See title.

Never!!!

r/le/s

I have a counter-request to improve the quality of votes, though.

On any battle, your final score is multiplied by your vote completion. This would encourage all participants to do a complete vote. (We only had 10 sets of votes on this decadent decade thing, but way more participants than that.)

Of course, alts make this a problem; so it'd be an additional feature request that users can link their alts so that alts can't vote + receive the primary's voting completion stat.

(Or we could have a big bonfire where we burn all the alts. ^_^)

Back to thinking about why OP makes this request, it might be good if at least admins could see the vote logs? Even if we want it to be private, it might be good if more than one set of eyes could check for vote trolls.

i thought vote completion already influenced your influence

It does, but I think that actually encourages people not to vote, unfortunately. (Partial votes are still way better to have than no votes.)

oh, i misread your idea about score being tied to vote completion. ludum dare does something like this, where one of the things you're scored on is based on how many other entries you rate

Not sure if I like this idea because some people may simply not be able to vote, due to lack of time and whatnot. It would be pretty unfair to have their scores decreased because of that.

Anyway, the reason I made the suggestion to show the vote log is because I think it'd be a nice way to see what others actually thought of your entries (plus it'd be interesting to look at, and would probably decrease the amount of trollvotes/shitvotes). Also, we already have OHB vote logs made visible so I don't see why these shouldn't be.

As for getting more people to vote... I'm not sure what could be done about that. I think a lot of people saw the amount of entries in decadent decade and were overwhelmed. (Plus, it's essentially a 500 entry compo in terms of how long it'd take when factoring in the original entries as well.) I don't think future major battles will have this problem.

I think it's very unfair to expect others to vote on your work if you can't do the same for them.

I see where you're coming from but I don't think reducing the botbr's score on an entry is the way to go to.

Perhaps maybe there could be some kind of perks for voting completely on major battles? Like earning badges for each major you vote completely on, or something.

I prefer it being anonymous. I'd rather not be scrutinised for what is essentially something subjective.

I like rws idea on admins being able to have a quick check over, just in case they want to query something - I just don't trust opening that info up to the general botb populace without awkward accusations/ill feeling taking place.

The only thing I dislike about rain's suggestion is that I'd really REALLY prefer not to have my time wasted by troll entries.

To clarify, the countermeasure could easily be circumvented by opening up hundreds of browser tabs and voting all 4s without listening/viewing. There is a sort of honor code that goes into listening to everything intently which is impossible to verify. I honestly skip things uploaded by troll alts. The site auto 1-ing known troll accounts would be nice feature that's all.

Regarding "Mandatory" voting: I've got so many things going on that I've hardly got time to write a tune these days, much less vote an entire large major. I'd rather not receive an automatic score decrease on all my major entries.

yeah, the difference in ludum dare is that all the scores are individual, so there's no aggregate score that gets brought down if you don't rate other entries (but if you don't rate other entries, people are unlikely to rate your own). all your scores are "ratings" which have both a numeric score out of five and a placement—except for "coolness", which is the "how many entries you rated" score, which has a placement and a percentile.

uhh anyway

actually, displaying [edit: the entrant's] voting percentage alongside the entry's other scores might not be a bad idea. it wouldn't have any influence on the aggregate score but it might provide a social incentive to vote

"...opening up hundreds of browser tabs and voting all 4s without listening/viewing..."

Are you pre-emptively declaring your intention to do this?

We're a community, and we do have oversight and moderation. Troll voting has been dealt with in the past; mandatory voting wouldn't change that. If you're gonna do a donkey vote you'll risk losing your ability to participate, same as always. The results only matter if you're already invested in this place. (Actually, this makes me in favour of public voting, too. If you vote stupid everyone should see.)

Same deal about "time wasted by troll entries". There were only about 5 troll entries in this compo. This ain't Famicompo; this is a community. If you care about the results, you're coming back.


Lack of vote quality has always been a problem in this place. I don't personally value the results of compos, and never have, but I've always taken the duty to vote seriously because I see how others value them. If I didn't intend to vote on a compo, I wouldn't submit, because that's not fair to anyone else who submits. It's part of the package. Mutual criticism is a very important component of BotB.

