Games ascending, it switches to Top Three / Bottom Five.
100 votes - Bring on the meteorites! The Veldt is devastated by a meteor shower. Everything receives a downvote button. If it already has one, it gets another.
175 votes - The third face desires Order, because what is Chaos without some hypocrisy? Every non-game entity on the list becomes a Hellgate. Explained below.
350 votes - The Fourth Face holds a Mystery Box. Davina Cage will tell you what's inside of it if she receives 175 votes. Then you get to choose.
-
Hellgate explanation: Every entity on the Veldt that is NOT a game turns into a Hellgate, which drills a hole into the Hell of Culled things. 24 hours after the Hellgates open, a Culled Game will return to the Veldt through the gate. The gate will then close. The game chosen depends on how many votes the Hellgate has and how many votes the game had when it was Culled.
Example: If the Hellgate has 173 Votes after 24 hours, it would pull through FF7 Remake back to the Veldt because it had 173 Votes when it was culled.
Summary: the Hellgate is replaced by whatever game in Hell is closest to it in votes, 24 hours after the Hellgate opens.
Davina Cage does not care about your (vote) pacing. Her effects are empowered if her vote thresholds are ever met.
-

The Third Radiant Angel, Corrupted Davina Cage <--- for voting

@everyone
Happy voting!

The name of the third radiant angel, Davina Cage, is a reference to notoriously bad game director David Cage. A couple of months before The Voting Game, Joe streamed all of the David Cage games, which is why he's referenced here. This message also references the titles of three of his games: Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy, Heaavy Rain, and Beyond: Two Souls.

The react emote for voting for Davina Cage was :Valle:, which is JADS' de-facto laughing emote. Davina Cage very quickly reached 175 votes, meaning the effects of the first three goals all happened: the win conditions changed to top three and bottom five, everything got a downvote button, and the hellgates opened. It also meant that the contents of the mystery box were revealed.

#the-voting-channel 18:09 UTC
The mystery box begins to open...
If Davina Cage receives 350. For the final four hours of the vote.
Everyone on the server can vote.
-
The game ends on Tuesday. I will stream for the final four hours whether Cage reaches 350 or not. The game ends when the stream ends.

Remember that only JADS users with the roles Twitch Subscriber or Patron could access #the-voting-channel still. Before The Voting Game started, Joe said that being able to vote should be considered a bonus if you've already bought a Twitch or Patreon subscription, and that nobody should be paying just to be able to take part. But once the game had started to pick up, there were lots of people who didn't have the required roles but wanted to participate. And the way you can connect Discord accounts to Twitch or Patreon accounts means it can take a few days for it to recognise that you've linked them, and for you to automatically gain the corresponding roles in JADS. So Joe had been giving special temporary roles to anyone who became a Twitch sub or a Patron during The Voting Game, as long as they had already been in JADS before it had started. But opening up the vote to all JADS members would mean removing the cost barrier, the wait for Joe to give you the special role, and the JADS membership timer altogether. If this happened, then it would provide a huge increase in the total number of votes which games would be able to receive, which would be good for the more popular games. But it would also throw off the careful balance which some less popular games had become acustomed to in order for them to have survived on The Veldt for as long as they had. So it would be good news for some, but very bad news for others.

When Joe was deciding which games in the vote were weeb games and writing them out in a list, he found a way to spell something out with the first letters of each of their names, and so he hid another secret in there like before. The phrase he spelt out this time was "Gladdest Gymnast", which is a reference to Aoi from Danganronpa. It was at this point in the game that someone spotted it.

#the-voting-channel 18:27 UTC
@wardrimmer was the winner of the second word search bullshit
The game chosen to ascend is...
Steins;Gate

#the-voting-channel 18:31 UTC
I know that was a lot of rule changes above so let me refresh the victory conditions:
At the end of the game:
Top Three Games are chosen.
Bottom Five Games are chosen.
The game in the middle position (closest we can get) is also chosen.
I am undecided if we will have outlier ascensions in this round. You may want to vote like we will. We shall see.

Then the time for the second word game arrived. This time, Joe created a special channel for the game to take place in, callled #the-word-game-room. This is also where he posted the rules:

#the-word-game-room 19:41 UTC
27 of you are going to receive a message from me with a number and a letter. These are Letter Carriers. Your goal is to find out what phrase these letters make. It's a specific string that I have in mind. The order of the words counts.
People can lie and say that they received a letter when they did not. It is up to you how you trickle out information while also getting the most information yourself. You are allowed to DM people and make deals. Information can be used as you see fit. If you do not receive a letter you can also pretend that you have one to lie your way into getting more info. If you do not have a letter you can still collect information and send me your guesses.
At any point a Letter Carrier can give up in chat I will 100% confirm their legitimacy and that they were given a letter. This can then be known for sure that it's a part of the game, however...
THREE PEOPLE CHOSEN HAVE FAKE LETTERS. These are the imposters. If they "give up" in chat I will confirm their letter. They have "give up" a SECOND TIME by saying "My name is [their name] and I am an imposter." I will then confirm they were an imposter and that their letter was fake after all.
Is anything about this unclear before I start giving out letters?
This is more of a logic problem than last time I think. But who knows.

