Red Rick Dias, pmed the same because of your post… ah the joys of copy/paste… I was already merging all the Nina version votes into one “Nina (BOF)” entity. Same with Ryu.
It has also been mentioned to merge all the BOF characters into one BOF entry, I’ll have to think about that… to be honest I’m no too fond of that, I’ll explain why;
Let’s say I do this, next thing I know the Powerstone fans want this as well, due to their characters being obscure as well. Next thing I know I’m fusing votes into “a Street Fighter character”
Replying to add some context; I got in touch to seek clarification on whether you were doing this, since at least one other BoF-voter had brought it up. It seems you are doing so in regard to separate characters but not the series as a whole, and I’m absolutely fine with that. That’s entirely fair, especially since voting for a series rather than characters could snowball into something that doesn’t convey any useful information to Capcom or Marvel; would we get mad if Series X gets a rep, but it’s Character Y when everyone wanted Character A, B, or C instead? That’s entirely possible.
Consolidating BoF votes by broad character instead of specific iteration of a character seems fair to me, however. The characters are ‘interchangeable enough’ (Yes, they have some meaningful differences; they’re not big enough for me to care about in a fighting game) to me that if someone voted BoF 3 Nina and another person voted BoF 1 Nina, then Capcom gave us BoF 4 Nina instead, that would be fine by me. Edit: Further, I suspect Capcom would just give us alt costumes of the other versions. That way everyone’s happy!
To avoid further thread clutter, I won’t comment further on the matter. In any case Diek’s decision on it seems fair to me and I’m pretty happy with it in regard to Breath of Fire character votes.