Re: Voting system idea..

[Paulster2]

While I agree with you fundamentally, castaway, I don't think that your solution brings anything to the table. I personnally don't think that eliminating the lower end voting bonus is going to do what you are wanting it to do, mainly because the lower end levels don't have that many votes to cast. The left-overs from voting at these levels is very slim. I would think that the larger abuse comes from levels 6 through 9, where a monk has more votes and therefor more left overs. By sainthood I would think that a monk is no longer in it for the XP (if they were in it for XP in the first place) so are a little more judicious in how they dole out their votes.

Anyway, I don't have a solution here, just wanted to state IMHO what I see as a larger issue than what you have stated above. As always, castaway, I appreciate your time, talents, and ideas you bring to the monestary.

[apotheon]

Point the First: I think you're overlooking the fact that there's more than one person of lower ranks here. Granted, the lower levels still don't add up to as many votes as the higher levels, but they aren't insignificant in this respect.

Point the Second: It has been suggested that it gets one into the habit of spending all votes, which I think carries a fair bit of truth. Eliminating the habit-making incentive will surely help cut down on later over-voting as well.

Point the Third: The first couple of voting levels pretty much never have any members to speak of. I think the earliest couple of levels pass too quickly. Ditching this extra XP incentive should help slow that down slightly. Granted, I'm an odd case, having posted a couple of things early on that got a lot of voting attention, but I literally advanced three ranks in two days. A little of that involved the fact that I got bonuses for expending all my votes.

[Paulster2]

Points well taken.

The habit of getting rid of all your points in the lower levels is not necessarily a good one, that's for sure. The only thing is that in the lower levels, because of the number of votes that you have, it's real easy to get rid of them. I found in the lower levels that I had burned up my votes and wished that I had more.

Besides, castasay pointed out that a lower level monk only receives 1/6 of total votes as a bonus. That really isn't a whole lot of bonus points. If my understanding is correct, that is a maximum bonus of 3 points. Please correct me if I am wrong, I hope that I didn't misunderstand what castaway was explaining.

[apotheon]

It's true that the bonus isn't much, but I suspect that most relatively new PM members see "bonus for expending all votes" and think "Kewl! Bonus points!" without really doing a quantitative analysis to determine the actual return on investment (of effort). The problem, after all, isn't as much the XP gained (though, as I mentioned, the gained XP does contribute to another "problem") as it is the gratuitous manner in which votes are cast.

Having a limited number of votes to expend causes one to consider whether a given node really deserves the vote you're going to give it. Getting rewarded for voting replaces that caution, for many people, with a desire to find excuses to vote on things. Getting bonus rewards for expending all votes compounds the problem by causing people to consciously think "Ooh, I need to go find excuses for voting until all my votes are cast, just in case I forget to vote before midnight!"