I've got zero sympathy for anyone who complains about the results but didn't vote. My suggestion for mandatory voting is entirely to make this attitude official community policy. There are softer ways to do that, sure, but I think making it part of the system would help instill understanding. If you want good results, but think you deserve them without participating: get real.


Ahh so much text, sorry. I appear to feel strongly about this. I'll try to calm down.

i agree with the idea that you should definitely not be able to criticize the results if you didn't vote but no one has really addressed the fact that some people don't have time to vote (of course they still can't complain about the results). so i disagree with a nonvoter penalty because your work should be solely rated on the quality of the work itself (incl: relevance to the theme if applicable, if it follows the rules, etc), not if you voted on the other entries (also the alt thing would be pretty messy to implement)

(lol maybe this applies in real life too)

i had this idea a year or two ago but i'll bring it up again: a big point bonus (maybe criticist or a "votist" category) for 100% voting in a compo. maybe you should get an extra x points for 100%ing a battle where x is the number of entries. if you spent a long time voting on every single entry in a 200-300 entry compo (which is the norm these days) (which takes probably 17 hours straight to pull off but realistically a week), i think 200-300 extra points for a major of this size for taking the time to vote is a fair and good incentive to vote. (you only get this bonus for voting on every entry)

people respond best to positive reinforcement better than anything else! (see: operant conditioning)

many botbrs probably don't have the chance to vote due to absolutely invalid reasons like SLEEP and so-called "JOBS"

maybe others feel differently but honestly getting a few hundred extra points for 100% voting wouldn't make a shred of difference for me, especially if i didn't feel like voting in the first place

i brought this up last time too, but voting on alt entries is bad, entering using an alt account isn't bad, so we don't want to encourage bad practice while penalizing not-bad practice

edit: goluigi, please don't delete the entirety of your original post like that. it makes the thread pretty hard to follow, since this post specifically responds to things you originally said.

oh whoops forgot about that

(maybe drop the incentive down to a 90+% vote in a compo)

"...reasons like sleep and so-called jobs..." you're only making this excuse because you wanted someone else to do the voting task for you. The same excuse didn't stop you from entering. :P

And even if you don't have time to 100% vote, you could have even cast 20 votes instead of 0 votes and you would have been contributing.


(I still think vote % should just flat multiply against score. If you don't care enough to vote, you're expressing that you don't care about scores, so you shouldn't get one, IMO, but I'm a ruthless bastard I guess. Also depends on additional features to support alts to even work. I hate alts too, BTW, but they're here already hello.)

_{the sleep and so-called jobs thing was a reference to this}

Yeah there's gotta be some kind of way to bypass voting on your own alts' entries. If there was, it would be fantastic to have some kind of points incentive for voting 100% as golgi suggested.

So, I doubt this will fix the problem, but it might help a little bit.

The way I understand it is this: when you vote on entries in a battle, your actual influence in the end is determined by taking your influence and dividing it by the number of entries in the battle, and then multiplying it by the number of entries you voted on. (Can someone please confirm this?) This is nice, because it disincentivizes people from only voting on their favorite entries, and it also keeps down the overall influence of people who register just to vote on their friend's tracks. However, it has the unfortunate problem of making it a chore to get one's influence fraction up to the point where their votes will really mean anything.

So I was playing around in Desmos and I came up with this graph

. Here's the idea: instead of getting the influence fraction by dividing the number of entries voted on by the total number of entries in the battle, we could instead use this function (f(x) in the Desmos graph) to get the influence fraction. What this does is it makes it much faster to get up to about half of your potential influence; then, you sort of hang out around 50% for a while, and then, as you reach the end of your voting frenzy, you begin to quickly ramp up again until you hit full influence at 100% voting completion. Using this function, you still have almost no influence with almost no voting completion, 50% influence with 50% voting completion, and 100% influence with 100% completion; it just changes how you go between these numbers.

You can play around the with the sliders to see what I'm talking about: change n to change the number of entries in the battle, and change m to change how sharply the ramping occurs.

Thoughts?

ModusPonens: I like it!

While the amount of entries you vote on should definitely affect your overall influence, I feel like currently the influence gap between voters is a bit too high. Your proposed graph seems like a good solution imo. (Plus it'd incentivize people to vote at least on some entries instead of none of them, if they don't have time to 100%)

What I tend to often do (because I also don't have time to vote for everything) is to vote for all the entries in those formats that I've contributed to (and maybe also those formats that only have very few entries because they're easier) but not others, could that still count as voting for everything if voting counts towards influence?