And then 27 people received the following DM from Joe:

Second Word Game DM
Hello. You have been chosen to be a Letter Carrier. Your number is [X] and your letter is [Y].
If you want me to confirm your status as a Letter Carrier and reveal your letter as real, please type in the word game channel "I was a Letter Carrier. I have chosen to give up for the good of the game. My number is [ ] and my letter is [ ]." Please include the correct information in the brackets (also please INCLUDE the brackets). And @ me when you do this. Thank you.

Except the X in "Your number is [X]" was a number, and the Y in "your letter is [Y]" was also a number. Immediately almost all of the letter carriers thought that Joe had made a mistake. He insisted he hadn't. So then JADS user Bulder said in #the-word-game-room "I'VE COME TO MAKE AN ANNOUNCEMENT. JOSEPH THE ANDERSON IS A MOTHERFUCKER. HE GAVE ME A 5." All of the non-letter carriers thought he was joking, until in frustration he officially revealed his letter by saying "@Joseph Anderson I was a Letter Carrier. I have chosen to give up for the good of the game. My number is [5] and my letter is [5]." This prompted Joe's confirmation:

#the-word-game-room 20:13 UTC
I can confirm that Bulder was a Letter Carrier and that his number was [5] and that his letter was [5].

This is another interaction which is still quoted to this day.

Eventually, the players started figuring out what the information they had been given meant: The "letters" corresponded to positions in the alphabet, and the numbers corresponded to positions in the target phrase. However, it wasn't quite that straight-forward, because the positions were on a per-word basis, meaning they denoted the letters' positions through each of the words, rather than their positions through the entire phrase. For example, if you were a letter carrier and your number was [1], then your letter would be the 1st letter in one of the words. And nobody knew how many words there were, or which order the words were in. And there was one more twist: The letter positions through the alphabet were backwards. So if your "letter" was [26], it corresponded to an A.

Somehow this puzzle was eventually solved after 3 hours, which was the same duration as for the first word game. The secret phrase was "Finally Leon Has His Revenge", which is a reference to how numbers and letters are involved in the first case of Danganronpa 1, which a long-running inside joke. However, the game was actually won by two people: JADS users Ironrath and Emmi. This is because they both submitted the correct answer at almost exactly the same time, so Joe decided to let both of them win. And very quickly after both of them submitted their answers, JADS user Bruce also submitted the correct answer. Because of this, Joe gave him an honourary 3rd place reward (for which he got nothing). And coming in very close before Ironrath and Emmi submitted their answers, JADS user Bonkey submitted his guess, which was "Finally Leon Has His Reverse". He was a couple of letters away from getting it right and winning. Joe revealed this immediately after the game concluded. This is yet another thing which is still quoted to this day.

Except this still isn't the full picture. This is how these events are often retold, but many forget the fact that Ironrath, Emmi, Bruce, and Bonkey, among a few others, were all secretly working together from the very start. When Joe announced that a second word game would be happening, Ironrath created a private group chat for people to help make Deadly Premonition win. The members of this group all pooled their information together during the second word game. And Ironrath was a double-agent in the Umineko private group chat, for people who wanted Umineko to win. When the letter carrier DMs were sent out at the start, Ironrath and AlduinFeetPic - another member of the Deadly Premonition group - both received letters, which they shared with the Deadly Premonition group. And three other people in the Umineko group also received letters, which they revealed to the Umineko group. But then Ironrath told the Umineko group that he hadn't received a letter, while secretly also revealing their three letters to the Deadly Premonition group. It was this double-cross which gave his group the edge they needed to figure out the solution before anyone else. When they had nearly got there, Bonkey submitted what was the entire group's best guess at that time. After this, Ironrath, Emmi, and Bruce all submitted a slightly better guess at roughly the same time, which happened to be correct. The details of this double-cross were revealed after the second voting game, but not many people ever paid attention to it.

So Ironrath and Emmi both got to ascend games. Ironrath chose Deadly Premonition, and Emmi chose Rabi-Ribi.

Day 10 - Sunday 14th

#the-voting-channel 17:18 UTC
Hellgates collapse in one hour from the timestamp on this message.
I will close the room temporarily when that happens.
A reminder of how this works: the Hellgates have a net vote count from upvotes and downvotes. Whatever this number is places them in the list simultaneously in the Veldt and in The Hell of Culled Things. When this hour is up, the Hellgates draw in whichever game is closest to them, spitting them back out onto the Veldt from Hell. If they are next to tied games I will flip a coin or roll a dice. Then the gates close forever. (This means the Hellgates are replaced by the game they revive, so they acquire all the Gate's upvotes and downvotes and their position on the Veldt).
There will be no more Hellgates after this set closes.
One hour. Happy voting!

