San Francisco, CA
Here's what I learned after creating a few polls about 80s and 90s games many years ago...
1. Do not use your subjectively measured parameters to create the initial base. They may not match how most people see the groupings. You can start by proposing your own parameters, but I recommend you put them up to a challenge first.
2. Start with write in options and count "thumbs ups" to get your initial base created so that the crowd feels more like they are the ones creating the base.
3. Have several rounds of polling to learn which pins keep winning in head to head or elimination rounds. It can be informative.
4. No matter how carefully you create the parameters and test them, and set up the base -- a few people will still call the poll rubbish.
Here's an example of a poll that was pretty fun over 4 rounds: (It still had a few rough edges as a few people disagreed on parameters: what could be had for $2500 at the time, based on their location of course) -- back at this time, if you recall, we could only have 9 games in a poll.
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/your-top-9-2500-dmds
