A more MD-ish way to vote?

[Guillak]

I was looking back at previous "mistakes" to think about a more flexible way to vote for entries in quests, for a hypothetical future one. Instead of doing it on my own then put it to use just once, I thought I might as well ask for opinions before, and why not in the end give a generic MDscript code so that anyone with clickie access can set up his own.

I have seen several ways to vote so far (forum poll, forum posts reputation, in-game system vote [not for public use?], "hand-made" solutions like PM's to the quest maker or panels of judges giving out marks), all with their pros and cons, but none does what I'd like to do: the possibility for one player to vote for several entries, but at the cost of lowering the impact of the vote. Basically, it would be the same as the way stats are divided amongst your creatures in a ritual. If you consider one entry is the best, then you will give it 100% of your vote; if you can't decide between three of them, then just vote for the three and they'll get 33% each. Then just sum up all votes to find out the winner(s) like in a regular poll. Practically it's not different from forum polls with checkboxes (Doodle-like), but with the addition that the more entries you choose, the less influence your vote has.

And since we're at it, this wonderful voting system would allow for total transparency and would not require mods to manually check for alts one by one. In order to reach this goal: how about optionally making all votes public, i.e. everybody sees for what entry everyone else voted? Entries would/can still be anonymous ("Entry A", "Entry B", or whatever). It would let all voters confirm that everything runs smoothly, and hopefully suspicious behaviors or alts wouldn't go undetected by the masses. The clickie would permit to export the whole thing in a grid.

Plus it would make people spend a couple more minutes in-game rather than on the forum …

Any thoughts? Would anyone use it if it were to be made? Need more, less? Or did I miss some hidden forum poll option that would make that completely useless?

[DARK DEMON]

I for one, agree with this new voting system

[Grido]

That I'm aware of, no current voting system like that exists (forum or otherwise).

The viewing of who voted for what is possible on the forum, but it's been disabled. You'd have to be 'careful' with doing that, as it would lead to a certain bias - if you saw 'Person A' has voted one way, and you want to be in their good books/such, you may also do similarly. Equally a Player may form a grudge against those that voted opposing them, or people's votes may be otherwise swayed due to others being able to view how the vote went.

[Magistra]

I for one would not use this system. I think it only would cause (more) 'hate'.

[Guillak]

[quote name='Grido' timestamp='1345455117' post='120528']
You'd have to be 'careful' with doing that, as it would lead to a certain bias - if you saw 'Person A' has voted one way, and you want to be in their good books/such, you may also do similarly. Equally a Player may form a grudge against those that voted opposing them, or people's votes may be otherwise swayed due to others being able to view how the vote went.
[/quote]

The idea was to show who voted for what at the very end only. As long as the vote is ongoing, nobody could see anything.

There shouldn't be any reason to hold a grudge against someone who didn't vote for you as long as the entries are anonymous. But that implies the entries have to be anonymous in the first place indeed, centralized by the quest organizer.

You are supposed to vote for the best entries, not for your best friends. If your friends come to hate you because you didn't vote for them, with all the more reason if you don't know what entry is theirs (of course you can cheat: "I'm entry A, vote for me please", hence making all votes visible), then you shouldn't call them friends …

Am I just being too naïve?

[Ackshan Bemunah]

If someone really wanted to manipulate you into voting, they would just describe the entry, not direct you to which one it is.

I suggest that different people see different random samples (or less than random) of the selections (and in the end all are visible.) Say "votes need to have such-and-such arbitrary margin to be considered representative" and then code that (date check followed by margin check, if the date passes and the margin isn't passed, poll doesn't close until it does, if the date doesn't pass and the margin is passed, poll doesn't close yet.)

[Grido]

[quote name='Guillak' timestamp='1345460558' post='120533']
The idea was to show who voted for what at the very end only. As long as the vote is ongoing, nobody could see anything.

There [b]shouldn't be[/b] any reason to hold a grudge against someone who didn't vote for you as long as the entries are anonymous. But that implies the entries have to be anonymous in the first place indeed, centralized by the quest organizer.