#the-voting-channel 18:49 UTC
Room is back open for standard voting. I have taken a snapshot of the Hellgates. We will resolve them in a quick stream in about 2 hours.
Standings as I see them:
Hellgate A - Revives Uminkeo
Hellgate B - I need to roll some for all the 71 games
Hellgate C - I need to roll between Paper Mario, Yakuza Kiwami, and Divinity Original Sin 2
Hellgate D - I need to roll for all the 72 games
Hellgate E - I need to roll for all the 68 games
Hellgate F - I need to roll between Apollo Justice, Dishonored 2, and LA Noire
Hellgate G - Revives The Void
Hellgate H - I need to flip a coin (or maybe a marble) between Ace Combat 7 and Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal
Hellgate I - Revives Bioshock
If you see a mistake in here somewhere let me know. Good evening.
New votes on the Hellgates will not change this.
-
The winners of yesterday's word game were:
@Ironrath
@Emmi
and @Bruce
Two games ascend to Outer Heaven as a result of this.
Deadly Premonition
Rabi-Ribi
May Votos have mercy on us all.

At 20:30 UTC, Joe started streaming again for the first time in 9 days.^[3] At the end of his last stream, he said that he'd be taking one week off streaming, meaning he shouldn't have come back until Tuesday. The title of the stream was "Resolving the Hellgate interactions caused by Davina Cage in the Voting Game through a clever use of marbles". Everyone who tuned in and hadn't been keeping track of what had gone on in JADS - probably at least 1,000 people - were bewildered. Joe then proceeded to give a breif update to chat on the state of things, in such a way that it came across as confusing as possible to those not in the know.

At the start of this stream, Joe said that he was going to decide the tie-breaker between the different Hellgate games by rolling a dice on his own, but then he realised that some people might not believe whatever he said the result was, so he needed some way of showing the random selection process happening live on stream to guarantee its legitimacy. This is why he streamed the game Marbles On Stream, which lets you simulate marble tracks with hundreds of marbles on them, each with its own name, so that you can randomly pick one of them by seeing which one raches the end first. Marbles On Stream does have options to let a Twitch channel's chat interact with the races by typing commands, but Joe didn't enable these.

In the first race which he did as a test, he named 20 marbles Purple-chan, 20 Fire Emblem, and 20 Metal Gear Solid, to "see if history will repeat or not". Purple-chan won. The highest-placing Fire Emblem marble came 6th. Of course, Joe was rubbing it in the whole time. Then he did the first real race, to resolve Hellgate F, between Apollo Justice, Dishonored 2, and LA Noire. The winner was Dishonored 2. Next he did Hellgate H, between Ace Combat 7 and Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal. There had been a running joke for a while at this point about Ace Combat 7 fans explaining the convoluted series of events which would need to unfold in order for Ace Combat 7 to win, accompanied by an image of a Brain David Gilbert video thumbnail containing the text "Here's how Ace Combat 7 can still win". The game's chances of winning became increasingly unlikely as time went on and it performed worse in the vote, until it eventually got culled. But then this joke came back with the introduction of the Hellgates, because the game had a chance again. And indeed, Ace Combat 7 won its marble race, and there was once again a way for it to win.

Then he did Hellgate B, which was between all 19 of the culled games that had 71 votes. Once he had finished typing out all of the games, he said "Just for the fun of it, let's put Fire Emblem on too. It's not gonna win, so who cares?", and he added Fire Emblem to the race. Then Marik said in chat "I demand you add a chan", so Joe added Bomb-chan and Purple-chan as marbles too, saying "If Bomb-chan or Purple-chan win, it's just the next one after that", and "We don't even need to discuss what happens if Fire Emblem wins because it's not gonna win". The winner was Frog Fractions. Next he did Hellgate D, which was between all 14 of the culled games that had 72 votes. And Fire Emblem and Purple-chan. The winner was Silent Hill 3. Then came Hellgate E, which was between all 16 of the culled games which had 68 votes, plus Purple-chan, Bomb-chan, Votos, and Fire Emblem. The winner was Bomb-chan, followed by Crypt of the Necrodancer which was chosen as the actual winner. Lastly came the race for Hellgate C, between Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Yakuza Kiwami, and Divinity Original Sin 2. He initially contemplated adding Fire Emblem to this race too, but dismissed the idea because the probability of it actually winning would be too high. Except then he decided to make the race contain 20 Paper Mario marbles, 20 Yakuza Kiwami marbles, 20 Divinity 2 marbles, one Fire Emblem marble, and one Purple-chan marble. The winner was Paper Mario. The singular Purple-chan marble came second, and the Fire Emblem marble came 5th from last.

All of the Hellgates had been resolved. The stream was complete, and Joe started wrapping things up. He announced that he would be streaming again on Tuesday to do more marble races to award another free ascension to a random game on The Veldt, because he'd had so much fun this time. Just as he was about to end the stream, Wonkabiggi said in chat "Do 19 Purple-chans and one Fire Emblem, and if Fire Emblem wins it goes back on". Joe accepted. But he named all of the Purple-chans "Kawaiinamite" instead.