Boy, oh boy, there's a lot of yammering here . . .

There was a bit of a hullabaloo when INF was originally introduced. It has evolved since that time, INF is now applied according to the number of entries: 5 entries means your INF counts as 5% and 300 entries means it's 300%. It's then divided by the ratio of possible voted entries voted and total number of entries possibly voted.

Alts, of course, complicate this. We all hope BotBrs take the moral path and skip voting on their alternate accounts' entries. There is no guarantee of this. There is no way to completely police this behavior either. There is functionality to jump between alts (b-knox is the only account with this) with a single login, but I have yet to implement a way to purchase/create an alt with boons (let alone the method for assigning current alts to a main account). Votes are tied to a user_id which is parent to botbr_id(s). b-knox can not vote on mr_bus and mr_bus sees b-knox's voting progress and vice versa. It's all accounted for in the tally process already too.

While I like Modus Ponens curve, I myself would be prone to apply an exponential curve as a further incentive to vote on all things possible. So leaving it flat is probably best.

Bonus points for completing voting for a battle is an old idea that has swung around for many years. Remember that these points affect a BotBr's class. In that regard, doubling the criticist points received could negate their chipist or mixist (or whateverist) standing from participating with entries. Would 25% of the entry count in the way of playa points be sufficient? Even better if we had better NPC's and one appeared to thank you for voting.

To answer the original request of the this thread: Viewing vote logs for majors has been reserved for BotBrs who have "Tally Goggles" which would be expensive and break often (especially if caught sharing the data). But we still don't have an item system. :(

All in all, I want to thank you all very much for all the passion that emanates from you all. I can kill myself trying to make everyone happy or I can giggle and play you all like puppets. I'm somewhere in between. Right now, I am focused on making a demoable BotB mobile app because it will look good on my resume.

--puke--

Like it's been said before, mandatory voting is a bad idea. I barely have the time to even write a single entry these days and I use BotB as a grounds to receive criticism and improve as a musician. I don't particularly care much where I end up in the results.

Likewise with the time I have, I don't have much time to vote on most majors these days either. I didn't have much interest in Decadent Decade to begin with, so I didn't enter--nor did I have the interest to go through 200+ entries and vote accordingly. Am I upset with the results? No, but I can empathise with those who spent a huge effort on an entry only for it to get like 10 votes.

I agree that if you didn't vote you shouldn't really complain at the results. But penalties for not voting I think is a horrible idea considering, I don't know, people have lives outside of BotB.

Mandatory voting on my end would be way too boring and time-consuming for me. I stopped voting because almost nothing these days are worth better than slightly above average in my eyes (usually I don't go above a 5 unless something really catches my eye), and there are simply too many of them (Also, I had college, and I myself will eventually be getting a real life job). I actually found myself more amused looking at the bottom rather than the top, but I usually wait for the results before this happens.

"Like it's been said before, mandatory voting is a bad idea. I barely have the time to even write a single entry these days and I use BotB as a grounds to receive criticism and improve as a musician. I don't particularly care much where I end up in the results." —DalekSam

where does criticism come from if someone doesn't even listen to your entry? i agree that mandatory voting is not the solution and that voting on every entry is a lot to ask, but it's selfish to expect others to critique your work if you aren't willing to do the same for them. lack of time is not a valid excuse for this.

my take is that listening to, voting on, and possibly commenting on 50 entries out of a 251-entry battle is already a good contribution, and those votes should count (almost?) as much as those of someone who votes on every entry.

more importantly, i think it's important to recognize the value of that contribution. decadent decade had ~250 entries and ~100 entrants. if each entrant voted on 50 entries, the entries would have an average of ~20 votes each, which is markedly better than the 10-15 votes that most entries actually got in that battle.

I would assume that if one is so busy that they cannot vote then they likely would not have time to complete an entry in the first place; therefore people who do not vote due to time constraints may not necessarily enter.

And even if they did enter, no one is at liberty to determine what is a sufficient excuse for not voting. I don't think there is necessarily an "expectation" that others will critique your entries; voting really doesn't qualify as critique in my eyes, a number doesn't explain how your work could be improved.