You are [b]supposed to [/b]vote for the best entries, not for your best friends. If your friends come to hate you because you didn't vote for them, with all the more reason if you don't know what entry is theirs (of course you can cheat: "I'm entry A, vote for me please", hence making all votes visible), then you shouldn't call them friends …

Am I just being too naïve?
[/quote]My bolding.

It's probably me being cynical, but it's something to think about.

[biermann]

It's probably easier to just say 'pick your top 3' to safe the hassle of percentages and at the same time force you to look further then just that one friend that pm'd you to vote for him/her.

That said, I am a cynic too. People should be helpful and nice on the internet....but they are not always. And though this realm is not a prime example of the dark side of the net, rest assured, with public results, grudges will grow. With voting, there will always be the risk of it becoming a popularity contest opposed to the best entry.

I'd be inclined myself, in a contest where (for the sake of not making myself look like a friend favoring git) my friends entry is nearly as good as my favorite, to vote for my friend instead.

[Chewett]

[quote name='biermann' timestamp='1345505704' post='120628']
It's probably easier to just say 'pick your top 3' to safe the hassle of percentages and at the same time force you to look further then just that one friend that pm'd you to vote for him/her.

That said, I am a cynic too. People should be helpful and nice on the internet....but they are not always. And though this realm is not a prime example of the dark side of the net, rest assured, with public results, grudges will grow. With voting, there will always be the risk of it becoming a popularity contest opposed to the best entry.

I'd be inclined myself, in a contest where (for the sake of not making myself look like a friend favoring git) my friends entry is nearly as good as my favorite, to vote for my friend instead.
[/quote]

if you dislike the system you just vote like a "single poll" and put 100% into one person. Then its easy if you just want to vote for one.

[VertuHonagan]

I would think that an easy way to do this would be for people to choose thier top three and giving a certain amount of points for the spot they are in. For simple standards lets say the points are: 5 points if your that players top vote, 3 Points if your thier second vote, and 1 point if your thier third pick. The player with the highest points would win the vote. So for example:

Lets say the competition was for Eon, Krioni, and Mya Celestia.

I voted them as 1. Krioni, 2. Eon, and 3. Mya Celestia

Menhir Voted them as 1. Eon, 2. Mya Celestia, and 3. Krioni

Krioni would then get 5 points because I chose him as first and 1 point because Menhir chose him as 3rd for a total of 6 points.

Eon would then get 5 point because Menhir chose him as first and 3 points because I chose him as second for a total of 8 points.

Mya Celestia would get 3 points because Menhir chose her second and 1 point because I chose her 3rd for a total of 4 points.

Eon would then get first place with the higest points, Krioni second and finaly Mya would get third place.

I feel that this kind of system would be good for easily figuring out who deserves what position without forcing players to only pick one of the contestants.

[Zyrxae]

I really like Guillak’s original idea, but it might be nice to be able to rank votes by preference.

Something a little more flexible than 1[sup]st[/sup]/2[sup]nd[/sup]/3[sup]rd[/sup] places:
Say for a given vote there are six options available. Each player has six sixths of a vote to distribute as they will, so they could vote 1/6 for option A, 4/6 for C, and 1/6 for E…or devote their vote entirely to one option, or split it across two, etc.

It’s a bit more complicated than the original suggestion, especially as the number of options increases..not to mention that part of the point may have been to make players choose between only voting for their favorite(s) at the cost of leaving out their second/third/etc choices and giving more weight than they might have preferred to those secondary choices.


Transparency can be nice, or not so. If alts are a concern but the poll-maker sees reason not to publicize the votes, a manual check can be requested. The scarcity of such evaluations might be an incentive towards openness..

The question of automated alt-checks in clickables was raised a while back with privacy concerns. If that is ever discussed/implemented it could work along the lines of attempting to attack/trade with a player flagged as an alt and give an error of “an alt of yours already voted in this poll” or similar.


All public votes are open to bias in one form or another. This has some interesting possibilities and gets more people somewhat more involved within the realm; I’m for it.

[Ackshan Bemunah]

This is random and counter-tide and less than thoughtful, but...

The negative vote, weighted slightly more than the positive vote.

Most balanced candidate/choice wins?