Hellgate Resolution Stream
"We are really tempting fate here, chat. But it doesn't matter, because Fire Emblem never wins."

From the very start, Fire Emblem was towards the back of the pack. But as the race went on, it started getting further ahead. By the time the leading Kawaiinamite had made it very close to the finish line, Fire Emblem had advanced to second place, but it was still very far behind first place. And then the unthinkable happened: The leading Kawaiinamite fell off the track. This left Fire Emblem in first place. And as it slowly made its way to the finish line, six other Kawaiinamites behind it also fell off the track. Fire Emblem won.

#the-voting-channel 22:29 UTC
The following games have been revived by the Hellgates and have replaced them on the list:
Umineko
Frog Fractions
Paper Mario TTYD
Silent Hill 3
Crypt of the Necrodancer
Dishonored 2
The Void
Ace Combat 7
Bioshock
In a stunning upset, voters and the mastermind lost a gambit against the Fire Emblem House of Voters, and it has been reinstated on the Veldt. You can find it at the bottom of the voting list where a ---- used to be.
@everyone For these updates
Stream on Tuesday will end the game.

Fire Emblem was put back on The Veldt with 0 votes. But to balance that out, it also didn't have a downvote button, because it wasn't present when Davina Cage summoned the meteorites and gave everything a downvote button. This meant that it immediately rose to the very top of the list, and everyone who also now wanted to humiliate Fire Emblem even more couldn't do anything about it.

Day 11 - Monday 15th

#the-voting-channel 03:49 UTC
Davina Cage sneezes.
Fire Emblem Three Houses now has a downvote button.

Day 12 - Tuesday 16th

At 18:00 UTC, Joe went live again, this time with the title "The most ambitious crossover event in streamer vote-to-play games history".^[4] We have now caught up to the recap stream, where all of these quotes have been coming from. Joe spent the first hour and 45 minutes of this stream explaining everything that had happened over the last 12 days, while showing Nodja's website and Weeby's meme album. During this segment, he made an important ruling regarding the final round:

Recap Stream
"I have decided that a short game - if it's a game that we can play in two streams - can outlier ascend. So Hypnospace Outlaw ascends as an outlier. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door does not ascend as an outlier because it's too long."

And then he started the marble races. These are the rules which he had come up with, for the whole event to go out with a bang to:

Every single game left on The Voting Veldt would compete for a chance to ascend straight to The Halls of Ascension. There were 33 such games, including everything that came through a Hellgate, and Fire Emblem. Each game had one marble, and several races would be run with them to determine the winner. Each game had three lives. If a game came first in a race, then it gained one life, although no game was allowed to have more than three lives. If a game came last then it lost a life, unless any marbles fell off the track, in which case all games that fell off would lose a life instead. When a game reached zero lives, it would be removed from all future races. The last game left would win. The races also featured three gimmick marbles: Bomb-chan, Purple-chan, and Davina Cage. There were three lots of each of them. The gimmick marbles didn't have lives and were not subject to the rules of the other marbles. If Bomb-chan finished in the top 10, then the two games above and below her lost a life each, unless one of them was already only on one life, in which case it would remain on one life. If Purple-chan finished in the top 10, then the two games above and below her gained a life each, unless one of them was already on three lives, in which case it would remain on three lives. And if Davina Cage finished in first place, then the number of votes needed to let everyone on JADS vote would decrease by 10.

By the beginning of day 12, Davina Cage had about 325 votes, so she was still 25 votes away from having her final effect activated. Joe was probably thinking at this point that it might not even be possible for this to be reached, like with Votos, so he needed to introduce something which would lower the threshold. This is presumably why he introduced the Davina Cage rule to the marble races, much to the dismay of many voters.

The winner of the first race was Davina Cage. Then after the fourth race, Davina Cage reached 350 votes, meaning she didn't even need the threshold to be reduced. So Joe removed the three Davina Cage marbles from the race, and opened #the-voting-channel to everybody.

#the-voting-channel 20:38 UTC
Welcome.
Davina Cage empowers.
@everyone Voting has been opened to everyone on the server.
Check pins for shortcuts.
Refresh discord if something breaks.

Discord broke almost immediately due to the huge influx of voters. Then when things calmed down and it was possible to vote again, there was panic from all aleigances of voters as they all tried to leverage the newcomers to their advantage. One aleigance who fared particularly poorly during this was, once again, the Fire Emblem fans. Their game had been hovering around the middle of The Veldt ever since Davina Cage sneezed and gave it a downvote button, allowing for anyone who wanted to rub it in some more to get it out of the top 3. But when the vote opened up to everyone during the stream, there wasn't a clear enough direction about what should even be done to the game. Many people wanted to try voting it up to the top three, but others noticed it was closer to being in the bottom five and were trying to vote it down. And while all this was trying to be communicated in #dragons-den - which was moving perhaps the fastest it ever had been - several people were intentionally trying to mislead the new voters in an effort to split the vote. So once the wave of new voters had come and gone, having placed all their votes, Fire Emblem ended up pretty much right where it had started. Its best chance at that point was to try and end the game in the middle ascension spot. But this was very difficult, because all of the games in the middle were so close on votes that it was usually possible for a single person to come along and change some of their votes and get Fire Emblem out of the middle again.