There is a solution that no one seems to have proposed, extending voting periods.

Vote periods for major compos should really be decided proportionally to the number of entries in the compo. For example, 10 entries = 1 extra day, so compos with very high numbers of entries like Decadent Decade would have a very long voting period, which should significantly reduce the issue of time.

Considering Decadent Decade went on for an entire year, it is reasonable that people who had time to submit an entry before may no longer have that time now, and were unable to vote. It's not anyone's place to judge someone else's life over the internet.

I do agree that a partial voting contribution is superior to none at all, even if you only vote on 10 entries out of 250 it is still a contribution to the process.

I agree that there should be some kind of perk for voting on all entries or even a certain percentage of entries but mandatory voting is a very bad idea, which I fear would lead to lower battle participation. I can say from personal experience that the idea of listening to and voting on 100+ entries is not appealing, and it could deter me from entering in the first place.

We should be logical about how we proceed on this subject. I think dynamic voting periods would be a good place to start.

yes, listens ≠ votes ≠ critiques, but they certainly correlate

"yes, listens ≠ votes ≠ critiques, but they certainly correlate"

Nothing more than a circumstantial correlation. One must listen to the song to vote or critique, but one can vote without critiquing and vice-versa.

sigh let's not hang the discussion up on this point; it's basically immaterial

something I don't fully understand: if one entry in a major gets 10 votes and another entry in the same format gets 20 votes does that actually disadvantage the first entry in any way?

the disadvantage would be smaller sample size

more votes on an entry doesn't boost its rating inherently.

A higher number of votes does in fact disadvantage an entry.

I don't want to get into all the math but here's a quick explanation. With fewer votes it's easier for an entry's score to be abnormally high or abnormally low. An entry with more votes would be less abnormal in any direction and score lower than the abnormally high scoring entries with few votes.

Entries with a lower number of votes should be prominently more visible than entries with a higher number of votes, like Ludum Dare does.

Ludum Dare usually deals with 2500 entries every time (happens every 4 months), and people are given ~3 weeks to vote. I think there's a lot to learn from them!

"Entries with a lower number of votes should be prominently more visible than entries with a higher number of votes, like Ludum Dare does." —MisaelK

during the voting period on botb, the entries page is sorted by ascending order based on number of votes.

i don't think ludum dare does this anyway. the last time i participated, visibility was based on how many entries the entrant rated. prominent visibility of entries without enough votes was an entirely third-party effort that took place off the main site.

"A higher number of votes does in fact disadvantage an entry."

A low number of votes increases the effect of "noise", but noise rapidly decreases with the first few votes. The difference between 10 votes and 20 votes is nowhere near as severe as the difference between 1 vote and 2 votes.

There is a disadvantage for an entry with more votes only if its difference in quality is lower than the noise increase from having too few votes, and I think you're getting far away from the practical reality here. Take a look at the distribution of vote counts vs overall entry score on this last battle. The problem we have is not from a statistical disparity between low and high vote counts (I think we're okay in this respect), but just overall low vote counts. I understand the theoretical idea a vote count disparity could bias entries but it's really not the problem we have. The problem we have is just noise from not enough votes overall.


It'd be unfair to propose something that would reduce an entry's score for having fewer votes on it. The entrant is not responsible for drawing more votes to their entry. They can only help by voting on other entries and hoping others will do the same for them.

You could try all the algorithms and corrections you want, but you can't squeeze blood from a stone. If you have few votes your information is just poor, and you'll get inaccurate results.

during the voting period on botb, the entries page is sorted by ascending order based on number of votes.

Ah, you're absolutely right, I always looked at the play count instead of the number of votes. Maybe both should be used. First votes then plays+downloads.

For instance, now Spring Tracks V has most of its entries without votes, and there's some entries with an odd amount of votes / plays / downloads: see this Xenon Odyssey entry

.

What Charlotte said is def true. I usually pull up the battle radio to figure out the 1st submitted entry and then pull up that entry's page so I can vote in order from 1st submitted to last (cause of the helpful nextious button)

yeah that's my modus operandi

The social aspect of synclistens has nothing to do with the responsibility of voting. Moreso for those of us who listen/vote by category