The races continued, and after a couple of hours a winner had emerged. AI: The Somnium Files, after making two daring leaps across the marble tracks in some races near the end, was the last game standing. It got ascended straight to The Halls of Ascension. And that was the end. Joe signed off and ended the stream, thanking everyone for participating and saying that the vote would close soon.

#the-voting-channel 22:53 UTC
Voting ends one hour from this message's timestamp. It may take a while for discord and the voting site to settle after that.

Joe also observed during the stream that Hypnospace Outlaw was the bottom outlier on The Veldt, and that since it was a short game, it would be allowed to ascend.

#the-voting-channel 23:02 UTC
AI and Hypnospace have been removed from the board. They ascend to The Halls of Ascension.

In the final hour of The Voting Game, the positions of most games on The Veldt were secure. The games at the very top and at the very bottom were all quite far apart. The top three and bottom five seemed set in stone, so it was clear what the final ascensions would be. That is, except for two things: Firstly, the middle spot. Right up until the moment that #the-voting-channel closed one last time, there was a war playing out for the middle spot. Or rather, to stop Fire Emblem from getting the middle spot. And secondly, Wandersong and Ace Combat 7 were tying on votes. Remember that one of the original, unwritten rules of The Voting Game was that at the end of the vote, if two games in the top five (as it was then) had the same number of votes, then neither of them would win. This same rule had translated over to now apply to the top three and bottom five. And Wandersong and Ace Combat 7 were fourth and fifth from the bottom, not counting Hypnospace Outlaw which had already been decided as the bottom outlier. So if Wandersong and Ace Combat 7 annihilated each other, then it would let Kingdom Hearts 2 and The Hex into the bottom five instead. So there was also a war playing out for fans of all of those games, trying to either make them tie or not. They kept on going back and forth on whether they were tying, as people continually adjusted their votes, while the position of Fire Emblem also kept shifting. And to make things more complicated, if Wandersong and Ace Combat 7 did annihilate each other, then it would mean that two games would be removed from The Veldt, meaning the middle spot would be in a different place. So voters had to contend with all of this as the time came down to the wire.

The vote closed. And by some miracle, Fire Emblem was still in the middle spot, and Wandersong and Ace Combat 7 didn't tie. Fire Emblem would ascend. After the whole Purple-chan arc, and then being revived again during the first marbles stream, Fire Emblem would somehow make it in to The Halls of Ascension at the end of the final round. Except then Joe came into #dragons-den and said that VA-11 HALL-A counts as a short game and therefore gets the top outlier ascension, thereby reducing the number of games on The Veldt and changing the position of the middle spot to be where Killer7 was instead.

#the-voting-channel 00:16 UTC
Final results:
VA-11 HALL-A ascends as an short game outlier. Leaving 13 Sentinels, Paper Mario TTYD, and Nier Replicant as the Top Three Winners.
Bottom five winners are: Crypt of the Necrodancer, Gravity Rush, The Void, Ace Combat 7, and Wandersong.
Killer7 ascends as the mid-spot winner. Congrats!

Outer Heaven roster:
Persona 4 Golden
Zero Escape Series
Steins;Gate
Deadly Premonition
Dujanah
Half-Life 2
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver
Rabi-Ribi

Halls of Ascension roster:
Metal Gear Solid 1-5
AI Somnium Files
Hypnospace Outlaw
VA-11 Hall-A
13 Sentinels
Paper Mario TTYD
Nier Replicant
Necrodancer (Crypt of the)
Gravity Rush
The Void
Ace Combat 7
Wandersong
Killer7

Thank you for playing!
Unless... ---
The sky darkens.
Davina Cage begins to laugh. Her faces bulge. Her arms stretch away from her body.
Then the laughter turns into screaming.
Something erupts from her chest. Then, in one instant, her entire body is obliterated. A rain of blood and bullshit spews over the Veldt.
Votos floats in the place that Davina Cage once occupied. Somehow clean. Pristine. Her eyes sweep the Veldt.
Everyone could vote? A lesser Dragon Angel in Outer Heaven? A BOMB DEFUSED? Ace Combat 7 somehow won? METEORITE DOWNVOTE BUTTONS?!
This cannot be.
"GOOD THING THIS ISN'T A DEMOCRACY!" Votos shrieks. Her face shifts. She's evolving. The injustice is either corrupting her or ascending her. It's impossible to tell.
"YOUR VOTES DON'T MATTER TO A FUCKING QUEEN."
Votos has become Vakotos, The Archangel of Injustice.
A pillar of light descends from the heaven in the middle of the Veldt. Another matches it, ascending from hell. They join together in the middle of the donut hole.
Vakotos will destroy the game now. Double Hell, The Culled Games, The Veldt, The Halls, and Outer Heaven.
And there's nothing you can do about it.
GAME OVER
Thank you for voting! We'll play Nioh 2 next week or something. ^_^

#the-voting-channel 00:25 UTC
---
A Glowing Light
🟣
---

The message had a purple circle emoji react button attached to it. It instantly gained hundreds of votes.

#the-voting-channel 00:31 UTC
The glowing ball of light in Outer Heaven pulsates as it receives voting power. Votos... or what she once was... returning to the game has stirred something inside of it. Whatever speck of power that was imbued from Votos that ascended to Outer Heaven for what the Voting Universe saw as an Act of Justice.
And that power unleashes tendrils from the glowing ball that consume the Dragon Angel next to it.
Bomb-chan shields her eyes from the waves of light blast through Outer Heaven. Still she is blinded, and so disorientated, that she doesn't realize she is being pulled into it too.
She is a hair's breadth from being sucked into the glowing cascade when it ceases. Violently. Bomb-chan is thrown back. When she stands up, a single wing now protrudes from her left shoulder blade.
Purple-chan is standing where the ball of light had been. A matching wing extending from her right shoulder.
The sky darkens.
--- Vakotos is in a trance. The Veldt is already beginning to break apart. The Halls of Ascension are rumbling. No one in Hell seems to care though.
The shard of kawaiinamite begins to glow. A sliver of light snakes upward toward the heavens, longing to be reunited with the rest of its body.
When the tip pierces the clouds it begins to expand. It forms a hilt in Outer Heaven. One that Purple-chan is waiting to grab.
A sword of light and energy stretches from her hand down to the Veldt. She grips it tightly.
---
"Are you sure you can wield that?" Bomb-chan speaks finally. She spent the last few moments looking at her new wing. Then shrugged and accepted it.
Purple-chan, who now looks however Marik decides she should look, nods once.
"You're asking me that?" she answers. "I was a training dummy. I know how to use a sword."
"One that big?"
"I'll need your help to lift it," Purple-chan says, keeping her eyes on Vakotos far below. "Or else I may not be able to control the explosion."
"I'm probably due to make one," Bomb-chan sighs.
The two chans grip the sword.
They lift.
---
Parts of the Veldt are crumbling into the pillar in the donut hole now. Vakotos is aware of nothing else. Is she even alive anymore? Even sentient? Or an instrument of twisted justice.
She neither sees nor feels her body cleaves in two from the blade that stretches between planes. Blood seeps from her from only a moment before her form disintegrates into light. Then that fades too. Into nothing.
The explosion that follows appears impossible. What was left to cause it? But it happens all the same. The Veldt is burning. Permanently scarred. Pillars topple in the Halls of Ascension. No one in hell still seems to care. But the universe remains intact.

---
Bomb-chan and Purple-chan sit next to each other, admiring the fires below in a mix of pride of horror.
"It's finally over."
"Yeah," Purple-chan says.
"You know we couldn't have done this without them," Bomb-chan looks at her.
"Without who?"
"They could have killed you for their game and they didn't. If they had..." Bomb-chan looks up. "Who knows what would have happened.
"Oh... Well... yeah, that's true. I hadn't forgotten. Just..."
"A lot has happened," Bomb-chan offers.
"Yes."
"You have power now. You could... ascend them, if you like. From the chaos below."
"I could..." Purple-chan considers.
---
Purple-chan stands up and holds out her hands. Her new power comes so effortlessly now. She reaches out for the game. It's so easy to pull it upwards. So simple.
---
METAL GEAR SOLID SERIES ASCENDS TO OUTER HEAVEN.

Thank you for voting! See you next game.

#the-voting-channel 00:41 UTC
And Fire Emblem. Everybody wins. Love you FE fans. Thank you for being good sports

References

↑ https://schedujoe.bulder.fi/
↑ https://janart.bulder.fi/gallery/22
↑ “Falco” video: “Joseph Anderson Marble Races stream 1 with chat [02/14/2021]”.
↑ “Falco” video: “Joseph Anderson Marble Races stream 2 with chat [02/16/2021]”.

[1] ttps://schedujoe.bulder.fi/

[2] ttps://janart.bulder.fi/gallery/22

[3] “Falco” video: “Joseph Anderson Marble Races stream 1 with chat [02/14/2021]”.

[4] “Falco” video: “Joseph Anderson Marble Races stream 2 with chat [02/16/2021]”.

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

@@ Line 9: / Line 9: @@
 == Day 1 - Friday 5th ==
-On the first day of The Voting Game, Joe created the channel #the-voting-channel in JADS. Using this channel was how users would be able to vote for games. He configured the channel so that only people with the "Lili and Some Guy" role on the server (the role which only Joe and his wife Lili have) could type in the channel or add new reactions to messages. Then in that channel, he typed one message for each game that was being voted on. He also added one reaction to each of these messages. A reaction is an emote attached to a message. If someone chooses to add a reaction to a message using a certain emote, it makes that emote appear below the message with the number 1 next to it. Then another user can click on that emote to add the same reaction to the message, increasing the number next to it by 1. They can also click on it again to remove their reaction, decreasing the number by 1. And because of the permissions Joe set for the channel, only he and Lili could add new reactions to the messages, but everyone else could still click on them to increase or decrease the number. This is what Joe used as a system to let people vote on the games: To vote for a game, you would click on the reaction beneath it. He gave most of the games a [[Jphpog|jphPog]] reaction, apart from some which he gave other emotes. He also added some fake games as jokes, like "I'm a Witcher" and "Touhou 21 ~ The Revenge of David Cage". Also, only people with the roles "Twitch Subscriber" or "Patron" could view the channel in the first place, which limited only those people to be able to vote.
+On the first day of The Voting Game, Joe created the channel #the-voting-channel in JADS. Using this channel was how users would be able to vote for games. He configured the channel so that only people with the "Lili and Some Guy" role on the server (the role which only Joe and his ex-wife Lili had) could type in the channel or add new reactions to messages. Then in that channel, he typed one message for each game that was being voted on. He also added one reaction to each of these messages. A reaction is an emote attached to a message. If someone chooses to add a reaction to a message using a certain emote, it makes that emote appear below the message with the number 1 next to it. Then another user can click on that emote to add the same reaction to the message, increasing the number next to it by 1. They can also click on it again to remove their reaction, decreasing the number by 1. And because of the permissions Joe set for the channel, only he and Lili could add new reactions to the messages, but everyone else could still click on them to increase or decrease the number. This is what Joe used as a system to let people vote on the games: To vote for a game, you would click on the reaction beneath it. He gave most of the games a [[Jphpog|jphPog]] reaction, apart from some which he gave other emotes. He also added some fake games as jokes, like "I'm a Witcher" and "Touhou 21 ~ The Revenge of David Cage". Also, only people with the roles "Twitch Subscriber" or "Patron" could view the channel in the first place, which limited only those people to be able to vote.
 Underneath all of the game messages, Joe wrote the following message:
@@ Line 71: / Line 71: @@
 Halls of Ascension
 Zero Escape Series (999, Virtue's Last Reward, and Zero Time Dilemma)
@@ Line 96: / Line 97: @@
 For some reason I can't delete these two.
 Deus Ex
 Kingdom Hearts 3
 Weird.
 OH NO! A BOMB!
@@ Line 156: / Line 160: @@
 '''#dragons-den 2:35 UTC'''
-I will make this unequivocally clear: if you want to "save" the line of text "A Bomb" from culling itself, you must get both the A Bomb and Dragon Angel into states of //Clear Outlier// at the same time in the same round. So example: by Wednesday 11 AM EST, the A Bomb must be the clear winner of the the high vote (but not higher than what Zero Escape had), and the Angel must be the clear lowest candidate.
+I will make this unequivocally clear: if you want to "save" the line of text "A Bomb" from culling itself, you must get both the A Bomb and Dragon Angel into states of ''Clear Outlier'' at the same time in the same round. So example: by Wednesday 11 AM EST, the A Bomb must be the clear winner of the the high vote (but not higher than what Zero Escape had), and the Angel must be the clear lowest candidate.
 </blockquote>
@@ Line 429: / Line 433: @@
 The second of the three Radiant Angels has appeared! The...
-Radiant Angel of Reckoning! Votos the Merciful. You have provoked her wrath after breaking destiny and saving The Bomb That Was Meant to Explode, and ascending The Angel That Was Meant To Ascend Only Others. Votos arrives onto The Voting Veldt in a dormant state. She requires votes to awaken her powers.
+Radiant Angel of Reckoning! [[Votos]] the Merciful. You have provoked her wrath after breaking destiny and saving The Bomb That Was Meant to Explode, and ascending The Angel That Was Meant To Ascend Only Others. Votos arrives onto The Voting Veldt in a dormant state. She requires votes to awaken her powers.
 At the end of the current round, she will cause the following GAMEQUAKE depending on her power level:
@@ Line 480: / Line 484: @@
 </blockquote>
-The emojis beneath Votos and each of the training dummies represent the reacts which Joe added to them. The down arrows are the downvote buttons, and the other emojis are the upvote buttons. Note that Votos doesn't have a downvote button.
+The emojis beneath [[Votos]] and each of the training dummies represent the reacts which Joe added to them. The down arrows are the downvote buttons, and the other emojis are the upvote buttons. Note that Votos doesn't have a downvote button.
 <blockquote>
@@ Line 515: / Line 519: @@
 '''Recap Stream'''
-"After a day, Votos wasn't doing too well, because she wasn't getting to 401. Not only that, there was a conspiracy starting to form that because I had added Persona 4 as a surprise game and robbed Fire Emblem, they were like 'Joe clearly doesn't want to play Fire Emblem, and now look, he's added this thing that's clearly going to cull the top 10 games, where Fire Emblem is.' Meanwhile, the chads that wanted stuff like Deadly Premonition and 13 Sentinels were unvoting their games out of the top 10. [...] I realised that this was a problem, and I was like 'Okay, I can kill two birds with one stone here. So I want to quell this Fire Emblem conspiracy, and I also want to give Votos a chance and lower the threashold of what she can do.' So I did this."
+"After a day, Votos wasn't doing too well, because she wasn't getting to 401. Not only that, there was a conspiracy starting to form that because I had added Persona 4 as a surprise game and robbed Fire Emblem, they were like 'Joe clearly doesn't want to play Fire Emblem, and now look, he's added this thing that's clearly going to cull the top 10 games, where Fire Emblem is.' Meanwhile, the chads that wanted stuff like Deadly Premonition and [[13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim|13 Sentinels]] were unvoting their games out of the top 10. [...] I realised that this was a problem, and I was like 'Okay, I can kill two birds with one stone here. So I want to quell this Fire Emblem conspiracy, and I also want to give Votos a chance and lower the threashold of what she can do.' So I did this."
 </blockquote>
@@ Line 1,157: / Line 1,161: @@
 [[File:voting game shimano.png|thumb|right|300px|{{Attribution|Marik Bentusi}}]]
-At 20:30 UTC, Joe started streaming again for the first time in 9 days.<ref>https://youtu.be/w8QqBQZEZdM</ref> At the end of his last stream, he said that he'd be taking one week off streaming, meaning he shouldn't have come back until Tuesday. The title of the stream was "Resolving the Hellgate interactions caused by Davina Cage in the Voting Game through a clever use of marbles". Everyone who tuned in and hadn't been keeping track of what had gone on in JADS - probably at least 1,000 people - were bewildered. Joe then proceeded to give a breif update to chat on the state of things, in such a way that it came across as confusing as possible to those not in the know.
+At 20:30 UTC, Joe started streaming again for the first time in 9 days.<ref>{{YTCite|w8QqBQZEZdM|channel=Falco|channel_icon=Falco.jpg|title=Joseph Anderson Marble Races stream 1 with chat <nowiki>[02/14/2021]</nowiki>}}</ref> At the end of his last stream, he said that he'd be taking one week off streaming, meaning he shouldn't have come back until Tuesday. The title of the stream was "Resolving the Hellgate interactions caused by Davina Cage in the Voting Game through a clever use of marbles". Everyone who tuned in and hadn't been keeping track of what had gone on in JADS - probably at least 1,000 people - were bewildered. Joe then proceeded to give a breif update to chat on the state of things, in such a way that it came across as confusing as possible to those not in the know.
 At the start of this stream, Joe said that he was going to decide the tie-breaker between the different Hellgate games by rolling a dice on his own, but then he realised that some people might not believe whatever he said the result was, so he needed some way of showing the random selection process happening live on stream to guarantee its legitimacy. This is why he streamed the game Marbles On Stream, which lets you simulate marble tracks with hundreds of marbles on them, each with its own name, so that you can randomly pick one of them by seeing which one raches the end first. Marbles On Stream does have options to let a Twitch channel's chat interact with the races by typing commands, but Joe didn't enable these.
@@ Line 1,219: / Line 1,223: @@
 == Day 12 - Tuesday 16th ==
-At 18:00 UTC, Joe went live again, this time with the title "The most ambitious crossover event in streamer vote-to-play games history".<ref>https://youtu.be/SnT5DqX2aKs</ref> We have now caught up to the recap stream, where all of these quotes have been coming from. Joe spent the first hour and 45 minutes of this stream explaining everything that had happened over the last 12 days, while showing Nodja's website and Weeby's meme album. During this segment, he made an important ruling regarding the final round:
+At 18:00 UTC, Joe went live again, this time with the title "The most ambitious crossover event in streamer vote-to-play games history".<ref>{{YTCite|SnT5DqX2aKs|channel=Falco|channel_icon=Falco.jpg|title=Joseph Anderson Marble Races stream 2 with chat <nowiki>[02/16/2021]</nowiki>}}</ref> We have now caught up to the recap stream, where all of these quotes have been coming from. Joe spent the first hour and 45 minutes of this stream explaining everything that had happened over the last 12 days, while showing Nodja's website and Weeby's meme album. During this segment, he made an important ruling regarding the final round:
 <blockquote>
@@ Line 1,476: / Line 1,480: @@
 [[File:purple-chan final form.png|thumb|center|300px|Purple-chan's final form, {{Attribution|Marik Bentusi}}]]
+== References ==